To Eat or Not to Eat

This is a piece based on Hamlet's famous soliloquy that was put in the school literary magazine. You may want to compare it to the original by Shakespeare which can be found HERE.

To eat or not to eat, that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous appetite
Or to take arms against a sea of food,
And by opposing end it.

To diet to starve
No more- and by starving to say we end
The heartburn and the thousand gasps
That a surplus of flesh is heir to.

Tis a consume nation
Devoutly to be wished. To diet, to starve;
To starve; perchance to look good. Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that starvation of dieting what beauty may come,
When we have shuffled off this double chin,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of fat,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s
contumely,
The pangs of disprized indulgences, the conscience’s delay,
The insolence of onlookers, and the spurns
That patient merit of the spouse takes,
When they themselves secretly make
An éclair, glistening?

Who would Weight Watchers bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary jog,
But that the dread something bad with weight,
The horrible state from whose bourn
No sane man returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus peer pressure does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied with the pale cast of cauliflower,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their lifestyle turn awry
And lose the name of happiness.

I was basically happy with it in the magazine, except that a couple lines were printed wrong and I felt that anyone could get into the magazine if they wanted to. I mean, a poem on the next page is called "Bacon Man". Oh yes, it's as bad as the title suggests.