The Alternative Diet

I’ve never been successful with diets. This past week I’ve figured out why: It’s not due to any fault of my own. The problem is how societal influences are imposed on the dieting process itself. To improve my success at dieting, I am going to alter my diet to fit the new social norms.

First, I am going to tackle the immediate indicator of my problem: the bathroom scale. Despite my best dieting efforts, I’m never able to break below the two hundred pound barrier. More often than not, I fail to lose any weight, and occasionally I’ll add a pound or two. I’m fixing this issue by recalibrating the scale to read one-hundred-sixty pounds when I’m on it.

Every year I am required by my workplace to undergo a physical examination. Every year they give me a nice little paper indicating my cholesterol is high and my blood pressure is borderline. This problem is being addressed by shredding these papers, deleting all my historic cholesterol and blood pressure data. If there is no data reporting a problem, the problem doesn’t exist.

I always thought part of my difficulty with losing weight was not exercising enough. Though I would take a jog and log my route and mileage on a fancy smartphone app, whenever I would review my effort, the tiny phone screen would make my run distance seem inconsequential. I’d read the numeric distance – 4000 feet – and the number would only add insult to triviality. I’ve decided the app must be wrong. Those jogs seemed like fifty mile marathons to me, so they must have been at least fifty miles, possibly one hundred.

I’m conscious of nutritional labels while grocery shopping, taking note of caloric, fat, and sodium levels contained within foods. I’ve been cognizant of the quantities as I would prepare meals and combine ingredients in recipes. I’ve worked to keep my intakes of these below the government’s recommended daily limits. However, I’ve realized nutrition labels may be a product of “too much government” restricting my rights as a food consumer, and possibly a partisan attack on my culinary beliefs. I have decided to assign my own nutritional values to food, based on their flavor. I will ignore all government nutritional labels until a full federal investigation has been performed.

I am a firm believer that variety is one of the primary joys of life. I have often enjoyed world cuisines, such as Italian pastas and sauces, south of the border spices, and Far East cuisines like Chinese and Thai. I have concluded these foods only dilute and weaken the importance and power of American cuisines in the global food order. So, I will no longer consume foods from foreign countries, focusing on domestic dishes, such as hamburgers and cheese drenched steak fries. If I do allow myself to eat an occasional foreign dish, I will not accept its foreign calories as legitimate.

Finally, I have decided that only the above tenets of dieting are valid, and all other diets are both ineffectual and illegal.

I discussed my new diet with my doctor. He advised against pursuing a diet based on falsehoods which would likely shorten my life span. I've scheduled an appointment with an alternative doctor.