House of Eratosthenes

The amount of food Americans eat has been increasing since the 1970s, and that alone is the cause of the obesity epidemic in the US today…”The food industry has done such a great job of marketing their products, making the food so tasty that it’s almost irresistible, pricing their products just right, and placing them everywhere, that it is very hard for the average person to resist temptation. Food is virtually everywhere, probably even in churches and funeral parlors.” [said the lead researcher]

Seems rather obvious. Like a case of real life imitating The Man Show.

Best Way To Lose Weight – Funny home videos are a click away

But there is another side to this that raises red flags with me. I think we’ve either got some eggheads that aren’t up to the task of eggheadery, or something must have gotten horribly lost in the translation as the eggheads discussed their findings with the reporters —

Physical activity—or the lack thereof—has played virtually no role in the rising number of expanding American waistlines, according to research presented at the 2009 European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam last week.

The finding is contrary to the widely held assumption that decreased physical activity is an equally important driver of overweight and obesity in the US, said lead author Dr Boyd Swinburn (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia).

Okay now, if this is all because of something Dr. Boyd Swinburn knows that I don’t know, that would have to mean I’m incorrect in something I learned decades ago: Fat people really do get hungry. Actually, here I would now have to claim superior experience over the doc. I wouldn’t mind chowing down on a chicken drumstick right this very minute — and it’s not because chicken drumsticks are yummy, it’s because I’ve got a little bit of a rumbling in my gut. Which, by rights, I really shouldn’t have because last night’s dinner was scrumptious and wonderful. So in this case, I’m the hungry fat dude. Now, why am I hungry even though I’m eating? Lessee…last night I drove a car home on a 2 mile commute…after doing some stuff on a computer in a cubicle for nine hours…after driving my car 2 miles to work…after blogging.

This weekend I’ll be riding my bike. But most Americans don’t even do that much. Just a few of us go to the gym, and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk about how we went to the gym.

Very few Americans really sit around on their asses all of the time. Here’s the problem, though. You eat one cheeseburger, you’ve got to work and work and work to get your digestion process back to normal. Not to get rid of the calories, which would require even more work. Just to get your body back into the “frame of mind” that okay, that was a treat, we aren’t built to eat cheeseburgers, we’re built to do physical things…so pump up the muscles accordingly and spend that fat.

The typical workout regimen for us, though, is one that would work dandy if things were directly upside down. You do four miles on the Stairmaster, and then you need to put away cheeseburgers all week to get that energy back. Life would be pretty neat if things worked that way. That isn’t how it works.

Physical labor, and lack thereof, affects your appetite. That’s because it determines the environment to which your body is trying to adapt. The type of food you shovel down your gullet, likewise, is part of the environment to which your body is trying to adapt. If it’s rich in starch and salt, your body gets the message that hey, we’re not gonna get the vitamins and other nutrients we need unless & until we consume several gallons of this garbage. So let’s send a nerve impulse to the lardass upstairs that we’re hungry again.

Work makes you fat. Or rather, to be more accurate about it, the time you spend doing work…by which I mean, not physical exercise, but things that need to be done, because nobody else will do ’em and they’ve gotta get done…depletes your ability to determine what kind of body shape you’re going to have. It also determines how much food you’re going to be eating. It all comes back to your body being a marvelous chameleon, designed to fit into whatever kind of work/eating regimen you’ve set up for it. And America does more work than most countries. We must, because you haven’t got that long to wait before some other snotty European/U.N. study comes out saying we do.

What are you doing when you get hungry? I’m pretty much always “working” in the worst way possible — with my brain and not with my bod. Day-to-day, when the thought occurs to me that it’s time to eat something…I’m either figuring out why something doesn’t work, writing code to make it work, or writing something else designed to be read by humans. You’d better believe that when the craving hits, I’ll be eating a lot more than someone who got just a little bit peckish by sitting around. More hours working means fewer hours doing something that would deliver the body shape you really want. We’re the chubby, barrel-shaped hubby clocking in at the coal mines eighteen hours a day, so his beauty-queen wife with the perfect figure can go jogging and sunbathing all day long.

