I never want to hear the term ‘calorie deficit’ on the internet again

I try to scroll Instagram. First of all, ‘try’, because my distracted ass stumbles over no-good reels of contour videos to make my hippo nose ‘snatched’ (whatever that means), to wear my scarf five ways (whatever that means), and watch people born after the year 2000 commodify every little aspect of their life like an ‘everything must go’ sale. The recommendation engines are way off. It’s like the compass Christopher Columbus used to try to find India, off-course by about a million miles.

Somewhere in the milieu, I am enthralled by a ripped dude from London showing exercises that are alternative to squats. But I am enthralled by almost everything; I also look at steak sizzling at 3 AM for this very reason, and also because I’m hungry in my bed, but I can’t leave the bed, because, you know, I’m already in my bed. Somehow of these two vices, the internet and its bizarre algorithm decides to focus on an entirely unrelated concept - that of losing weight and this infernal term they like to toss around, called ‘calorie deficit’.

For the sake of this article alone, I sullied my search history to google how calorie deficit is defined. Calorie deficit means to consume fewer calories than you burn, so that you do not put on weight.

Here’s my trouble. I don’t care. In a world where what we choose doesn’t matter, and apparently everything is customer centric but I am no longer in control of what appears before me, I could care less about how many calories I’m consuming. Between work and life, I go on Instagram or other social media to hopefully come across a cute kitten but more often than not, tells me about Kim Kardashian or my school friend getting hitched or, you guessed it, some yuppie cutting another thing out of their diet in order to reach their ‘target weight’. I’m not sure why someone else's target weight targets me. My idle scrolling is not an invitation to tell me how many calories I’m consuming. I can’t stress it enough. I. Don't. Care.

Ladies first

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the thing that gets my goat. According to the internet, only women get fat! Men don’t get fat, they get bulked up, they have dad bods, they flaunt their paunch with confidence, they are DILFs. Women have chubby ankles and armpit bumps and boobs, either big or small but somehow not perky, not perfect, not melons or whatever the hell is the fruit of the season. Like Gordon Ramsay would say about a contestant’s dish on ‘Masterchef’, there is always something missing.

This is of course, not to say that it doesn’t work, for at least some people, in their weight loss endeavors. Maybe everyone is right, that wretched term, calorie deficit is really the only way to lose weight. The problem is deeper, sort of a cultification of the people, mostly women, being scrutinized instead of seen, to jitter and flap anxiously instead of being free, to hem and haw over old clothes and attach overt-meanings to former bodies with no thought paid to former selves, to glorify the past instead of being future-bound, to think of the past as better only because they were thinner.

Everyone is thinner in their past. We were all fetuses once, and prior to that was the bliss of non-existence. I am certain that, though heavy with the potential of appearance, we were certainly thinner then. We change, we grow. We stretch, we consume. We create, we burgeon, we live, so that we can die. It’s not that hard to understand.

Keep your ideas out of my food

My food is not Donald Trump, or Ted Bundy. Stop calling it guilty, and then proposing options that are guilt-free. My poor chocolate cookie didn’t ever hurt anyone. There is this personification of cheese and flour and all those other things that give joy as sort-of tempters into the arms of flab and sin, like you have deigned to exist at a size and shape that Tyra Banks and the crew of America’s next top model would have a lot to say about. According to these meddling nellies, you know what we're missing in life? Ginger shots. Broccoli stew. Gluten-free, sugar-free birthday cake that you should be afraid of serving even at a funeral, for you will be haunted by the dead and alive both.

Ultimately, I am rightfully peeved about the obsession with weight loss on the ‘gram and how it feels like my adult female body is trapped under a square cellophane to be viewed through a microscope, nothing but marks and acne and bulges, nothing that I would define to be me. There is a difference between fact and emphasis. I may be fat, but then again, so is DJ Khalid. So is Malala Yousafzai (I think, if looked at through ‘Vogue’ lens). So is your mama. So is my mama. I am not saying we pretend we aren’t fat. I am just saying, that’s not the point.