By G. E. Shuman
I put a new
app on my phone a while ago. It’s one of those that is supposed to help you,
more precisely, help me, keep track of weight, calorie intake and exercise
regimens. (Exercise regimens… Ya, sure.)
I don’t exactly know why I would want to do all of that, but evidently it might
help me lose the 20 extra pounds I accumulated while hibernating last year, so
I downloaded the app.
Anyway, I grabbed
the app and was soon very impressed by one part of it; that was the weight
tracker, which, at first, seemed pretty cool. The tracker makes a graph of your
(I mean my) progress as I drop those terrible, guilty pounds. What I envisioned
was the displaying of something resembling a downward-sloping Vermont hill as
my disgusting-fat weight-loss progress continued over the weeks and months. Unfortunately,
that is not the envisioning I seem to be producing. My graph looks like a
fairly smooth road, maybe somewhere in ultra-flat Florida, with a few potholes
and speed bumps here and there, although, actually, there are no potholes in
Florida, so there’s that. So far, as far as that app is concerned, I’m a little
disappointed.
The other
‘helpful’ area on the app is where you put into it everything you put into your
mouth, and it then counts the calories for you.
Gee… how
much simpler could it get than that? This all works well in theory, but I’m
here to tell you that some days, you, I mean I, just cannot count calories. The
app doesn’t tell you how to input the ingredients in a Chinese restaurant
buffet, to say nothing of calculating the calories in that extra cheese you always
order on your pizza. Those things are just parts of the great unknown. Also, nowhere
at all does it mention how many slabs of homemade lasagna there actually are in
a serving. That lack of information is just ridiculous. Then there is the
problem of remembering to input the results every single time you innocently
walk through the kitchen and end up at the refrigerator door. Geez!
Some things
are just not as easy to accomplish as they are advertised to be. For instance, with mine or any other diet app,
there’s always the problem of correctly counting the calories in something like
a handful of potato chips. Wouldn’t that all depend on just how big the hand
is? Duhhh? When dieting, are we just supposed to stop EATING potato chips? And
isn’t it better to grab all the chips you can with that hand, so you don’t have
to take two handfuls? Seems pretty elementary to me. When you think about it, all
this counting and recording can become just impossible, and believe me, all my
counting so far hasn’t done much to change that weight graph.
On the
different, but somehow related subject of self-care, let me share that I’m not
much for the idea of that at all. Seriously, I think most of that self-care
stuff is just an excuse for being self-ISH. My parents walked a mile to school
in foot-deep snowstorms, uphill both ways, without complaining. My wife and I
raised our kids before the term self-care was even a thing, or deemed ‘needed’,
but that’s all stuff for another column.
Yes, dietary-wise,
I may seem to you to be a bit self-careless, but let’s just say that I do try
to control myself somewhat, and, at least as far as food is concerned, I can
pretty much resist anything except temptation.
I guess
diets, like exercise bikes, only work if you stay on them, which is a bit
disappointing for someone like me. Bad habits, as in the over-eating of things
like chips and french-fries, are what I need to quit. But now I’m confused. Think
about it. Isn’t quitting for losers?
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