The Perils of Tightrope Walking

Source: The Kenyon Review

A blogger is MIA--you know, one of the purist, cleanest eaters, the one who exercises religiously, who tracks every bite she eats.

She's been MIA for a few days.

Maybe she just doesn't feel like blogging, maybe she's busy buying Christmas presents, maybe she's come down with the flu. Any one of these options is better than how much she could be hurting if she's fallen off the dieting tightrope.

I have never even thought about becoming a tightrope walker. I always say that I can do just about anything except dance ballet, but I should add tightrope walking to the list. It must be really tough--the embodiment of the "straight and narrow". On a tightrope, there's no room for any mistakes at all. Once you've fallen off the tightrope, it seems like the show's over.

Sorry friends, but I do believe there's a very dark side to "eating clean", or eating "perfectly" or whatever you want to call it. For every yin, there's a yang and to eat "clean" there has to be an "eat dirty", for every "good" food, there has to be a "bad" food. If how you eat has become a dichotomy, make sure you've got a hospital nearby, because you're going to have lots of broken bones once you fall off the tightrope. And make no mistake about it, YOU WILL. Why? Because you're human. Only computers always follow the straight and narrow...until they crash.

Get off the tightrope and walk on the road. It's not as exciting by half. For the most part, people won't notice you. The changes might be minimal or hard to see. You might simply feel more content. And you won't fall off the face of the earth.