Obesity: America’s deepest shame
The fatter we get, the more we fear and loathe fat people. Go, Nathan, go.
"Our inner bullies want to mock them, to speak of the importance of self-control and discipline. Our inner nurturers want to hand them a cookie. In its famous marshmallow experiment, Stanford University showed that our willingness to withstand temptation has more to do with our prefrontal lobes than the portions on our plates. But Al Franken, in his 1999 book “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot,” showed there’s always a market for fat jokes, and you’re never too old to be a playground bully.
Even as America has gotten fatter, so has its fear and loathing of fatness ironically grown. It’s why Romney couldn’t have picked the New Jersey governor as a running mate. Four years of fat jokes wouldn’t do a presidency good. Oprah Winfrey is allowed to be 50 shades of fat, but only because hers is beautifully concealed, and she’s always trying to get rid of it. Our fatness is America’s deepest shame, more troubling than our ballooning debt. Everyone, it seems, knows how to fix Social Security. No one, save Mike Huckabee, seems to know how to fix fat.
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On paper, weight loss looks simple. One pound equals 3,500 calories; expend 3,500 calories and lose a pound. What’s so hard about that?"
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