Real Fat Tuesday @Solsticepublish

Today is Fat Tuesday for Roman Catholics.  It is the day before the start of Lent when traditionally the sugar in the house was used before the fasting period.  These days it’s an excuse to buy super fattening special doughnuts made for the occasion and eat what you want.  So I decided to talk today about something Americans are obsessed with; fat.  It was back probably around 2001 when I was watching Entertainment Tonight with my wife and they showed a poll of several thousand women.  They asked them, “If you could have any star’s body, who’s would you choose?”  At the time the overwhelming first choice was Britney Spears.  As soon as they said that my wife said, “Ha, I bet she’s not happy with her body.”  I was confused and asked why.  She said, “No woman is 100% happy with her body.”  That floored me.  That can’t be true, I thought.  My wife is perfect.  So many women are absolutely beautiful.  How could that be?  Ever since then I have taken a non-scientific poll of female friends and asked them if they were happy with their body.  Nearly every one of them told me they were too big here or too small there or there was too much fat in this area.  I didn’t see what they were talking about.  Then I started listening to my male friends and they were unhappy with their bodies too.  They had the same list of complaints except in different areas.  The biggest difference was that men were usually less inclined to do something about their weight.  Our society condemns anyone overweight.  Women are particularly held to an unfair higher standard, it would seem.  They are expected to look like some size 0 supermodel.  In the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” the main character is ridiculed for being a size 6 which I am told is not very big.  I have always been heavy.  When I was having a health screening for my insurance I was shown a chart stating just how obese I had become.  As bad as I felt about the number, I looked at where I needed to be in order to be “Normal” on their list.  At 6 feet tall I needed to weigh 135 pounds.  When I was starving in college for lack of money I wasn’t even that light.  The old excuse is that “I’m big-boned.”  Well, I do have broad shoulders and a large frame.  I am still way overweight right now but those tables they use to figure your weight do not reflect different body styles.  It’s like saying, “Every vehicle should have a 4 cylinder engine for better gas mileage.”  What about big sedans?  What about SUVs?  What about trucks?  We can see the wisdom in that but are harshly judged by those tables.  I think they are purposely adjusted to make people pay higher health insurance premiums and frighten them into losing weight so they won’t have as many trips to the doctor.  Lighter people in good physical condition tend to lose fewer days of work.  It’s not like I try to make poor choices when I eat but as many of you know, it is hard to eat healthy.  In the morning I am usually in a rush and have a bagel on the go.  Recently I saw that my innocent little bagel had 600 calories in it before I even put cream cheese on.  That’s over a third of my daily allowance of calories in a few bites.  I’ve tried cereal but I am usually hungry an hour or two later.  The bagel seems to stick with me longer.  Since restaurants are the places that display the calorie content, let’s stick with them for lunch.  If I get a Jimmy John’s sub, it’s nearly 1000 calories.  I might as well have gone to McDonald’s where I can buy my grand-daughter a Chicken McNugget Happy Meal with the same number of calories.  I will work on my weight, but in the meantime I won’t look at the calorie content in restaurants.  As I seem to enjoy saying, “Ignorance is bliss.”