As I mentioned in my first post, I have lost 45 to 50 pounds in the past year and half. It's been hard work, and I consider it a big accomplishment.  Yet while I don't mind writing about it, I cringe when people start asking questions, because the discussions almost always take an uncomfortable turn. Between the deer-in-the-headlights stares, the gasps of disbelief, the "are you sick?" questions, and the backhanded compliments, I just want to tell people to shove a cheeseburger in it.  (My favorite un-compliment so far has been "Well, my my Chris, aren't you just a shadow of your former self." Umm, okay, yeah, thanks.)

If there is one thing I've realized since I started my quixotic fitness journey, it's that there is something about seeing others successfully lose weight and get in shape that makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps it has something to do with the level of commitment required.  (Or it's possible I'm enough of a jerk that people would rather see me fall on my face.) I'm not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with the single-mindedness it takes to exercise your freedoms.  

I'll be the first to admit it; I've become a zealot.  I want to be able to pedal a bike, paddle a kayak, and climb mountains until the day I die, no matter whether that day comes tomorrow or 60 years from now.  For me, these   things make life worthwhile, and I'm willing to do what it takes to keep at them, including getting down to a manageable weight.  (I estimate I've got about 25 pounds to go.)

I've just seen too many of my friends and family and loved ones endure crippling ailments and give up on the things they love doing, because they are unwilling to exercise and drop some weight.  I have vowed I will not suffer the same fate.

However, living the life you want to live is hard work--because all our default options are typically bad ones.  Free will tends to take a beating when it comes up against the ease and conveniences of an open-market society -- especially one where bad habits sell like hot cakes (and more specifically, a tall stack of IHOP hot cakes covered with high-fructose-corn-syrup, strawberries, chocolate sauce, caramel, and Reddiwip).  

There's a Wendy's and a McDonald's on every corner.  Well-funded marketing efforts tease us with clever campaigns and dress up unhealthy food in pretty packaging.  Workplaces have snack machines filled with all sorts of garbage. Grocery stores and convenience stores are stocked full of food so heavily processed that even the cockroaches won't eat it. Fresh meat at the supermarket is filled with hormones and antibiotics; fresh vegetables are drenched in pesticides.  

In short, food production in the western world is quite simply broken.  But it is what it is because it's cheap, efficient and convenient.  

So, let's say you want to exercise one of your many liberties, and you choose to eat good food. That's fine, but you've got to work harder for it and pay more for it.  Not to mention the fact that, given the scarcity of healthy already-prepared food, you have to seek out the ingredients and cook for yourself--which requires a lot of time and effort.  Freedom is indeed not free.

But the problem goes beyond simple access to good food and speaks to something bigger, something more fundamental.  In a relatively free market such as ours, self-reinforcing systems of exchange pop up like mushrooms, fertilized by collective need, want and desire (not necessarily in that order).  And ironically enough, these systems thrive by making us all a little more dependent, a little less free.

For example, participation in the system of food production becomes less a matter of choice than of degree. Unless you are a subsistence farmer, growing everything you eat in your backyard, there is no escaping it. After all, (1) people gotta eat, and (2) people gotta pay their outrageous mortgages, so therefore (3) people gotta work like dogs and have no time to cook. Consequently, (4) people eat whatever processed food-like substance they can find at their local grocery store or convenience store or fast-food-in-sheep's-clothing eatery, such as Chili's.

It is possible to minimize one's exposure to such systems by, for example, living below one's pay grade.  But who wants that?  After all, it's patriotic to blow money we don't have and keep the economy strong, right?   

Maybe this is the libertarian in me speaking -- and this may sound strange, given that we live in the most free, open and prosperous country in the world -- but we as a people are perfectly happy trading our freedoms for convenience and status.  And perhaps that is why people get so uncomfortable when a member of the herd starts bucking these powerful systems.  When someone shows the tenacity to overcome not just the intrinsic physiological and mental challenges -- but also the extrinsic social, cultural and economic difficulties -- of maintaining good health and losing weight, it confronts the people around him or her with how locked in they really are.

Granted, it's rather self-serving and arrogant to suggest that I'm somehow freer than many people who have the same range of choices I do (and perhaps more choices than I do).  But I certainly feel freer, especially when I go to Wal-Mart and see obese, but otherwise able-bodied people wheeling themselves around in courtesy wheelchairs.  When it comes down to it, every time I make a tofu salad or head out the door for a 27-mile bike ride, in my own little way, I feel like I'm sticking it to the Man.  To paraphrase a line from Food, Inc., in an open market, we vote with our pocketbooks every time we make a purchase and every time we choose what type of  food to put down our gullets.

I, for one, plan to make my vote count, no matter how uncomfortable it makes people.