see "lose weight" kicked out of the 43things all time top ten list of goals

But for the laugh (or whinge) I have just checked how many people have this goal.

“17,770 people want to do this…”

This is insane.

1931 goals found under the key word “weight”
today’s count on the goal “lose weight”:
10218 people, 29 people today

I’d sworn to myself that I would “give up” as soon as there are more than 10.000 ppl “doing” this, so that’s it.

Thanks to 43lives for sharing this goal! But I ran out of optimism on this one.

This one DID make me laugh!

I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I had lost exactly two weeks.
- Joe E. Lewis

8281 people, 35 today.
People, weigh yourselves, then go to the bathroom. You’ll lose weight there by definition. Only marginally, but then weigh yourself afterwards and cross this off your lists!!!

To make sure the lawyers Jo can afford aren’t on my heels straight away, I proclaim truthfully that the following text is copied (without permission) from the official website of JK Rowling, the author of the wonderful Harry Potter books: www.jkrowling.co.uk

I so agree with her “rant” that I could not resist posting it here, because it fits my goal and I don’t suspect many people who’d need to read it will surf to her website, click on the hairbrush and then on “Miscellanious” to find the wise entry, entitled:

For Girls Only, Probably…
Being thin. Probably not a subject that you ever expected to read about on this website, but my recent trip to London got me thinking…

It started in the car on the way to Leavesden film studios. I whiled away part of the journey reading a magazine that featured several glossy photographs of a very young woman who is either seriously ill or suffering from an eating disorder (which is, of course, the same thing); anyway, there is no other explanation for the shape of her body. She can talk about eating absolutely loads, being terribly busy and having the world’s fastest metabolism until her tongue drops off (hooray! Another couple of ounces gone!), but her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms tell a different story. This girl needs help, but, the world being what it is, they’re sticking her on magazine covers instead. All this passed through my mind as I read the interview, then I threw the horrible thing aside.

But blow me down if the subject of girls and thinness didn’t crop up shortly after I got out of the car. I was talking to one of the actors and, somehow or other, we got onto the subject of a girl he knows (not any of the Potter actresses – somebody from his life beyond the films) who had been dubbed ‘fat’ by certain charming classmates. (Could they possibly be jealous that she knows the boy in question? Surely not!)

‘But,’ said the actor, in honest perplexity, ‘she is really not fat.’

’”Fat” is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her,’ I said; I could remember it happening when I was at school, and witnessing it among the teenagers I used to teach. Nevertheless, I could see that to him, a well-adjusted male, it was utterly bizarre behaviour, like yelling ‘thicko!’ at Stephen Hawking.

His bemusement at this everyday feature of female existence reminded me how strange and sick the ‘fat’ insult is. I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain…

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’

‘Well,’ I said, slightly nonplussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’

What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

So the issue of size and women was (ha, ha) weighing on my mind as I flew home to Edinburgh the next day. Once up in the air, I opened a newspaper and my eyes fell, immediately, on an article about the pop star Pink.

Her latest single, ‘Stupid Girls’, is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness. ‘Stupid Girls’ satirises the talking toothpicks held up to girls as role models: those celebrities whose greatest achievement is un-chipped nail polish, whose only aspiration seems to be getting photographed in a different outfit nine times a day, whose only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs.

Maybe all this seems funny, or trivial, but it’s really not. It’s about what girls want to be, what they’re told they should be, and how they feel about who they are. I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls. Rant over.”

7203 people, 26 people today.
Aaaaargh!

...want to LOSE WEIGHT!
Again, I wish it were less.

I have written the last entry about this goal 8 or nine minutes ago, but when I go to Zeitgeist, recent entries, it’s not showing up! Who is cencoring my entry????

We ALL want to feel better in our skin, and that naturally goes with losing weight for most of us. I for one, would also like to lose weight, but I don’t even OWN a scale! So even if I ran regularly, which is one of my 43things, I could not check.
I have “indicator pants”, a pair of jeans that’s either too tight (now, after crimbo and quitting smoking 10 weeks ago), or too loose (that was in October).
But it hurts me to see that so many people on 43things want it so badly that it is the top ten goal of all time, currently with 6154 people wanting to “do” this.
We should all be aware that our extra pounds (as well as our general wealth and thus our internet connections) are the result of not caring for the other 90something% of this planet’s human population, not even starting to think of how we treat primates and the rest of our co-habitants on this wonderful Earth.
Imagine, we are the first species to die of eating too much! Just think about this for a minute…

So, unless you are obese, think of how much your weight actually bothers you on a normal day. Your figure should not be your main source of self esteem. Don’t believe that being thin would change who you ARE.
A lot of thin people have issues, too. Most of them, actually, thinking of millions of hungry people in the world who’d love to see the extra pound on themselves or their child.