Monday, February 21, 2011
Column 405
The Diary of an Unhealthy Dart Throwing Slug. Week Three of Nine.
February 14, 2011
Today is Valentine’s Day and I am traveling. I’m on a US Airways flight as I write – headed to Bethesda and then Ukfield, East Sussex for some business and darts. Yesterday I gave my wife a special Valentine’s Day present so all is okay. I gave her a chocolate covered vacuum.
The infamous Dave “Boy” Green has been giving me crap again at the Stars of Darts forum. Green has made a name for himself with his mouth – by challenging people to money games and losing his arse. He’s such a silly little boy. Over and over he sets himself up to be pulverized. Probably he got is arse kicked at conkers too.
Travel is tough on the waistline. I always return a few pounds heavier than when I left. But this trip I’m 100% committed to staying on my Whole Health Plan. I’m beginning my third week. I’ve lost 12 pounds. I’ve got 41 more to go.
The diet went perfect today – lemon water and five oranges for breakfast, salad for lunch, and brown rice with vegetables for dinner. When I checked into my hotel (a Doubletree, which is famous for handing out a warm chocolate chip cookie at check-in) I took the cookie but just set it on the desk in my room. Tonight I began the exercise component of the Plan. I walked the streets of Bethesda for an hour. I found a military surplus store and plan to go back tomorrow to buy some cool shit that I don’t need.
February 15, 2011
Today I met up with my friend and the creator of the Whole Health Plan. Friends now call him Reverence Raw. I promised him I would work a few paragraphs into this journal to explain that the Plan is about more than just eating oranges. (He confirmed that it’s acceptable to eat “as many oranges as you can cram into your face” but suggested I change it up a bit by mixing in apples and pears, pizza and chocolate cake.) I may have misunderstood some of this.
So here’s the deal. It’s all well documented; you just have to know where to look.
Some sentences below are lifted (okay plagiarized, or is it pulverized?) from my buddy’s Plan, but what the hell. Where this is the case I made note that attribution is due (and also sent a little message to Dave “Boy Green, in the event he has any delusions about what would happen if he faced me).
Slowly but surely we’re being murdered by the food industry. Yes, murdered. Since birth we have all had a bulls-eye on our backs and the food industry has been at the line 24 hours a day.
Just as in the 1950s and 1960s the tobacco industry intentionally cultivated a condition of hyper-addiction in smokers on a mass scale and lied to the public (with the help of academics, doctors, the news and entertainment industry, politicians, government bureaucrats and lawyers) about the health effects of their cancer-causing product – and then pocketed trillions of dollars off of the disease and death they caused – the food industry is responsible for an even deadlier consumer con. What the tobacco industry did pales in comparison – and they killed millions and millions of people.
Much like the tobacco industry business model the food industry creates food products that cultivate a condition of hyper-addiction in unwitting consumers. While there are some food companies that are working to improve the nutritional quality of their products the overwhelming majority of commercial foods are potentially highly addictive and can cause chronic disease. They are consumed on such a mass scale – across every age group, at every meal, every day – that the resultant cumulative disease and death caused by the food industry eclipses that of the tobacco industry. (Pulverized!)
We’ve become compulsive eaters and because, in a very real way, we’ve been drugged. The food industry has for years and years manipulated sugars, fats and salt in food products to mimic the neurological effects of drugs like heroin, cocaine and, yes, nicotine. Do you think its coincidence that when R.J. Reynolds, one of the largest tobacco companies, saw the gig was up, bought the Nabisco company, which is one of the largest producers of processed food products? (Pulverized!)
You name it – breads, cereals, frozen dinners, canned vegetables and fruits, prepared sauces, dressings and spreads – whether sold in supermarkets or restaurants – are just flavor and texture variants on a delivery system for some narcotic cocktail of sugar-fat-salt. This is all most of us eat and most of what we eat has absolutely no redeeming nutritional value. But we crave more of it. We are hooked. (Pulverized! Pulverized! Pulverized!)
From birth to the moment you read these words, all of us, every day – from breakfast through lunch and dinner and snack, snack, snack – are like Stepford Wives, almost zombie-like, shuffling along a conveyor belt of addiction to food products that have been proven to cause diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, most cancers, Alzheimer’s and even premature aging.
Just like the unaware husband who is slowly poisoned to death by his black widow wife we are all being systematically poisoned to death by the food industry.
This is why I’ve committed myself to the Whole Health Plan. This is I’ll no longer eat anything that has been grown in chemicals or sprayed with them.
February 16, 2011
Another successful day. In fact, today I even faired better than the creator of the Whole Health Plan. He was briefly diverted from the program because someone named Bud called his name, three times. I skipped the Night of Temptation to go walking again.
February 17, 2011
I’m 39,000 feet in the night sky as I write this – en route to the Mother Country.
When I packed this morning I put the chocolate chip cookie from the Doubletree into my briefcase. I was proud that I’d resisted eating it and, in some way that I don’t understand, felt that keeping it with me and continuing to resist the urge to eat it would solidify my growing confidence that I could stay on the straight and narrow of the Whole Health Plan, make it through the nine weeks and reach my goal weight.
Well, I have blown it. But it’s not my fault (except that I was the dumb-ass who put the cookie in my briefcase and carried it on the plane). It’s the evil food industry’s fault. They made the cookie talk.
It was trash-talking to me. And it sounded just like Dave “Boy” Green. “Oi! Dartoid! You’re a moronic piece of fooking Yank poo!” So I grabbed it, broke it into pieces and chomped it until it was gone. Pulverized!
February 18, 2011
I am in England and back on the Plan. It’s been easy because, besides the cookie, I packed a sack of oranges. Plus pretty much every restaurant here is an Indian – and Indian food (except for the meat) is safe eats.
Tomorrow night I arrive back home. I must resist the urge to chow down on my wife’s new vacuum.
From the Field,
Dartoid
