How to Lose Weight in 21 Days, "Naked and Afraid"

You don’t have to back away from the table, you don’t have to exercise, all you have to do is agree to appear naked on camera, “survive” 21 days in a remote location such as an uninhabited tropical island paradise, a jungle, or an African country with inhospitable terrain to city folk, fend for your own meals, water, and shelter, while trying to stay away from major predators, sun burn, sun strokes, bugs, snakes, crocs, caimans, scorpions, lions, hyenas, water-borne diseases, and other creepy crawlers. At the end of your weight loss, you will be picked up and brought back to civilization svelte, tanned or ultra-burned, smiling and dirty, a new and improved you with a higher survivability rating than when you first started.  What a fantastic diet!

In the quest to shock and to titillate our bored senses, reality TV has pushed the envelope a tad further with its newest show, “Naked and Afraid” on Discovery Channel. I don’t know about you, just dreaming about being naked in public makes me wake up in a cold sweat. Being naked with a total stranger of the opposite sex in a dangerous environment for 3 weeks and in front of millions of viewers is enough to give anybody a panic attack or worse, a heart attack.

A carefully selected couple, perhaps someone with no inhibitions about nakedness and lacking the component of fear is dropped in the middle of Africa, let’s say, Tanzania, on a deserted island in the Pacific, or an island in Costa Rica or Panama.  A male and a female must survive naked for 21 days, providing their own food, shelter, and water. Each “survivalist” has prior experience in outdoor challenges in the U.S., comes with one chosen implement, and a camera to film each other’s misery while the crew is at a distance, enjoying the spoils of civilization, making sure that nobody dies.

The challenges include fighting hypothermia, sun burn, proper shelter, proper nutrition, proper hydration, fighting off predators, building a fire, maintaining it, keeping warm, keeping clean, building tools to fish with, capturing animals and killing them for a protein-rich meal, sending smoke signals, and building a raft that will withstand flotation for two people in preparation for the escape to the much maligned civilization.

The producers rate the Adam and Eve’s adaptation techniques and give them a score before and after the show. I can understand the shock value in ratings and the interest to make money on the part of the producers and the interest in ratings for the cable channel. I am interested in the motivation of the participants in this odd experiment.

It does not take a brain surgeon to figure out that the naked explorers want their hour of fame, publicity, possible future gigs, and a career in television.  Perhaps some honestly want to challenge themselves and their endurance, adaptability, survivability, and to earn bragging rights to the world. I am not sure how much set up and editing goes on behind the scenes, or how much of the time the two adventurers are actually totally alone in the wilderness.

Could it be an insidious attempt to indoctrinate people into the liberal mantra of “living simply,” getting us used to live with less food, houses, cars, roads, land, medicine, doctors, civilization in general, in an attempt to implement the environmental preservation Shangri-La dreamed up for decades by environmental alarmists who decry man-made bio-diversity destruction, and advocate for population reduction, one of the tenets of Agenda 21?

The reality show appears unnecessarily dangerous, nonsensical, and contrived at the same time. Take for instance the case of the couple dropped in Tanzania. He does not figure out that even the natives do not walk barefoot in areas overgrown with thorny bushes and plants. He fashions sandals out of tree bark after a long thorn embeds in the sole of his foot. Only the intervention of a doctor who stops the show, drains his severely infected wound, and treats him with antibiotics, saves him from certain death from septicemia.

Is the show meant to portray men as the weaker of the two genders when faced with unusual challenges? One very fair-skinned man suffered severe sun-burn from day one. His olive-skinned partner was able to withstand the tropical sun’s punishing rays much easier.

Do they work together in spite of the nakedness and fear to overcome the dire circumstances? Did the producers try to say that we, as a society, are too soft, fat, and civilized and would thus be unable to compete or survive in the harsh environment that native populations adapted to?

When the couple finishes the ordeal and is picked up at an agreed location marked on a map, they are weighed. Each participant loses anywhere from 18-40 pounds depending on their arrival weight and their gender. What a torturous and unhealthy way to lose weight fast! Protein deficient, dehydrated, sun-burned, infected, and bitten so bad by sand flies that one participant looked like a pin cushion with swollen feet the size of the Michelin Man, this seems to be a dangerous way to lose weight. I can only hope that no tropical flies deposited eggs under their skin. They may have some unpleasant parasites to deal with later.

I promise to stay away from chocolate and lose weight, just in case someone decides to drop me off “naked and afraid” on a tropical island paradise full of sand flies, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, dangerous reptiles, and other poisonous critters.

