The Last Hedonistic Pleasure

Picture taken last night on the way home.

Ever look in the mirror and think, I'm getting old?

And fat?

Ever look at an attractive person younger than you and think, You're cute?

Then get depressed because you realize that they're probably thinking, You're old and fat?

At least Krista put it in perspective for me. When I told her this she said, "They're not thinking that; they're not thinking anything; you're not even on their radar."

Great. That makes me feel better.

Maybe the reason that a lot of people of faith are overweight is that, for those that are trying to live a godly life, there is only one hedonistic pleasure left: food.

I was driving home the other night, and wasn't hungry at all; but for some reason I was thinking about how good something would taste. I can't even remember what it was now. But it got me to thinking - there's nothing else that we allow ourselves to completely lust after and indulge in. I don't know if it's our culture, or the specific church tradition I identify with, but gluttony isn't even a sin any more. Nobody hardly even talks about fasting. Jesus talked about it on more than one occasion, but while we hold fast to certain things he said, we ignore others.

Every time I try to lose weight I think about looking better; I guess it's about time I tried to get healthy for a higher reason.

Of course, now I have to bring up the recent NFL study which indicates that more than half of the players in the NFL are obese.

I don't know...from the beginning, this seems suspect. The first thing I noticed was that they used the BMI (Body Mass Index) - which says I'm 10 pounds from being morbidly obese. Now it looks like from the article on Web MD that the "severely" and "morbidly" categories might be replaced by the better-sounding "Type 2" and "Type 3". Even so...I look in the mirror, and I'm overweight, but morbidly obese?

Morbid, maybe, but not morbidly obese.

An article in the National Review of Medicine suggests that "Bariatric surgery is the best option for the morbidly obese." They cite the case of Patrick Deuel who lost nearly 500 pounds (from his original 750). At a little more than 1/3 his original weight, I don't care for any adjective that describes my weight as "morbid." Good grief, according to the BMI, if I do my math right, after losing all that weight, he still weighs more than me and he's still morbidly obese.

Enough of that soap box...upon further research I found that the study was based on information found on the internet (player rosters at NFL.com), and although it was printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but wasn't even a research article - it was a letter to the editor.

While I'm not a serious football fan, but I'd have to side with the NFL in that this was hardly a serious medical study. I'm sure that there are players in the NFL who have serious health problems, but it'd be nice if it was a more scientific study that decided to report it to the world. I wasn't going to spend $12 to read the entire article, so I'll have to go by the first 150 words, but that looks like enough to indicate the study probably isn't the most sound.

Picture taken tonight.

Another picture taken tonight.