#weight

When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent directly or indirectly, in the assay. ↗

— Samuel G. Blythe

#healthy-living #weight-loss #motivational

A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about digestion: the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes t o regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#food

You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stored up to make it through the telling of the tale. It's short. I am monstrously fat. I am a glutton. My wife was disgusted and repulsed. She gave me six months to lose one hundred pounds. I joined Weight Watchers . . . see it there, right across the street, that gaunt storefront? This afternoon was the big six-month weigh-in. So to speak. I had gained almost seventy pounds in the six months. An errant Snickers bar fell out of the cuff of my pants and rolled against my wife's foot as I stepped on the scale. The scale over there across the street is truly an ingenious device. One preprograms the desired new weight into it, and if one has achieved or gone below that new low weight, the scale bursts into recorded whistles and cheers and some lively marching-band tune. Apparently, tiny flags protrude from the top and wave mechanically back and forth. A failure--see for instance mine--results in a flatulent dirge of disappointed and contemptuous tuba. To the strains of the latter my wife left, the establishment, me, on the arm of a svelte yogurt distributor whom I am even now planning to crush, financially speaking, first thing tomorrow morning. Ms. Beadsman, you will find an eclair on the floor to the left of your chair. Could you perhaps manipulate it onto this plate with minimal chocolate loss and pass it to me. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#humor #weight-loss #humor

Actors worry about bad breath, weight, receding hairlines and why their leading lady looks like their daughter. ↗

— Matthew Ashford

#bad #bad breath #breath #daughter #lady

Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall. ↗

— Charles Babbage

#another #arises #fall #lifting #mode

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln. ↗

— Russell Baker

#american #american public #commentators #conditioned #down

I eat cheese and salami and a lot of fried chicken. I eat a big bag of oatmeal-raisin cookies every night and I don't gain weight. I still look OK as long as I'm dressed. ↗

— Ellen Barkin

#big #cheese #chicken #cookies #dressed

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#body-image #diet-industry #eating-disorders #self-esteem #weight

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. ↗

— John Updike

#adult #bore #consumes #each #half

Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist: it reduces him to his fighting weight. ↗

— Josh Billings

#effect #fighting #him #his #man