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How the hell did I get on THIS mailing list?

living xl

Goddamn it! I am not fat!

Okay, maybe I’m not as svelte as I was in art school, when I lived on coffee and broken dreams, but I sure as hell don’t be needing no double-wide toilets or extra sturdy waterproof furniture so I can sit down in the shower.

I guess I have to admire the entrepreneurial spirit; this is surely a catalog whose time has come. The headline promises, “unique, innovative products for tall and plus-sized men and women” but I don’t see a whole lot of tall guys up in here.

I think it’s safe to say if you have to turn to a specialist catalog to find an apron of sufficient hugeness to encompass your personal bodymass, you don’t need to be in the kitchen.

Note that the sand chair pictured on the cover is rated to 650 pounds. Heh. That metal tubing might be up to it, but I’m guessing if you flump a third of a ton on an itty-bitty surface area on the sand, your fat ass is going to be sitting flat on the beach, pronto.

Okay, okay. I quit. Apologies to plus-sized minions. Shop online at LivingXL.com

I wonder how many of those high-capacity bicycles they sell?

Comments


Comment from cranky
Time: July 16, 2008, 10:53 am

The Big John might be a nice accessory for Al Bundy’s Mighty Ferguson.


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 16, 2008, 10:59 am

What frightens me is seeing all of those Jabba the Huts riding around in stores on those itty bitty scooters. Ball bearings can only take so much.
Double wide terlits?


Comment from Anonymous
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:38 am

High capacity bicycle seats? What, do they bolt a sofa onto the saddle tube?

Heya Cranky. If you supersize the toilet seat, don’t you by definition (I don’t really want to go there but…) have to supersize the commode and plumbing. Scalability. Did you notice that it meets “regulatory requirements”? They have regulations for supersized toilet seats? What next? Regulation doggy condoms?


Comment from Gabriel
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:48 am

Double wide terlits?

I second. Huh?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:54 am

Meet Big John. Capacity: 1,200 pounds. Or how about an extra long shoehorn for them what don’t bend over so good no more?


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 12:49 pm

Personally, I think that mandatory liposuction for rendering into biodiesel would be a good incentive for some of these people to quit stuffing their gobs so often……

I’d mention Soylent Green, but I think that they are a little high in cholesterol.

(ok, I’m kidding, but only just…..)


Comment from cranky
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:00 pm

I think Al’s Mighty Ferguson could handle anything thrown its way.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:06 pm

Whoa! How did I miss this? Thomas M. Disch — one of my least favorite scifi writers — is dead. Put a bullet in his head on the 4th of July.

Well, well.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:19 pm

You know, I’m not sure how worried we should be about Iran. Iranians are obviously retarded. Did you know Meet the Parents was a cunning Zionist plot to instill sympathy for the Jew? (Pinched from HotAir).

Jesus. Was Ben Stiller’s character even Jewish in that thing?


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:20 pm

Hmm…if I were married to an Al Bundy, giving him his own bathroom would be a priority. Can you imagine having to share one with him? I doubt a match could save you from not only the smell but the armies of drug resistant bacteria.


Comment from pajama momma
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:47 pm

Ok, I’m bigger than average. Size 12 (size L in clothes) An example of how much my in-laws hates me? She got me a nightgown for Christmas one year that was size XXXL.

One hint that, that is not my size? When my head can easily slide through the armhole.

My step-mother-in-law looks at me as I’m opening it and says, “It might be a little big, is it?”

A little big? A LITTLE?

BITCH!


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:51 pm

Pff! I’m bigger’n you, PJ. But I’m still not fat.

My stepmother sends me things for Christmas that…are…indescribably horrible. Things that I wouldn’t wear in a trillionty-zillion years. As she appears to have pretty good taste, I have to assume she’s ragging on me.

My cousin thinks she finds things on sale, can’t resist buying them, and then gets home and thinks, “what the hell? Oh, I know! I’ll send it to Weasel.”


Comment from Jill
Time: July 16, 2008, 1:52 pm

For fuck’s sake…any plot worthy enough to be called ‘cunning’ wouldn’t have had Ben Stiller any where near it.

