JUL 1 - 15, 2004

VOL. 2 ISSUE 13

JULY 8, 2004 – Today CBS News ran a story (What Does Sugar-Free Do To You? ) telling how rats fed artificial sweeteners ended up consuming 3 times as many calories as rats just fed straight sugar.

This is just the latest in a dizzying slew of article based on this or that study that have recently blamed high-fructose corn syrup, carbohydrates, TV (by affecting hormone levels,) etc., etc. for leading to our nation’s obesity problem.

And the fact is:  200 million of us are now very overweight, 100 million obese, 25 million morbidly obese.  When Osama got 3,000, we went to all out war.  But with 25 million in immediate, clear, and present danger, our nation still is not ready to take action.

Well we at M/I care too much about our nation to not lead the charge.  As we at The Moderate Independent have been saying for well over a year now, it is enough.  There is no question what the problem is.  No studies are needed.  We know why the people of our nation have grown so big, we know what the causes are and what the solutions are.  And so we are going to lay it all out for you here.

This is worse than a war – this is an attempt to stop a genocide.  Please, for the sake of your nation – and yourself – read, and then act.

Here are ten simple rules that deal with the problem in its entirety and, if followed, will solve the nation’s obesity problem.

1)  Never eat an artificial sweetener.

No one has ever become thin by drinking diet Coke.  In  fact, it is virtually always the opposite.  The reality is you can not and do not fool your body.  What you do is get your body thinking it is about to receive lots of easily useable calories from something sweet, only to have it get upset that those calories never came.  Make no mistake, your body will get you to consume those calories later.

Here is our question to you?  What the heck would happen if what you ate or drank wasn’t so sweet?

Nothing.  It takes about a week or two for your body to get used to drinking plain water instead of soda, juice, or a “diet” beverage.  You won’t miss it.  And cake doesn’t need to be some darned sweet either.  Just make it with less sugar.  Never, ever, use any artificial sweetener again for any reason.

2)  Get some damned exercise.

There is no mystery to this.  Eating or not eating will not do the trick.  Even if you ended up thin, you’d still be unhealthy as heck.  Yes, there was a story online yesterday saying overweight but in shape people are healthier than thin but inactive people, and how removing fat with liposuction didn’t improve people’s health at all.  Where have you heard this before?  That’s right, here at M/I.

Fat is not the concern.  It’s being out of shape, inactive, and not eating healthily, and fat is just a symptom of that.  The media loves to kiss your but and give you excuse after excuse for your condition, one day a fat gene, the next blame this or that food.  I don’t care what size you are or aren’t, if you don’t get lots of activity regularly, you are killing yourself early and making yourself suffer horribly until then.

3)  Stop watching TV.

TV causes obesity.  You want to lose 30 pounds, just stop watching TV.  TV makes you fat and inactive.  You have no control over it.  It is not just something for entertainment, it is a highly addictive drug.  Yes, this is not a joke.  TV is a highly addictive drug that makes you fat, lazy, ill-informed, and which creates an actual addiction leaving you needing to watch more and more.  It creates an illusion of mental and physical stimulation, all the while acting as a hypnotic which freezes you in inactivity like a zombie.

To witness this actual physical effect of TV, go to a gym and watch a person on their workout cycle.  When they are working on a machine that doesn’t face any TV, they move quickly through their exercises, working very actively.  But when they get onto a machine that faces a TV, the time they take between sets and per machine more than doubles and this person who had just been very active and focused on their workout repeatedly finds themselves sitting inactively and open-mouthed staring at the box on the wall.  The TV physically draws their attention with it’s glow and flashing lights and then physically hypnotizes them into zombie-like inactivity.  Breaking free from TV’s hold to move onto the next task if a difficult thing, even for these active people.

And remember, just 20 years ago TV was just 13 channels (realistically about 7,) there were no remote controls, not VCR’s or DVD’s, no cable TV, no Internet.  No one sat watching like we do now.  And, of course, the rise in obesity directly parallels these inventions.

Now notice something very important:  nothing so far has anything to do with you being defective, genetically deformed, innately fat, a bad person, lazy in and of yourself.  The inescapable reality is that America’s obesity problem is cultural – living in America today makes you fat.  Yet for some reason every article and diet attempting to address the issue deals with individuals or individual habits.  It is absurd.  Living here in this culture makes you fat for the reasons we are listing.  If you lived somewhere else you wouldn’t be fat.

