Lose Weight, Fix the House and Cure Insomnia!!

Yes, I intend to sound like an infomercial. Because I need to let people know--how I accidentally discovered why us humans are sinking into a pit of obesity and insomnia. I (like everyone else) for the longest time simply thought--well stress less, eat less, exercise more. The kicker is this: I truly never realized what MORE exercise meant.

I have a husband to thank (and blame) for my new wisdom. This summer as we moved from our humble country home of 9 years to a woodsy, yet domestic dwelling-- dear husband had the "fantastic" idea to rent a Uhaul to move our belongings. Then he insisted nobody help us move. That's right--no movers, friends, or suckers (except for me!)
His reasons for this act of hedonism, are still unclear to me. Something about us being more careful or saving money !?...
Either way, as anyone else who has ever moved an American household knows--this is a silly task to try to undertake. But take we did. Even dumber was our decision not to sell the futons, beds, lawn mower, snow blower or big-ass cedar play set. These had to be moved. And how about our library of books? Why does a child have 8 large boxes filled with books?

The best part was, on the day we reserved the Uhaul--the larger sizes were already booked--so we needed to take a smaller truck , resulting in more agonizing trips! yay!

At first, I was ok. We moved bookshelves, boxes , desks up the Uhauls ramp with a dolly. Drove to the new house, unload and repeat. This was incredibly time consuming--and we had to make multiple trips. Add to that the crazy scheme to remove all the screws from the giant playground set and move that too. By that time I was so crazy tired--a big cedar beam hit me in the head and I didn't even notice.

Yet the fun did not end there. The new home we had purchased needed to be cleaned and stripped of its old carpeting. This meant we didn't even unload the furniture into its final resting place. Instead, got to work scrubbing and ripping out carpet pad & carpet, then put in the new floors, and only then moved the furniture from the garage. We spent days and days on this nonsense. Performing hard physical labor from sun up until falling into bed.

But the weird thing is--I kind of miss it. I have never before been that damn tired. The bed (which was a mattress on the basement floor) felt like a magical cloud. I believe in those days I fell asleep in about thirty seconds until the sun woke me again in the morning. At first my muscles sort of hurt, but then they got lean and stronger. The craziest part was the incredible hunger. We would run to fast food restaurants and I would scarf fried cheese sticks (all I craved were fried cheese sticks). My abs got firmer and firmer, but I kept eating and eating--it was incredible.

This whole experience has taught me one thing--our human bodies are made to perform an incredible amount of work. It's almost scary. Simple jogging, or some exercise bike just doesn't cut it. If you want to eat a bunch of carbs or fats--the labor you need to do is just incomprehensible to the average human today. And if you really want to sleep--again, just  a walk around the block isn't going to do much. (but it's better than nothing).  It's like our bodies are made to be heavy duty construction trucks--but all we ask of them is to drive to the mall.

At some point in history we needed that kind of truck. Running away from Woolly mammoths perhaps? Fighting each other with our raw hands over territory? But for this day and age these machines have simply become soft and squishy human beings...