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BY CAMILLE BELOLAN TIMES LEADER CORRESPONDENT
Wednesday, January 26, 2000 Page: 1C
We’re all probably tired of reading millennium stories.
Tired of Y2K preparations, Y2K survival, Y2K hype. Tired of everything from
the best athlete to the most despicable dictator.
Are you ready for one more helping? Because I believe the ’00s are the
time for everyone to lose their neurotic focus on dieting.
The situation being what it is on the planet, I say we end the
calorie-counting and concentrate on finding solutions for more pressing
dilemmas.
Consider the disturbing reports of world hunger, civil unrest, terrorist
threats and the deteriorating ozone layer. Surely these matters are more
deserving of our consideration than figuring out how to rid ourselves of a few
surplus pounds.
Economic statistics back up my contention that our obsession with
overweight must cease: Millions of people pay billions of dollars for diet
books, diet foods, diet pills, diet drinks and even diet shrinks every year. A
December New York Times best-selling how-to paperbacks list had three, count
’em three, diet books in the top five: “The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet,”
“Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution” and “The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifespan
Program.”
These billions would be better spent on repairing the infrastructures of
our major cities, hiring more teachers, building a national health care system
and/or initiating space missions that work. At the very least, we could spend
those dollars on seeing that several pints of Ben and Jerry’s and a Sara Lee
New York-style cheesecake are placed in every freezer. (I contend that while
savoring a heaping bowl of high-test ice cream or diving into a hunk of rich
pastry, no one thinks about kicking people out of the hospital before they’re
fully recovered or increasing school class size.)
Where did our mania for mini-sized bodies come from? My theory is that we
are dutifully carrying out an evolutionary mandate rooted in thousands of
years of fat fanaticism. As far back as 400 B.C., Greek philosophers had to
quell their contemporaries’ penchant for hedonism. “Moderation in all
things,” one of those wise men is purported to have said.
I would have thought that back then, they had more serious problems to
tackle than over-indulgence. Like how to purify drinking water after the whole
family had bathed in it, or how to heal the mammoth water blisters they must
have developed after walking on bumpy cobblestone streets while wearing
sandals.
Our penchant for figure molding might actually be primordial, extending all
the way to the very bottom of the food chain. A recent Discovery Channel
program focused on research that says even in the insect and animal kingdoms,
both sexes have always preferred mates with “symmetrical forms.” In other
words, if a chubby ant wants to mate with another ant, he or she had better
focus on eating Nutrasweet particles. Hold the sugar droppings.
Giving this distressing information its philosophical due, one might well
conclude that even the lowly ant’s one pleasure in life – eating what others
leave behind – must be abandoned if indeed the creature would expect to
attract a willing partner.
But back to the world of humans: Consider the Clinton-Lewinsky brouhaha.
News reports have focused not on the fact that the leader of the free world
may have fooled around with another government employee while on the job, but
rather, on Monica’s girth. She’s been called the “portly pepperpot” by at
least one high-circulation tabloid. That same tab reported that during a
recent dinner out, Monica ate “crab cakes, salmon … and a rich chocolate
Bundt cake served with vanilla ice cream.”
Even the achievements of Oprah Winfrey have been overshadowed by reports of
her yo-yo dieting. News hounds keep us posted, not on her acts of kindness,
but on her weight. Today she’s a size 10. Later we learn she’s ballooned to
200-plus pounds.
What about her habit of helping struggling authors, actors and inventors
become famous by interviewing them on her talk show? Or her book club’s
mission to promote worthwhile reading? Rarely does the public hear of these
projects. Do these pursuits not count more than her daily scale readings?
The corpulent Luciano Pavarotti has brought millions of opera lovers songs
of celestial beauty, yet his mind settles on dieting, even as he gains
admirers for his recently acquired hobby of painting: “I pass whole days
painting. I don’t feel tired, hungry, tense. I forget to eat. I’ve heard of
the grapefruit diet, water diet, liquid diet, carbohydrate diet. Paintbrush
diet? This is a first,” he quipped recently.
Let’s not live obsessing about a few extra pounds, or the fact that the
50-something Suzanne Somers still has abs flatter than a pancake.
Let the Year 2000 be the one that will be remembered for guilt-free eating
and a workable plan for healing the world’s woes.
Camille Belolan of Nescopeck writes feature stories about food for The Times
Leader.