Thursday 23 November 2006

Pic of the day: Make love, not food! Giving people food is a primal expression of love, but you're killing them softly, at least if they are already on the chubby side.

St Gluttony's Wake

It was my online friend Tsaiko who introduced me to the concept of St Gluttony. I found this very amusing. As you know, today the Americans (well, those in the USA) celebrate Thanksgiving, the first day of the holiday season, and the one where they eat as much as they think their bodies can handle, in memory of their ancestors (or at least the first colonists) surviving in the face of starvation, long ago. It seems to be a kind of holy obligation to eat to excess on this day, thus the concept of St Gluttony.

Of course, at times it seems St Gluttony is the patron saint of the entire nation. Now, that's easy for me to say who don't live there. And in all fairness, it is likely that the tourists may be fatter than average, since they tend to do overseas travels toward the end of their career, when they have the most money (and the most fat). Still, numerous reports from the USA shows that the country is among the absolute world leaders in obesity. And by that I am not referring to women who find out that their butts have grown since they were 12. I am talking about shapeless blobs of fat, that's what obesity is all about. Being slightly overweight may or may not be bad for your health, depending on your family history of certain illnesses. Drowning in your own fat and unable to walk up a flight of stairs is definitely bad for you. A lot of people are somewhere in between these. Genes is part of it, but as some guy said: No matter what your genes, you don't grow fat in a concentration camp. We should all be glad the USA is not a concentration camp (and now may not become one), but the cheap food and the multitude of TV channels do help you put on weight and keep it.

In fact, for most people the holiday season is where they gain weight. Most of it comes off afterwards, for healthy people, but a couple pounds stay all the following year and are still there when the season comes around again. After 40 years that way, it becomes quite noticeable.

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Don't get me wrong. After I could no longer eat fat, and lost a lot of weight, I learned firsthand what hunger felt like. I have a healthy respect for it. I can see how people would rather live a shorter life than to give up their gluttony. Eating really is the one primary pleasure of life. So don't think I am mocking the fat Americans here. But... "Thanksgiving" does not help! The whole "holiday season" does not help! It is a bad idea, or rather a good idea gone wrong because we no longe live in an age where there is lots of food in the fall that will spoil during the long winter unless we first convert it to human fat. This kind of lifestyle works for bears. It does not work for modern humans. If you skip the season of gluttony, you can eat normally the rest of the year and still run much less risk of becoming a quivering mound of jelly-like fat.

If you think this over for ten seconds, you will realize that there is no rational human, and no known deity, who will consider stuffing face a proper expression of gratitude. I mean, say you were a kid and your parent gave you your first bike. You would probably hug them and thank them profusely and promise to take good care of it. Perhaps you even did the dishes for a couple days afterwards. What you certainly didn't do was say: "Why, thank you. I'll go eat everything in the fridge now as an expression of my gratitude."