"LIVING LARGE"
According to the National Institutes of Health, 25% of Americans are obese, and 60% of us are overweight. Worse still, 40% of our children are overweight. According to Runner's World, only 1 out of 20 Americans can actually run a mile without stopping.
My friends, we are becoming a nation of Cartmans.
This is a significant problem, and it's one that people don't want to talk about because it forces us to examine our own shortcomings. Who wants to admit that they're lazy? Isn't easier to insist that you have a genetic inclination to be rather large than admit that you're fat because you eat too much and don't exercise?
My tirade isn't directed against the exceptions -- against people who actually are predisposed to accumulate weight due to their metabolisms. And at the same time, there are people who go too far to the other extreme (I'll save my anti-Anorexia/Why-I-Hate-Our-Cult-of-Thinness-That-Rewards-Girls-For-Starving-Themselves-Like-Christina-Aguilera <sp?> rant for later). But, I'm talking about the average American who eats at McDonald's at least once a week, takes the elevator to go up two stories at work, and parks as close as possible to the supermarket so (s)he doesn't have to walk an extra 10 meters to get more food. I'm sure that the 60% of Americans that are overweight don't all share the same glandular problem. I'm going to blame, of all things, our success as a country.
We do, after all, live in the most comfortable nation that has ever existed. While our ancestors died of things like warfare, Cholera and Smallpox, we are typically killed by Heart Disease (we eat too much meat) and Lung Cancer (as a country, we smoke). What does that mean? It means that the leading causes of death for our countrymen are from overindulging their appetites. As a country, we're so immoderate in our consumption of goods that we're literally killing ourselves in the process.
What bothers me the most about this is that, while we're eating too much, exercising too little and then trying to find some easy diet to make us look thin and sexy again, people are dying of starvation all over the planet. I don't know how many children will have died of hunger alone by the moment you've read this site (depends on how quickly you read), but someone dies of starvation every 2.43 seconds. You figure it out.
Tell you what -- I'll feel bad for overweight Americans with poor self-image problems the instant there are no starving children in the world. Does that sounds like a fair deal to you?
It is illegal for me to solict donations for a particular fund on a non-.org site. But if you feel like I do, you might want to give some money to a good organization.
