NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 302854" data-attributes="member: 2067">Fast food wouldn't be so big if we didn't have a need for it...if we didn't buy it, it wouldn't be huge.So we buy it. We buy it because we're too busy to bother actually making a meal.About the "on the go" lifestyle? This applies mostly to adults, but younger children-teens suffer from a greater problem of this. Most of this kinda assumes the Typical American Office Job, and there is a large variation in it.Wake up: 7 AM. Get on the road by 7:30-8. No time to make a meal, barely time to get the kids up and on their way to school. Toaster pastries and microwave pancakes make the meal.8-9: On the Road. Maybe you carpool...if one of your co-workers hasn't eaten, you may stop at a Krispy Kreme or something on the way...9-12: Work. Most places, you can't eat while doing it. The most you get might be a bag of chips if you missed breakfast.12-1: Lunch. Often a social opportunity with co-workers. Not enough time to commute home to make a meal, you eat out. Every day. Sometimes it's fast food (y'know, when there's a lunch meeting to get to), sometimes it's a big-meal-style (especially if you haven't eaten breakfast). Often, this will be the first meal you eat, and you're hungry enough to make it a big one.1-5: Work. As above.5-6: Drive home. You're pretty dead on your feet by then -- it's amazing how energy-sapping sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours can be.6-7: Get home. Kids have been home for a while, and were hungry when they got off of school, so you left them $10 for pizza. If you're lucky, there's some there when you get back, and if you're luckier your kids are still home. More than likely, they've taken off to go elsewhere with their friends, leaving you to nuke a piece of Pepperoni and die on your feet.7-10: You learn about how you should be exercising, how you should be with your kids, how all Arabians hate us with good cause, and how generally bad of a person you are. Kids get home, if it's a weekday. You've been on the go all day, and you're stressed enough from work and driving (driving has to be one of the most stressful activities you can do sitting down...every brake is inches away from avoiding a firey death) that you don't really have energy. You feel mentally drained, though physically you're not too bad. You may try to excersise or something, but, really, you can't get up much of a motivation.10-12: You go to bed...too late, because you're still tired when you wake up.For kids, it's even worse. They get up earlier, don't get home till about 10 (after extracirricular activities), and still have about 4 hours of homework...and that's before they get about 4-6 hours of sleep. They don't have time to feel drained -- they're never allowed to sit.When you lather, rinse, reapeat for 365.25 days, this kind of lifestyle puts a wieght on you. And one week a year isn't enough to recover it.People look forward to vacations because it gives them more of what they don't have and what their brain and body knows they need: down time. Time to think. Time to acclimate. Time to read, time to recover, time to panic about what you're going to do when you get back.I'm not sure how different the European lifestyle is, if at all, but most people over here I talk to feel so drained...all the time...all their energy poured into making enough money to pay for rent and school bills with precious little left to appreciate the luxury apartment or educated children. You're not rich enough. You're not pretty enough. You're not allocating your time right.Food is a comfort and a convienience, one of the few we can afford or enjoy without hating ourselves for wasting the 15 minutes it takes to scarf down a crab at Red Lobster.I blame it mostly on the American cult of guilt and self-abuse. I could be way off base (it's just a theory I pulled outta my poo-shoot), but it seems right.McD's isn't all to blame. We have to blame ourselves for giving McD's money because they're there, they're easy, and they give us instant gratification: eating.Eating releases some pleasure chemicals of some sort. It's one of the few hits Americans get of any sort of pleasure that isn't drug-induced.Yeah, I'm probably way off. But it looks tha way to me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification