The Promise of a Brave New World

Bah. Hogwash. I fear for our country’s future, dear friends, if someone can come up with tripe like this and it somehow becomes a #1 bestseller:

“If someone is overweight, it came from thinking "fat thoughts".... Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight..... Think perfect thoughts and the result must be perfect weight.... Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can. If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them."

So basically it’s not my eating Ho-Hos and lemonheads and corndogs that makes me chunky…..it’s the fact of my looking in the mirror and thinking boy, you’re looking plumpy Miss Tasha, maybe you need to cut it down to 3 corndogs a day instead of 5. I think I’m zaftig, therefore I am. Who knew? And how much would I weigh if I ate crap all day long but thought happy sundress thoughts? Helga in a sundress. This may be my next tactic, so consider yourselves warned, the tens of you out in Readerland.

Anyway, according to the reading I’ve been doing as part of my strategic plan to beat the Feuding Hatfields and McCoys (aka Chuck and Kevin – sorry Ryan, I’m leaving you out not to be mean, but rather to be the slightest bit realistic given my negative chance to beat you and your freakish Rainmanesque capabilities), hill riding is the domain of those of us who are light-on-our-feet, so to speak. Loping manatee gait notwithstanding, I think I weigh at least a few pounds less than the boys. I hope. Maybe.

Speaking of manatees, oh sure, there are you naysayers out there thinking huh, manatees don’t run, you dumbass. In the first place, that’s a bit rude of you. So bite me. In the second place, you’ve sorely misunderestimated triathloning and its apparently boundless capacity for humiliation. Where one would think that running, unlike the DeathTrap that is cycling or the SwirlingVortexofDeath that is swimming, would be somewhat foolproof. You’d think wrong - some of us will always find a way. Let’s just say that watching a video of one’s running gait,and seeing with horror that one has a serious case of heel swing, which brings to mind the placid manatee and its flippers (arms?) waving as it meanders along…….this is not a good thing.

So there was an article where these cycling guys were bleating on about VO2max something and AT thisandthat blahbahddy blah blah, whatever. I’m about results, people, the bottom line, so I focused on the key takeaway: lighter = faster. Therefore, I’ve calculated that if I were at my current watts but weighed, say, about an even 100, according to the Power Profiling Chart I’d vault from the “Suckitude” column all the way to “Semispeedygoddess”! Hence, new goal: worry less about training, lose lots of weight. I guess this means I have to stick to the damn Longevity Diet, at least until it kills me from sheer boredom. I’ve actually figured out the secret to living the longest life possible: if you’re on this kind of diet, every day will seem like an eternity. So you don’t actually have to live to be 110 – it’ll just seem like you are.

As a random aside, is pistachio ice cream considered a fruit?