I grew up fat. “Plump” might be a better term for a youngster who was athletic but also ate vast quantities of junk food. Somehow I managed to compete in gymnastics with a frame that, inflated to adult size, had around 70 extra pounds that had to be shredded off for my first bodybuilding show. Those days of excessive plumpness are now behind me, knock on wood, though it’s still a challenge, and not one I often rise to very well. Unfortunately, all that high-impact living and a bit of heritable shenanigans left me with a spinal injury – in particular, a couple of broken vertebrae. Every couple of extra non-functional pounds add up to more pain, and that means that keeping the ol’ strength-to-weight ratio high is kind of an existential need. So, all the focus on diet and the need for “mindful” eating, got me thinking about one of the aspects of food and portion sizing that gets us all in the end.
The fact that this world has 3 spatial dimensions. Yeah, you heard that right – we have 3 dimensions and people get in real trouble because of it. “How can that be,” I hear you cry, “a world with more or less than 3 dimensions just wouldn’t make sense, and besides, we’ve all grown up here and are used to it.” Well, to you I say: sit down and I’ll tell you a story.
So way back in 1993, when I didn’t have no Ph.D, I was a young boy eating Twinkies and Ho-hos, when my parents discovered a store called Costco. Yes, Costco, font of big cheap junk food, big take-and bake pizzas, big piles of big pastries, big big burrito platters with big cheese on top and you get the idea.
Everything is big at that place, and one of the things that my parents would always bring home was pie. Gigantic pies, around twice the size and thickness of a regular pie. Bought in the name of cost efficiency, of course – those gigantic slabs of diabetes-bait didn’t even cost much back in the day. And though I’m ashamed to say it, we still ate those pies in about the time we used to eat a standard one, consuming twice the sugary, fruit-filled goodness. I got to thinking and wondering, even then, whether eating twice the pie as we had before was a sustainable activity from a health perspective. And, indeed, with twice-sized pies (and similarly twice-sized danishes, cakes, and so on), I watched the pounds pack on as I grew into adolescence, and conveniently wrote it all off as just “growing.” This left me with habits that have haunted me since, and even now staying lean-enough-to-rely-on-being-able-to-walk is a daily challenge, and not one I always succeed at. A lot of me blames those days when I accepted a factor of 2 increase in food consumption and got used to it. Except….wait…..
Have you spotted the issue with the above yet? If not, I’ll cut to the chase – the world has 3 freaking dimensions! Length, width, and…wait for it……depth! The volume of a rectangular prism is the product of these 3 things, and by the same token the volume of a cylinder (say, the approximate shape of a PIE), is (pi*T*(R^2)), T being the pie’s thickness. So what mom and dad were conveniently missing is that when you multiply radius and depth by a factor of 2, volume goes up by a factor of 8! We weren’t eating “twice the pie,” we were eating 8Pi! Sorry, 8 pies. Technically DR^2 times pi worth of pie, which in this case works out to 2^3 times that original pie. You know what I mean.
This was happening throughout my whole childhood. Try it out yourself, go anywhere where they serve really “big” things and take note of how much bigger those things are in a single dimension. That bread bowl looking just a little bigger than one you might imagine making yourself? Maybe just 25% bigger, you’re thinking it’s not all that different? Try 1.25^3=1.95, almost twice as much volume! Small pizza 10 inches while the large is 16, thinking they’re not so different? Even at the same thickness, this is a difference of 1.6^2=2.56. Yes, the large is about 2 and a half smalls. And an “unreasonably big” slice of lasagna that is about twice as big in each dimension as a “regular” slice racks up to an impressive 8 times the amount!
If you’re still reading at this point, then you know what we have to do – it’s time to give that third dimension a second look and see if we really want it in our lives. You may think you’re happy with it, but honestly, when was the last time that depth did anything for you? With just the 2, we would all have flat stomachs, at least in a sense. I’m passing around a petition to do away with the do-nothing, useless third dimension. The petition will be on *flat* paper (go team 2D!) and you can sign it by…….by…..
Bye.
** Note: Please don’t harm yourself with eating one way or the other, everyone. I care about you. But in my case I feel like I took a solid round kick in the back every day for every couple of extra pounds I’m carrying, so I think about it all the time. YMMV.