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Can it be that it was all so simple then?

By Me | January 10, 2007

Yesterday, I opened up the Washington Post web site to read the morning paper and came face to face with no less than three references to dieting and weight loss, in articles and in ads … all in the first fold.

It’s that time of year again, boys and girls. Now that we’ve all stuffed our faces repeatedly in those halcyon days between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, it’s time to face the music.

It reminded me of something I wrote back when I was in high school. Mine was a peculiar high school experience: an all girls boarding school in the hills of northern Virginia. Yes, that’s right. Two hundred horny teenaged girls from well-heeled families (except the scholarship students like me), all of whom seemed obsessed with losing weight.

Combine that with the fact that we studied Hamlet during my junior year and you get … this.

To eat, or not to eat–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the gut to suffer
The huffs and puffs of outrageous obesity
Or to take arms against a sea of extra pounds
And by dieting end them. To eat, to drink–
No more–and by a drink to say we grapple with
The Boone’s Farm, and the thousand natural hangovers
That intoxication is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To drink, to eat–
To eat–perchance to belch: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that belch of indigestion what gas may come
When we have pigged out at this mortal meal,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes dieting of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of thighs,
The calorie calculus, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of tofu, the Weight Watchers’ delay,
The insolence of co-workers, and the spurns
of trying to fit through the subway door,
When he himself might lose his extra pounds
In a bare Danskin? Who would this fatness bear,
To grunt and sweat under three dozen extra pounds,
But that the dread of something after dieting,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those pounds we have
Than lose them and gain them all back?
Thus dieting does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Topics: Stuff |

One Response to “Can it be that it was all so simple then?”

  1. Spiritgirl Says:
    January 10th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

    Very nice, Dawn! And can I ever relate to that!