New Years Ridiculousness

So it's January, and everyone is feeling sluggish and run down from the excess eating and drinking that they have done over the Christmas and New Year.

And so, it's January, and talk is full of how everyone is feeling so fat and how they want to get their weight down as fast as they possibly can.

The first day with everyone back at work, everyone stood around, clutching their stomachs, all talking about how repulsive they all are. They described how they felt their weight and how it was affecting them on a daily basis. They would discuss at length how terrible they felt, how disgusting they all looked, and how they badly wanted to lose weight.

At our work, we have a routine called 'Biscuit Monday' (American Readers - biscuits here are what you call cookies), so everyone takes a turn at bringing in their favourite biscuits to share with everyone in the office. The reason for introducing this is because everyone is in a sour mood on a Monday morning at having to come in and go to work after the weekend ending.

The first Biscuit Monday of 2012 was my opportunity to bring in biscuits for the office people.

This, was my offering.

To everyone who had professed dieting glory, this was a nightmare.

'OH NO!', they exclaimed. 'WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO US?!'

But wait! All is not lost.

One of them said, 'I know! I'll have a Tim Tam now, and NOT EAT ANYTHING FOR DINNER.'

One of them said, 'Oh it's okay because I haven't eaten anything for breakfast.'

One of them said, 'Arrrrgggggh, I can't eat these! I'll just smell them. *picks them up* Ohhhh they smell so good. BUT NO! I will smell them.'

I'm sitting there, absolutely slackjawed, looking at them all. Most of these people were my seniors, and most of them had children of their own. I thought about whether they behaved this way in front of their kids, and if their kids thought that they had to skip a meal was the only way they could ever justify being able to eat a Tim Tam.

Several of them are also on cleanses, eating almost nothing, and all of them either bragging about how much running they are doing before work, after work, or proudly strutting off in the middle of the day.

Then we take it out of the office and into every other place I go to on a daily basis.

In the gyms, people are making ridiculous promises to themselves. "I'm going to come into the gym 5 times per week." My class numbers are higher, and I should appreciate that, though I can't help but think 'You are doing activities you hate for too long, too frequently, with too much resistance, on not enough fuel, and you are not giving yourself enough time to recover. You are going to burn yourself out, feel exhausted, and resent yourself in a manner of weeks.'

Then there's the flourish of Nothing But Updates About My Weight Loss on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. There is one girl on my feed (who is now removed because it did drive me nuts) who every day was whining and crying about how no matter how much work she did in the gym, she wasn't losing any weight and how the scales were her enemy. She would post pictures of celebrities with rippling abdominals and cry as to why she didn't look that way and how it was Oh So Unfair that she didn't look the same way.

I know that I'm not going to achieve anything by pushing my view or preaching to anyone. When my colleagues brag about their lack of eating and put themselves through ridiculous training regimes which they clearly do not enjoy - there's nothing I can tell them to sway them from that train of thought. When my participants excitedly tell me about how many training sessions they've done and how they haven't eaten xyz for however many days, I know there's nothing that I can say to them to tell them that they will burn out and focusing on developing a balanced routine that is sustainable is better off.

There's enough diet talk in the world at the best of times - though this period after Christmas combined with the bombardment of weight loss advertising brings out even more ridiculousness than normal.

I will be so incredibly relieved when excessive ridiculousness calms down to just regular ridiculousness.