Teeth are important. They help you eat delicious foods and nourish your body and stuff; they help you bite those who deserve it and they most certainly make a nice accessory to your face. You have to take care of your teeths just as much as they take care of you. You have to keep ’em clean; floss those suckers and if they start looking in the wrong direction, you send them bad boys straight. To each their own of course. If your mouth isn’t in complete and total chaos, and you’re not really phased by your teeth playing googly eyes with one another, then perhaps you should leave things as is. I on the other hand decided to take a different route. 28 years into my existence, I finally decided to make my smile just a little more perfect. It was a pretty nice smile to begin with but you know, there’s always room for improvement.
So I opted to spend the big bucks and dedicate almost a whole year of my life to the Invisalign process. I figured what the hell; I already spend an absurd amount of money on shit I have too much of already, like clothes and endless booze. It’s about time I put my hard earned green towards something more useful and long lasting. Not to mention, behind the allure of clean cut lines of sparkling whites hides another big fat perk... which brings me to my main point.
Invisalign puts you on one hell of a diet. Much like all diets this one is super annoying of course. First of all, every single time you feel like shoving food in your mouth, you have to take out the trays. After you’re done, you have to triple brush both your teeth and the trays before you place them back in your mouth where they belong for 22 hours out of the day. Furthermore you have to carry around a toothbrush and toothpaste with you at all times, which really cramps your style if you’re one of those ‘I only like to have my phone and keys on me’ kind of people. But hey! At least you’re forced to eat like a normal human being at designated parts of the day instead of just finger picking your way through everything that looks good enough to land in your mouth. Yeah, you can forget about snacking. You’ll never snack again! Well, not never… but not for a while. You can definitely forget about drinking copious amounts of red wine and beer, as anything with color will stain your trays and anything other than water will transfer its scent onto them as well. The Invisalign diet inadvertently teaches you discipline. The whole idea is that you’d be too lazy to continue to take your trays in and out of your mouth, so instead of eating all day long whenever possible, you’d limit yourself to fewer, properly spaced out meals and overall more water. By the time you’re done straightening out your teeth, you’ll be this whole new person that eats and poops entirely according to schedule and doesn’t over-indulge in bad habits like alcohol consumption; talk about killing two birds with one stone. In spite of its obvious downsides, the Invisalign diet sounds pretty appealing, right?
Wrong. Like all diets, the Invisalign diet is too a big fat failure. Not only is it bothersome, time consuming and way too expensive for a diet, but most importantly it doesn’t work. Instead of adopting the art of discipline all you end up gaining is gorging habits because you have to hurry up and eat as much as you can, as fast as you can before putting the trays back in so you’re not hungry again for as long as possible. You don’t give up your drinking habits; you just switch to white wine and lots of it to compensate for the fact that you can’t drink what you truly want. You stop eating salads because you’re convinced that the tiny green particles get stuck in your teeth way more than a burger would. You don’t eat baby carrots and celery anymore because those things are very much in the snack category and ain’t nobody got time for that no more.
There is a chance that I’m just a big fat saboteur of my own health. I’ve been on this Invisalign “diet” for almost a month now and I’ve got to say that so far I haven’t been eating or drinking any less than I used to; quite the opposite. I feel like if I really wanted to make this “diet” work, I would. Perhaps one day I shall learn. Until then I’ll just remain a happy, drunk chubster with a soon to be nice(r) smile.
