SMWI*: It’s simple. More in than out.

You read.  Articles.  Books. Magazines. Posts.

Much of it blows in one ear and out the other.

Not this one.  This article is from The Monthly and is titled Fat City.  It has stuck with me since last weekend.  It’s long but captivating. Seared in long term memory.

Karen Hitchcock is an Australian author and medical doctor.

A few excerpts:

• Barring the gravely ill and a couple of men, everyone I know wants to lose weight.
• As a doctor, I no longer know what to do about the obese.
• people quit smoking, cut down on their drinking and sometimes lose weight. But usually counselling people to lose weight is hopeless.
• and obesity seems simple: more in than out
• love reading articles with titles like ‘How I Lost 25 Kilos’, even though the answer is always the same: I ate less.
• Who wants to eat less – of anything – when food is so good and plentiful?
• It’s hard to say no to something that is right in our faces, promising a bit of easy pleasure.
• It is especially hard to say no when the consequences of overeating come about in such a distant, gradual and mysterious way.
• I find it difficult to believe that an extra scoop of ice-cream will end up as fat somewhere on my body
• If you make a fat person thin, you are sentencing them to a lifetime of hunger.
• In current medical research obesity is often conceptualised as an unavoidable disease. It’s your genes, your metabolism, the chemicals in your environment, what your mother ate when she was pregnant, whether she fed you at her breast. It is everything but what you choose to put in your mouth.
• “‘The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.’ He punches his thigh.”
• Prescribe exercise? Walk for an hour at an average pace and you’ll only burn off the equivalent of one slice of bread.
• Corporations make it easier for us to eat than to abstain. They loudly promote and supply cheap, taste-intense, non-sating food that is bad for our bodies. They know us better than medicine does.
• Forget obesity as a disease; it’s a ruse. For whatever reason, the majority of the population can no longer say I have had enough.
• If you come to me, your doctor, and you ask me to make you thin, for now I will have to cut you or drug you, as these are the only weapons I have to ward off the sirens.

• SMWI*: Saturday Morning Workout Inspiration
• Credits: Image – The Wheeler Centre. Article and image: The Monthly