I Was Just A Pawn In Your Game of FAT!

The title of this post is taken from an episode of the old Bob Newhart Show.

Newhart, as those old enough to remember will know, played a Chicago psychologist on this program. As psychologists do, he had groups that met weekly to discuss special behavioral problems. In one episode his group consisted of overweight people seeking to confront that particular problem. In an attempt to help one of his patients, a particularly obnoxious fat man played by Cliff Osmond, Bob persuades his secretary Carol, played by Marcia Wallace, to go out on a date with this guy. Osmond's character shows Carol such a cruelly rotten time that the next day she upbraids Newhart with one of my favorite lines in all of TV-dom:

"You USED me, Bob! I was just a pawn in your game of fat!"

Now, I will be the first one to declare that Morgan Spurlock, who made the film Super Size Me  a few years ago, was so full of shit his eyes were brown. Spurlock's thesis was that there is some gigantic corporate conspiracy among companies like McDonald's and KFC to make people fat by selling them fattening food.

Stuff n' nonsense, I say. If I offer you a double cheeseburger with whipped cream, you have the choice of accepting it or not. Nobody FORCES anyone to eat fast food. People who dine at Burger King every day are on their own lookout; if you're dumb enough to live on Whoppers, fries and take-out pizza, that's your problem, not Pizza Hut's. Sensible people eat fast food occasionally, you know, like myself. I eat fast food maybe two or three times a year at most. If I go and stuff myself with Taco Bell burritos every day at lunchtime, my weight is my fault, not Taco Bell's, or the government's, or the Book-of-the-Month Club's or anyone else's. Period.

But there is no getting around one immutable fact: America IS collectively overweight. I've been hearing about it for years, and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully last weekend when I went to the Target store with my sister. No, it wasn't the shock troops of the Adipose Army waddling about the store that made the point; I'm so used to seeing people with beer guts and big butts that I more or less pay no heed anymore. I just don't look at them. If you want to see some particularly grotesque examples, which, by the way, have been making their way around the Internet for quite some time now, just Google "Walmartians." Some person or persons have been going around taking clandestine photos of Wal Mart shoppers and then circulating them on the 'net for laughs. Most have to do with the outlandish clothing you often see on people who shop at Wal Mart, but a great many combine the accoutrements with the sometimes-unbelievable bulk that fills and often overflows them.

 

The American consumer, 2013?

No, my moment of revelation (and my sister's as well) came when she and I were looking for sweats for ourselves. Even here in southern California, winter nights can get chilly, especially when the vaunted Santa Ana condition sets in, which forces dry air from the desert over to the coastal areas. In summer the Santa Ana brings often-record high temperatures. (San Diego's all-time high, 113 F., was reached in 1963, when I was in the fourth grade here. It was so hot our principal gave us a day off from school.) In winter, the Santa Ana brings delightful days, dry, clear and cool, with unlimited visibility. The obverse of that is at night, when temperatures sometimes get down into the 40s. To southern Californians, that's cold. When I stay at my sister's house during the summer, I sleep in
my underwear beneath a sheet. In January I bundle up in sweatshirts and sweatpants and sleep under a quilt.

So we were looking for these accessories, but immediately we encountered a problem: almost everything we looked at was either extra large, double extra-large or even triple extra-large.

I recently returned from overseas, and had been out of the mainstream for a while. "Are people really getting this FAT?" I asked.

"Look around."

Yup. pus-guts and broad beams, every which way, from the women's section to hardware.

Now, I used to have a few extra pounds on me, I'll admit. Spare tire. Love handles. I'm 6' 1" and when I was at my heaviest, about six years back, I weighed in 213. I went to a doctor, who put me on a special diet -- liquid meal substitutes combined with medication to reduce my appetite, and yes, I did drop a few pounds then. A couple of years later I quit drinking liquor, and the change was even more noticeable. (Booze is loaded with calories because it's loaded with sugar.) In about three months I dropped 25 pounds. My weight dropped down to 172, just seven pounds more than I weighed in high school. My sister thought I looked unhealthy. "Eat a damn Snickers!" she urged me.

