Historical September–October 2000 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Grab a plate of cookies and your favorite beer. I’ve got an important issue to discuss: diets and weight-loss! Is there any topic that takes more column-inches, more minutes of Infomercials than shedding those unwanted pounds? Ok, aside from the President’s indiscretions, is there any topic that takes more column-inches, • more minutes of Infomercials than shedding those unwanted pounds? And it will get worse.
In a few months we won’t have William Jefferson Clinton to kick around any more.
He and his wife will simply move to New York and be off the radar screen for- – ever.
I doubt if we’ll hear a peep out of either of them. (And if you believe that, please contact me immediately because I have a great deal for you on some land in Florida.) As a culture, we are obsessed with thin. Thin is in, fat is nat (a little poetic license, thank you). Oddly, more and more of us are overweight, yet more and more of us want to be slender and spend time on weight-reducing aids and exercise fads. Gosh, come to think of it, maybe the two are related.
The Surgeon General’s office just announced that 84% of the adult population is overweight and 31% are morbidly overweight.
Now those figures seem high, and granted, there is a problem, but still, you have to factor in their criteria.
As defined by el Surgeono Generalissimo, overweight means that you can’t comfortably sit in a Ford Escort while holding two inflated beach balls or Richard Simmons. (Why you would want to do either is beyond me but, hey, I’m not el Generalissimo, I was only in the Army Reserves.) Morbidly overweight means that if you go to the beach, people will pay you not to take off your shirt, regardless of gender. Theirs or yours.
The chunky problem is getting worse each year. I’m convinced that one way to make a fortune is to produce a clothing line that is intentionally mislabeled, i.e. marked small.
A shirt that is extralarge would say LARGE, a size 11 dress would be labeled SIZE 9, and pants with a 38 waistline would say 34. Regardless of color or cost, people would be buying those suckers left and right!
There are some rather complicated theories about why folks are packing on the pounds. Hypotheses range from the decreasing ozone layer in the sky causing calories to burn more slowly to high frequency sounds from cell-phones which subliminally cause the person talking to feel hunger to global warming which increases ice cream sales to the MetroLink being above ground at intersections to sedentary life styles caused by cable television.
Some think that run-on sentences contribute, too, to people eating more because they have difficulty discerning the author’s meaning as sentences go and on and on and on, but, personally, I’ve never subscribed to that theory and believe, in fact, that longer sentences are better sentences although, I’m the first to admit. not everyone agrees with me but that’s ok because agreement, or at least consensus, has never been high on my list, just like I’ve never been fond of short sentences even though they might contribute to weight-loss. Personally, while all these scenarios for possible causes of EL CHUNKERINO resonate deeply with me — I’ve never understood how a microwave cooks my turkey dogs or caramel-covered popcorn, much less how all those tiny people get inside the television set — I think the major culprit is sititis (sit-I-tus); that’s Latin for “remote channel-changer.” I mean, how attractive can running in the sunrise be when the alternative is 300 channels of mishmash? Exercise or walking the ferret simply can’t compete with CNN’s talking heads, the exciting forecasts on the Weather Channel, or watching games that took place more than a decade ago on ESPN Classic. Bottom-line, it’s pretty simple: a net calorie gain means weight goes up while a net-calorie loss means that weight goes down. Of course, that formula gets very fuzzy (fuzzy as in arcane, not fuzzy as in fuzzymath) when one considers the actual calories in some of the things we love to eat.
It should be simple to regulate calories and lose weight but n000000. Even normal stuff is laden with more calories than you can shake a Nordic Track at! Here’s a simple table, copied from The Economist, that shows how much exercise is required to negate the calories in everyday, commonplace food.
With these sorts of hidden calories, you can see why the average Joe and Josephine have so much trouble keeping the waistline in check. Or in plaid for that matter. Personally, being a chunkerino is a topic without much significance to me. I’ve been fortunate to stay around the same weight for most of my life. That means that I can eat just about whatever I want and stay the same weight.
The proof is in the pudding.
I weigh less now than I did in high school. (Of course, an alternative theory would be that I was a porker, even in high school.
I guess it’s more accurate to say that the proof is in the pudding, cake, and chocolate-chip cookies) Oh, I’ve tried all the diet fads. For a while I subsisted on Slim Fast.
I have no doubt that this is a successful eating regime, but talk about boring!
It makes Regis look exciting.
After a week of Slim Fasts, Ritz crackers and carrots were a delicacy.
I tried the Weight Watchers diet too, but the portions were so small that I found myself eating two, three servings at once. Amazingly, that wasn’t successful for me either.
A friend told me about the garlic diet — you eat raw garlic before and after each meal — which is probably my next venture. (You may or may not lose weight, but no one will get close enough to you to know.) My greatest success has been with, get your pens and pencils ready, the bagel diet.
I eat a bagel with each meal, figuring that I fill up a bit on bagels, a relatively non-caloric food.
I eat less baloney, cookies, frozen concretes, bacon-melts, lobster au Heineken, chocolate cheese cake, and corn dogs. Granted, bagels don’t go particularly well with a frozen concrete or corn dog, but that’s the price I pay for being svelte. No one ever said that-being glamorous was easy.
Original photograph caption
Original comic food-and-exercise table, part of In Your Ear satire.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September–October 2000.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2000_09.pdf, printed page(s) 12; PDF page(s) 12.
