So in my continuing if probably futile attempts to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve decided to do something about my whole thing with fast food.
‘Cause here’s the deal. I tend to get distracted very easily: snatches of songs, beautiful women, the Internet, shiny objects in general, conjectures about domination in cubic graphs… I have this little trouble with focus on occasion. This is bad when one has arranged one’s day in such a way that one has a very specific time period when one is supposed to be out getting lunch, because one quick distraction and all of a sudden your lunch hour’s reduced to about twenty minutes. Hence, fast food. It may not be great, but it’s quick and filling, and sometimes that’s good enough.
Except, of course, that fast food is actually everything that’s bad for you about food distilled into a mass-produced essence and then scented with chemicals from a factory in New Jersey. (I’m exaggerating, of course, but not by a whole lot. Further details can be found in Fast Food Nation.) My reliance on it as an option is a bad habit that I’d really like to do away with.
And so: my new system. Once a fast food place pisses me off, then I never patronise it ever again. By pisses me off
, generally I mean they get my order wrong, which — when one has morbid dislikes of certain common foodstuffs — isn’t that difficult to do, yet renders my food inedible.
Phase 1 started with pizza places, and so I’m now boycotting the second- and third-largest pizza chains in the U.S. Phase 2 got under way this week, and already my two most significant fast-food weaknesses have been banished. I don’t know what it says about me that I don’t mind eating crap in a regular basis except when the profit on my weakness goes towards incompetence, but that seems to be the case.