When I do my daily hour of power yoga, I imagine myself weighing forty pounds less than I actually do, a ripped 190 pounds, performing my routine on a cliff looking over the Pacific Ocean. I am tanned and chiseled. Hip trip-hop plays in the background. I do the voice-over, of course. My workout is on DVD and sells millions.
My power yoga workout is extremely hard to do. My dentist tried to follow it, but he almost fainted and he had to stop. Others who thought they were in great shape could not follow me through my routine.
I started the yoga five years ago. Before that I had been going to the gym since I was twelve. I’ve always worked out, have always been in shape. However, in my early thirties my metabolism slowed down significantly and I no longer hovered around the 200 mark. As I write this I am forty-eight years old and I weigh in around 230. I’d love to get down to 210. But I eat too many calories a day, about 3,200 a day, perhaps more. If I could keep my calories around 2,500, I’d probably be at a weight I’d be more happy with.
As vain as I am (and I consider myself extremely vain), my vanity cannot match my love of food, my strong emotional attachment to it, and my compulsion to eat it. I know I am not alone. Most of us are consumed by our appetites and are helpless to our proximity of relatively affordable, calorie-dense food.
I recently heard a scientist on NPR say that our stage in agricultural, industrial society is actually harmful to our evolutionary development. We’ve hit this Epoch of Inevitable Fatness. Our bodies are not compatible with the food abundance that results from living in an agricultural society. All the nutritionists, personal trainers, self-proclaimed experts, dieticians and so on are feebly fighting against the tide. Some of them tell us to reject agriculture, to go back to our Hunter and Gatherer lifestyle, but this isn’t practical for many of us.
Here’s another powerful force that compels us to eat more than we should: In our Agriculture Age, we find ourselves at the same time living in the postmodern Technological Age where alienation, anonymity, and uncertainty compel us to look to food as the Great Comforting Mother.
Of course, all these forces notwithstanding, not all of us are doomed to a life of corpulence. There are those genetic freaks who are skinny and there are those who make their living at being skinny so that they have motives for limiting their caloric intake that go deeper than the rest of us.
But it seems we devour diet books the way we devour food because these diet books are merely a frenzied albeit feeble attempt to reverse our current place in evolutionary history: The Epoch of Inevitable Fatness.
My power yoga DVD remains where it belongs: in the recesses of my vain imagination.
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