Sprinkles Don’t Matter; Ice Cream Matters

Sprinkles don’t matter. Do you know what matters? The ice cream matters. When you have a heaping bowl of ice cream with sprinkles on it, let’s all agree that this culinary experience is an ice cream forward issue. Sprinkles, while visually appealing and solid contributors to texture and sometimes even taste, are largely beside the point.

What’s more is that when it comes to ice cream, people rarely mess this up. For example, I’ve never seen someone make a bowl of 2% milk poured over some lazily blended ice only to attempt to salvage the dish with some excellent sprinkles as a topping. We’re all smart enough to get an ice cream of our liking if we intend to have such a desert. Hell, sometimes (Dare I say most times?) we don’t even add sprinkles at all. It’s 2016, people, sprinkles are barely relevant and unless you’re six years old, I think we’re all generally concerned with the fact that this is an ice cream issue.

Why is it, then, that we make this mistake all the time when it comes to fitness. We do it with nutrition, too. Performance, like strength, flexibility, speed, and work capacity, is the issue here. This is the ice cream. These elements are the point of the fitness conversation. Tiny shoulder exercises, ninety minute mobility sessions, and hyper-specific gym party tricks are the sprinkles. If you’re spending so much time in the gym being a fit fanatic, you’d better be able to do something as a result. Be strong. Be fast. Be athletic. Be able to run until the people watching you get tired. With food, taking powdered greens, antioxidant supplements, and water filtered through Polynesian rhinestones under a full moon are sprinkles, too. You can’t sprinkle a healthy diet on an awful lifestyle.

While I am a fan of sprinkles, I won’t even put sprinkles on a fake bowl of ice cream. It tastes awful (like a fake bowl of ice cream would) and I’m smart enough to realize that tiny little bullshit sprinkles aren’t going to save the day here. Furthermore, I’d definitely never eat sprinkles by themselves (like a psychopath would). Let’s not miss the point, people. First and foremost, this sprinkle-focused approach has no results. Secondly, adding sprinkles, eating sprinkles, and shopping for sprinkles takes time, money, and energy. If you’re putting forth the effort anyway, it seems like you ought to get a bowl full of results, too.

Don’t spend hours in the gym and not have anything to show for it. Don’t eat like an average American and identify as a healthy individual just because you make smoothies. This is not about the sprinkles.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach