I am embarrassed to live here...

Okay, the national news reports on the potential for war between developing nation's food shortages, and still North America fights obesity. Or does it?

About a week ago I learned that our blessed 'Happiest Place on Earth' (Disneyland) has shut down the family favorite ride 'It's a Small World' because the boats are no longer floating through the ride. Yes, it's not a boat problem, it's a fat society problem. I like how Disneyland termed the changes 'renovations'. It's better than renaming the ride to 'It's a Fat World' I guess.
But wait, there's more. The link below is the latest to piss me off.

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=3a035ae3-7ebe-4338-8537-95878670593a&k=14646

Now our hospitals are having to find ways to reinforce hospital beds, enlarge wheel chairs, and order longer instruments. I know I'm going to take a lot of crap for this next comment, but when you need to re-outfit deliver rooms in EXTRA LARGE, is that called child birth or is that simply calving season?

It's brutal. Then we all wonder why we have a growing childhood obesity epidemic. And it's the heftys that are the first to blame someone or something for their child's lack of physical activity and high risk of heart disease. My advice? Look in the mirror. Take charge of your own life. The best way to teach is by doing. SO START DOING MORE AND BLAMING LESS!

Oh my God, I have to eat my words!

Breaking News!! New weight loss pill on the horizon!

Well, maybe. Check it out here

http://health.msn.com/weight-loss/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100198326

This would be nice to have, but it's at least 10 years away from availability. And in that time, how many people are simply just going to die because of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancers, or any other disease that is caused by obesity (proven fact!)

I mean really, if a legitimate obesity pill came on the market, even though I would most likely be out of a job (Starbucks is hiring and I could walk to work, oops, that's exercise) I would still be excited for it. It would mean that I too could join the throngs of North Americans and line up for the BUFFET ROYALE! I'd be eating steak, burgers, and cheesecake every day. Hmmm, no, come to think of it, I wouldn't eat like that, because we'd (Americans) be consuming so much that food prices would be so high that I wouldn't be able to eat like that on my Starbuck's wage.

So at the end of the day, I guess it's just a nice thought. Or a useless thought.

I've decided most obesity research is completely useless.

When you read in a headline that some researchers in 'Broomstik' Finland found that more fat can be burned while sitting on the couch than while working out, I can't help but roll my eyes.

But that's because I know better, and I guess most other people don't. I studied this stuff for 7 years in university, and yes, you will burn a higher percentage of "fat" calories while on the couch than working up a sweat. A higher percentage.

Your body burns calories (and it doesn't matter where they come from in your body) in a variety of different ways. Yes, it even burns calories while sitting your caboose on the couch. But when you work up a sweat, it's not only important to realize how many calories are burned during that session, but how many total calories are going to be burned because of that session for up to 8 hours afterwards. The difference in the 2 numbers is staggering.

But getting back to findings that some researchers postings, a lot of it is just posted to sell news stories. Which is really too bad, because it means that someone out there is making money off other people's overweight issues, without helping them. And I guess that's why fad diets and new weight loss magic foods and diet pills make people money. They don't do what they claim to do, and when you go back to the health food store to get a refund, they sell you on the promise of something better. It's almost criminal. Or it should be.

More Men vs Women stuff

I read today that if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, there is far more meat and frozen pizzas in the boys fridges, and gardens aplenty tended by the girls. While I sat and pondered how much money this 14 000 person telephone poll cost us, I came up with 2 of my own ponderances to this article (http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/19/diet.sexes.ap/index.html).

Outlandish finding #1.

Does it stretch as far back as our ancestral australopithecus? Maybe we (men) have this deep innate lust for the blood of the conquered, and while we were out pillaging other cave clans and hunting mammoths with our finger nails, the women were home eating carrots.

Outlandish finding #2.

Maybe we men eat the crap we do instead of choosing healthy substitutes because of widely abused socio-generalizations.

• Men work all day, no time to buy groceries and cook! (I'm guilty of this one!). Are we too tired to eat too?
• Men don't know how to turn on the oven. Duhhhh, it's one knob.
• Aunt Jemima was a female, and so was Betty Crocker and Mrs. Beaver Cleaver...all household domestic icons. All this proves is that men don't have to make pancakes and cake frosting, or wipe Beaver's snotty nose, because the women already did it, all before breakfast!
• Men are only good at "blue" jobs, and women at "pink" jobs. Why then did 'metro-sexual' men start modeling (clearly pink) and Danica Patrick start woopin boys' asses around the race track (clearly blue)??

Okay, I might have gone over the edge this time and not backed up my boys enough in this one. But I do feel very strongly that if you (as an individual) don't take responsibility for your life, no one else is going to. The days of Mrs. Cleaver for a wife are over, your wife now heads up a multi-national company, not the bathroom and the kitchen.

And I also have to state the obvious truth in the other corner. Girls...20 somethings? You better start learning to cook and clean just as fast as you are learning how to climb your way up the corporate ladder, because mommy and daddy don't want you living at home until your 35. Or you'll have to learn how to enjoy rare steak and frozen pizza, 'cause guess who's going to be cookin' for you?

Balance - For the 10 000th time!

I don't quite understand why fad diets are still making a killing on the obese market. Maybe it's because they are preying on an already vulnerable demographic. I thought the days of the South Beach diet, Atkins, or Body for Life were over, but apparently not.