I prefer Payday bars, so I ate a few of those. Cookies, too. My body, deprived of the sugar in alcohol, had decided it wanted to get it from somewhere else.

Anyway, Carla and I searched high, low and sideways at Target for sweatpants marked "M," my current size, but in vain. Target's clothing section could be renamed The Blimp Barn ("Where The Lardos Land!") Finally I settled for "L," the smallest thing I could find. They're a little baggy on me, but what the hell? I only wear them as pajamas.

Whose fault is all of this? Spurlock's insipid movie was obviously grinding a political axe, displaying the Culture of Victimhood in full flower: "You are all fat because the evil corporations have conspired to make you that way! Government! Regulate McDonald's!"

Horseshit. This has nothing to do with corporate conspiracy and everything to do with one of the most potent forces in the universe: human stupidity. You know, the same spirit I see displayed when I see some cretin riding a bicycle down the street, steering with one hand and blabbering into a cellphone with the other. Anyone who learned to ride a bike as a child knows that when you're steering a bike with only one hand you have no control over it. If that idiot hits a pothole or even a speed-bump, he's going right over the handlebars for a busted head.

And yet, they do it. Take some comfort in the fact that Americans aren't alone in this. The Chinese, for example, are as stupid as we are. I just got back from China last month, and everywhere I looked in that country I saw people not only riding bikes with one hand and yakking with the other, but even motor scooters. It would seem that the tendency to live life as a coma-in-motion is not an exclusively American invention.

Of course what really lies behind all of this is the principle of the route of least resistance. Or as one critic of cell phone jabber in automobiles put it, "People do stupid things because they can." If you empower people to do something insane-but-convenient, they'll do it because it's convenient. Because it's the easiest way. And they won't think much about it until they go over the handlebars. Maybe not even then.

That's why America is a prize-winnning hog at the state fair. Packing yourself a reasonably-healthy lunch to take to work with you is a chore you can avoid by popping down to the corner Arco station for a frozen burrito and a soda. Why bother wasting 20 minutes cooking yourself a couple of scrambled eggs and a piece of toast after your coffee in the morning, and washing them down with some orange juice, when it's easier to pull into McDonald's and order a sausage Egg McMuffin (with potatoes on the side, and maybe a cinnamon roll?) Why, after a long day at work, knock yourself out making dinner for yourself and your two kids when it's easier to pick up the phone and order a Four-Meat pizza from Dominos?

The route of least resistance. It has made the fast-food chains into billionaires, but unlike Spurlock I insist that it's not their fault. They only supply what the public demands. Remember a little thing called the marketplace? Supply-and-demand? Nobody's going to sell something that people don't want. Plenty have tried. Products have failed by the millions because the public didn't want them. I can even cite an example from -- yes! -- the fast-food industry. Years ago KFC, still called Kentucky Fried Chicken at the time, decided to offer ribs. A big advertising campaign started, ("The colonel's got RIBS?") but the company quickly learned that the public wanted chicken from KFC, not ribs, and ribs were discontinued.

The market only offers what people demand. Anything else isn't profitable and doesn't last.

Then there is the separate subject of child obesity. It's an offshoot of the first. Children eat what their parents make available to them, and if they would rather eat pizza and then sit down in front of a screen and play computer games like Mega-Homicide and Splatter Man than go outside and work the calories off playing sports or chasing each other up trees, well, that's their parents' responsibility, not the government's or Wendy's.

And so to breakfast, as Pepys might have said. I don't know what Pepys had for breakfast on Sept. 24, 1662 (although he might let me know were I to check -- he kept one hell of a diary), but it wasn't a Big Mac, and he probably looked at his food and noted what it was before digging in. Diarists notice things. And think about them. We need more of that. Thinking, that is, rather than blaming. Also, Pepys didn't die overweight, and we also need more of that.