September 24, 2006

A Thicker Fool than I Like

There is comfort on my couch. It never says “no” to me and is always there to welcome me like a lost and well-loved friend would. It never judges me, but instead accepts me just as I am, or – more honestly – as I have allowed myself to become. My couch is my most enabling friend: my couch contributed to my allowing my once athletic frame to have become more than ample. I learned that, according to any definition, that I am obese. Obese. Obesity is something that this former endurance athlete could never in his wildest dreams have imagined as a fair description of himself. I have difficulty using the word in the first person. Here it is: I had become obese.

At my worst I weighed 245 pounds. I am six foot, one inch with a moderate frame. I should weigh 190 pounds to be on the high side of healthy. I was carrying 55 pounds more than I should have. Just to put that into perspective, to lose one pound of weight a body has to burn 3500 calories beyond what is necessary to take in to maintain life. To get to my healthy target, 188 pounds, I would have to burn 1,995,000 calories. [See correction below] Now, what causes me shame is this statistic: to maintain life, a person can do well on about 2000 calories per day. The calories that have gone into making me obese could have fed a person for 997.5 days. This is nourishment lost to a hungry world. The calories that must be burnt to lose my middle-age paunch could have sustained another for 2.7 years.

Here is another way to look at it: I love MacDonald’s Sausage Mac Muffins. They have 370 calories in each. The weight that I have put on is equivalent to 5,391 of these sandwiches, nibbling a bit on number 5,392. Now, what does a sausage Mac Muffin cost? I would tend to buy these when they were on sale two for $3.00. That is $8,088.00 in calories that just hang over my beltline and shorten my life. No, I am not blaming MacDonald’s. There is only one person ultimately responsible for my choices: Mea maxima culpa.

I’ve thought about this much. We use the image of obesity as a metaphor for our country’s hunger for oil. Yes, this needs to be changed. We need to wean ourselves from our gluttony for resources that harm our environment and create a gross disparity between rich and poor. But I have to start with me and my gluttony, for oil, for my little snacks, for all of these things that are comforting but ultimately deadly. Long term changes mean a change in life. These are more easily imagined than accomplished. It is one thing to have a lofty goal and quite another to be about the mundane activities that bring the goal to fruition. The difficulty is that milestones, way-markers, and accomplishment are measured not by one sudden explosion of accomplishment, but in imperceptibly small increments. Trend lines may waver, but the trend is what is important. Motion toward is the prolegomena to having crossed the line. I have decided to change my way of life to be healthy in all facets of life. I have made tentative steps in these directions and have retreated into the comfort in my less than salubrious lifestyle.

My couch is still my friend, but I have another friend that has been helpful to me, as well: My road-bike. I have lost 13 pounds toward my goal of 55. It is a start, a modest one, but it is a beginning. I am trying to ride at least 150 miles per week and have entered a Century, the Tour for Literacy (money raised goes toward local literacy efforts). I am still leaning how to eat less and how to find other means of comfort than my couch and snacks. There is no quick solution. I have begun to wonder how I can raise $8,000 or so for local hunger projects (that seems fair to replace what I consumed), but that is still in the dreaming stages.

Changes come, but they come in very small steps. And my couch still welcomes a slimmer frame, eating celery instead of cheese.

Ah, but I am only a fool...

Correction to the previous post: This proves that I am a better wordsmith than accountant! There is a gross error of addition in the above posting.

  • To lose one pound, a person has to burn 3500 calories beyond what is necessary to maintain current weight. In my case, I have to take in about 3600 calories per day to maintain my current weight. To lose about two pounds per week I have to burn at least 500 calories in exercise and cut out at least 500 calories in meals. So far so good...
  • Now to the error of fact... I was 57 pounds overweight. 57(3500) equals 199,500, not 1,995,000 as I noted!
  • So... 19950/370 calories in each Egg McMuffin equals 539 of the luscious atery cloggers, not the 5000+ that I noted. Still, that's lots of money for fat: $808.78.
  • Now... The calories that I have to lose could sustain a starving person for 100 days, not 2.7 years.

My errors in addition aside, the point remains... We have way too much and others have way too little. Maybe there is a realistic way to raise $1000.00 for local hunger. - tDF


September 14, 2006

The Fool is Back

I took another hiatus from writing. In the past I have used my blog as a sort of on-line catharsis and place to share the world – which is entitled to my opinion! – to my meandering beliefs. I had come to a point where I had nothing to say. It is not that there was not much to think about, God knows that the current state of politics creates situations that are in and of themselves satiric. I just felt that I was needing to be silent for a bit.

The silence is broken, for better or worse.

There is an account in Genesis of the creation of the world: it begins in silence. That silence remains while all is formless and void; darkness caresses the waters and the winds whipped them into chaos. There was no commentary, simply the silence of God. And then God spoke…

That act of speaking was what began creation. It is significant that this is not creatio ex nihilo; it is an ordering of a preexistent, albeit chaotic, environment. God speaks and land appears, darkness and light are separated, and life is made possible. Language is too powerful to be trivialized. Words have power that we all too often underestimate. They create and destroy, even before violence and healing can occur.


For better or worse, the fool is back.