Diets and Discipline: Indulgences
| This is an entry in the Diets and Discipline series. You can find more information at the series’ main page.
This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3) |
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The topic of losing weight is a hard one. There’s a lot of discipline involved, and a lot of food that we all know doesn’t taste as good as the food with a lot of calories. And you can’t always eat only the healthy food. The trick is knowing how much of the ‘good stuff’ you can eat, and how much of the ‘healthy stuff’ should be in your diet.
Because I don’t like diets—not the kind where you need a not of discipline to lose weight, anyway—we aren’t going to talk about the healthy stuff today. We’re going to talk about when you decide to go ahead and eat something you know you shouldn’t eat. We’re going to talk about indulgences.
Before You Start the Recording
If you’re like me, you make a lot of rules for yourself. I tell myself that I have to practice the piano every day, and spend at least half an hour trying to make Bite-Sized-English.com a better website. What ‘rules’ have you made for yourself? Have you ever ‘broken’ these rules? What did you do?
Start the recording to learn how to say these things with the words ‘indulge’ and ‘indulgence.’
After You Hear the Recording
Everything clear? Can you see how this would be a word you see in a lot of English language marketing? “Indulge yourself” seems to be the slogan for anyone who markets luxury products, and the message is clear: “normally you wouldn’t buy something as expensive as what we sell. . . but don’t you think you should make an exception just this once?”
How often do you indulge yourself? Do you think it’s important to have a few indulgences? Or are you proud of living your life with as few indulgences as possible? My mother, for example, says that drinking Coca-Cola is her only indulgence. What are your indulgences?
Vocabulary
Indulgence: Some people tell me that, when they’re on a diet, they can’t eat a single piece of chocolate or they’ll lose their discipline and leave the diet altogether. Others tell me that having a little chocolate now and again doesn’t stop them from following the diet, in general. These people can have occasional indulgences without any problem. An ‘indulgence’ is any time you allow yourself to do something that you want to do, or normally wouldn’t do. You can indulge in food that you normally shouldn’t eat—a little can’t hurt, right?—or you can make a trip into an indulgence: if you’re saving money for a new car, you can say “we deserve a weekend away. . . and we’re still on track with our savings.” It becomes an indulgence.
