Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet.
7:07 p.m.
Like most men his age, he battles the bulge daily. In his case, there is a genetic disposition to weight gain, as witnessed by the enlarged girths of his brothers and sister and parents and various aunts and uncles. His older brother is out-and-out obese, having suffered a stroke while still in his 40’s, and his niece, that brother’s daughter who was beautiful and slim all through high school and university, has now started to pack the poundage on herself in recent years.
Tonight at supper Hubby was telling us about an article he’d read stating that 40% of the world’s population was obese. That’s an incredible proportion, considering how many mouths there are to feed in the first place and that two-fifths of them are eating way more than their necessary share. It ushers in all sorts of problems, not just health, but pollution and the cost of transporting food. It also explains why we have so much in the western world where birthrates are steadily declining, and so little in third-word and developing nations where birthrates are on the rise.
Yesterday over pad thai (which as I mentioned was an inordinately large serving), Little Princess and I discussed the means at our disposal to a thinner lifestyle. Human beings are programmed to eat whatever is in front of them whenever it appears because of evolutionary imperatives. As our ancestors chased prey across the savannas of Africa, they did not know if tomorrow would bring famine or feast, and so they feasted when they could. We, on the other hand, live in a time of feasting and our homo sapiens metabolisms just can’t deal with.
The food industry takes full advantage of this knowledge, lacing food with fat, salt and sugar, the three hunger magnets, in an attempt to addict people to their products. Even with the labeling of foodstuffs and suggested serving sizes on the packages, people continue to get larger. As thinking consumers, we can turn the tide by simply not buying the products we know are bad for us. We can limit our consumption of food so that we are satisfied but not sated. Overeating of healthful, nourishing food is just as bad as eating junk, in that too many calories get stored as fat. People just have to school themselves to eat less. Period.
Which brings me to what I started on at the top of this entry. My husband realized during his first sabbatical (somewhere back in the mid-80’s) that he has this family predisposition to weight gain and he was already getting kind of tubby when he got to see his parents and siblings sitting around a swimming pool. He started exercising and playing squash, which eventually branched out to tennis and occasionally running. While his weight has never decreased to what it was when we first met, he does keep it under control for the most part.
Lately he has been trying to reduce further. At least, he says he’s on a diet. This means eating less at meals, not snacking between meals, and not eating in the evening. He has in fact lost a few pounds. Today, however, I caught him on the back deck with his hand in a bag of chips. He had been playing tennis for two hours, running all over the court (he’s very athletic) and felt he could celebrate with chips and a beer. When he wasn’t looking, I took a gander at the package and this is what I saw: 50 gm. or 16 chips were equal to 220 calories. The bag weighed 240 gm. initially. It was more than half empty. This means he had consumed about 500 empty calories, which is more than what he burned off playing tennis. He also followed this up with supper. When I asked him about this, he got very defensive and said he was “just fine, thank you” and I shouldn’t worry about him. Little Princess, who usually stays out of these things, piped up, “But she does worry about you.”
I just think it is very strange that he would relate those facts about world obesity and then contribute to the problem in a manner of speaking. There is something terribly wrong with our society that we continue to let big business dictate what happens with our bodies. We ought to be in control. He ought to be more supportive of my efforts to keep him healthy. I feel rather helpless and insignificant here. Is it just me or is this endemic?
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