I think you’re correct in your observation that the inhabitants of Irania are TARDS.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:02 pm

LOL… Jill, you are talking about the morons who claimed that “The 300” was a slanderous declaration of war by the west against Iran………. πŸ™‚


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:03 pm

Holy poo, Thomas M. Disch killed himself? That’s sad. All he was writing recently was poetry, which isn’t my cup of tea, but I held his early Sci-Fi in very high regard. What can I say, I’m a fan of dystopian literature. Hell, I’d take Disch over Haldemann or Heinlein (I can’t get into any of his stuff no matter how much I want to and try) any day of the week.

Classy way to go though, shooting the back of your head off on Independence Day.


Comment from Jill
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:27 pm

Scuba – sometimes I sits and shakes my head, and sometimes I just sits. πŸ™‚


Comment from RHJunior
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:52 pm

Look, it’s easy to laugh at fat people. It’s not so funny when it’s you having to shop four different stores just to find clothes in your size amidst the stuff made for starving Hindus.

I’m fat; I weigh in at 320. And no, I don’t sit down and eat a whole roast boar and a dessert cart at every meal, either. I’m male, I have a so called “big boned” build to begin with, and I come from a (pun intended) large family. I don’t eat much more than the skinny guy next to me, and often a bit less. What’s more, I’m in my late thirties and my metabolism has slowed to a sluglike crawl….I am, like most people in my condition, inclined to fat— and nothing short of a life-long prison-yard-level diet and exercise regimen would get me thin and KEEP me thin. I don’t have time to join the Self Loathing Weight Loss Boot Camp, and even less time to waste turning counting calories at every meal into a new sacrament. I have one religion already, thank you, I don’t need to join the First Church of Kate Moss.
You can scoff that I eat too much or that I don’t get enough exercise, and I won’t argue with you, but like it or not I still need some stinkin’ pants like any other person.

According to the experts, the American populace is, on average, closer to MY build than to yours (you skinny people out there.) Yet I still can’t find clothes to fit, and I have to check whatever furniture I buy for its @#$%@#% weight rating. Most lawn furniture is rated for 100 lbs or less. How many people over the age of twelve do YOU know who weigh less than 100 lbs?

It doesn’t help matters that every year they rate “obesity” downward. According to the experts, someone 170 lbs lighter than me is overweight. (I personally haven’t weighed less than 200 lbs since I was EIGHTEEN– and I was a literal RAIL back then!) According to the charts Micheal Jordan is overweight, and a professional weightlifter is morbidly obese. People half my size are having to buy “x-large” and “2x” clothing because some rat bastard clothing manufacturer decided to save a few tenths of a penny per pair of underwear and scale down the size of their clothes an inch all around.

Maybe when I stop seeing “Obesity epidemic!” on one page and “Anorexia at an all time high!” on the next, I’ll start giving a flying crap through a rolling donut what the experts think of my weight again.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:57 pm

<blinks>


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:11 pm

Jr, I am fat. I weigh in at 318 pounds (at 6′ 4″), and am a member in good standing of lard-***es of America – Colorado Chapter. I wrecked my back in the navy, don’t get nearly enough exercise. When I poke fun at fat people, I am also poking fun (or scathing commentary) at myself. I look around today and see 5X as many oversize people as I did just 10 years ago, and that IS a problem. And I admit, I am part of the problem. When I talk, I know that I am slamming myself as well, and I fully accept that.

I am not going to stop talking about it just because people don’t want to hear it.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:27 pm

Some people have a genetic propensity for immense weight gain, others don’t.

I can lose weight (and I should). Many others – same thing. They can, and they should, but they don’t. Them – myself included – we mock. As we should.

As far as the obesity epidemic, I find it amusing. Another thing to milk governments and international agencies of their money and attention. Go to any country with a good circulation of English magazines. In each such country, there will be articles about how that country has the most obesity, the largest increase in obesity, and a veritable obesity epidemic. They are on top of the obesity pyramid! But every country claims that. Is the pyramid a square?

My weight varies. I am overweight but not obese (yet). I lost a lot of weight, now I’m gaining a lot of it back. Keeping active and portion control are what worked for me. And, interestingly, taking care of my diabetes somehow translates into a better diet and into more activity (maybe because then I’m aware of what I am eating, so I control it) and thus better weight control. There may be a genetic component, but I don’t care. I know what I can change.

