Live Fast Die Pretty... The System I.

"I'm scared... In a few days, my diet will end, and I'm afraid of the end because I don't know what will happen afterward and what I'll eat." These are the words of a friend of mine, who, as the end approaches, started to ponder her life after the program. Life after death, I could say, but it's not that dramatic, though it's a fact that with the end of the program, your accustomed lifestyle also ends. No more prescribed meals, no more rules to follow; instead, you step into an independent life, so to speak, outside the program, and then you've lost weight, you've achieved your goals, but what next? What should you eat if you're not dieting anymore, when, and based on what? Will you start binging again? If so, you might as well go to hell, because that would be like hitting your hard-earned, freshly built house with a 3-ton steel ball. The first few days after the program are tough, because you no longer have to mess with pasta-less soups at weddings and birthdays, and you don't have to wash down parties with light cola and sugar-free water. You're no longer the designated driver, and you can drink your favorite booze, but let's be honest, after successfully completing a program, it's mandatory to get incredibly, disgustingly, truly drunk.

The program is a lifestyle-changing period, and by adhering to it, you achieve your goals, but living by it for a lifetime is impossible and unnecessary. Hungarians are an unhappy race; if we don't have problems, we still fall into depression, and in our current stimulus-poor society, food is almost the only happiness factor we can access cheaply and anytime. The problem is that nothing much happens to most people; average weekdays, weeks, and months just roll by. Grey, problem-laden daily routines follow one another; for most of the year, nothing special happens to us, just the usual stress, the constant, and relationship hassles. You feel unhappy, so you eat a chocolate for happiness hormones, you devour your favorite food, and for those few minutes, you feel good, everything is okay because it's so delicious, and oh, I really needed this. We need to feel alive; we need those moments we consider happy, even if they are such small, petty joys, but life is shitty, and despite the trendy saying "live fast, die pretty," its realization is unattainable and even unattempted for most people...

When I joined the sad circle of gambling addicts at 18, standing over the roulette wheel, I was searching for something I wasn't getting from everyday life. Risk-taking, dancing on the edge, an adrenaline rush, something to remind me I was alive. That damn wheel spun, and I waited for the ball, which I thought of as a springboard, to land on my number, from which I expected salvation, that I would have money, that that damn big hit would finally come in, from which I would start climbing without work, I would have money, and everyone else could screw themselves. I stood there for those half-minutes, but in the end, even the money didn't matter; it was just about having that certain feeling of being alive, that little extra, that my heart was beating, and I forgot everything shitty in the process because it felt good then, it felt damn good then. People jump out of planes, perhaps with ropes on their feet, or climb rocks without ropes, or steal other people's women, searching for a similar feeling, but women will never understand this. Life is a roulette wheel, and that's the point. I knew what I was doing was wrong; I lost so much money I don't even dare write it down, but I didn't care. I did it because it felt good, because I needed the feeling. The exact same situation applies to eating. You know it's bad, you know it's destroying you, but damn it, you need it this much, you f***ing need it, because if you don't even have this, then we really can go to hell. Everything harmful eventually kills you in the long run, but you don't care because it just feels good. Cigarettes are harmful and humiliating, but those who haven't smoked will never understand what it means to sit on a bench and light up, just to smoke a cigarette, giving a damn about cancer and death, but I think that's the best part of it all: that you risk, that you deny, that you rebel, and you don't care.

Once you've finished your school years and start working, you'll truly realize what a sucky machine life is, in which the carefree school years might still echo for a while, but for most people, not even that much is given. The struggle with work and for existential survival takes up all your time, and depending on your education, it slowly but surely pushes you into the sadly monotonous weekdays of everyday life, and even existential differences don't help much, at most you feel, sitting in a better chair, that your life is shitty and infinitely short and meager. In this state, only two constant and stable escape points remain: food and relationships. This men-women topic would be worth an entire blog, but to simplify, we can summarize the gender characteristics of our current society as we most often hear it from the two sexes, which goes like this: men are filthy, lying scumbags, and women are whores who can be laid down with the right words, proportionally, in the non-pejorative, nobler sense of the word. Dating, endless compromises, and the most despicable, face-dropping cheating. Of course, there are counter-examples, but I wouldn't base my happiness on the stability of relationships in today's world, because enough girls in relationships have passed through my life for me to know what women are capable of doing while in a relationship with their boyfriend, whom they supposedly loved, and besides, I don't trust a person who bleeds for 4 days and doesn't die from it. Of course, there are plenty of counter-examples, so let's assume that if you only get a few months of a relationship, or if only casual sex provides emotional satisfaction, then we can already check off the source of pleasures provided by the sexes to each other. The happiness of relationships is thus accounted for, but what about those who haven't even achieved this yet, or who are currently in an incredibly shitty relationship, afraid of change because, in the female world, as long as there's no other branch in sight for them to cling to, there's no movement. Well, for them, there's food, that damn light mascarpone, chocolates, and of course, the 800+ calorie sugared or fatty, messed-up gastronomic crap.

For almost 8 years now, with the exception of 3 friends, I have exclusively surrounded myself with women. They are the daily participants in my life; I talk to them almost every day of the year, I try to pick them up, I am with them, so I know them well enough to know that being born a woman is one of life's biggest screw-ups, even if I know they are the meaning of life and we do everything for them. We study for them, we build a livelihood and a life for them, so that in the end we acquire them, and preferably as many as possible. The unambiguous centrality of female existence and their defining characteristic is their figure and appearance. One can protest against this, of course, but a woman's emotional state and her attitude towards life are 98% determined by her beauty and external appearance. Everyone gives a damn about what women achieve in their workplaces, because no one in the world of men will care about that. You can have a multimillion-dollar job with 70 subordinates who depend on you and your work, but men among themselves will only ask about the color of your hair and the quality of your butt. How charming your face is, how feminine your legs are, how big your breasts are, and what sexual aura you possess – this is what men get excited about, not your social status, because everyone gives a damn about that; in fact, it's more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Women, their appearance, and the quality of their lives override everything, and this external appearance is fundamentally determined by the quality of the food they consume and what that food does to their bodies and thus to their lives.

Women diet their entire lives and, of course, almost always fail. On the one hand, because of their emotion-based thinking, which leads to extreme life situations, and on the other hand, because, as I wrote above, besides the emotions of relationships, food remains the only source of experience left to them, and with dieting, they want to take even this away from them. And here I haven't even talked about the many difficulties and feelings of vulnerability that come with being a woman, which they have to face every day. The post-childbirth period, the undeniably shitty moves of men, the weight gain due to contraception, on which estrogen acts as an incendiary bomb, and the feeling that they are just accessories in a world made by men. The lifelong struggle for a more beautiful appearance, the emotional outbursts due to the emotional factor, for which women find sweets and eating to be the appropriate solution, which only ruins their appearance, thereby pushing themselves into the deepest pits of their self-esteem crisis...

You don't have to starve yourself for a lifetime and torture yourselves with the most idiotic self-torturing diets, because there's another solution that has a system and is even livable. Lifetilt's first major lifestyle change program is difficult, but once you've done it, you've taken the biggest step towards a healthier and more fulfilling life, but this is only the first step, the first 70 days, which will eventually end. This post is about the period after the program and the years that follow, that is, how to maintain your figure and what you need to do to at least roughly keep the weight and appearance you achieved with the Lifetilt program.

This post is about that, and about this post-program life in the second part of this entry...

The System II. On Friday.