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. [Read more…]