One more thing worth pointing out: There is a pretty consistent correlation between the cost paid for a meal, and the meal’s delivery of nutrients your body needs on a per-dry-ounce basis. We tend to forget this because the correlation between cost, and the meal’s ability to kill that “I’m hungry right now” impulse, is all over the map. And it is that helter-skelter correlation that is of greater concern to us. You can fill your gut for twenty bucks, you can fill it up for $3.50. You can fill it for a buck.

But the less money you pay to fill up your gut, the richer the gut-filling will be in the salt, grease and starch. Which means you’re back to screwing up that delicate assembly line made up of your digestive tract, your brain, the blood sugar delivery to it, and the “I’m hungry” nerves. The strength here is the weakness. Your system is designed to adapt to the environment, and what you eat is part of that environment. So it’s easy to screw it all up.

But of course, I’ve used a great many more words to nail this stuff down, than were available to poor Dr. Swinburn. I don’t think any of what I’ve said would be news to him, and I don’t think he’d even disagree. This, I think, is a textbook case of lazy reporting. It just isn’t even a thought worth pondering, that “physical activity or the lack thereof has played virtually no role” in turning us into a nation of lardasses. There’s very little physical activity being done anymore. I have some company out on the bike trails, but really not that much considering the population density of my area; over the years, I’ve come to think of it as one of my opportunities to get away from people. If I walk someplace — in Folsom — I get funny looks from the motorists sitting way up high in their nice big cars, like gee I’m dressed nice for a homeless guy, and I must be some kind of homeless guy if I’m out walking.

So what are people doing? Going to the gym?

The gym that “everyone” attends is right next door to the recycling station “everyone” uses. Neither one is really a day-and-night hotbed of bustling activity.

Our asses are getting fat because we sit on them a lot. I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but it doesn’t seem to me like something that’s even open for question.

We do have to train ourselves to resist temptation. Rarely do I ever take a doughnut when they are brought into work anymore. They are right about the availability of good tasting, inexpensive food.

What they’re wrong about is the “can’t resist” bit. We can. Oh yes. We can. But we do have to make a conscious effort to do it in order to train ourselves.

One thing I noticed back in my skinny days was that I was often too busy to eat, and would skip meals. I also had no car and rode my bicycle everywhere.

Then I got married. Fat and happy, as the wife puts it. Well, I’m not “fat”, but I’m 10 lbs over where I’d like to be. At one point I was 16 lbs over that. But through diet AND exercise, I got down to it. And I’ve rebounded back up over the past couple of years.

Partially because I like beer.

And partially because I like sitting on my tuchus. The older I get, the more I like it.

Same might go for the beer as well 😉 And we’re not talkin’ Miller Lite.

We actually eat fairly smart for the most part, which is why I haven’t ballooned up to lard-ass proportions. Still, I refuse to go up another waist size.

So I’m riding my bike to work again. I try to do it at least 3 days a week.

Hopefully, in a couple of months I’ll be a lot closer to that 180 mark I like to shoot for.
- philmon | 05/20/2009 @ 12:28
We must, because you haven’t got that long to wait before some other snotty European/U.N. study comes out saying we do.

Ummm… aren’t we OVERdue for another of these studies, seeing as how the quoted Seattle PI article is from 2001? But I digress.

On the subject at hand… I WISH to Hell I had just a little bit of this “obesity problem.” I’ve been skinny all my danged life, but it’s gotten worse as I get older. I could make good money as an extra if Hollywood made more concentration camp movies. I hate to think what I would look like if I gave up beer and Ben and Jerry’s. 😉
- bpenni | 05/20/2009 @ 13:15
[A]ren’t we OVERdue for another of these studies, seeing as how the quoted Seattle PI article is from 2001?

Probably. I’ll clean up my sourcing tonight, I shouldn’t have plucked the dustiest link out of the whole pile. Doesn’t fit in with my wording very well.

It’s won’t be harder to find a fresher specimen. Google it; it’s been a popular meme for awhile now. I can’t blame other countries for pointing a finger at us and saying “they work too hard,” or “they are too fat.” Nor can I blame them for pointing a finger at us and saying “my life would be easier if I had all the things they have.” B-u-u-u-t…to nurse a simmering rage against us, for all three of these things at the same time? That’s sort of a death of common sense right there.
- mkfreeberg | 05/20/2009 @ 13:38

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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009