I’m staunchly opposed to efforts to legislate healthier diets and whatnot. Leave the state out of this. When we pander to the obese, they have no reason to change. Mock them shamelessly, and thereby help them realize they need to do something.

So, please to be beginning the mocking me now.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:33 pm

OK,

Muslihoon, you are a Yo-Yo.

You dress in last year’s fashions.

Your taste in music is…….

Oh, sorry. Got carried away there. πŸ™‚

Now, who thinks that Heath Ledger will get an Oscar as the Joker?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:44 pm

Actually, to be honest, I think there’s something VERY fucking weird going on with this obesity thing. Many of you are too young to remember it that well, but AMERICANS WERE NOT FAT BEFORE 1985. We weren’t. You go back and look at newsreel footage and old newspapers.

And if you think we ate right and exercised in the ’60s and ’70s, you *definitely* weren’t there. I subsisted largely on junk food growing up…back in the days when they were stuffed full of lovely additives.

I don’t have a theory. But you can’t tell me “eat less, move more” is some kind of cosmic wisdom. Something’s fucked up here.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:47 pm

Could it be stress or something?

It’s obvious to anyone that in the past people ate far less healthy (lard? ghee? parathas and omlette for breakfast every day?) than today, yet they were healthier on average. (A paratha is a type of fried bread; very oily and greasy and unhealthy, was a staple for breakfasts until recently, and is still served during festive breakfasts.)

You’re onto something, Weasel. I’m just not sure what.

1985 was the beginning of President Reagan’s second term. Could it all be an anti-Reagan Soviet plot? “Fatten the Americans so they can’t fight us!”

And 1984 is one year after Big Brother is said to have taken over…is this a plot by Eastasia with whom we have always been at war?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 3:55 pm

Oh, it could be a lot of things. From pretty obvious things like the food pyramid telling us to eat too goddamned many carbs for a couple of decades, to odd things like a possible fat virus. I can think of a dozen possibilities I’ve seen bandied about.

The problem is, thin people feel pretty damned smug about being thin people, and so the prevailing meme is that it’s just plain a self-control issue. I know; I used to be one of those smug thin people.

Then I quit smoking and had to struggle with weight for the first time. (Lots of us quitting smoking is another possibility for all the extra fatness, BTW).


Comment from Jill
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:04 pm

I quit smoking four months ago. I’ve felt like shit ever since. πŸ™‚


Comment from Lemur King
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:11 pm

Whoa. No idea (1) why I was posted as “anonymous” earlier and (2) why the company next to us in the same building put their malfunctioning ice machine next to our internet connection hub, thereby killing our ‘net for the last FIVE HOURS.

Do you have any idea how painful that was? Ow.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:12 pm

Oh my god! You didn’t have to do any…any…work, did you?


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:15 pm

I was a heavy smoker since embarrassingly early in life, Jill, and I got it on the first try. I was surprised: it didn’t hurt as much as I expected, but it hurt for much, much longer. I still miss it, eleven years later πŸ™


Comment from Allen
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:28 pm

Weasel, one theory I heard was that when artificial sweeteners came under the gun sugar use skyrocketed. That might also account for the increase in diabetes.


Comment from Lemur King
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:34 pm

Yes! (sob) It were HORRIBLE. I couldn’t even check my stats. Oh God, the humanity…

We have become a more sedentary (read: wedded to our computers at home and work – guilty, as charged) and we’re on the go a lot more because life got faster and then we eat crap at fast-food joints. Honestly, w/o trying to sound holier-than-thou, it is hard to find people that can cook an entire meal from scratch anymore – right down to the roux or bechamel.

Hard-core ultra-consumerism didn’t necessarily do us any favors.


Comment from Lokki
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:57 pm

Since we’re all in this confessional/meeting mood –

My name is Lokki, and I am an eater.

Here is my story, and for me at least, the end of the discussion:

Mrs. Lokki and I had a beautiful Turkish Ankora cat. He was a mean bastard, but a beauty, and he loved to eat. It was his joy, and (being neuterd and declawed) perhaps his only true pleasure. He weighed 23 pounds or so.

Our Vet declared him dangerously overweight and decreed that from that date forward Anton must subsist on “Science Diet” cat food until he reached a healthy weight – of perhaps 12 or 13 pounds.

