You still have 20 days...
I have some bad news. If you don't start working out by the end of May, you might as well forget about losing weight until mid-September. A hindering external factor called summer has crept in. Summer is not exactly the most ideal time for self-sacrifice, but the best part is that this is when most people will confront their own weak self-image and how much of a pile of crap body they are forced to live through the beach season in, and pay tribute in the land of bikinis for 3 months. I truly and sincerely wish everyone a summer full of complexes, hoping that after the twenty-ninth condescending glance, you'll finally come to your senses and hopefully won't eat that damn pancake for dessert after lunch. Yes, I know you ate it with light whipped cream and drank light coke with it.
Summer is banging on the door, bringing a steady average temperature above 20 degrees Celsius and the least amount of clothing possible. If we wanted to define the concept of illusion with a season, it would certainly be summer. On summer nights, after the seventh Mai Thai (above a certain level, of course), nobody really cares who you are, what you are, or what you think about anything, only how you look. I'll never forget the first time I went to Sound. I had heard legendary stories about the festival of pretense and superficiality, but seeing it live was something else entirely. This is a place where there's posing for 96 hours straight. From the moment you cross the administrative border of Zamárdi until the minute the last tents are packed up. I don't know who has been to Gerendai's Balaton party, but this is the place where out of 60,000 people, no one goes into the water because 1. they're wearing sunglasses even in the water, and 2. their hair will get wet, and there wasn't enough room for gel and a curling iron next to the Burberry blanket. This is huge in a way, because this isn't the Onassis family's private party, yet everyone acts as if they have a million-dollar dot-com business behind them. Of course, then everyone goes home to their rented apartment, or in a better case, a two-room flat with all amenities. Last year, three people went into the water, but they were glared at like hell. This is a life-or-death struggle in Zamárdi. I love it.
Festivals, grill parties, pool parties, and beach trips, Siófok, holidays, massive drunken binges, wild road trips with friends – these are all about everything except being able to stick to any diet or exercise program. Summer is simply unsuitable for any kind of body shaping or lifestyle involving sacrifices. Let's go through what I'm talking about. Even on average weekdays, conditions are appalling in Budapest if you want to maintain a diet. You have to hunt for so-called healthy foods, and what happens if you spend 10 days in a resort area?
Festivals
Sziget, Volt, Sound, Hegyalja, BalaTone, Ozora, Efott… You can find everything at these, except healthy food, apart from perhaps the Krishnas' seeds, or I don't even know what that sect eats. But there's nothing wrong with that, because it would be a bad sign if these parties weren't about drinking, irresponsible sex, and hot dogs eaten after the fifth vomit at dawn. Last year, I went through a similar program before the summer festival season, and then at Sound, I didn't give a damn about how many calories were in anything. Not to mention, we started drinking on Thursday afternoon and finished in the early hours of Monday. I still don't remember Sunday's World Cup final, even though there's nothing more calorie-rich than alcohol. But I reassure everyone that this summer will be no different.
Grill parties
I hate them like hell. Let's move on.
Pool parties and beach trips.
Last year, I spent a day at Palatinus right in the middle of my diet, when I took my then-girlfriend to the beach before the weekend crowd. I don't know who has tried to eat diet food at a Budapest beach, but if anyone wants to try it this year, I would just tell them that it's absolutely not going to work, because I would risk saying that the most diet-friendly food you can get at the beach is lángos. I go to the counter, which isn't hard to find, just follow the smell of grease, then I ask if they have any diet food, because I'd like that. The girl looks at me strangely and then managed to say the following, which I have witnesses for. "We have fried cheese, ham sandwiches, and potato salad." Before I could ask her to send someone smarter in her place, I tried to ask questions that could only be answered with yes or no, because I felt every sentence hurt her. "Do you have rice?" I ask. "Yes." "Great, then I'll have a portion of rice and a plain water." "Okay, and what would you like with the rice, because I can't just give out plain rice." But by now I felt bad about bothering her and being smart, and anyway, I should just go to hell. In the end, we settled on a plain water and a completely dropped blood sugar level by 6 p.m. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should stock protein bars and protein shakes, but I don't think it would be too much trouble to have two kinds of dressing-free salads and grilled chicken breast. We ridiculously try to ape the West on every level, but somehow we are unable to adopt a healthy eating culture. This deeply socialist mentality still sticks to us that if we leave home for more than two hours, we should make sandwiches. In Italy, on the beach, you could tell exactly who was Hungarian, because they were almost certainly eating, about to eat, or the folk rhyme "Come on, Zsoltika, eat something" was carried on the wind.
What more should I say about pool parties besides booze and wet women? Oh, right, that at such parties, appearance is tied to some visual presentation. Well, yes, you should have started training by the end of May, shouldn't you? Or are you pathetically searching for this?