4)  Get some self-respect and stand up to fake food, rip-offs, and bad quality.

There is a new product called Natural Doritos.  It is Doritos but without the hydrogenated oil and other cheap, artificial ingredients.  The result?  You get slightly fewer chips for a slightly higher price, but those chips are made with real corn and cheese (organic even.)

Now this product summarizes in nutshell why Americans are fat, more than anything else.

There are two products, seemingly identical.  The look the same, taste about the same.  With one, you get about 20% more chips for 99 cents, the other you get 20% fewer chips for $1.29.  However, there is another difference.  One is made with absolute crap that fattens you, exposes you to pesticides, and leaves you even hungrier than before you ate it.  The other has no pesticides, contains natural, high-quality ingredients, and your body knows when you are done that you have eaten something.

But Americans are taught to never stand up for themselves, to not care about quality – only the snobby French do that – but only about how big and cheap food is.  We are told we can’t have food without pesticides or artificial ingredients or things will be too expensive.

Well now you see.  If we get rid of the pesticides and artificial ingredients, you get a few less Doritos for a little more money.  You know what would happens when things are this way – you eat slightly less.  In fact, just enough less to get what you need but not be fat.

Stand up to fake cheese, stand up to hydrogenated oils, stand up to “chicken breast” that is not actual cuts of chicken breast, stand up to ground meats like burgers that are just ground noses and fat in disguise.  Demand quality.  Despite the scare tactics corporate profiteers have used to scare you into accepting artificial, low quality crap, making us fear we won’t be able to afford to eat otherwise, this is not reality.  Eating artificial crap leaves you with larger quantities of garbage that does not fool your body but instead leaves it, like the rats in the above study, eating even more in the end to try and get the good stuff it thought it was getting to begin with.

5)  Eat protein-centered meals with fresh fruits and vegetables.

A starch, such as spaghetti, is not useful food.  Pizza is not a main course.  Nor is a fatty hamburger.  Atkins in nonsense and low-fat diets are nonsense.  Don’t worry about carbs or fat, just make sure your meals have some form of lean protein as the main course.  You can then have spaghetti as a side dish or pizza on a special occasion, but neither of these are actual food worthy of a meal, and to feed yourself or your family these things is to attack your and your family’s health like a mugger in a dark ally.

But even eating just lean protein will leave your body craving.  The difference fresh, high-quality vegetables and fresh fruit (no, not fruit-flavored crap) make are enormous.  Why, because they fill you up, provide roughage, fiber?  No, and enough of this crap about needing to be filled up.  You need to get the right stuff, not be full, ever.  Just do it, have a piece of fresh fruit with a lean protein centered meal and a decent vegetable and you will see, your body is satisfied more than twenty cakes ever could fill it up.

6)  Stop letting people overfeed you.

Portions are too damned big, and they are that way just for the sake of extracting more money from you.  You are willing to accept cheap, crappy ingredients, so giving you larger portions of them doesn’t cost that much.  And, by doing so, they can charge a whole bunch more.  For Christ’s sake stand up for yourself.  The way I and my wife do it is to always split one meal when we eat out.  You save money and, more importantly that just eating fewer calories, reset your body’s portion expectation.

Remember, full is a maximum.  If you were going to go climbing a mountain or do something very physically active and not have a chance to get food for a long time while doing it, or if you were in a society or situation where you might only find substantial food every few days, then you should fill your belly.

But most of us are just going back to the car then to some other inactive activity (like TV watching.)  And yet still, we always think we should eat until we are full.  “Are you full yet?” is what we ask.  You are allowed, despite what you have been told, to do something called “thinking.”  Yes, just like when you go to a gas station and decide if you need to fill up or just a few gallons based on what you have planned, you should do the same for yourself.

You feel hungry before you eat.  That doesn’t mean you need to fill up.  Eat some and wait.  Your body will realize you’ve eaten what you are going to for the time and it will go away.  Have some water, it helps finish off an appetite.  Yes, you are allowed to drink water.  Yes it fills you up.  No, you don’t need to be full, you are not climbing Everst.

7)  Stop being such whiny little wimps.

So what you feel some hunger?  And?  It is ok.  It doesn’t kill you.

We have been conditioned to think that if we feel some hunger, that means we must run off and eat.  Bull.  Feeling hungry doesn’t even mean necessarily you need food.  Boredom, inactivity cause this sensation.

