One Angry Monkey

People today. They’re obsessed with “the secret”. Wow! You look ten years younger! What’s the secret?

For the record, I don’t look ten years younger. If I looked ten years younger I’d look eighteen. I don’t.

No, my secret revolves around weight loss. When I was having my crohn’s flare I lost something in the region of thirty kilograms. I don’t know how much that is in pounds. Google it if you care. (The real achievement? I kept all but twenty-five of it off! Yay me!) As I lost the weight all of my friends kept asking me, “What’s your secret?” I told them. I have a chronic illness. I can’t keep much food down. What food I can keep down just fires out the other end a couple of hours later, undigested. In essence my body has issued me with an eating disorder I don’t need to maintain myself. My stomach does that for me.

Wrong answer.

They’d just stare at me with an expectant smile, waiting for the punchline. I’ll admit that’s a little self-inflicted. I rarely give a straight answer when presented with stupid questions. But in that case I was. They knew I was barely eating. Still somehow they expected an answer that didn’t involve either that truth or a universal truth. Where energy in =/< energy out you’re gonna get littler. How do I know they don’t want universal truths? I tried that too.

No, what they wanted was the name of the diet pill or meal replacement shake I was on. They wanted “the secret”. Well the truth is, there isn’t one. There’s no secrets. There’s just physics.

I’ve been losing weight again. Not much so far, five kilos. I made the mistake of telling one of the expectant smilers. Her immediate response? “What’s your secret?” I changed what I eat, I told her. I stopped eating the stuff that was making me get progressively fatter. And guess what? I stopped getting progressively fatter. And guess what next? She didn’t believe me. So now here I am, caught in the same old moral dilemma. Do I stick to the truth, point out that chocolate & doritos = bad, vegetables & fruit = good or do I pull the first weight loss link to get tangled up in my spam filter and email it to her?

This is why I don’t like people, people!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.