on chunkiness
The whole obesity thing reeks of pseudo-science and media sensationalism. I haven't seen one thing yet that would lead me to believe that BMI isn't a useless, made-up number. Yet people seem to follow along, not questioning what it actually means when somebody says "60% of people are obese!" or something equivalent statistic and lays out the catastrophic consequences of that statement. You think you know what it means, but when you start to look at it critically, it kind of falls apart.
So I was glad today when Neil Gaiman pointed out an article that voices my disdain for the anti-fat jihad. I'd like to pick a quote and paste it, but there are a lot of good ones. I can't decide. It makes more sense than most of the health segment news reports. Go read. Enjoy.
I've been a little on the chunky side since puberty. I'd prefer not to be, but I also don't really care enough to do much about it. I kind of instinctively know that I'll never be able to keep to an "ideal" BMI of 25 or whatever. The only time (since puberty) I've come closest was when I has my near-nervous breakdown in college and pretty much stopped eating. That wasn't terribly healthy. I am, however, concerned about health consequences. I have diabetic grandparents on both sides of the tree and my mother is diabetic as well. I'm also considering the diet and excercise thing more nowadays.
Diet I'm less concerned about. For one thing, I like food. I don't see anything wrong with treating myself occasionally. It's the habitual stuff I'm more concerned about. My regular diet isn't really that bad, with a couple of exceptions I'm working on dealing with: snacking and drinking pop at work, most notably. Free pop is tempting. But 3-5 cans of Coke a day can't be good. So I've been cutting that back to one at most.
Work's kind of a problem. I have a sedantary job and a sedantary lifestyle. If anything, I need to get out and do more. At the end of the summer I biked to work at least twice a week, I felt better than I had since highschool at least. Then I bought a car. Biking is harder than driving. Still, there's some incentive there. And people have stopped caring whether I'm late for work again. So that's doable. I just wish we still had the showers here.