Then there's diet. It should be so easy. It's just what we eat, and we pretty much have complete control over what we eat. We may not be able to lift 500 pounds -- it's just impossible -- but anything we can eat, we can lift. It's just that we shouldn't eat everything we can lift. Temptation. Hardly anyone is tempted to get fit. It's a discipline. We sacrifice, as a sort of agape, that we may have more abundant life. Food on the other hand is one of the things Satan tempted Jesus with.
So both, diet and exercise, are easy, and hard. In my mind there is no question whatsoever as to which is more important. Diet is about health. Exercise is about fitness. Health is about proper functioning. Fitness is about what we can do. Both are important. But you can't depend on a malfunctioning machine. You are made out of what you eat. Imagine trying to build health out of cheetos and dingdongs and coca cola and pig colons. Coca colons. It's like a Great Wall, made out of paper mache.
Any talk about health or fitness is going to be repetitious. These things are not unknown. Details may be wrong, and whole philosophies, but being sensible is the message. Sure, religions have cults, that pervert universal truths, but that's why criminals counterfeit real money. It is the nature of evil to mock truth. Point is, eat good food, and use your body vigorously, that it might be vital. Everyone knows this. Why then is there illness and indolence?
It's easy and it's hard. The relatively few minutes it takes to be fit require sometimes an almost heartbreaking intensity. We might approach it with dread. But it's easy, once it's done. The not-unreasonable self-control of diet -- the very same that we expect from children, about not filling up on candy -- well, parents can, really they can, control the diets of their children. Controlling other people is much easier, and apparently more pleasant, than controlling ourselves. It's diet. Diet is what's hard. All it would take is the application of rationality. Eat this, because it is healthful. Don't eat that -- it is sweet but deadly, like a bad woman.
The rules? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. That's one rule, or set of rules in a catagory. Work hard, don't get injured, rest. So those are the rules of diet and of exercise. Real food is nourishing -- not transfats, not dried molded slurries in boxes, not factory meat. Real work is practical -- not sitting on a bench doing dumbbell curls. What that achieves is impractical -- big guns, no grip and no shoulders. It's work the way compulsive handwashing is work.
It's hard because intensity is hard, and so is appetite. We're tempted to sloth, and to indulgence. Just saying no, or yes, gets us through some larger fraction of a second, in the process of self-discipline. After we've said no to the bad thing, or yes to the good, there still remains the need for action. And we do, as everyone knows, live in bodies of death.
Hope? There is no hope. Just do it? Sure, somehow. How? That's the magic. There must be hope, as the desert seed awaits the brief showers of spring. My feeling is that encouragement helps. We are after all very small children, learning to walk. Attaboy! Other people, and their opinions, seem to matter -- even people we don't respect. It must be a sort of temptation. But that's the alchemy of it. Even as we can transform vitiated food into almost 60 or 70 years worth of lifespan, we can draw motivation out of human contact.
That must be another rule. Be human, not impatient, with integrity. Humans strive to transcend weakness. They aspire beyond their capacity. Humans are foolish, like small children. They should make us smile. The meaning of their lives is embodied in the word, hope.
J
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