Then, quite by accident, I heard about someone who started eating more healthily and FELT BETTER. No mention of weight loss. It was an a-ha moment. So I ate some broccoli, stopped eating pasta and potatoes and a family sized block of Crunch every night and, remarkably, had heaps more energy and felt more cheerful. I still had no tits and boys still didn’t like me, but I’d learnt a valuable lesson. Our society is so obsessed with weight loss that “health” has become synonymous with “thinness”, to the point where one skinny, unhealthy person could get well into adulthood before realising there was a connection between eating rubbish and feeling rubbish.

Of course, I might just be a tad slow. But I still blame the patriarchy.

People who are obese are marginally more likely to become type 2 diabetic but only because obesity is ONE symptom of insulin resistance, a precursor condition to type 2. However, you can be skinny and be insulin resistant, and there are plenty of thin people out there with unpleasant symptoms and bad lab values in their futures, and I’m sure they’ll have no frigging idea why. That stuff only happens to *fat* people!

Just underscores what happens when you scapegoat an entire people and let yourself believe crap just because experts say it. The facts become obscured and of those health factors over which you DO have control, you can’t control them because you don’t know how.

If I’d known fifteen years ago that the low-fat craze was bullshit and that pasta would destroy my glucose metabolism I would be in a very different place today.

As for cancer, pollution and the use of hormone mimics in damn near everything we touch are at least as responsible for the increase in cancer rates as anything the sufferers have done in their lives. Once again, obfuscation of the facts is killing people, and of course IBTP for all the pollution going on.

As for Chantix, I can’t personally say, having given up with other methods, but it certainly raises a tidal wave of depression in my wife when she tries it, so rejoice in your singularity, and make the most of it: and good luck with it.

As to why give up, eh well … my father was youngest of 13, all of whom smoked heavily (and still do, in the case of the 5 remaining), and of them all, only he has died of smoking-related disease yet (emphysema), so perhaps the odds of cancer may be somewhat skewed: however, knowing my luck, I figure I’ll be the one to even up statistics if I continue.

Marilynne Richardson is the writer. The book is called (and won’t Twisty love this) The Death of Adam.

I’m halfway through Richardson’s essay called Prigs and Puritans. She notes that original Puritans didn’t think some things were important enough to be moral issues. John Calvin called them “things indifferent”. Seems to me Christians who want to make dieting a moral issue have gone off the rails even by strict Calvinist standards.

And thanks, I needed that today: have spent the entire week interacting with people straight out of the ’50’s for a class I’m teaching this year at a college where the students are pretty great but the entrenched faculty/staff culture is Stepford. The result: wanting to tell the sanctimonious, arrogant, privileged, classist, hypervigilant arbiters of other people’s behavior to go have a f*cking cigarette for dog’s sake (preferably right in front of the 600% mark-up Co-op).

Have a beer, too. Or a pint of ice cream.

And when you come around to the fact that mortality is inescapable even for you, and cancer is not a moral issue, and in fact judging other people’s behavior will not keep you alive or healthy any longer than you would otherwise, try out some inventive curses. Good and loud.

No offense, but that’s just disgusting.

The deep fried Oreos were sooooo much better. Only problem is they don’t sell ice cold milk by the glass at county fairs. Curses!

And now I’m really craving some hot mushy oreo mush fried dough dipped in chocolate sauce. Ahhhh.

I realize these are not normal reasons. And I also do not Blame individual smokers. I still BTP.