I need to try harder

I try to be good. I go to the gym, I walk daily, I try to watch what I eat. But it's hard.

Snacking is really appealing. Sometimes it's a symptom of boredom, or programming (like associating movies and popcorn) or a social behavior (just like smoking or drinking can be).

In the end, it's my own fault and I have no one else to blame. I need to be more disciplined.

This discipline thing is still a new piece of software, however - on a biological time scale. It is not in the Human hardware to say no to a tasty meal.

And everything that's terrible for us is what we crave most, because an ingredients like fats are very nourishing, and rare for a species that spent most of its evolution eating fruits and scavenging the rare carcass. High octane fuel sources like fats and carbs are very desirable by the body.

The body doesn't know I can hook it up with Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough every day for thirty years. It follows its standard procedure and stores those 500 fat calories for future use - there's no telling when I'll eat again. (news flash to my spare tire - probably in two hours, no worries).

So I have to be smart enough and willful enough to choose my diet carefully - and 'diet' is not something you do for a month - diet is what you eat every day.

But we're not hard wired for discipline - it's new software, and it has a lot of bugs in it. I need a patch to update my software, and I'm the only one who can do it, one step at a time.

Though it would be interesting to be able to tell the body not to store anything. I mean, I take a multivitamin every day, and consume more than enough calories to sustain myself. But surely that would have bad consequences of some sort - especially if you had to go a few days without eating or drinking.

Another option to circumvent this storage (if I should find myself with a deficit of discipline) would be to take a freaky, surgical approach. Right now our throat ties directly into the digestive system.

What if a gastric bypass of sorts could be installed - it would lead from the esophagus to the very end of the digestive tract - for politeness purposes, let's just say "near the exit". Perhaps a tissue sample of the esophagus could be taken, and a long esophagus duplicate could be grown in the lab.

Once surgically implanted in your body, you could switch between these two tubes at will. Perhaps through practiced muscle control, or perhaps through an implanted device.

So you'd eat a sensible breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and allow them to be digested normally. But all of your snacking could bypass the digestive system altogether. And it would smell a lot better on the way out...