Confused in a Jiffy

(Taha, don't read this post. It doesn't have any useable data and that will annoy you.)

It turns out my car has all kinds of exotic fluids in uncharted parts of my engine and that, apparently, I need to jostle, aerate, and agitate all of them occasionally to keep my car moving. It's a good thing Jiffy Lube is there to offer various services, at $49.95 each, to handle the siphoning and swishing of each respective substance for me. I believe for an extra $29.95 they can read my fortune in the burnt discarded oil much like the reading of tea leaves only way more sciency. (And slightly off-topic, I find it disturbing that they know every service I've ever gotten and the timeline of every service I need. Who wrote their database? Nicolae Ceauşescu?)

As I navigated their well-lubed floors, I was only half listening as I tried not to slide gracelessly into the checkout and under the counter like home plate was secreted there. They continued to babble on about how my discombobulator worked and what lubricant needed to be whisked in order to keep my engine from having an aneurism. It was something like that. I'll have to trust that the gentleman working on my car is a discombobulator whisperer and he's spiritually attuned to it's needs.

I smiled to myself as I stood there in a big heap of girl, not knowing what to say or to ask and wondering if a shirt the color of radiator fluid would be a nice spring addition to what I like to call my wardrobe. I'm partial to green and with a little bit of a summer tan . . . . anyway, the noises that they kept making were completely foreign and I didn't know which briefly recognizable snippet to grab a hold of to keep myself from drowning in their fluid talk.

Of course it made me think of exercise and nutrition because everything does. In this world there are plenty of experts spouting expertise and con artists making pretty noises that sound shockingly similar. And just when you think you're expert enough to figure out whose foolin' whom, you have the world wide web to get horribly entangled in. Without much else to go on, you start sorting through web data with superstition and conspiracy theories. You justify your conclusions with brilliant deductions like, "This is not the font of a credible organization," "This sounds like propaganda written by angry livestock", "Could an organization called 'Partnership for a Drug Free Dairy Cow' really exist?"

For these reasons, as if I haven't given you dozens more, it makes sense to eat real food and to move in functional full-ranges of motion. In that way, you aren't continually sifting through studies and for the most part you aren't setting yourself up for a good-intentioned poisoning. If you're goal is to flap you arms like a bird then commence to flapping often and if you want to stay strong and lean, don't eat non-foods.

[Insert name of spiritual being of choice here] didn't make your knees wrong and if your ass could touch the floor in a squat, maybe you should make sure it continues to do so. And, unless there are other religious books I haven't read, Little Debbie Snack Cakes weren't invented by [insert name of spiritual being of choice here] on the eight day which means they wouldn't likely be the fuel of choice in our owner's manual if we could find it in the glove compartment.

Most of all, Jiffy Lube reminded me that many of my clients are just learning about their nutrition and exercise discombobulators. They're still just chewing on what's 'real' in 'eat real food'. Stop, breathe, don't get distracted by the pretty colors and don't stray out of the produce isle. Exercise upright, bend more than one joint at a time and step away from any damn machine unless you plan to spend your days as a widget in it's machinery. Oh, and get the oil in your car changed occasionally, or you'll never get to the gym on time.