We live in a post-modern world where obesity kills more people than starvation. Elaborating on the moral atrocity of the situation is overdone, and preaching guilt about the inequity is akin to a Sunday school teacher telling off the fat kid for not sharing his sweets with his malnourished classmates.
Weight-loss is fucking simple. Take in less calories than you are expending. Repeat until skinny. Logically if people had enough self-restraint and willpower to do this, they would no longer be obese.
In reality we are all busy and constantly ambushed by fast-food outlets. Crucially, we have become so accustomed to instant gratification that we're too lazy to do anything which requires more than a modicum of effort.
If you want to lose weight and you're too lazy to put in any effort, turns out all you need to do is to smoke, according to a recent study published in the British Medical Journal.
If you're lucky you might even end up looking like these people:
So what should you do?
I have been compelled by the unholy forces of the gods to solitary confinement to memorise equity law for most of tonight. What perfect time to write a blog post.
Naturally, my frequenting of facebook increases exponentially, and seeing the same, inane scribblings most people call a 'status update' annoys me even more so than usual.
In the spirit of legal tests, here's one for whether a facebook status update is appropriate or not. (Naturally I ask you to follow the VUWLS Style Guide when you cite this test.) Take heed post-modernists, your posts should be diamonds in the rough, not background noise.
1. IS IT SIGNIFICANT? - Is the substance of the post significant enough for the reasonable person to find it interesting and/or relevant? What you had for lunch, how you feel, emoticons are trite, unnecessary and you are boring the fuck out of people.
2. IS IT RELEVANT? - Would a significant proportion of facebook users find your update relevant? If your update alludes to just a few select people, post it on their walls, tag the relevant people if necessary. Otherwise I would analogise this with telling a crowd of people an in-joke with a loudspeaker.
3. IS IT INFORMATIVE/INTERESTING/FUNNY? - does the post should provoke some sort of emotional or intellectual response? The purpose of a status update is to update people, not to annoy people.
A good indication of a good post is one which provokes responses, in the form of "Likes" or comments. If it was one worth posting, you should be getting a minimum of 5-10 responses. If one of your status updates gets less, be ashamed, you should probably go to confession.
Ignore this at your peril - you may find yourself getting blocked, or losing friends as people delete you.
Every word I type, every turn of phrase or witticism I construct on my netbook screen can currently only be seen by me (and the ceiling cat).
At the end of my post-modern observations and critiques, I click the orange button in the bottom left corner of my screen labelled "PUBLISH POST", and it becomes freely available to anybody and everybody.
There are over 2 billion people who use the internet. While only a minute proportion of those will ever reading my scribblings, I seem to forget that everything I write can be scrutinised by any one of those 2 billion people.
I don't think I fully comprehend the significance, or consequences of clicking that little button.
By this, I mean I am genuinely surprised when someone talks to me about something that I have blogged about, even though I know they read my blog.
Is this odd, or is this the post-modern norm? Why don't you ask me, and see if I freak out?
