America is fascinating, flabtastic

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA


I have just finished breakfast of one omlette, two pieces of toast, some sort of flat-bread-pattie-thingy and two cups of repulsive coffee. In the process of scoffing this lot, I was fascinated that I had amassed 16 separate pieces of packaging waste.

This is bad - not least because I hate eating anything out of plastic.

And then I looked around the restaurant and saw the mass of flabby humanity tucking into huge plates, piled high with: bacon (3x thickness of Swiss bacon), sausages, grits, eggs, toast, muffins, ketchup, cheese, bagels brimming with cream cheese, sugar-sprinkled waffles the size of truck tyres, pancakes swimming in maple syrup and cubes of roasted potatoes. Some of these good folk were so fat, they got their backsides wedged into their chairs. You could have got two of me sitting side-by-side in one chair - and my arse is not so small.

Some of the men's bellies were so large and round that they had to belt their jeans up under their armpits - any lower and the belt would have been on the downward slope and their trousers would have fallen down. And one woman's flab started just below her ears and gently sloped out and down for several feet before coming back up and in just above the top of her legs, which were clad in a fetching pair of bright pink trackie bottoms.

And after breakfast I wanted to take a stroll, but was warned not to by the friendly receptionist. She told me: [1] There are no sidewalks, [2] the traffic is heavy and dangerous so i should not walk along the pavement (road to you and me) and [3] - don't go into the woods without a dayglow orange baseball cap because it's huntin' season and there will be guys out there blasting away at anything that looks like a deer... Apparently my salt and pepper grey hair is the same colour as the species of deer around here and some of the guys only need a hint of movement in the undergrowth before they unleash several rounds of rifled shotgun slugs into a bush. Holy crap.

So, lots of fatty food and no chance of a spot of light exercise for fear of being run-over or shot. Not healthy. Surely there should be a law against shooting people who are not morbidly obese - or at least a defined season for hunting the overweight. A 'Fat Hunt', of sorts...

This phenomenon - of fatness and the aggressively anti-exercise environment I found myself in, so fascinated me that I looked up the Center for Disease Control website, the US medical authority, to see if they had any pearls of wisdom. But apart from stats and maps of obesity in the country and learned papers on fatness in the US, they failed to mention in plain English that the reason people here are fat is because they eat too much of the wrong foods and don't exercise. The nearest the CDC gets to this is, and I quote:

"Whether you want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, it’s important to understand the connection between the calories your body takes in (through the foods you eat and the beverages you drink) and the calories your body uses (through normal body functions, daily activities, and physical activity)".

Still awake? Normal bodily functions - does this mean we should all consciously remember to go for a dump; set it up as a daily reminder on our mobiles? Daily activities - can you lose more weight watching baseball or American football on TV? We should be told.

I fear for this country - and not just because of its all-pervading, rabid religious extremism and neo-conservatism. Nor because of its interesting foreign policy. Obesity will do this nation in...it is the threat within.