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The Overweight Phenomena

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Published: 10Sep2006
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It is almost beyond common sense – beyond reasoning. No one in their right mind would make a conscious decision to want to be overweight or obese. There are no real benefits to be so. Being overweight or obese carries with it so many impractical implications...

Obesity restricts your general movement, the range of clothes you can wear, it makes you feel lethargic - sometimes even lazy, and it can certainly encourage you to eat the wrong foods. Comparatively, many overweight people don’t believe they look as good as they could do and some even develop a dislike or even a hate for their own body. Obesity certainly doesn’t make you feel as good as you could feel, and some say it even dampens your sex life. But more importantly it increases your risk of ill health – and of that there is no doubt. It is even believed to reduce your life span. There is an abundance of medical evidence to prove this is so, and the effects of obesity is now so bad that some believe that many of our children of today may be the first generation not to outlive their parents. The truth is hard but simple - being overweight and obese encumbers our lives in so many ways…So why do we allow this to happen, why do we do this to ourselves?

So we now sit in the midst of an obesity epidemic and in reality, no one really wants to be or has chosen to be overweight or obese. And this is despite over 200 million website pages of diet plans, diet pills and diet potions. And then there’s the government advice, the medical advice, the advice of nutritionists and untold diet companies - all unusually eager to take your custom. So what isn’t working? We only have to take in the moment and pause…look around us to see that something is obviously very very wrong. And do the government want it to be so? I think not, as obesity costs our nation billions of dollars a year. It is perhaps more the case that they are not really sure of how to tackle this self inflicted epidemic, which is second only to smoking in the stakes of measurable loss of life.

So why? Why do we knowingly inflict this self induced ‘illness’ upon ourselves? Incredibly, despite the fact we know which foods we should eat, we know which foods are good for us and we know which are the ‘badies’. But despite all this, we still eat too much and too much of the wrong stuff. We still self inflict the misery of obesity upon ourselves.

Here’s food for thought…If a close friend appeared to be alarmed and serious in telling you that the food you were just about to eat, contained the deadly poison arsenic in it, your natural reaction would be to stop ‘dead in your tracks’ or at the least hesitate to confirm. Are they fooling around? Do they mean it? And that is our dilemma in a nut shell. We do not experience an immediate or real threat to our lives when we are eating what is deemed to be food that is ‘bad’ for us. Some processed foods, most fast foods and all junk foods. We are accustomed to eating it and our ‘self image’ accepts it and therefore there is no threat to our instinctive survival mechanisms. Our primeval instinct to survive does not ‘see’ eating as a threat to life itself. We are biological eating ‘machines’. And so if our ‘self image’ accepts it – we do.

Is there an option to do nothing as an individual? Can we afford to wait for the miracle ‘diet drug’ to stem our appetite? Only you can decide. But would you want to be on ‘diet drugs’ for the rest of your life – day in day out drug dependant just for the sake of…eating? I think most would not and it almost sounds ludicrous to even consider the option. There is another way…and that is to go back to basics.

We have existed on this planet as Homo sapiens for well over 2,000,000 years and for 99.5 percent of the time we survived well as the ‘hunter/gather’, and proudly became head of the food chain. No, I am not suggesting in any shape or form that we must go back to living a ‘cave man’ life style, (although it would probably be healthier!), but I am suggesting we must learn from our genetic inheritance. It is suggested that 99% of our nutritional genes have remained unchanged over that humongous period of time, and yet our diet in the last 50 years has changed beyond all recognition. Totally.

Who are we, apart from just mere mortals to ever think we can dictate to ‘Mother Nature’ in providing today’s diet, when the human body has changed and mutated over million years of evolution to accept what is now thought to be a much narrower range of ‘acceptable foods’. Our body is doing and saying what it has always done over hundreds and thousands of generations before us, and yet we choose not to listen. We choose to ignore the signs and believe “I’ll be alright”. Our ancestors left us a heritage of which we should be proud – but sadly we are failing to leave anything like as comparable.

For now, obesity still remains a matter of choice…but choice means a decision.

But will you make yours?

My best regards,

Jeff Garcia

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