If I had retained all the weight I have lost during the last millennium I would probably weigh a cool 10,000 pounds. “Guinness Book of Records,” here I come.
While I’m on the subject, if the weight we had lost collectively as members of the human race could be gathered in one place, we could probably form another Earth and colonize it with a whole new size of humans. OK, OK, where is this going? Have I fallen into hunger pangs and my mind has lost its weigh - way?
A short time ago I was traveling to Thailand and then back from Hong Kong to the States. Not only were the movies awful but the flights were long - 25 hours for the main legs. With nothing much to do but try to read and eat, I began to conjure some thoughts.
What I started to realize as we flew those many miles was that we love to eat. We enjoy savoring the tastes of both regular and exotic foods. Once we have been hooked, the addiction sets in. It is very hard to say, “I’ll only have a postage stamp-sized piece of that meat or a teaspoon of that dessert.” Humans, much like the lions of the plains, like to gorge ourselves in culinary delights. If we were not meant to eat, why were we given mouths and ample stomachs to store our intake?
This idea of the natural order of eating brought me to some interesting and naive questions and conclusions. I began to wonder why we spend billions of dollars a year on every conceivable form of diet-related stuff. We buy pills and books, steam treatments and exercise plans, inspirational tapes and mood music, crazy diet regimens and hypnosis. We try everything thrown before us for the sake of one specific task - to lose weight.
The problem is it never works. We shed a few pounds, then wake up a few days later with that evil weight right back in our beds. That lost weight becomes a stalker that can never be driven away.
We make fun of our ancestors, who purchased all varieties of wacky potions from every street-corner quack. We find them naive and ignorant because they just didn’t know any better. Well, we haven’t learned much from the past. We continue to throw good money after bad in our pursuit of the ultimate weight, a magic number only known somewhere in the heavens above.
As I pondered my own desire to remove excess weight and become the perfect size for my build and height, I began to feel a sense of resentment. Why do I have to go through this torture on an almost continuous basis? Why should I have to pay someone for treatments that don’t work, for pills that have no lasting effect and for a lifestyle that seems always to be just beyond my overweight reach?
It suddenly hit me that we, the food addicted of the world, have been bamboozled just like the addicted smokers. We have been driven to feast upon the culinary delights of existence and then told we must not partake. Well, you can partake, but you will need to pay for that activity by buying all the attached diet-related items to take off what you have put on, and that won’t work for long.
Think about the television programming you watch. When you put it all together, there is a sinister scenario playing itself out. Thousands of thin people parade across the screen of every soap opera, sitcom or movie. Added weight is not a positive force in any programming. Then, during the commercials, we the viewers are handed over to the food merchants: “Come to our buffet where we will feed you like royalty - all you want for only $5.95!” “Why not try the new delights of our new gluttonous menu!”
Food, food, food - thrown in our faces, aiming for our mouths and adding to our waists. But before we return to the show, let’s view a few clothing commercials that are designed to accentuate people in sizes you have never witnessed in real life. And lastly, there will probably be a diet-related ad to top off the lineup. Then back to the thin performers appearing to gorge themselves on food they never swallow.
There is a conspiracy to keep Americans eating at exhausting levels, to force a belief that diets work when we know they don’t and to foster a belief that everyone must literally kill himself or herself to attain and maintain the thin physique. The food, clothing and pharmaceutical industries have joined together in a diabolic triumvirate to keep Americans buying food, trying to diet away the food and continuing to change clothes from size to size.
It has reached a point where we need to do some really drastic things. We need to stop the unbridled craziness that has consumed us and say, “No more!” If every citizen of the United States suddenly stopped buying any diet-related pills, regimens or devices, maybe then we could live our lives to the fullest, enjoying the fruits of the harvest, instead of only the tiny scraps allowed on those so-called “diets.”
I believe with the right incentive, pharmaceutical companies could be forced to zero in on the three culprits of weight - fat, sugar and carbohydrates - and create the means to allow us to eat what we want without fear of excess weight, sugar-related ailments and all the ramifications of added food intake. We have the power to direct the focus of research away from the stupidity of forever dieting under conditions bound to fail before they begin. Let us force the powers that be to give us our God-given right to eat what we want with no restrictions.
Craig Gunn is a communications director in the Department of Engineering whose column usually appears every other Wednesday. He can be reached at gunn@egr.msu.edu.
