In my last post, I talked a little bit about our visit to Cazenovia Museum of Oddities, to see the real mummy on display there. We'd never seen a real mummy before. I remember being extremely surprised at how it looked. You know how mummies look in movies? Where they look like muscular guys just wrapped up in old rags? Not so! This mummy was skinny. VERY skinny-- skinnier than my son, who is 5'11'' and 95 pounds. I was very surprised how thin the mummy was. They say it was a woman, about 5'5. I don't know if she was really that thin, or if she shrank from, uh, her guts being taken out and then being on the rack for 2,000 years. That might do it, huh? Maybe both combined-- people were definitely smaller before modern sanitation and nutrition. But I was certainly surprised at how very tiny the mummy was, and yet she was my height.

In the Middle East and African continents, being skinny means being impoverished. Only in America and the Western world is there cultural competition and social pressure to discover the best diet pills to maintain an almost-emaciated look. Modern medicines were, of course, not available to the ancients, but they did use herbs and other plants to control diet, hunger, weight gain, and weight loss. I would LOVE a pill that I could take and lose 10 or 20 pounds! I actually did try an appetite-supressor pill, years ago. It did nothing for me. My fat doesn't want to budge. :( I look back at how thin and fit I was, twenty years ago.... sigh.... anyway, I'd never want to be as thin as a mummy. But if being thinner helps a person feel better and helps with their energy levels, why not a pill? We take vitamins, aspirins, even coffee, to improve our level of fitness and health (and sanity, lol). I think the best diet pill could have a place in our modern world of health maintenance, as long as a person doesn't get as emaciated as that mummy!