Think about sexuality.  Many times during a day you may feel a sexual desire, but you don’t run off and do something about it every time you feel it.  Yet we act as if if we don’t run and stuff our bellies full of something every time we feel the slightest hunger sensation we will die.  It is like the bad parent who gives in every time their child whines.

Again, you are allowed to think.  Have been very active or have you been sitting on your butt in some office.  If there is not just reason for the hunger feeling, realize it is just boredom playing with various want sensations in your body to try and get you to do something that will stimulate it – reality check:  it is unnatural for a body to sit inactively in an office or in front of a TV.  You fend of the sexual impulses, ignore the hunger ones.  Despite what you have been scared into thinking, nothing happens.  You don’t get an ulcer from acid, you don’t go into hypoglycemic shock (unless you are one of the very, very few who truly have a blood sugar condition – something many Americans pretend they have but don’t.)  To placate the aberrant hunger impulse, have a big glass of water (no, not diet coke.)  It calms the stomach.  Then pat yourself on the back for using your brain to realize you didn’t actually need food and, instead, do ten jumping jacks or push ups.

Huh?  What do jumping jacks or push-ups have to do with hunger?

As I just said, the hunger pang had nothing to do with actual need for food.  It was the body whining about your inactivity.  Doing even just this amount of exercise gives the body what it truly was looking for.  This is why, as you will find out, exercise is actually one of the best appetite suppressants.  Try going to the gym someday after work, when you are really hungry – without eating one of the “sports bars” they trick you into needlessly eating or drinking anything besides water.  You will find that your appetite completely disappears.  And, even better, afterwards, when you do eat, you will actually eat less.  Why?  Wouldn’t your body want more food after a workout?  Nope.  Because the only hunger left would be actual hunger, not fake hunger born of boredom.

And it’s not just physical activity that cures hunger.  Even mental activity, like, yes, reading an informative or involving book or playing a game of chess, can serve the same purpose.

8)  Never again let anyone tell you being overweight is genetic, beyond your control, or only something surgery or some drug can cure.

Our ancestors, from who we got our genes, were not obese.  In fact, just 20 years ago here in this very country we weren’t.  We started letting them feed us far too large quantities of low quality food, started sitting on our asses watching far too much TV (and VCR’s, Cable, and the Internet were just invented within the last 20 years, in case you forgot,) started eating absurdly unbalanced diets, such as low-fat diets, started drinking artificially sweetened beverages, and have allowed ourselves to be frightened into believing if we don’t carefully attend to our “blood sugar levels” by feeding ourselves constantly we will drop dead.  This is why we are fat.  Not genes.  Not lack of stomach surgery.  Not lack of drugs.

And even more importantly, as said above, it’s not the fat that’s the problem.  It’s the inactivity and being out of shape.  Staple your stomach all you want, if you don’t get moving nothing will improve, even if your waistline does.

Long article, huh?  Well, this is no joke – there is an epidemic that is giving us all horrible diseases, killing us young, making us feel horrible, and bankrupting our healthcare system, and we need to address this seriously and right now.

Last two rules:

9)  Repeal the 21-year old drinking age and curfews immediately.

What does this have to do with anything?

Inactivity, inactivity, inactivity inbred.  Young people want to and should be out dancing all night or riding their bikes or just being out hanging out with friends.  Instead, they are now required, by law, to do nothing, sit on their butts in someone’s house eating Doritos and watching videos.  And such force inactivity during the formative years sets the pattern for life.  They will not suddenly become inclined to go out a lot or go dancing at age 21.  You know how many calories dancing burns and what good exercise it is.  Even more, you know what the social pressure of “going out” does to people to make them keep themselves in good shape, and how just “being out” talking with friends burns lots of energy in and of itself?

10)  Stop waiting for new research or new articles and realize it is in your control, up to you, and far more of a threat to you and your family than terrorism ever could be.

It takes all of two second for you to realize that is the truth.  200 million of us are very overweight, 100 million obese, 25 million of us “morbidly obese.”  Terrorists don’t even dream of being able to kill 200 million of us through, inflicting us with horrible diseases and early death.  But the above problems have accomplished a horror on a scale no one could ever have imagined.

The good news is it is even easier to fight this war than it is to fight the War on Terror.  We know exactly what to attack.  We know what is responsible.  We know how to fix it.

25 million Americans are at risk of immediate death, 100 million at risk in the very near future, 200 million not so far down the road.  It is time for our nation to do what we did when just 3,000 people were attacked:  mobilize in our own defense.

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