I was listening to an advertisement the other day. It started out, “If you’re overweight, it’s not your fault.”
Umm. Yes it is. Unless someone is force feeding you cheesecake and fried chicken, it’s your fault.
The ad continued to talk about slow metabolism and genetics and tried to convince the listener that they’re off the hook for being overweight. Of course it did. Heaven forbid that people actually take ownership of their own problems.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret about losing weight. I’ve personally lost 45 pounds. It was about 15 years ago. So, I speak from experience. This isn’t just me making something up. I have a proven technique for shedding excess weight and I’m going to tell you what it is for free.
The secret is, there is no secret.
There’s only one thing you have to do to lose weight. You just have to eat less calories than you burn. That’s it. This is an indisputable fact. As long as you’re consuming less calories than you need to maintain your current body size, you WILL lose weight. You can’t not lose weight.
But the ad preys on most people’s desire to look for an easy fix to any problem. And it plays on the current asinine assumption that everyone is a victim of something, all the time.
What a load of crap.
Even if you do have a slow metabolism or are genetically predisposed to gain weight, you’re still responsible for what, and how much, you put in your body.
Ask yourself this, why are there fat poor people?
I read an article the other day that says that, statistically, more poor people are fat than not-poor people. It further went on to say that, statistically, more poor people are either black or Hispanic instead of white. The conclusion they drew is that fat poor people are caused by racism.
Apparently, as the theory goes, white store owners aren’t putting Krogers and Safeways in primarily black and Hispanic neighborhoods. And that means that poor people living in those neighborhoods don’t have easy access to healthy food choices.
Here’s another little secret. If the only goal is to lose weight, it doesn’t matter what you eat. You can live off a diet of cheeseburgers and full sugar Coke if you want to. To lose weight, it’s not what you eat that’s important, it’s how much you eat.
When I lost my weight, I did it by eating a McDonald’s salad for lunch every single day. So don’t tell me that the problem is a lack of healthy food choices. Like I said, you can eat cheeseburgers for every meal and, as long as you’re not eating too many cheeseburgers, your weight won’t be an issue.
The problem isn’t that poor people are eating fast food. The problem is that they’re eating too much fast food.
Losing weight is free. It’s gaining weight that costs money.
The thing about fast food is that, while it may be convenient, it’s also fairly expensive. So, these overweight poor people have to be spending a ton of money to eat enough fast food to cause that kind of obesity.
And where are they getting the money to buy all those cheeseburgers? That’s right. Government handouts.
The reason that there are so many fat poor people isn’t because of racism and it isn’t because they don’t have healthy food choices. The problem is that their Welfare checks are too high.
Think about it. If they received less money from Welfare, they’d have less money to spend on food. And, if they had less money to spend on food, they wouldn’t be able to afford to overeat. So, we lower the size of their Welfare payments and, before you know it, no more fat poor people.
OK. OK. I know someone is going to say that these people aren’t just overweight. And that poor often suffer from other medical issues like diabetes, coronary heart disease, osteoarthritis and high blood pressure.
Right. And all of those issues can be caused by obesity. Which we can solve by giving them less benefits, not more.
If we get to a point where we have a lot of not-overweight poor people who are suffering from scurvy or rickets, or clogged arteries, then we can start looking at the availability of healthy food options. But until that happens, making food even more convenient is only going to make people fatter.
Government assistance programs should be just that, assistance. Programs should be designed to help someone become independent enough so that they no longer need assistance. Getting people off Welfare should be Welfare’s primary goal.
While we’re talking about Government Assistance, let’s stop calling it that. That’s giving the government way too much credit. The public is picking up the tab so let’s call it what it is…Public Assistance. And the Public Assistance program is broken. Because it’s designed to create more fat poor people who have more medical problems which causes them to stay on Public Assistance forever.
So, let’s fix that.
I have a rule I follow. If I see someone standing at the corner holding a sign saying they’re hungry and need money for food, and they’re obviously a hundred pounds overweight, I never give them my spare change.
Public Assistance should be the same way. There should be no fat people living on Welfare. Nor should anyone receiving my tax dollars be using it to buy cigarettes, alcohol or drugs (which is currently allowed in some states). If someone has enough money for that kind of stuff, then we’re giving them too much money. Period.
I propose that benefits be reduced for anyone who is overweight or uses drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. Not only will we help reduce the cost of the Public Assistance programs, we’ll also help people become healthier, which will save us even more money in the long run.
This isn’t a new concept. People with unhealthy habits such as drug use and smoking are already charged more for life insurance because of the higher risk associated with their actions. What I’m proposing is the same thing, only backwards.
I can tell that some of you aren’t going to be a fan of reducing benefits for whatever reason. So, how about this: The benefits can stay the same. But we’ll expect recipients of Public Assistance to eat better and healthier. Which will actually cost them less money than eating all the crap they do now.
But there’s another benefit. By forcing them to have better habits, not only will people on Public Assistance live longer and have less health problems, they can take the money they won’t be spending on too much food and buy their own damn cell phones.
