“Maps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country!  They give shape…to continents.†– The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
I call this the Cruel Map.
Excellence requires consistency. Consistency does not imply excellence – a visit to any McDonalds® will prove that. But consistency is required for excellence.
And excellence is required for health.
The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do. The human body is robust. The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you don’t succeed. About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster. Bread in – toast out. Works every time, but I still can’t figure out where the bread went. Maybe the bread powers the toaster?
Humanity’s most complicated machines can’t even come close to the versatility that is a human: if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, you’d be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food. Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades – your tires would grow back in the middle of the night. Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but that’s a longer story.
The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs. But the owner’s manual sucks, and many times we don’t operate it properly or fuel it very well. Case in point – achieving excellent health requires measurement. Of what? Unless you’re an adolescent reading this, you’re not getting taller. What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day? Besides armpit hair length. That’s too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway. Think harder.
Oh, yes! Weight!
There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and don’t want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight. This is no small problem – 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos Bellgrande®, Cheeze Whiz® and Twinkies™ since then while watching videos from Blockbuster®. I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a “big†patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.
Fun Fact: The number of Blockbuster® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbuster™ video stores in the United States today.
Unexpectedly (at least I wasn’t expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans. I won’t go into the details, you’re aware and you’ve read ‘em all.
But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement. Thankfully, there’s a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement: a scale. Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply won’t work. To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month. How much extra, on a daily basis, is that? 2.7 Oreo® cookies. Each day. It’s 9.6 ounces of Coke® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units). On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, it’s less than 3% of you your total daily calories.
Okay, maybe the metric system has one use. One.
No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long. So, a pound. That’s not so bad.
No, I said a pound a month.
If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds. All from less than 10 ounces of Coke™ a day. Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day. That’s why everyone is fat – the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful – a world without refrigerators. A world where Sonic® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of Sprite® are available for only $0.25 wasn’t really planned for when your pancreas was designed. If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.
“Oh, hell. More soda coming in. Insulin production to maximum. Again. And someone call storage and tell ‘em we’ve got to get fat production moving. It’s overtime tonight for sure, boys. And someone call the liver and wake it up. He may be hungover still, but it’s time to get to work. This fat won’t make itself.â€
I drink about a soda a year, so that’s not a problem my pancreas has. The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter. A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you can’t charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces. I think Coke™ is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the Coke© syrup. Or at least that’s what I read on Wikipedia®, or maybe on Huffington Post© or CNN™. So it’s certain that it’s true.
But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I can’t even think about having a Chick-Fil-A™ sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.
Does this Empire make my butt look big? Â
Okay, if measuring the inputs doesn’t work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR? You have to measure the output. Ruthlessly. And don’t gain that first pound. If you do? Get rid of it. That day. Or that week. But don’t wait. And you can’t lose more than one pound at a time. And you know how to lose a pound. It may not be easy. It may not be quick. But you know how to do this.
This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent. Also pictured: all of the happy Soviet citizens.
You can afford to compromise – outward, on those things that aren’t intrinsic to you. But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you. You have to have a line.  And health should always be important to you, unless you’re Johnny Depp. If you’re Johnny Depp – you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.
Health determines what the quality of your life is really like. And I’ve got some new goals.
The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life. But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest. Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcs™ that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by Sauron® and Frodo© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount Doom®. My goal? To be in sparring shape and size by August.
There is no shortcut. But I have a map.
I’ll let you know how it goes . . .
Soviet Map via:Â User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
