©REESE PALLEY
Not often, you don't.
Does it make you stop and think? Do you wonder why all of those nifty folk who spend their time on sailboats and eat like horses, have loose and rangy bodies? Enough questions, here are some answers.
Fat is when you take more stuff in than you burn off. Fat is when you fail to use the muscles, all the muscles, you were born with. Fat sneaks up on you, ruins and dominates your life, alters your self image and drives you, in desperation, to spend hopeles and sweaty hours in expensive exercise spas with the rest of the pudgies.
The spas ain't free. It costs time and money to use the intricate, sometimes ludicrous, equipment that is designed to do what you could do yourself if you would only get off your fat butt. Pulling machines, pushing machines, bending machines, stretching machines and rowing machines are only highly chromed imitations of those healthy exertions in which sailors are involved every time they step aboard their boats.
Sailors pull ropes, they push winch handles, they endlessly bend every which way even some ways that they cannot. They stretch for the sails and when the outboard goes belly-up, which it always does, man...do they row!
With fat gaining on our culture every year, the commercial peddlers of Thin are pushing Isometrics. It is supposed to allow you to use your muscles without moving too far from where you are sitting. Well, isometrics, actually Isomarinometrics, were invented the first time an ancester stepped aboard a raft, hung up a couple of skins and tried to make his craft go somewhere. Isomarinometrics come free with every sailboat. It is an extra added attraction that diminishes your waistline as it tightens flab. The thinning is generated by the endless motion of the sea imparted to your rocky, wavy little vessel. In order to survive aboard a sailboat it is necessary to clench and release every muscle of your body a thousand times a day.. It is the ne plus ultra isometric toning process invented by Mother Nature and subsequently ignored by us Couch Potatoes as our bellies slop out over our belts...ugh!
The other side of nautical decellulitization is that a sailboat cuts down on food intake. We eat mostly out of boredom and we have too damned much food too easily available to us on land. On a sailboat boredom is a condition only vaguely recalled, so stuffing your face in front of the tube out of ennui is forsworn. Rich foods, meats and fats and cakes and breads, do not keep well in a marine environment so if you should get a surge of gluttony at sea, you are likely to find only spare and healthy stuff to eat.
Getting a meal together on a boat under weigh is so damn much work that it is not uncommon to skip rather than to cook. On a boat, since the opportunity cost of food is hard, hard work, you eat less.
And don't forget, even the most salty of sailors are, if not seasick, then 'aware' of their digestive systems. No sailor would dream of gustatory self abuse when discomfort is already just ahead of his gorge and a hint of nausea is a constant companion.
Put all this together and it spells...thin, sexy, taut, spare, attractive, alluring, captivating, glamorous, seductive and handsome. Few of these words are applied to those porcine folk laden with greasy surplusage who seem to be the norm today.
So hie yourself out to sea. Banish the norm, the fat, the porcine. Feel free to moon your tight and roundy cheeks and let the thin person inside you escape the burdening, burgeoning envelope of sloth. If you do so you will aquire a nifty tan, the pleasure once again to peer at yourself in full length mirrors and, no small matter indeed, the sex will be outstanding.
Fat Persons Arise! You have everything to lose!