Well, Anton just damn hated that Science Diet stuff. Mrs. Lokki, kind soul that she is, pointed out that he wasn’t eating at all. “He HATES it”, she said.

I assured her that when he got hungry enough, he’d eat Science Diet, like it or not.

Mrs. Lokki looked up at me with tearful eyes and spoke these immortal words – by which I now live:

Better a short, fat, happy life, than a long, thin, hungry life.

Anton lived more than 20 fat, happy, years. Pretty good for a cat.

End of subject


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 4:57 pm

Before we had computers, we had these things called books. I was seriously the most bone idle skinny kid you can imagine…and I lived on Big Macs and fries, when I got the chance.

I’m telling you, something damned odd is going on.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:00 pm

Well, my lab-shepard has a great new weight loss regimine. It’s called “eat 2 bites of kibble, then go follow Schroedinger all over the house to see what he is doing”. By the time she thinks to go back to finish supper, my Rottie mix has finished both bowls LOL….

She’s lost about 9 pounds so far…. πŸ™‚


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:00 pm

I had EXACTLY the same conversation with my vet about Charlotte, Lokki. She was slightly overweight, so the vet put her on an Iams diet. She hated the stuff, and I told the vet so, and the vet said, “well, I don’t like eating my broccoli, either.”

And I thought, “whoa! Wait a minute…this is my cat. If I can’t spoil my cat rotten, why have one?” I want my cats to live a long, happy life…but if I have to pick one, it’ll be “happy.”

Of course, Damien called my bluff on that one πŸ™


Comment from Lemur King
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:10 pm

Cruel Wife has this great theory. We have a certain amount of energy that we get each and every day of our lives. As we get older/bigger it doesn’t take us as far.

My addition: As we get bigger it takes us less far. And after a while we capitulate and don’t do as much, and that energy gets stored as blubber. Of which, I have my share.

I’m going to sound out with a controversial opinion: Health professionals tell us all these things we ought to do to live longer but we never stop an realize that these are STATISTICS based on a group aggregate and correlations are hard to make with a human body. Lifespan doesn’t depend solely on whether or not you do or don’t do something. Sure if you’re high risk there are things you can do that are not-stupid, but our genetics play a higher role than this delusion of control.


Comment from Lokki
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:13 pm

My theory on Damien is that his decision to leave home stemmed from a combination of youth, opportunity, and dislike of construction.
Lots of people in the house, and no place to sleep anyhow since the furniture’s all rearranged. Stinky floor refinishing – the hell with this, and out the door.

Cats love their adventures… He’s off having a good time. Will he be back? Well, he’s a boy so:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/472564/leaving_home/


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:16 pm

That’s a huge beef of mine, LK. (For all I’m personally innumerate), it astonishes me that people don’t grasp statistical probabilities better. We’re increasing and decreasing weak likelihoods.

What was that cold medicine they took off the market because it was statistically tied with stroke? Something like five billion doses had been taken over the years, and there were, like, a few hundred more strokes than otherwise. Geez, that’s a risk I’ll take.

I also worry that we’re bombarded with health information all the time, so it sounds like everybody is either sick or about to be. The vast majority of us live pretty healthy lives to the end of our days and die when our organ systems simply wear out.


Comment from pajama momma
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:19 pm

Many of you are too young to remember it that well, but AMERICANS WERE NOT FAT BEFORE 1985. We weren’t.

High fructose corn syrup. Even Coca Cola and other sodas back in the day were sweetened with sugar. If you have to choose, sugar is far superior to high fructose corn syrup. In addition to that, Americans were eating a lot less processed stuff. The introduction to the microwave brought about a heck of a lot more processed, unhealthy food products.

Also, there is freaking soy in everything we consume. The Asians don’t eat near as much soy as we do and they don’t eat it prepared the way we do. They eat it fermented. The “health” industry has us believing that chocolate soy milk, soy ice cream are all good for you, but they’re not. For one thing, they’re processed, for another, soy is used as a female hormone replacement. Hello? We’re feeding our little kids female hormones? Holy hell!

Oh I’m on a rant now! Look at me go! I challenge any of you to find a processed food at your grocery store and see if it doesn’t contain soy in some form. Soybean oil, soy lecithin. Our cows and chickens are being fed soy. Which means soy is in our meats, our eggs and milk. It’s cheap and it feeds the masses and that’s why it’s being used. Not because it’s good for us.

