Vive la France!
Today's Fatslaying Workout 1 hour bike ride (yesterday). Rest day today.
Today's Weight 202.0lbs
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Happy Bastille Day, everyone!
I've been watching the Tour De France, so I'm feeling all Francophilliac and Gallic. I like the French, even though it pisses me off that the world seems to assume that all English women are as lumpy and stodgy as Lancashire Hotpot whilst all French women are as thin and insubstantial as consomme. They're not all chic and gorgeous like Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Sophie Marceau and Brigitte Bardot, you know! Trust me, some of them are real dogs - and more pug than poodle if you get my drift.
According to this book we should all be eating like French women and we'd become chic and skinny in no time. Hmmm. My room-mate at University was French, and she ate the average person's total daily calorie allowance every day for breakfast in croissants, pain au chocolates, and brioche. She wasn't fat, but she wasn't exactly built like Audrey Tautou either.
Anyway, back to the Tour de France. I've been watching it, and feeling uncomfortably humbled. Those riders work so bloody hard! And I don't mean baboon-arse-hard, I mean really, REALLY burn-to-the-bone hard! Even watching them is a physical effort.
It dawned on me that I've never really tried that hard at anything in my entire life. I don't just mean exercise - I mean in any aspect of my life, period.
I'm not what you'd call lazy as such - I did the whole college, university, post-grad professional qualification thing to haul myself up the career ladder a few notches and I work reasonably hard at my job - not bust a blood vessel hard, but hard enough to deserve my salary and to earn regular promotions.
But outside work it's a different story. Outside work I'm just an idle slob.
If the media is to be believed some women go home after putting in fourteen hour days performing open heart surgery and cook cordon bleu meals, clean house to operating theatre standard, knit sweaters, home-school their brood of children, write novels, compose symphonies, study quantum physics, run half-marathons, give killer blow jobs and still manage to cleanse tone and moisturise before hitting the sack.
Me, I just can't be bothered. I figure housework is some kind of Sisyphean form of torture dreamt up by men to enslave women, so I simply refuse to play the game. When the piles of steaming yak guts get too high to ignore I simply sweep them out the back door so that they're out of sight, out of mind, and go back to reading bodice-rippers on the sofa. It is one of life's fundamental truths that there is always more housework than there are hours to do it in, so I've given up feeling guilty about it and embraced failure instead. Besides, the bodice-rippers are much more life-enriching.
I just like lying on the sofa and vegetating, in the same way that some people like having sex orgies and others like climbing Everest in a pair of flippers and a tank-top. Whatever floats your boat. I'd like to be able to say that I have a burning urge to do triathlons every evening before dinner, but the truth is that if I had my own way I'd never willingly raise a finger to do anything sporty and energetic - not unless my life depended on it (which of course it does).
Duh - do you think this explains why I've been fat my whole life? Man, is it really that simple? If so, I'm vindicated, 'cos it's obviously not my fault - I must have faulty genes or something! A leopard can't change its spots, so pass me that bodice-ripper and some chocolate, pronto!
According to this article, there's certainly some truth in that assertion.
So fundamentally you can't change your nature - any more than you can change your nationality. So whilst I may read the books that tell me to aspire to eat like a Frenchwoman and dress like a Frenchwoman and live like a Frenchwoman, I'll never BE a Frenchwoman....so what's the point in feeling bad about it?
