Are you fat? Read this then

OK, I admit I'm not fat. Not at all. Have never been fat (apart from a beer belly which is debatable as a beer belly as I've had a belly all my life) and hover around 68 kilos as an adult. No, I've never had a problem with weight at all, and today with HIV it can be a bit of a thing to keep my bloody weight on darlings. 

But I have known intimately someone who developed a severe weight problem over time, much to my huge frustration at times. One of the things that contributed to my late wife's death years back, was huge weight gain and a stubborn denial of the facts why. She was a lovely little lady when we met and fell head over heals, despite many previous operations and dramas in life. Ironically, even though she was at one point "morbidly obese" years later, she also had malnutrition. I've heard all the excuses and justifications.....

Simply, she ate all the wrong shit and made excuses for it. Didn't exercise, didn't look after her body at all, whilst waiting and hoping that a magic pill would come along and fix it all. It's certainly something that I very much take on board now with all my health worries. It's not rocket science.

I grew up on a farm in New Zealand. We had three square meals a day. Potatoes, vegetables, and meat were the fare of every nights meals. We ate a healthy breakfast, took a healthy lunch to the little NZ primary school we went to, and came home for dinner cooked by mum. Not one of us 7 kids were fat. Or mum and dad. In fact I don't remember hardly any fat people at all in the whole community. I do remember the first glass of Coca Cola I ever saw, on the kitchen table, for me to try. I found it incredibly sweet and quite unappealing.

It basically boiled down to that we didn't eat the crap being served up today by food corporations who have no interest in your health but to maybe keep you alive long enough to eat more of their crap. We ate food that was in today's terms "organic", and there was plenty of it.

So it was with much interest that I came across this article that bloody says it like it is. If you're fat, exercise more and eat less. Simple. It's the only way. Forget the silly diets, forget the silly pills, forget the notion that you can eat to get thinner. Get out and walk, stop eating shit, eat healthy. It's a simple recipe for success darlings and I'm crapping on about it here for $nothing.

If there is a disease at work in the obesity epidemic, it is the disease of laziness. People want a quick fix to solve all their problems, and they don’t want to have to do anything differently… even though the things they have always done are what caused them to end up being overweight and unhappy with themselves. 

The desire for a magic answer ends up creating a psychological barrier to progress. Because people want a quick, magical solution, even good medical advice is translated into bad, ineffectual behaviour.

The science of obesity is not complex, but cutting through the noise requires some common sense. If you are obese, then losing weight is simple. You need to gradually decrease the amount of food that you eat, and gradually increase the amount that you exercise, so that over time your body adapts to having less “fuel”. If you do this, you will gradually lose weight. 

But there are no short cuts. There is no special food that you can eat, or exclude, and have the pounds melt away with no other change in your lifestyle. Eating organic or “additive free” food won’t help you if you eat 4,000 calories a day. There are no magic pills. more