Diet, diet, diet! screams from every possible media outlet. When I walk into a US grocery store, I’m greeted and guided through a carbohydrate zoo of temptations: Chocolate this and chocolate that, cakes and sweets, cookies and brownies -  all across from the fruits and vegetable stalls. Hey, I’m educated, I can do it! Forget that it’s taken more than 100,000 years of the human body needing and craving the rare fats found while hunting and gathering. Just tell those 100,000 years of conditioning that the past 20 years of education say these delights are unhealthy. Yeah, sure! 

By now, nearly everyone knows the best diet is a balanced meal with plenty of fruits and vegetables. But even that isn’t enough to lose weight. It’s just the harsh beginning.

Diet for me means exercise. When I was a kid, I made fun of adults calling running, jumping, climbing trees and chasing after other kids a dirty word when I called it play. Now that I drive a car, sit at a desk and climb a few stairways at work, with no exercise gym in town and no one to chase after….. Diet ads don’t say that, except in the teeny-tiny small print ‘along with a physician-approved exercise program’. 

Diet is exercise, what with a nearly 50-pound weight gain from menopause, it’s the only way to live. Yeah, I had heard the weight gain was only about 20 pounds, but no way for some of us unfortunates. Those damn 100,000 years of conditioning means I had lots of fat to live off of when the food came to the open pit fire, and the best bits were given to those younger than me in the clan.

So live with it? Researching how to age with grace, less pain and a good, healthy death,  the experts’ conclusions are lift weights (to build muscles) and exercise (to keep blood flowing).  Then, get sick and die fast and painless.  I’d rather do that than go like my parents did with their excess weight. One took nine months and the other five years to die. Both deaths caused a great deal of family financial and emotional hell.

Exercise to die well? Hey, if you’re under 50, it seems like an outrageous proposition. Put it this way: dying well – painless and quickly -  is like attaining a Masters degree when you’re young: makes life easier, opens many doors, and raise one’s self-esteem. Same for a good death.

 

 

 The business of the USA is business fraud. Enron – a few people got thrown in jail.  Savings & Loans – the government bailed the banks out.  Now we have sub-prime loans. Made by bankers all across the USA. Who are these guys? Masons?

 

Enron selling stockbrokers were never charged, never compensated the shattered lives they created, and never served white-collar jail time. Savings & Loans bank operators buying and selling on the stock market, not realizing each time they did a trade, they lost thousands of dollars? Come on! Were all those bank employees that silly? Weren’t they ‘just obeying orders’ from their bosses?

 

What person in his right mind would lend money to a stranger who lacked the ability to repay the loan and wasn’t even asked to prove the money could be repaid? Who in the world lends money only to lose it? Someone who knows someone else will make good on the loan – the US taxpayer.

 

Hang all the bankers, financial analysts and Wall Street Terrorists!  They systematically  steal from the coffers of everyday people’s salaries. Top people institute shadow policies their underlings must obey and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the friends in high places transfer monies from one source back to their friends in banking.

America, with nearly 300 million people, has at least 40 million poor and millions more uneducated – a rich pool of potential marks.  Pretty easy to outfox them with regulations, laws, rules, loopholes and the keys to a new home.

 

Then there was the US election, run on comic-book nightmares of invasion and devastation that opened the door to billions of American money to be redistributed to the war pirates of the high flyers. Their names are legendary and in the White House.

 

Since I’ve lived overseas for nearly 20 years, my saving grace is I don’t pay a penny in income tax to the US government and their partners in crime: the Wall Street-terrorists.   But my US stock pension plan rapidly bleeds away my future. I’m so angry I want to mobilize those 40 million to overthrow the bankers and Wall Street Terrorists.

 

Not a good idea. Bloodlust easily Malthusian multiplies. My conclusion is to live and learn: I moved stocks into money markets which are protected during a recession. But not a depression. Guess I may be Hoover Tent Camping on the White House lawn.... Maybe I’ll get Alzheimer’s and not know where I am.

 Egypt? A dream holiday? Are you kidding! The multitudes of dirty children and unkempt beggars screaming ‘baksheesh’ is enough to make any tourist feel like the US bestowing foreign aid. Give one person a few coins, a thousand others appear, bleating for the same.

 

Las Vegas? Forget the TV Las Vegas, the real Las Vegas is crowds of overweight, mentally challenged, badly dressed and dipsey-eyed middle-agers gambling for dollars. Most tourists would look away askance, asking themselves: ‘Would that be me if I stayed longer than a few days?’

 

London? Overpriced, notoriously bad food, crowded, trashily dressed teenagers, and smokers outside every pub complaining they can’t kill themselves inside. The Great Westminster is an in-door graveyard. Theatre tickets are over the moon, and who wants to litter their suitcases with made-in-China Big Ben and Underground Tube multi-colored kitchen towels – memories of crowds, bad smells and too much money spent?

 

Hong Kong cheap? Before I was born! My hostel was a tiny, dirty room with a half-decayed, thin curtain that allowed in all-night city lights. Sleep? Not much. A hotel? Pricier than London! Food? Chinese cheap. Nicest find? Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookie stand in an outrageously lovely sky-rise office-shopping mall.

 

India? Squalor-shock. Men using the open air for all their bathroom needs, even in the gardens at the Taj Mahal. Airport rides to exotic five star hotels offer first hand sights of homeless Indians doing their business on the narrow side of the highway. Leave a hotel’s protected gates, and be immediately accosted by demanding Indians worst than Egyptian beggars. Not just one town, but for a guided tour of over five cities, but well-insulated from India’s realities within a First Class train cabin.

 

Los Angeles? Shockingly expensive taxi rides, every Californian ripping off tourists as in the infamous 1984 Olympics. Back then, thankfully word got out of the Californian con artist trick of smiling with ultra-white teeth and offering dreams with one hand, while stealing with the other to every new person in town. No one in their right mind would go to Hollywood & Vine if they knew it was in the heart of a  slum with lots of extras, such as real-life drug dealers and users. And the lines at Disneyland are a nightmare!

 

The best holiday I discovered years ago was to spend time with loved ones – wherever they are, and especially when they were in a warm, touristy place!