Letters to the Editor
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Call me cranky, but I can't help thinking more women are going to read that line and think about their muffin tops than men will reconsider their love handles.
Not cranky, just whining.
Jebus. A blog is not a collected series of whines intended to support a proposition. That's abuse.
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I hear ya, Carol
I'm a guy, 24, with 8% body fat and I my abs are so shredded I can't keep undershirts in one piece. That being said, obesity is a huge problem. It's a gender-blind human problem.
I agree that more women will worry about their muffin-tops than guys about their handles - because of our US-Weekly society (Britney is Fat!! -- go look at those pictures. yeah, I'm fitter, but she still looks downright great)
Little secret which helps me. My body is a vessel. The only vessel I have on this planet. I demand an hour in the gym every day to respect my vessel. I'm not all christian my body is a temple or anything - I'm just a human. Think about evolution. We ran around hunting and burned a lot of calories living life. Now we sit around, watch tv and eat.
The answer is simple -- work out and sweat (you will be happier and healthier). And pa-lease, lets not be happy because the french are fat like us now. That's so ridiculous.
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Brains and fat
Perhaps the reason the whole planet gets fat as the American diet is adopted is the same reason that brains have shrunk. A little known fact is that our late 20th and 21st century brains are 10% smaller than 19th century brains. Stupidity and fatness go together. Not because stupid people eat more (maybe they do) but our diets don't contain brain food, mainly omega-3 fatty acids. Beef use to contain lots of omega-3 when cattle were grass fed. So maybe the cause is that we are all lacking nutrients and overeat to compensate. In any event fish oil contains lots of omega-3 and since most of it goes to make paint, there is plenty for supplementing diets. Who knows what other shit our modern lifestyle has perpetrated.
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Hmm...
Where have I heard the phrase "a little known fact", followed by an odd and irrelevent scientific theory?
Oh yeah! Cliff Clavin! How's it going, Cliff?
Just kidding! No offence.
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OK one more time for the very slow: A woman can fuck ANYONE SHE WANTS as long she ISN"T GIGANTICALLY FAT
For a man being good looking is just ONE of a LONG LIST of necessary conditions to be met before he can have a life. So yes, it is literally true that for women fat "matters more" but that is because women get a pass on everything else.
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Open Letter to France
Dear France,
We're sorry.
Best.
America
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Processed food CAN be manufactured in a healthy fashion and ANY food can be eaten in quantities that will not make you or keep you fat
We can't allow ourselves to fall into the trap (a trap which is being heavily promoted that lets manufacturers off the hook AND excessive consumers off the hook) of accepting the belief that once you give up expensive and time consuming to prepare traditional foods fat is inevitable. EVERYONE can be thin and healthy even if they eat nothing but cheap microwaveable freezer foods (which is all lots of people have the money and time for) and food makers should be required to help by producing their products in such a way that doing this is not made much harder than it needs to be.
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I love watching you
turn your lives into misery, fear and anger. So someone got a little heavier - I guess we need to blog furiously about how it's some politician's fault.
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The next export I predict will by le gym
The last time I lived in Paris I noticed there was nowhere to work out. That was really aggravating.
I learned how French people used to keep the weight off. The cafes don't serve fast food. Anywhere you'd get food, you'd have to sit and wait for it. In a French cafe for lunch you'll get a little piece of meat and a little piece of bread and a little glass of wine. Then you have to walk or take the Metro everywhere, because who wants to drive in Paris? Then you go food shopping, and you'd have to go to a different store for every single kind of food. Then the food is sold in such a state of immediate perfect ripeness and freshness, that it doesn't last until the next day, so you have to go shopping EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Yes you'll be thin if you work for a living and have to stop at five different stores on foot every night after work to put together dinner.
Now that they have fast food and the supermarche, they're going to need to start building somewhere to work out.
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Falling in the trap is fun.
So, let me get Anonymous's argument straight.
1. It's possible to eat a healthy diet without paying attention to the culinary arts.
2. Paying attention to what one eats is a trap foisted upon us by evil cooks who want us to develop cooking skills.
3. Seeing the truth in points 1 and 2 will lead to obesity.
4. Which leads to a contradiction.
5. To resolve this contradiction, the government must step in and do something.
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Everyone will get fat if they eat too much, of anything.
No American is going to live the way the French used to, even the French won't.
Therefore there are two choices:
Everyone is obese or
Cheap convenient food is available and is of such a nature and is eaten in quantities such that NOT everyone is obese.
Assuming the second alternative is preferred what is the best way to bring it, rather than the first, about.
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and it's not the foodies who are plotting but the fat acceptance movement on the one hand and the food industry on the other.
the fatties blame the food industry, or biology, and say there is nothing they can do. the industry blames fat people, or biology, and says there is nothing they can do. They are both wrong, and the solution is not and cannot be to go back to the food past, at least in any general sense. Specific things can be learned from the past though.
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I forgot what I was going to say
All the idiotic, anonymous comments distracted me. Is Anonymous six people, or just one with too much time on his hands?
Oh, yeah.
"Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, as the American waistline continues to expand, the length of the American marriage is shrinking."
I am less concerned with my muffin top than with pondering what the heck one has to do with the other.
?
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are you seriously telling us
that you can't even hazard a guess?
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Our bodies were built for famine.
And we live in a world of plenty.
We need to remember that. I'm not saying that fat is good, I'm saying that what we have to do to avoid it is contrary to everything which evolution (or God's divine creation of our bodies, take your pick) has chosen for us. We are designed to retain fat so as to survive through the lean winter... but there are very few lean winters for anyone in the developed world. We are designed to seek out food, as much as possible, to develop those fat reserves. We are designed to avoid things which are bitter, which might in nature be poisonous, and to seek the sweet and fatty for additional calories.
So what health now requires is completely counter to what our bodies are made for. And, what, we expect it to be easy? Simple? Of course it's simple: we want to balance calories going in with calories going out. If already overweight, we want more calories going out or fewer coming in. But this is not easy because out of the millions of years in which life has existed on earth, there has *never* been a point where a creature could say, "Y'know, I feel like a snack, y'wanna head to McD's and pick up a Big Mac Value Meal?" and in five minutes be provided with enough food to survive for days on.
The same attitudes and habits that create fatness now used to be very well-adapted. "Eat heartily, don't over-strain yourself." Our images of the good life still regularly include relaxation and lots of food and drink. After generations where that was true, we can't overnight just tell everyone, "Sorry, the new rule is eat only the least calorie-dense foods and go running every morning for fun!" and have that work immediately. It's going to take awhile to make that shift, and in the meantime, yes, there will be some fatness.
Once plenty truly stops being a novelty, people will change.