Skipping Dessert … and taking the stairs

“Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction.” – Guy Kawasaki

I took this picture yesterday at my local Big-Box Bookstore.

Twenty-Five Feet of Disagreement

 It’s the diet book section.  I counted-off twenty-five steps (and I step big) from one end of this section to the other.  This is not the cookbook section, or the health and fitness section, it’s just the diet books.

I took this picture at the same store, at a display up-front.

Four books, four contradictions.

I was thinking,”Hey, this will illustrate how confusing dieting is – four brand-new books, all contradicting each other.”  And then I decided to go look for the diet book section, assuming it would be four or five feet wide.  Shows how much I know.

The question I have now is how in the world is it possible for any human being to look at all those books and come up with any kind of reasonable expectation that they can find helpful information?

Remember too that most of the people looking to those books for help are scared and sad already.  Throwing hundreds (thousands?) of books of advice at them just makes the problem worse.

The crowd says, clearly, and with a loud voice, buy diet books.  Buy all of them. Drive yourself crazy trying to rationalize how they can all be right.

The crowd is wrong.  You know that in your bones.  It’s silly, sub-optimal and destructive, at least in this case.  What’s right?  I hate to be a broken record, but what’s right is eating real food.  Enough of it – just enough – and at the right time.  What’s right is paying attention to how your body reacts when you eat something.  What’s right is thinking for yourself.

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For those of you scoring at home, not a banner week for me on the scales, but I’m sticking’ with it.  Stuck at 262.  I blame the gnocchi. Next week I’m determined to get below 260.

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Thanks for reading, and thanks to all those readers who forwarded the blog to friends this week.  I appreciate your support!