The Climate Change Diet

Phase 1: Weight Change Denial

• Notice tightening of pants around belt-line. Assume pants have shrunk. Loosen belt.
• Notice that shirt flares around buttons near belly. Consider switching detergents or using a cold-only cycle. Laundry is ruining your wardrobe.
• Blame your weight on “Big Laundry.”

 

Phase 2: Continued Denial Into Acceptance of Measurements

• Pants no longer fit. Shop for new clothing. Endure traumatic emotions in fitting room but tell yourself that clothing manufactured in Asia “likely runs small” and that it isn’t you.

• Weigh yourself.

• Weigh yourself on a different scale that you feel is properly balanced.

• Try out a digital scale at Bed Bath and Beyond, imagine that your clothing and shoes weigh twenty pounds and subtract from total.

• Estimate your rate of annual weight gain and project forward that in twenty years you will expand to 452 lbs.

  • This is a long way off and is really your children’s problem.

 

Phase 3: Make Problem Seem Complex and Unsolvable

• Seek causes of weight gain. Consider:

  • Poor diet and lack of exercise

  • Work-related cortisol

  • Aging process

  • Uncontrollable water weight

  • Toxins

  • Carbs

  • Gluten

  • Processed foods

  • GM foods

  • Vaccinations

• Read somewhere that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is considered obese by the government’s standard Body Mass Index and conclude that the BMI is bogus.

  • Also, muscle weighs more than fat and you might have a lot of unseen muscle.

 

Phase 4: Find a Way to do Nothing While Seeming Reasonable

• Conclude that experts have reached no consensus about causes of weight gain.

• Admit you are gaining weight but determine nothing can be done about it as the cause is unknown, and possibly unknowable (call this, “the moderate position on body change”).

 

Phase 5: Find New Weight Gain Scapegoat

• Become religious.

• Believe that God told people to eat everything on Earth but apples, which you do not like.

 

Phase 6: Planning without Doing

• After prodding from concerned friends, family, and medical professionals, promise to implement a diet and exercise regimen.

  • Develop plan to gradually add exercise and cut food intake in order to reach a state of caloric deficit by 2025.

• Determine there is plenty of time to implement this plan and that it makes no sense to start a diet before the summer holidays and a planned fall trip to Europe.

  • Vow to start diet upon return from Europe, just before Halloween (“The Paris Agreement”).

 

Phase 7: Retreat for Further Planning

• Upon return from Europe, pull out of The Paris Agreement because of Halloween candy and the futility of starting a diet with Thanksgiving around the corner.

• Firmly resolve to resolve to begin to increase exercise and decrease caloric consumption in January.

  • Forget about this in January.

  • Continue research and debate.

 

Phase 8: Final Commitment to Further Planning

• Research non-lifestyle causes of Type II diabetes.

• Outline 40-year Type II Diabetes cessation plan.

• Begin research into efficacy of plan by reading Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

• 2025 still seems a long way off.