Weight Loss, Hot Pot, Emotion, Reason

As I keep going on about every day, I’ve been dieting — for almost a year now. Oh wait, today makes it exactly a year. Unluckily enough, on this commemorative day I stopped running. The reason, naturally, is that my legs and feet feel off. On days I can’t run my OCD acts up a bit, but then I figure I’ve been running to lose weight for a year now. The goal failed, sure, but at least I shed the fat — isn’t it about time to call it a wrap? The weight loss is a done deal; all that’s left is figuring out how not to bounce back. The weekend came around and I got a craving. I wanted hot pot, but I was also worried about putting the weight back on. Being the kind of guy who lives parasitically on the internet, I fired up the search engine again… Searching around, digging through every bit of experience I could find, all I got was “keep up good sleep and eating habits, don’t go stuffing yourself just because you lost weight… blah, blah, blah.” Finally I found an answer on Quora: “An occasional binge is no big deal. Once you stop dieting you can relax a little — no need to stay wound so tight.” I let out a long breath. Finally, I could eat hot pot. My mother, who had watched the whole process from the sidelines, said: “So you searched for ages just waiting for that one sentence, huh?” “The other answers aren’t scientific. This guy’s take is comparatively reasonable.” I defended myself. “So because he said what you wanted to hear, you think he’s reasonable?” Yeah… no comeback for that.

After finishing the hot pot, I thought it over and felt my behavior was honestly a bit ugly. To get the result I wanted, I went around hunting for other people’s approval, and in the vast sea of the internet I picked out the words that sounded nicest to me to believe, while dismissing anything unpleasant out of hand. People are emotional animals. Sometimes emotion is a good thing — it lets us feel the warmth between people. And sometimes emotion brings a lot of negative force too; being too bound up in it messes with a person’s ability to judge reasonably. There’s a signature on Quora that I think nails the problem: “When you want to ask a question and the answer is yes or no, you already have your answer in your heart at that moment — you’re just hoping someone else will say the words you want to hear.” Looking back at all the questions in my own heart, a lot of things get a lot clearer. Sometimes hesitating over something is just wanting someone else’s approval. What you like and don’t like doesn’t come out of so-called rational analysis — most of the time we just use that rational analysis to prop up the judgment we’ve already made about liking or hating the thing. Maybe some guy who spends every day listing reasons to hate Apple is really just a hater because his ex-girlfriend sneered at him for not being able to afford an iPhone, and he hates Apple for that, not any of the other reasons… Think about it that way and all those people trying every day to prove they’ve reached their conclusion through rational analysis are a bunch of tsundere. Of course I’m the same. Sometimes I like or hate something out of personal preference, and I’ll go and gather all kinds of rational-sounding material on top of my emotions to fill out my opinion, to prove I’m being reasonable and not just acting on impulse — even when another voice inside me is telling me the thing really isn’t that bad. Bullshit. I hate certain things because of some dark history, not because of some dumb reason #1, 2, 3, 4, 5… Once you’ve picked a side you stick with it to the end. Once you’ve branded yourself a hater of X, you have to keep hating. It’s an emotional one-way road…