You stand before the pulpit, knees on the hardwood floor, tears streaming down your face, searching for - nay, craving for absolution. You know yourself to be a sinner. Even worse, you want to keep sinning. You shriek with sobs as you admit this to yourself. You know what's bad for you and yet you can’t seem to stop. I descend from on high, floating down from the pulpit in white, priestly robes to kneel beside you. I kiss you on your forehead and hold the sides of your face as I whisper in your ear,
“I too, am quite fond of jelly donuts.”
I mean how couldn’t you be!?! It’s a damn near perfect pastry. Soft butter based dough deep fried to a beautiful golden hue on the outside, lightly dusted with powdered sugar, followed by an explosion of sweet fruity flavor in your mouth. Yowza! Call the priest and get me some more!
All joking aside, plenty of people have an incredibly rough experience when it comes to resisting the processed food that surrounds them. Take for example a person staring at a platter of cookies. You may just look at a platter of cookies and think, “Well, those look fantastic. I think I may just have one.”
However, someone trying to resist those cookies may have a very different experience. Their inner monologue could fire up with something along the lines of, “don’t you do it you fat fuck, don’t even think about taking one of those fucking cookies. If you intend on taking one of those cookies you’ll be even fatter than you already are, and thats just fucking embarrassing. Stop being a fat fucking embarrassment.”
Woof.
Talk about abusing yourself. There’s hate, there’s shame, and there’s a whole lot of blaming oneself for having a natural reaction. It’s not healthy. Shaming yourself for wanting something objectively delicious is completely unwarranted. Seriously, it’s not your fault.
Here’s why.
Brilliant Food Scientists
These motherfuckers are brilliant…and diabolical. The very first article I ever wrote covered how food companies hire people to create foods that literally hack into our dopaminergic system and reward us for consumption, but it bears repeating anyway, nature is never going to be able to compete with cheesy fries.
It just ain’t.
In fact, food scientists have now coined the term “bliss point,” which is the point where a particular food has the perfect ratio of sugar, salt, and fat. We’re talking food so good you ignore the supermodel who just walked past your table because of the mouthgasm you were experiencing.
Over the past 70,000 years your tongue evolved to enjoy meats, fruits, and vegetables. Our taste buds never evolved to protect us from something as blissfully toxic as Coca-Cola.
Food companies would have you believe it’s a matter of moving more but there’s an evolutionary problem with that argument as well…
Wired to Chill
Our bodies reward us for movement with adaptations that allow us to survive said movement. We get stronger tendons, ligaments, and muscles for engaging in difficult training. But 70,000 years ago*, these adaptations were a given. You had to hunt and gather your food, you had to walk to the river to get a drink, you had to move to survive.
Now not so much.
In many ways you evolved to conserve as many calories as possible. In prehistoric times one of the main problems that concerned the human brain was getting enough food to keep it going. If you didn’t have to move, why would you? If you were a tribal citizen your exercise would come with the hunt soon enough. The body incentivizes you not to move and conserve calories whenever possible. A lot of the time not moving feels pretty good. Rest and laziness is actually good for someone who already moves a lot.
Now Uber exists.
Forget hunting, killing, skinning, carrying back to camp, and cooking an animal with your homemade set of knives. Now you press a button. The evolutionary bias to conserve calories remains…but the reason has evaporated.
We’ve grown quite fat without it.
*I keep referencing 70,000 years ago because that was when humans experienced the cognitive revolution and the first modern human brains started walking around. These are the guys you could teach quantum relativity too if you had the drive to create a time machine and try such a thing.
So who’s fault is it?
Society. Obviously. It’s always that assholes fault. And capitalism, he’s an asshole to.
Look, we can point to any number of earth-shattering scientific discoveries that led to cheap hyper-palatable food, unlimited transportation, and a smartphone in our pocket. But what’s the point? Blaming massive global trends for humanities weight gain is akin to screaming that the boogyman force fed humanity Honey Nut Cheerios.
It’s no one person’s particular fault, including you. Seriously, you had no chance against your own evolutionary DNA and the awesome power of scientists finding a bliss point for your tongue. Your best bet against childhood obesity was having an overprotective mother who for some reason decided to ignore the governments cereal grain based pyramid and decided meat and vegetables were a better way to go.
That’s about it. Your best protection was luck.
So for those of you with a brutal inner dialogue that hates yourself for loving jelly donuts and marathoning Game of Thrones from the comforts of your couch…don’t. Your biology evolved to enjoy that.
However…
C’mon. You knew I was going to throw in a good “however.”
Your health is still very much your responsibility. If someone leaves a baby on your front door step, rings the bell, and immediately disappears, it's not your fault that there’s an infant chilling in front of your house…but goddamn, it’s certainly your responsibility to do something about it.
If you look down and you can’t see your wee-wee/hoo-ha due to the bulge of your belly, everything I know about food science, evolution, and human psychology leads me to believe it’s not your fault. The environment we occupy makes that common place, but the ball is still in your court. The only person who can do anything about it is you.
I encourage you to fuck fault. The inner monologue that blames you for some “weakness of character” is a useless liar. Choose an action that moves the needle forward a little bit every day. Prep your food, start your day with a walk, set an alarm at night that automatically shuts off your TV, commit to strangling your friends in a Jujitsu club three times a week. Steal a Lamborghini, drive it off a cliff, get arrested, and join the prison weightlifting club. Do something. Anything. And when you stumble, (and you will) get up and try again.
Drop the blame and pick up a habit.
Its the only way forward and it’s worth it.
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