So you want to lose weight eh? Well, let me say that you didn't gain weight over night, and you won't lose it over night either. And here is another bubble burster. It won't be as easy as eating a chocolate cake either. But then again, nothing worthwhile in life is ever easy.

Everybody is always looking for a quicker and easier method, that still allows them to keep consuming the same amount of food. YOU NEED TO MAKE A LIFESTYLE CHANGE. Avoid the buffet, enjoy a fresh salad, celebrate a job promotion with a trip to the lake, not a steak dinner. Choose a simpler way of living...start by reducing your consumer tendencies.

With regards to nutrition, your body NEEDS nutrients from the 3 major macro-nutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) to stay healthy and at a proper bodyweight. If you cut out fat from your diet, your body will just take the calories from the other food you eat and will turn them into stored calories, into fat. So there is no point in cutting out any macro-nutrient. Doing so also sends a stimulus to your brain that you are being starved of one nutrient, and your body's reaction is to store any calories from this kind of macro-nutrient the next time your body consumes it. Are you going to be able to cut out every carb for the rest of your life?

Just take a minute and think critically about the next weight loss diet that is dangled in front of your eyes. Don't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon, because that bandwagon is ultimately trying to make money off of you. Very few websites are written to actually help you for the sake of you. Just be careful with your body, treat it right, you only have one. Make it last.

The source of my dismay?
http://health.yahoo.com/weightloss-overview/the-carb-lover-s-survival-guide/mens-health--6185.html

My response to this junk?
http://www.conquer-your-body.com

Skinny Songs?

Yup, thats what I just heard being discussed on the radio. Need a good laugh? Check out the link below.

http://www.skinnysongs.com/

This just goes the extra mile in proving that people really will buy anything to get the edge on weight loss. It's a skinny song CD because each tacky song has lyrics that talk about "skinny jeans", or "move it to lose it" or "incredible shrinking woman". Now I don't know about you, but I don't know if I'd want to be known by friends and family as the "incredible shrinking anything" (the implication is I was really fat) Does this CD have some sort of powerful hypnotic message in it if you play it backwards? Is there a psychology to this that if you play songs with the words "skinny" and "thin" in the titles, you lose more weight?

If so, why not listen to a songs by real artists such as Lo Rider's "She's so skinny" or Josh Ritter's "Thin Blue Flame". (I don't know either song but it tells you just how ridiculous this whole concept is)

Aside from having to hide this CD from the prying eyes of your friends and the general humor loving public, I don't think that listening to these CDs can possibly be more enjoyable than downloading some really great songs from iTunes to workout with. Find ten of your favorite upbeat songs, download them for $0.99 cents apiece and save yourself the additional $4.99 plus the cost of shipping of this CD ($14.99 is what this stupid CD sells for. Get real!)

I find it quite interesting that some of our bulgy neighbors up and down our streets will try anything to lose weight by purchasing this skinny song CD. This CD is making someone's pockets really fat, lined with people's wasted money. If a website for Skinny Songs exists, people are obviously buying it. Are there no other good ways to spend your money? Maybe you just have too much money?

Or maybe, we all sit on a continuum of laziness. I do know though, that the answer for each and every one of us is physical activity and proper diet. But I guess my answer to "death by fat" isn't sexy enough.

Apparently obesity is a good thing

Americans, they kill me. A study originating in the eastern states recently reported that morbidly obese individuals seem to have a bizarre knack for holding onto dear life following hospital surgeries, in particular, the time spent on a ventilator.

Please bare with me while I unravel this crap. Have we as a society now resorted to finding the benefits of obesity? I didn't think there were any. This article sounds like the American doctors are giving up, throwing their hands up in the air and coming dangerously close to using the ol' saying, "if you can't beat em', join em'!"

Why do the obese seam to survive longer? Who cares, because being morbidly obese (and using that 'morbid' term) implies a fairly real restriction on life, I termed it 'death.'

The only smart thing written in this article came from an Alberta (that's a province in Canada) doctor who states that obesity doesn't mean you'll be better off in the long run. The article goes on to say that obese patients spend about 2 days longer in the ICU recovering than non-obese patients. So in an already 'taxed to the nutz' health care system, not only are the obese more at risk of developing heart disease, asthma, breast cancer, gastro-intestinal cancers, diabetes and strokes and costing the health system billions of dollars annually in treatments, but now taxpayers end up having to pay for them to recover an extra 2 days in the most expensive ward of the hospital? Wow. I guess maybe I didn't read the article properly. Maybe I was supposed to think this was great news in the fight against obesity.

Look on a larger scale. Globally, we have a shortage on basic grains. That's wheat and barley and other nice grains. The price of your favorite white Wonder Bread garbage (ever wonder why Wonder Bread doesn't spoil?) is going up. Every pizza joint, burger bar, bakery, grocery store and super market are going to have to raise prices. Oh, maybe there's even a bigger problem. While North American's gorge themselves on hot-wings and pizza at Buffet World, the rest of the less-consuming world is starving (The starving to death kind of starving.)

All of this is going on amidst 'supersize' advertising. Now I am feeling very confused. The United States is heading for a recession, food prices are going up, costs of disease treatment and hospital treatments are therefore on the rise, and people are still sitting in their cars in the McD's drive-through supersizing their orders for an extra dollar? That makes for a recession that's hard to swallow.

Or maybe I'm the only crazy one that finds this alarming. What do I know.

The source of my rage...
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=50fff290-e814-4580-93a9-cc5722ac0af6