Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Sinful chocolate cake. No, really, sinful.

You may get the drift from the previous post that I've been in better moods.

Grandmother duty was at least short last night. I got out by nine or so and she scratched nurses, not me. I offered to hire somebody to come out to Fairfax Hospital and "give her a special manicure" but the nurses kindly said it wasn't necessary.

I swear to God I could never be a nurse.

Later on, I was talking to my smart friend Pam who mentioned that she had been to a Godiva store earlier that day. I said I felt I had no business in them and she asked "why?"

I was moved. Someone sure must have to love me a lot to ask that question. And she did it without snickering, too.

On that front, things are slowly improving. But slowly.

This may seem like a stupid question, but I'm asking it anyway.

Does God want us to diet?

I'm not running out to rent a Christian exercise video or anything like that, but that eating badly could actually be sinful has been on my mind. Some months ago, I gave my definition of sin:

It’s something you do, anything you do, that distances you from what makes you a good and useful person.

I am a less good and useful person when I feel sluggish. It's hard to confidently fight for justice when in your heart of hearts, you suspect you look like a Hobbit. Fixating on food means that much less brainpower is spent on more important things. And, of course, I will certainly be less good and useful if I die younger, not that I've seen any really great advertisements for old age in the past few days.

So that chocolate cake may literally be sinful.

Nobody ever said that living a good life was easy.

CC
Really in the mood for scrambled eggs and bacon, but about to eat Total Raisan bran with skim milk for breakfast. Fie on virtue!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know if God had anything to so with it, but our appetites are designed for a different world than we are living in.
Our distant ancestors were fruitarians. To tell whether fruit is ripe, you judge by how sweet it is. so we developed a "sweet tooth" to keep us eating ripe fruit and not getting sick on unripe fruit. Our ancestors also had difficulty getting enough calories, especially in winter, so they developed a taste for fat, which has more than twice as many calories per gram as anything else.
We still have the tastes, but now it's not so difficult to get sweets and fats, so we overdo it -- we never got a chance to develop a corresponding "enough is enough" sense. Maybe that's what you're working on?

PeaceBang said...

I think this is great and love you for bringing it up. I've been carrying around so much extra blob for so long I constantly muse about this question. There's a reason that fasting is part of most religious traditions. And there's a reason that over-indulgence (gluttony) is considered a "deadly sin."

I'm willing to accept the fact that my steady over-eating is morally reprehensible because it makes me less than optimally healthy.

It's a reality, just as it's also true that I have done many good and healthy things with my person.

So if I die young from a heart attack and everyone laments and moans that I never lost a bunch of weight, I just hope they don't waste their time.

Some people can manage to eat reasonably; others of us fail so often, and have so many years of ineffective therapy for compulsive overeating that we just give up and decide it's a lesser evil to be fat than to obsess about dieting all the time.

I don't mind that my body visually expresses that I am a voracious person with untamed aspects. It's honest, at least.

Much more than craving to be thin, I crave the physical freedom of wildness. I'd love to dance more, for instance. Or just run and run and play in the woods without any worry about safety or proper footwear or carrying water or keys or a compass.

I've been getting to be a better and better cook and the great thing about it is that it confirms how right I was to truly love food all along. God food is AMAZING!

(I prefer sushi to Godiva any day)

Sorry to blather on and on but it's a great topic. Thanks for posting on it.

PeaceBang said...

Ha ha ! I wrote "god" food instead of "good" food!!

Wotta slip, eh? ;-)

Chalicechick said...

Thanks, Kim. thanks, PB.

I loved your post PB, though I'm trying not to reread it because when I read it the first time, some little part of my brain started going "We can trust Peacebang, she's so smart. And SHE says we might as well eat bacon!"

And that part of my brain has gotten me in trouble before.

I am giving dieting another shot. My new theory is that if I can get down to a weight I don't hate, I can live a semi-diet existance forever where I eat what I like until I gain ten pounds, then diet them off, then go back.

But getting down in the first place is the problem. For what it's worth, lean cuisines have improved a lot since last I ate them, which was only a little more than a year ago.

And the stairmaster is my friend. No, really, it is. I tell myself that all the time.

CC