I figure if it’s made in some sort of lab, then it ain’t good for you. Thank God chocolate grows on trees and that I have a Newcastle Beer Bush in my backyard, otherwise I’d be screwed.

oh and by the way weasel?

Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 2:57 pm

made me LOL!

Oh and I made fun of fat people when I was a size 16/18 when I was a member of Nutrisystem, well I made fun of them on the NS forum, not necessarily because they were fat, but because they were a bunch of whiny crybaby bitches.

I think I sprained my fingers typing this.


Comment from Allen
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:41 pm

Statistics and healthy living… Bah humbug.

After having witnessed all manner of friends and loved ones pass away over the last 2 or 3 years I am convinced when it’s your time it’s your time, and there is nothing you can do to change it.

I personally want to go out in some totally improbable, obscure, yet memorable manner doing something I love. Something like… “a huge eruption occurred in the Sierra Nevada mountains in what was previously considered a geologically inactive area. In the incredibly destructive eruption only one casualty has been recorded. The sole casualty happened to be camping exactly at the site of the eruption.”

πŸ™‚


Comment from Dave in Texas
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:49 pm

they should make a pill


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 16, 2008, 5:58 pm

There is.

Before a meal, you take the pill. It has to be taken with a full glass of water and a half-hour walk to spread the pill’s chemicals throughout the bloodstream. Water and and half-hour water before each meal. Oh, and the pill.

You can ignore the pill.

(Sorry, Weasel!)


Comment from nicole
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:20 pm

I think it has a whole lot to do with the convenience of our lives.

We are all busy and all stressed. We do things that are convenient rather than things that are better for us. We eat out, we eat pre-packaged, pre-cooked foods with tons of sodium and corn syrup and soy because they are faster than cooking with fresh ingredients. Fresh stuff is hard to keep around and keep fresh unless you do cook every night. Then when we have finished our pre-cooked, pre-packaged meals with tons more calories than anyone needs on a sedentary lifestyle, more of us than used to go back and sit in front of a computer for fun and for work.

We don’t have to work as hard as people used to. We don’t have to walk anywhere, we don’t have to bike anywhere. Cars are affordable to almost everyone and almost everyone needs one to get to a job unless they live in a downtown city area. Public transport is available in most large cities and it isn’t cost prohibitive either. Computers are affordable to most people as well as is internet service, cable tv and going to the movies.

For fun we watch movies, we watch 100 channels of satellite, we play video games (more and more adults, not just kids), we surf the net, we teach our kids nothing about being outdoors because the outdoors has Stranger Danger unless we are with them – and that would pretty well cramp our style.

Our lesiure time has expanded and we’ve filled it with sedentary activities, a lot of us. I’m not meaning everyone – I know people who bike and go to the gym regularly and run marathons, practice martial arts, etc.

Me, I love to cook and bake. And I love to play a video game and watch movies. And read. And go to drag races and symphony concerts and plays. Pretty much all spectator activities. So you see where my enjoyments in life take me.

While we don’t eat pre-packaged crap around my house, we do eat more than we should of baked goods and do far less moving than we should to make up for our intake. But we are working on the fat and happy but maybe shorter life plan. If we have kids ever, that will have to change and we’ll have to think being around awhile longer so they aren’t orphans (who will have no mama, no pappa and no mittens and will be laughed at). Till then, everything in my house gets fat – guests, cats and spouses. But we are damn happy. πŸ™‚


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:28 pm

Not buying it. The sedentary thing, I mean. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as an adult who owned a bicycle. Let alone a gym membership! I grew up in Tennessee, for chrissakes. For six months out of the year, it was too hot to go anywhere outside the influence of an air conditioner. My mother used to get in the car to drive from one end of the mall to the other.

And junk? Good lord, I lived on it! People, people! Screaming Yellow Zonkers are not health food!


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:43 pm

I can’t find the link at the moment, but we’re actually “on average” only something like 10-20 lbs heavier today than in the 1950s. Yes, I’ll keep checking for the link. In addition, BMI was developed as a lark by a Belgian dude in the late 1830s and is more a population wide tool that fails when applied to an individual (like any of a dozen other population wide measurements). And the so-called obesity epidemic occurred around the same time they moved the obese category down again. I also have an article somewhere from like 1903 talking about how fat Americans were and how it was going to kill everyone. Fat is one of those things that sets my rant button off, but I’ll spare y’all most of it.

