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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: We are FAT (and secrets for losing weight)
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"About one in three American adults is considered to be obese. And childhood obesity is at an all-time high."
Good. God.
You know, I used to be one of those cynical, "Hey, it's your own damned fault" kinda guys. But the verdict is in - we need some external (i.e. government) force to intervene at this point. Mandated nutritional information is nice, but we all *knew* that the Big Mac extra value meal was *bad* for us. Maybe we did't know just *how* bad, but let's not kid ourselves. Education is good, too, but slow to disseminate.
I'm not sure in what form, or at what level, that intervention should take. Pressure food manufacturers and restaurant chains like McDonalds? Too little effect, in my opinion - there's just too much money involved. Outlaw junk food? Seems a gross violation of our constitutional right to stuff our own face, but I don't see much of an alternative if we want to fix this problem. We're clearly not capable of being left to our own devices on the matter. Not that we could outlaw it if we wanted to.
As for myself, one of my New Year's resolutions this year was to drop about 15 pounds. It's August, and I'm down 13 pounds, though I think I'm going to drop another 7. You know what my big secret is?
Stop. Eating. Crap. Oh, and excercise once in a while.
Pretty tricky, eh? My *main* dietary change was switching from regular to diet soda. That alone saved me approximately 400 calories a day in empty sugar. That's the caloric equivalent of about a 30 minute jog, by the way.