Laziness, pill-popping not true path to success

I’ve always believed that if you want something bad enough, it’s worth working hard for. This… I’ve always believed that if you want something bad enough, it’s worth working hard for. This philosophy has helped me achieve things in my life, such as learning to parallel park for my drivers test, making sports teams and getting good grades in college.

Having hard work pay off is one of the greatest satisfactions one can experience; it is incomparable to getting results by taking the easy way out.

The media floods us with the temptation of quick fixes and fast and easy ways to solve our problems and make our dreams come true: get-rich-quick schemes that require no time, work or education, creams that will make you look years younger and pills that give you the abs of Britney Spears – pre K-Fed of course. I even received an advertisement in the mail claiming that if you take certain pills, you will be able to focus better and concentrate longer.

It seems that some people are willing to do anything to get results – except put in the necessary time and effort. Instead of being so fast to find that easy way or quick fix, we should strive to achieve results in a natural, safe and honest way.

At the risk of sounding like a goody-two-shoes, it bothers me when students take Adderall to help them stay up all night to study and concentrate. How can the students who get good grades consequently take pride in their grades, knowing they needed a drug to help them? Whatever happened to pulling all-nighters with hourly trips to 7-Eleven for coffee?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d be lying if I said I never peeked over my shoulder during a test or copied homework. But I’ll be the first to admit that getting a good grade because I had wandering eyes can’t beat getting a good grade because I actually studied and earned it.

I’ve also noticed this quick-fix phenomenon with regards to physical appearance. I watched a TV show that showed the struggle of a teenage girl to lose weight for a beauty pageant. Rather than eating healthy and hitting the gym months before, she went on a cottage cheese-only diet a couple of weeks before the pageant. Is it just me or does all cottage cheese all the time seem like it would get a little old – and gross?

You can rarely flip through the TV channels without seeing an ad for diet pills – think Anna Nicole and “Trim Spa, baby.”

These pills might aid people with conditions that prevent them from losing weight in the conventional way or people who have exhausted every other means to lose weight. But I can’t tell you how many girls I know who have tried diet pills without truly trying to lose weight on their own.

A friend of mine said she started taking diet pills because she “tried everything else” and nothing else worked. When I asked her if she tried exercising she said, “Oh, God no. I hate working out.”

People like this annoy me about as much as girls who put makeup on just to go the gym. But hey, at least they’re going to the gym.

Are these people just being lazy? Or are they so naive as to really think that popping these “super pills” without making any other changes will get them down to their ideal weight? It kind of reminds me of those pills that claim to cure a hangover. If those pills were really successful in curing or preventing hangovers, there would be millions more college students waking up a lot happier on Sunday mornings.

If you’re not willing to work your hardest for something, you must not really want it. For example, I would like a six-pack stomach. It would be great to have my stomach be nothing but solid muscle and have people make comments like, “I could wash my clothes on that thing.”

But I know would it would take to get it: a healthy diet and a considerable amount of exercise. I got the exercise part down but my diet is simply not going to cut it. I’m not going to get a six pack when I basically need ice cream to function and eat only a couple pieces of fruit per month. My constant supply of double-stuffed peanut butter Oreos probably isn’t helping either. I’m not willing to give them up, so that six pack just isn’t worth it to me.

In a world full of tempting quick fixes, we need to find out what’s really important to us and work for it. I gave up on my six-pack dream a while ago. But if I ever do get it, I can assure you I got it from eating grilled fish and doing sit-ups, not from taking a pill that promised to turn my rolls to rock.

E-mail Anjali at amn17@pitt.edu.