The Formula for Weight Loss
and the simple answers to the complex questions of Life
The Formula for Losing Weight “Fast”
The formula for weight loss is simple. It is Wl/g = Gl + (ΔFi + WlEx)
Translated to English, it is:
Weight Loss or Gain equals Glycogen plus the Net Weight Gain from Food-Intake plus Weight Loss as a result of Exercise.
This means that …
If you think drinking a magic slimming tea will give you the magic abs in one week; or that you’ll wake up one morning and look in the mirror to find that you now look like Anthony Joshua, you are deceiving yourself.
If you are serious about losing weight, eat less food and exercise. Period!
Why people keep Googling “How to lose 20kg in one week” or why they follow that notorious Mashable link that has two images of the same person side-by-side is a study in understanding humans for who we really are. In that Mashable picture collage, the picture of a grossly fat, grumpy and unhappy person is placed next to another picture of the same person, but now rake-thin and beaming. There is always a caption below the picture — a clickbait that reads: How I lost (insert a high weight loss target) in (insert a ridiculously short period of time).
The Formula for Getting Rich “Quickly”
Humans love to cut corners. And we like to listen to anyone/anything that tells us that the short cut we secretly hoping to take will get us to our destinations. This is why ponzi schemes proliferate, the same product rebranded each time, and sold to the same gullible demographics across all societies.
The truth is that humans want to be stupendously wealthy, but can’t figure out how best to go about it even though the proven habits that make wealthy people wealthy are out there for free for all who’d care to adopt them.
Save more than you spend, invest your savings, create passive income … yada, yada, yada …
Yet every day, we chase meme stocks, cut betting slips, talk about what we’d do with one million dollars if we somehow had it. Every hour, we are oogling the lives of Instagram bourgeois wishing we were them.
We argue aimlessly on why we don’t like the 2021 Audi R8, and why we prefer it to the Pagani Zonda. Yet, we log on to our various ponzi portals later at night, hopeful that tomorrow our dream of winning big will come true, and we’d be set up for life. We write posts on Social Media, secretly wishing that it will blow-up, earn us a million subscribers, turn us to influencers and throw open the AdSense floodgates.
For majority of Nigerians, of whom I am most familiar, the rhetoric of pastorprenuers isn’t lost on them on Sundays — the only day they are not wishing upon these other stars. One proclamation, one prayer of blessing, one act of giving a shifty pastor all your money, and you’re hoping for a chance to be abundantly blessed by a god who miraculously fed a multitude with 2 loaves and 5 fishes, and can turn your 5 naira to 5 million. Even with faith, we regress easily to the place of hoping that we can get everything by doing little or nothing.
Sigh.
The equation for achieving wealth is the same equation for losing weight.
Needless to say that the answers to life’s goals are not complex at all. We are often the complex variable in the equation. Disciplining one’s body or mind, or depriving it of immediate gain and taking it through pain is not what we are naturally good at. Sadly, it is the baseline for most human achievements — weight loss and wealth gain inclusive.
The Formula for “Complicating” Life
“Truly, I say unto you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Christ’s many references to children in his parables, though anecdotal, aren’t coincidental. It is descriptive of the mindset Christ expected us to have in order to understand the truth he came to teach — the mindset of a child. Christ understood that the adult mind is set, and wired differently from a child’s. He understood that the simplest concepts could confound adults — not because they are short of wit, but because they are more knowledgeable. This may sound counterintuitive, but where a child hears the truth as it is being told, an adult hears a version of the that truth — one they badly wanted to hear all along.
It is this same voice that tells them that they don’t have to be prudent to be wealthy, or that they don’t have to be consistently active in order to lose weight.
Paradoxically, the knowledge that tilts them towards copping an easy way out of everything is the same one that makes them suspicious of the too-easy-to-be-true things of life, especially where life’s seemingly complex abstractions are concerned.
There is this game my children play called Word Rings. It is a word game where a picture is displayed and you have to figure out two words that explain the picture. While playing this game with them, I notice how sometimes, I go off on a tangent and spend hours trying to figure out right word only for my 6-year old to walk past, look at the screen and say, “cup” or “legs” and the answer would be correct.
The above analogy explains how many of us approach the simple things of life. When something seems difficult to achieve, we try to find an easier routes to reaching it, but when it seems too simple, we invent ways of complicating it until our craving for complexity is satisfied.
Most people don’t believe that there are simple answers to what they think are complex questions.
They are like the person that is asked,
“How are you?”
and answers:
“My cerebrum at the prime instance of comprehension, pondered for an aeon for a fitting answer. Does one respond in the glorious affirmative, or enunciate in detail, one’s internal state of discombobulation in answer to this rhetorical salutation?”
The “Simple” Formula of Love
Man’s greatest challenge, especially from the perspective of the Christian faith, is that the message of Christ is so simple in its charter — to love oneself and love mankind.
But man thinks to himself. It cannot be this simple?
So, he creates philosophies and doctrines, objects of worship, slangs and lingos. He adopts mantras and chakras and wraps himself in fancy robes. He reaches for money and fame to fill the vacuum in his soul to no avail. He does practically every other thing apart from the simple tenets of the charter, to convince himself that he has indeed worked hard to deserve the abundant grace that has been so freely given.
He cuts himself for blood to flow in penance of his shortcomings. He falls hard upon himself in order to groan under the full weight of his bad decisions. He wears his stoicism like a frown that betrays his self-framed piety, and he distances himself from the sullied. And he continues to wallow in this misery because for all this, he still doesn’t find the answers that he seeks. He continues to listen to the voices that praise him for shouldering the full weight of his own destiny.
Day in, day out, he is locked in a circle — away from the light of this marvelous truth — one that a child easily understands. That love conquers all things, and believes all things. That love is not self-seeking or easily angered. Love keeps no record of wrong, and does not delight in evil. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Osundolire Ifelanwa