It's A Great Day in America

“It’s a great day in America.” The atheist left is rejoicing that an NBA player is out of the closet and Tim Tebow, “the often-polarizing quarterback,” as the Washington Post describes him, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2013/04/29/tim-tebow-released-by-jets/)

is gone. Sport analysts and other NFL teams did not think he was good enough as a pro quarterback but he was a very popular player. His overt Christianity was offensive and annoying to the liberal PC police.

We are living in the “Great Diversion” era, one unresolved real or manufactured crisis after another and a disastrous economy, yet an NBA player’s sexual orientation, which should be nobody’s business, demands accolades and public speeches.

The word “courage,” which MSM uses loosely to describe such public disclosure, has lost its meaning entirely. Courage is fighting in battle when everyone else retreats, saving another human being from peril when the rest are cowards, and sacrificing heroically and bravely to the betterment of mankind.

No wonder people are turning away from the ugly and terrible reality to the “pane et circenses” (bread and circuses) reality TV, not just any reality TV, but Duck Dynasty.

Duck Dynasty is the most popular reality show on A&E, the formerly artsy elitist channel which must irritate and drive to distraction the New York opera crowd. Why do people watch and love Duck Dynasty? What is it that attracts people to the reality show and its Louisiana cast of beautiful real women and their bearded husbands who make duck calls for a living?

Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the clan, gave up his promising football career to make duck calls for hunters. The show ends each time with a prayer around the dinner table of extended family and friends. It is something America longs for, a return to family values and Christianity.

The Robertsons love and care for their family, believe in God and country, hunt, fish, and teach their grandchildren to carry, use, and handle guns responsibly. Through comedic situations, they emphasize the value of work and respect for elders. Most of them, with the exception of Willie, the CEO, live, dress, and eat simply in spite of their vast fortune.

The sage brother Jase and the Jack-of-all trades Vietnam War vet uncle Si delivers witty one-liners while sipping his ever present glass of iced tea, a southern tradition.

Miss Kay, the matriarch of the clan, is the sweet and doting mother, wife, mother-in-law, and grandma, who uses humor and southern wit to teach her teenage grandchildren how to handle dating and abstinence from sex. This must irritate liberals who encourage sex, out of wedlock pregnancies, co-habitation, and abortion.

Americans love the Robertsons because they long for a return to family tradition, respect, and interaction with meaningful, clean language, and dialog. The back to nature, outdoorsy life is appealing to many Americans who love the simple, witty ways of the Robertsons. The innocence of their daily lives is lost in our troubled country.

The clan is made up of ordinary Americans, who, in spite of their wealth, have not changed their family values, traditions, and faith, all deeply rooted in the American pioneer spirit and exceptionalism.

One episode pokes fun at fancy coffee shops patronized by liberals who drink strange and expensive concoctions of the caffeinated brew. Another makes fun of the southern love of donuts. Jase runs into trouble with the communistic Home Owners Association staffed by community volunteers who like to control other people’s lives. Jase had chickens in his yard and burned leaves on his property. He was told that he signed a contract in order to live in that neighborhood and thus had to abide by the rules the HOA saw fit.

Avid hunters, camouflage wearing, gun toting, blowing up beaver dams on their property, eating squirrels, frogs, and other critters, the Robertson men must have inflamed PETA and animal rights activists.

Duck Dynasty is a show about southern culture, about family, about values unaffected by wealth earned through entrepreneurship and hard work, a show about what liberals call “rednecks with money” who live normal lives. It is a show about American nostalgia for a time and innocence lost.

The Robertsons embody the myth of what America used to be, the America in which the family did not fight, did not use profanity, mom and dad did not divorce, people respected each other and their elders, traditional marriage was important in raising kids into healthy adults, and children did not move far away from their roots, values, and from mom and dad. 

Severing ties from family and God has fundamentally changed our formerly cohesive society. The massive dependency on government welfare as the daddy of all out of wedlock newborns further eroded the American family. The Planned Parenthood abortion mill, the “social justice” indoctrination in school, the lack of morality, glamorizing the drug infested Hollywood lifestyle, and attacks on the Christian faith exacerbated the damage done to traditional marriage and family.  

We should be celebrating the Robertsons and their lifestyle. It is what made America great. Their family values are shared by the core majority of our country. If we are to succeed, we have to return to those healthy principles and celebrate Tebow for his character.