Siófok…
…and other resort towns. I have fantastic memories tied to Siófok. My friend Ádi and I were on our way to the annual Efott party, maybe Sound wasn't even a thing back then, anyway, the point is, we started off by train, just the two of us. Around Fehérvár, the idea came up to get off at Siófok, spend half a day there, and then continue in the late afternoon. If it's Siófok, it's Beach House. (Is it still there?) It's important to know that there's no bigger cheapskate on earth than Ádi (he's not Jewish), so there's no way he'd pay more than 500 forints for an entrance fee anywhere. For years, Ádi has been going to festivals by using rubbing alcohol to remove wristbands from totally drunk people at the entrance, then putting them on himself, waiting for the alcohol to dry, and then going in. Maybe I wasn't clear. The guy goes to festivals with rubbing alcohol in his pocket!!! Okay, that always gets me. So, we're standing in front of the Beach House, entrance fee 1,500 HUF, and right then I knew it was a no-go. And it was, we didn't go in. Okay, let's find a waterfront, but of course, in downtown Siófok, there are hotels all along the shore or paid beaches, but we eventually found a free spot next to the Siófok hotel row. Ádi says, let's go into the Beach House from the water, because it's pretty crappy here in the reeds next to the storks. I say, "Damn it, doesn't it bother you that we have two huge backpacks and our tent with us?" Ádi says, "No problem, let's leave them here, ask someone to watch them, we'll go in for 2-3 hours and then we'll continue." There was a sympathetic family there, so we left our stuff with them. We go in, everything's awesome, Ádi kept wanting to put suntan lotion on every girl's back, so the usual summer flirting stuff, then it starts getting late, we need to go to Efott. Time flew by, 2-3 hours turned into a leisurely six. We go back to the reeds, the family is gone, and so is all our stuff. So, to sum up. We're standing in Siófok in just our swimming trunks, without money, stuff, or anything really. Our phones, clothes, tent, damn, everything was taken. That's when I first felt that we were really screwed. But how could we be such idiots, and why? Because Ádi begrudged the 1,500 forint entrance fee. I could tell this story for a long time, but in short, we had to go to the police station barefoot on the hot asphalt. The cops didn't think we were crazy when we filed the report in just our underwear. We got two police t-shirts at least, and called Pityu to come pick us up. Oh God, it was great.
The bottom line is that you absolutely cannot eat diet food in Siófok.
Vacation
As you might have read in Dani's report, it's incredibly difficult to stick to a program when you're away from home, even if you're on a business trip. In '96, we were in Greece, and all I remember from the whole trip was standing at the Macedonian border for 9 hours, bringing an absurd amount of canned food, and Germany winning the European Championship. Tasting local foods, sit-down dinners, and especially if you're not on an all-inclusive plan, it's totally impossible to manage any kind of diet. For example, on the Greek coast, a guy walks up and down all day selling sugared doughnuts, as it's some kind of national sweet or something similar, just to give an example. I think it's impossible to maintain a low-calorie diet during a vacation, and I haven't even talked about workouts, because who's the idiot who's going to run 6-8 km three times a week during their vacation? Of course, everything is a matter of determination, but the circumstances are much, much more difficult than in the other 9 months of the year.
Summer is perfectly unsuitable for starting a diet, not only because we are constantly in places where you have to drink decently at the very least, but also because it's almost impossible to get the kind of food we should be eating, and the workouts themselves are damn hard in 30-degree weather, and I don't even need to tell you what effect the heat has on willpower and an active life. Anyone who doesn't believe me should look at the kind of life that goes on in countries along the equator or in Africa. The hotter the climate, the more screwed the economy will be. North and South Italy are excellent examples of this, or even the difference between the northern and southern parts of the USA. If you don't approach summer with momentum, meaning if you don't start preparing in May, you'll have no chance of getting into it during the summer.
So everyone still has about 3 weeks until mid-May to start their lifestyle change program, because if not, they can say goodbye to it for at least 3 months, and until then, they'll be stuck with a flabby belly, cellulite thighs, and a saggy bottom. If summer catches you out of shape, it will be the perfect breeding ground for intensifying your complexes and deepening your self-esteem crisis, which will, of course, end up in several massive binges. You have 20 days to decide what this summer will be about for you. Will you sit at home and constantly cancel plans, claiming that you can't get undressed, if you even have a social life anymore, or after reading this post, will you get up, turn off the monitor, change clothes, stop making excuses, not tomorrow, not another time, but now, and go for a run? But don't worry, even if this summer also passes you by, there will be another, and another, until you realize that a whole life has passed. Unfortunately, this life will be shorter and worse for you, but at least meaningless, because social life often requires more than just logging into Facebook…
From now on, you have 20 days to decide what you want from this summer…
19 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds left…
