Sunday, March 21, 2010

Everything's gotta be good or bad for you these days.

iPhone app measures calories burned during sex

I dunno, man. I don't have sex to burn calories. I eat calories so I'll have the energy to have sex.

Also he seems pretty skinny in the photo, so while he might benefit from strength or cardio, he really doesn't have a desperate need to burn more calories.

Also this silly thing obviously wouldn't be very accurate and I'm taking it way too seriously. I guess I'm just annoyed by the idea that everything you do in your life has to be in service of your health and thereby worth. Some things are just ways to enjoy being alive, you know? It's like eating a delicious salad with really crisp fresh vegetables, then having some jerk come up and go "Good for you, that's so healthy!"




I've been reading Kate Harding's blog a lot recently, and while I don't agree with everything she says (she rejects deliberate weight loss entirely and has no problem with indefinite weight gain; I think weight loss is a valid--but not mandatory--choice and gaining weight is more concerning than just being stably fat), I like her and the community on that blog. In a world where I'm constantly being told I'm both the victim and perpetrator of a horrible epidemic, it's a place to hear that I'm really okay.

Man, I'm like a hippie vampire. I don't have nearly the niceness or the loopiness to be "accepting" of everyone, I just like to hang out with hippies so they'll accept me. It's terrible.

3 comments:

  1. "A woman desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to exercise" --

    Is anyone else reading that as "a woman desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to 'exercise'"?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anon - Eh, I just read it as "a woman who figured out that $1 app x silly news story = a couple thousand bucks at least."

    ReplyDelete
  3. I gotta say, I don't love Kate Harding's blog/writing, for some of the same reasons you've already suggested. I don't like that Shapely Prose will ban you, or block your comment, if you express disagreement with any of the principles of their fat-acceptance philosophy (that deliberate weight loss is never okay, that you can't lose weight & keep it off, that "it's okay for you to be fat, but I want to lose weight" isn't a valid stance). The idea that NO ONE needs to lose weight or should ever try is very radical; reasonable people should be able to disagree about how these issues of health/acceptance/discrimination interact, without being banned or mocked for it. And insisting that you're not really "fat acceptance" until you've accepted the divine truth of these teachings into your heart... I dunno... it smack of "political correctness" in the original 1930's sense, where if you don't toe the party line, you're out of the party.

    The above makes it sound like like I'm a bitter ex-Shapely Prose commenter, but I'm really not. I just think it's a shame, because about 1/2 of what that blog has to say is really important & commonsensical.

    ReplyDelete