Lokki hit my motto up top. I’d rather be plump/chubby/fat/fucking whatever and happy than skinny and miserable. I like food (within my picky range :)), and I’m not fucking going to give it up. And if it was just a matter of will-power I’m fairly certain that the majority of fat people wouldn’t be that way.


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:49 pm

If this is a topic that you are interested in reading in, I highly recommend the Obesity Epidemic by Gard (I think it’s Gard) or the Diet Myth by Campos.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:49 pm

OMG!! LOLOLOL

I know this is off-topic, but it is too funny!!!

Argentine scientists are installing “airbags” on their cows to measure methane emissions….. πŸ™‚

http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/1-cowbackpacks.jpg


Comment from Allen
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:51 pm

For those of you who might have never seen a flash flood.

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-45615

That was from Sunday afternoon. That wash is a few miles from the casa. It literally took place in 10 minutes of rain.

More flash flood warnings on the radio.


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: July 16, 2008, 6:55 pm

Allen, that is cool!


Comment from Allen
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:06 pm

TI they’re pretty powerful. One minute nothing, the next a wall of water. You can hear them coming from quite a ways away though.

I hope I have a house to go home to. Nah, just kidding I sited the place pretty carefully for just this very thing.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:12 pm

My dad and uncle came within seconds of getting caught by a flash flood on Grandfather Mountain once. My father points out the spot where they ditched the car every time we drive past. Victims of flash floods are always found naked; the violence of the water is like that.

It’s not the averages, TI. It’s the outliers; the grotesquely huge people you see now. Every day at work, I see people fatter than the fattest people I EVER saw as a child.

I’m convinced that whatever it is, the mechanism is something that is making us CRAZY hungry. And many of the people who get gigantic are diligently following the diets prescribed for them, and something in them is having the opposite of the desired effect.


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:16 pm

Yeah, but swease those outliers have to have a counterpart on the other side.


Comment from Allen
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:20 pm

Weasel, it’s something you never forget. I got close call once on horseback. It was on the other side of the mountains from where that one was. Berts Canyon. Who names a canyon after someone named Bert anyway? I’ve always wondered about that.


Comment from Gnus
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:29 pm

Naw, Sweasel, I was the laziest, most bone idle skinny child around. Of course, I had a head start on ya.

And, speaking for myself, being skinny – 6’4″ and a bit and weighing 127 lbs – wasn’t, and still isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Hell, even the Army didn’t want me. Underweight, they said. Heh. (And later, when the Army did want me, for Vietnam, I was married with two kids, so it worked out for me. Take THAT, Army. NOW I’m good enough?)

Personally, I suspect the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup in everything as a big part of the “obesity” problem, but what do I know?

Hmmmmm… now that I think about it, it was around the time of that switch to HFCS that I really started to put on some weight. I don’t weigh 127 lbs anymore.

Sorry to ramble here, but I too subscribe to the short, fat and happy life camp.


Pingback from Weighing Ultra-Low-Intensity Holes « Lemur King’s Folly
Time: July 16, 2008, 7:32 pm

[…] who wouldn’t try the simple approach and use a scale?Β  I would have thought that the link in Weasel’s post would have a scale big enough, like this one, but no […]


Comment from Nicole
Time: July 16, 2008, 8:39 pm

Don’t mean to imply that it is all sedentariness. I was the same as a kid as I am now – non-activity inclined. I wasn’t fat then, but I wasn’t skinny either. Something else to bear in mind is that metabolisms age as well. What you live on when a teenager and gain no weight isn’t necessarily what you can gain no weight on as an adult.

Not saying that something else isn’t going on, but I definitely think that our increased leisure time and easy lifestyle is a contributing factor – one among many I’m sure. πŸ™‚


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 16, 2008, 8:42 pm

I have to agree with LK and Nicole on the weight thing.

