By Leila Molitor.
There’s a very particular kind of psychosis that grips New Yorkers from Monday to Friday. We become these monastic figures, these wellness warriors, meticulously weighing our quinoa and side-eyeing anyone who dares bring a bagel into the office. We’re on a mission, see. We’re “clean eating.” We’re detoxing from the sins of the last weekend, preparing our bodies for some unspecified, future triumph. We sip our lukewarm green tea, chew our sad desk salads, and tell ourselves we’re disciplined. We’re superior. We’re building healthy habits, one flavorless chicken breast at a time. It’s all about “balance,” we’ll declare, usually with a faraway look in our eyes that suggests we’re already dreaming of Friday at 5 PM.
Because Friday at 5 PM, baby, that’s when the switch flips. It’s like we’ve been holding our breath all week, and the second the weekend hits, we exhale directly into a giant, boozy, greasy, self-destructive tornado. All that pristine, disciplined energy we cultivated? It’s not for sustained health. It’s for surviving the sheer, unholy magnitude of the weekend’s debauchery. We didn’t "clean eat" because we love kale; we clean ate because we knew, deep down, that by Saturday afternoon we’d be three Aperol Spritzes deep, trying to decide between fried chicken and a giant plate of pasta, both of which we’d finish.
The physical fallout of this nutritional whiplash is, predictably, a mess. Your digestive system has no idea what’s happening. One minute it’s gently processing steamed vegetables and chia seeds, the next it’s fighting for its life against an onslaught of saturated fats and sugary cocktails. You’re bloated, you’re tired, your skin looks like you slept in a deep fryer. You spend Sunday nursing a hangover that feels genetically engineered to punish you specifically for thinking you could outsmart your body. It’s not balance; it’s a controlled demolition of your insides, followed by a frantic attempt to rebuild before Monday morning. We think we’re being clever, gamifying our health, but really, we’re just exhausting ourselves.
It’s a peculiar New York truth, this. The intensity of our work ethic bleeds into our “wellness” and our “unwellness” alike. We go all in, always. There’s no middle ground. We’re either saintly or we’re fully embracing hedonism, and we justify it by saying, "Well, I ate clean all week!" as if those five days are a magical antidote to the pure chaos we inflict upon ourselves from Friday to Sunday. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of penance and indulgence. We just keep doing it, convinced that we’re somehow winning, even as our bodies stage a quiet, continuous rebellion.
And by Monday morning, we're back to our bland desk salads, pale and slightly shaky, already planning the next round of clean eating as a desperate attempt to undo the damage, knowing full well the cycle will repeat itself in exactly five days. It’s exhausting, but it’s our exhaustion.
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