Sunday 4 August 2002

Pic of the day: Ooh! The colors! Real life shines again. Kinda.

Phat enuff again

The sun came out, and I took a walk. When it comes to graphics, real life still reigns supreme. After a bit, I had to choose between two roads. "If I take the steep uphill, perhaps my heart will be overworked and I'll die" whispered a little thought in my mind. "Feh!" replied my conscious self, "It is far more likely that I will die from too few uphills than too many."

I have in fact regained a substantial amount of the fat I had before the fall almost two years ago. (Fall as in autumn, not an accident – I had a couple bad infections and a penicillin cure that kept me from eating more than tiny amounts of food for a while, and it took me a long time to get used to it again.) Anyway, the renewed paunch is nothing to celebrate. As a man, I gather my fat on the guts, which is not healthy. Women mostly store their fat below deck until they have a bit more of it, so slight chubbiness is not really a health problem to most of them. To me, it is nothing else. I couldn't care much less about the zeitgeist of slim body image. The sooner people get used to variations in human shape, the better for all involved. But I am not eager to pay the price for that with my life.

***

I don't have scales, but if I am indeed near the weight I had two years ago, I am just barely overweight – ca 10%. It's still enough when both of my parents and at least one grandparent had age-related diabetes. This variant of the illness is pretty much unable to manifest if you don't have a bit of excess fat, but given enough time you don't need to be a walking blob.

Whether I have inherited the immunity to heart disease from my mother's side is also up in the air, though the tests I had taken at the hospital seem to indicate that. This would certainly be welcome, but I still need to move about more than I do. Running through Morrowind simply doesn't have the same effect as in real life.

I guess there is an upper limit to how obese I can possibly become without a car. I have a 12 minute trip to the bus, and a similar distance from the bus to work. (And of course the same distance home.) I also avoid elevators wherever I can find stairs. Buying my groceries on Saturdays tend to involve a walk of half an hour each way to the shop. Just walking up and down the sloping roads every day would become a strenuous exercise if I put on enough weight, and that exercise would presumably melt away some of the fat. So not having a car puts me safely ahead of the 1/3 of Americans who get no exercise at all. As a matter of fact, before I lost that weight almost two years ago, I had more or less reached a weight plateau. I guess I may be there again.

***

And for good measure, I have been hungry as a wolf this weekend. Usually it takes like 8 hours to get hungry again after a macaroni & cheese meal, but now it takes only half that. As a matter of fact, it is bedtime and I am hungry right now. From across the room, the bag of chips is looking at me with a mixture of fear and revulsion ... OK, that may be my fear and revulsion, but you get the point.