Back in the day, we had to walk everywhere AND we were rarely ever home as kids. Not home, not sitting on our butts, not eating. When we did eat, it was plenty of sugar and preservatives. My mother made those Oncor mystery meat patties – salisbury steak or chicken parmesano and tons of T.V. dinners.
That was my life until I moved out at 18. Then it was dorm food…that most people gained 15 pounds on during 1st semester…me, the food shot right through (the beginning of my plumbing rejecting lactose).

I was way skinny then and am now a step up (Poptarts and Cape Cod tater chips are my downfall). I have had to monitor my diet due to not being able to eat dairy. It is amazing how much dairy is in most packaged and prepared foods. So I am forced to eat healthy. Fresh or flash frozen fruits/veggies, dinners from scratch most nights (‘ceptin those stupid chips cramming themselves into my piehole…mmmm…home made apple pie).

So there you go….sedentary lifestyles, too much dairy, not enough dinners from scratch.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 16, 2008, 9:18 pm

Won’t we be switching now to real sugar, seeing as we are sacrificing corn by the bushels as heave offerings and wave offerings and peace offerings and meat offerings unto Mother Goddess Gaia?


Comment from wendyworn
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:28 pm

Yeah. I’m fat too.

I think all the reasons stated above are valid. There are chemicals in our food, water, soy (you are so right there is now soy in almost everything and it is so bad! My boyfriend always checks the labels and now even the beef jerky that he has always eaten before has soy! Why? I ask you?) the seditary life, but even if you want to eat healthy, you can take your life in your hands! First it was salad and now tomatoes? Oh, but wait they dont know if it was tomatoes or maybe jalepinos or onions or whatever may be in pico de gallo these days. Sheesh! If I put myself through the pain of quitting diet pepsi, will some other poison find it’s way into my food chain? I mean sheesh, I live in an apartment in the suburbs. I can’t grow my own food and buy a house with a non-polluted water source, off the grid, just in case. Not to mention that to eat healthy is really expensive, and fresh food goes bad fast (like someone else mentioned).

Oh my God. Maybe I should stop reading all the conspiracy theory websites.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:48 pm

On the one hand, people know too much. Humanity has survived through great odds…and now we freak out about Nalgene bottles or tomatoes or eggs. Everything is bad and good, so let’s enjoy it because it won’t really kill us (on the average). And if it does, well, feh.

We can’t avoid everything that has to potential to harm or sicken or kill. It’s everywhere, in everything, with everyone.

And there is no other hand. Sorry.


Comment from LemurKing
Time: July 17, 2008, 12:01 am

Allen, I second your thoughts about “When it’s time…”

Reminds me of a gallows humor joke:

When I die I want to go quietly and peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car.

After reading you lot’s ravings (which I agree with) I can say with hope that this incessant obsession with controlling our fates with supplements, vitamins, unnecessary drugs, diet changes, etc. might finally be winding down as the pendulum swings the other way. My grandparents didn’t do any of that BS and they lived to be 92 and 94. I think it had a lot more to do with keeping relatively active and making life pretty stress-free. They were *happy*.


Comment from LemurKing
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:01 am

I’m slowly catching up reading through this as I pack for a vacation. We’re going to Budapest. Or Nebraska. Or was it Siberia? Maybe Oregon. Don’t know. I let Cruel Wife figure it out and step out of the way.

Pajama Momma: “I think I sprained my fingers typing this.”

You did seem a bit… animated. Rant away though, because after eating blocks and blocks of tofu every week for a while I’m starting to get… (oh the shame)…

… man boobs.

Ok, so I exaggerate a lot and I’m really just flabby because I haven’t worked out for 18 months, but I am starting to think you might be on to something. My son and daughter drink soy milk, and that boy is running around in a hot-pink gardening hat and watermelon-red rubber boots with black seeds peppered all over ’em. Not my proudest moment.


Comment from Allen
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:09 am

LK, when I’m headed up to the mountains I stop at this little independent grocery store for vittles. The owner has one up about the same thing but about flying, it cracks me up.

Note to self: never go flying with someone who finds that funny.

“Oh shit the engine died”

died is not a good word.

“hang on”

as opposed to what?


