Choices

Trying to not be fat is hard. Especially when I have to deal with the aroma of McDonald’s french fries when I walk down to the gym. Dealing with the scent of delicious, salty fried potato is a new phenomenon. Yes, I had not been to the gym in a while prior to this week – laziness had gotten the better of me – but this week was the first time I had noticed the french fries.

It all has to do with how I’m getting to the gym. Instead of driving the 1.9 miles to the gym, I decided to start walking to gym. Walking there takes thirty minutes, instead of the seven-minute drive, and it’s a simple way to pick up a bit of extra cardio. Plus, being in the full swing of spring in California, why wouldn’t I want to spend a couple extra minutes under gloriously blue skies?

Walking instead of driving is one of the simple choices I’m making in order to get to a reasonable weight. And for the most part, a lot of these choices are no-brainers. In the battle of jello pudding vs. ice cream, jello always wins. And frozen Girl Scout Thin Mints are absolutely out of the question. As tempting as that green box in my freezer is, the 8% of my daily saturated PER COOKIE almost makes me sick. My limited soda drinking has been replaced by water. And I’ve done my best to cut down my portions.


At the end of the day, it’s all going to come down to choices, but making the right choice isn’t always easy. It’s not that I don’t know which foods are good and which foods aren’t. It’s the circumstances that often drive bad decision making.

Two recent examples:

1) I went out with Paul – yes, the same Paul who convinced me to not go to the gym – to watch Game One of the Red Wings-Sharks playoff series. Typically, I will drink dark beer at a bar, but tonight I went with rum and cokes. Sure, I picked up a bit of sugar with the coke, but I made sure to kill it off by dancing with a clearly inebriated, overweight Vietnamese girl who told me she loved me ten seconds after meeting me. So the choice of beer vs. liquor wasn’t so difficult. The difficult choice came when somebody at the bar offered me free pizza. Now, of course I know pizza is a terrible food to eat, but how can I turn down FREE pizza? More pressingly, how can I turn down free pizza when I have a serious case of the drunk munchies? In the end, I couldn’t. I had two small slices, but I’d like to think that the sweat I built up while dancing represented those calories being whisked away.

2) On Sunday, I went to a birthday party for a friend from the Peace Corps. The party was on the beach and I knew there would be a lot of running around, so I didn’t feel so bad about drinking a couple Coors Lights. But when it came time for cake, I cringed and salivated at the same time. My love for frosting is unmatched, so much so that I have been known to eat frosting straight out of the container sans cake. Me turning down cake has the same odds as a snowball surviving in hell. So instead of going for the full size, I had a small piece plated for me. It seemed like a reasonable compromise.

My family likes to joke that fat people become fat because of an illness called “hand to mouth disease.” But eating doesn’t explain the whole story. We all eat. I don’t see anyone mainlining dinners. What we can do is eat differently. And exercise more.

Simply put, we can make better choices.