Yesterday, I gave some unsolicited medical advice to a woman about to buy some Aspirin. Telling a woman with a large belly in maternity jeans that a certain medication will harm the baby, ought to be something one can say without having to think about hurting someone’s feelings. However, with the current sad state of affairs in the anglophone world, I’ve just upset some fat girl who thinks I’m am some insensitive asshole, which may be normally true, but in this instance I was trying to be nice. Clearly, society has gotten to a point, where it’s acceptable to wear maternity wear in public, despite not being pregnant or having just had a baby, but showing concern for the life of an unborn (and obviously being carried to term, here, since she looked to be in the third trimester) child is something we’re no longer allow to do?
There is a solution to all of this: Stop Being Fat. I did it, and it honestly wasn’t very difficult. Will power is not one of my strong suits, but I did it. Just change your diet a little bit, and the pounds will just shed off. All it takes is a little bit of self control, and the ability to do basic mathematics. Calories in, calories expended, and cut back on the carbs. It’s not that difficult, and you can even project how much weight you’ll lose plus what that’ll look like via various apps and websites. All you have to do is type in what you want to eat, and the magic little computer in your hand will tell you how much you should have. One small slice of cake occasionally won’t kill you, but a half a cake a day will, rather quickly. Ricky Gervais used to be kind of fat and relatively poor, now he’s pretty trim and ridiculously rich. I’m not saying that correlation equals causation, but how many rich and powerful people can you think of who are fat besides Jeremy Clarkson, President Taft, and Henry VIII (who started out skinny, by the way)?
If he of all people could do it, then why can’t we all stop being fat?
How did I lose 20 kg of bodyfat over the course of a year? Well, it sure as hell wasn’t from upping my physical activity! Yes, I actually cut back on working out, yet still stopped being a fatty. After a decadent bacchanalian binge over Christmas 2012, to test myself, I did not have a drop of alcohol or more than 20 grams of carbs in a day from Jan 2-31 of 2013. Achieving and maintaining ketosis for those 30 days, I dropped 8 kg. I ate food that’s apparently bad for you, like bacon and eggs every morning, yet became healthier Apparently, not all calories are created equal, and our bodies process the different sources of energy from food id different ways. So, I kept eating better quality food, in a smaller quantity, due to it being more filling, and I just kept dropping the fat. You see, the empty calories in junk food, just make you hungrier a little while later, because your body wants more of it. You cut out the ‘junk’, and the extra fat goes away. It’s pretty simple, and without having apparently great genetics like certain other contributors here, I had to make a relatively lifestyle change to be a healthier person.
In a quest to see what wouldn’t work for me, I reintroduced certain foods, one at a time, to see how they effected my weight and GI tract. Dairy and Dwarf Wheat make me feel fat, bloated, and are what can only be termed ‘rental foods’ in my case, so I avoid them now. In just avoiding two foods, I never really liked that much to begin with, but were just sort of omnipresent and easy (much like some of the women I’ve dated), I’m now a former fatty. Having reached my goal weight, I’m now working on swapping the remaining fat for more muscle, and I don’t really have to worry about what I eat. Food, which tastes much better than the easy ‘junk’, is better for me, and I feel better after eating it. If you can’t appreciate some delicious and fairly inexpensive sushi instead of overpriced, tasteless fish and chips, then you may want to have your head examined.
When I was a three-sport athlete in school (ok, I was privately educated, but I won awards and competed in a completely different sport at Uni), which until recently took some people by surprise, I weighed about the same as I do currently, but my new, very long-term goal is to be in better shape going towards 40 than I was looking at 20. It really wasn’t that hard to get healthy in the course of a year, so I cannot for the life of me, understand why our society makes any sort accommodation for fat people. In yet another example of misguided paternalism, Yale University is now so worried about some of it’s naturally thin students, that they are being threatened with suspension for not gaining weight. How warped is our culture? An elite university is so concerned about a student with a slight build being too thin for their arbitrary standard rather, when a fat girl with the same underlying build would pass their test with an obese body fat percentage? Let’s stop giving a BMI and other unreliable measures of what is a ‘healthy weight’ any credence, when we’ve known for years they’re all wrong. All of us have different builds. My BMI is not even close to being an acceptable measure of how thin I am, so I’ve learned to ignore it. The percentage of body fat to lean mass is all that matters, and it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re fat just by looking in the mirror or poking your belly. If it jiggles, you’re fat; if it’s firm, you’re not. How is this a difficult concept to grasp?
Now, I’m not a big top down, big-government type, but since healthcare is socialized to various extents just about everywhere in the world, government does have a role to play. No, I’m not talking about banning large Cokes, but rather a simple solution to let there be no excuse for people not knowing they’re fat. Taxpayers already fund schools, recreation centres, public clinics, pools, and all sorts of other places with at least the partial goal of health promotion. Why can’t we as a matter of public policy, to reduce the massive expenditure on health issues related to obesity, provide free body fat percentage measurements to everyone who wants them in all of these places? No names, no questions asked, just give everyone access to unlimited measurements of how much body fat they have. People could track things themselves, see what works, and set their own goals. Then, there would be no excuse for people to not know that they’re fat, so we as a society could go back to assuming that a woman with a big belly in maternity clothing is pregnant, not just just an oddly proportioned fat person, who has no sense of shame when shopping for clothes.
Also, we can go back to making fat people pay more for their healthcare by having body fat measured during their fully covered, annual checkup. We technically have smokers cover their cost burden through cigarette taxes and the like, so why can’t the clinically obese pay their cost directly? You can’t argue this is in any way discrimination, because, by having healthy people pay far more than they should for basic healthcare under the current system(s), we’re actually subsidizing fat people at the expense of others. If we’re all supposed to be equal, then why are the obese given what boils down to unfair, special treatment simply for eating too much? Have special interest groups been formed for the promotion of obesity and sloth, and if they have been, why wasn’t I told about it back when I was a fatty?