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 17, 2008, 2:05 am

LK, you may want to try the kidlets on Rice Dream rice milk instead of the soy. It is from organic brown rice and you will want to get the fortified kind (calcium, vit. D). Won’t have to worry about the estrogenic soy or growth hormoned milk.
Yep, I think the over abundance of hormones in our food supply is a big problem. Hormones in milk, chicken, eggs, meat….no wonder we are turning into a bunch of heffers with large boobages.
Case in point –
– friend’s kid gets bad acne… as in pizza face bad.
– friend rejects putting him on antibiotics/medication
– since he drinks a lot of milk, Dr. suggests switching to organic milk from cows not injected with growth hormones/antibiotics. Says if he is sensitive to said substances, there should be improvement within a few months
– friend’s son’s acne clears up within a week

Read labels, not only soy but milk, is in everything.


Comment from Allen
Time: July 17, 2008, 4:03 am

Horses ridden, chores completed. It’s time to head towards that aluminum tube in the sky, and slide on back to the south for the beach vacation.

Wrightsville and Carolina Beach… where the y’all is smooth and easy. Beach music, and a turn on the dance floor doing the Shag.

Y’all take care.


Comment from Dawn
Time: July 17, 2008, 10:28 am

Hey stoaty. Can I come back and play?


Comment from Nicole
Time: July 17, 2008, 10:44 am

Hormones would explain a lot… why young girls are built like Playmates before they even get to middle school – very few in my day looked like that. Why meat eaters like Jessica Simpson have huge chests and lots of angry vegans have none… j/k πŸ˜›


Comment from Lemur King
Time: July 17, 2008, 11:17 am

Thanks pnb, I appreciate the time you took to type that out. I’m not a food nazi but neither do I just cram any old piece of food in my mouth. My kids on the other hand…

And as for me…

We go to the NW for vacation tonight, leaving our house watched but emptier and sadder – Silver d’Cat has a last date with the vet tonight. It’s for the best, both Cruel Wife and I agree, but he’s been a fixture in our lives for 13 years. I have a square of ground in the middle of the catnip patch – I think he’d like that.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 17, 2008, 11:33 am

My condolences, LK.

Pets really grow on you. It’s amazing. But it’s heart-breakening too.


Comment from RHJunior
Time: July 17, 2008, 12:14 pm

Like I said before, a lot of it is that we are defining obesity downward. Remember when Brittany Spears appeared on that awards show? (Yes, she is a skank and she made an ass of herself, but set that aside for a moment.) The first thing out of everyone’s mouths about her was how fat she’d gotten.

She had given birth TWICE since her last public appearance. She was in better physical shape than 90% of the people snarking at her. Physically speaking no male on the planet would kick her out of bed for eatin’ crackers. But because you couldn’t count her ribs anymore, she was “grossly fat.”

What the pan-fried hell, people.

It’s ethnic too. Surveys have indicated that young black women are more comfortable with their physical appearance than white women of the same age and build. (Largely because “zaftig” is more popular with African-American men…)
The researchers were openly appalled that these “overweight teens” had such a positive self-image.

But I digress.

I think there are two or three possible contributing factors in the increase in body weight in our culture.

First, let’s take our infotainment industry into consideration…. the internet, 100+ channel cable and satellite TV, Playstations— we spend a LOT of time sitting very still moving little more than our fingers on a keyboard. (Submitted that such innovations as the Wii and Dance Dance Revolution might actually reverse that trend— think positive, you know.) Even our cellphones contribute a good bit. When’s the last time you actually had to get up and go looking for a pay phone, as opposed to just reaching into your pocket?

The second is WHAT we’re eating. We’ve had something of a massive ingredient change in all our food over the past 50 years… We replaced sugar with corn syrup, lard and beef fat with “healthy” vegetable oils, so on and so forth. They’re now saying that corn syrup is actually more fattening, calorie for calorie, than cane or beet sugar. And replacing beef and pork fat with vegetable oils, I’m sure the late Dr. Atkins would not have approved. Call it mystic thinking, but I suspect there was a reason God made ANIMAL fat a little easier for the cook to collect than VEGETABLE fat. Plus the food, especially baked goods, doesn’t TASTE as good, so we cover it up with– you guessed it– more sweetener….

We’ve spent the past generation or so trying to make ourselves “healthier” by broad-spectrum tampering with our most basic food staples. That can’t have helped.


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:00 pm

Allen and LemurKing, have a fun and safe vacation.

LK, so sorry about Silver d’Cat. Give him a scritch for me. I think he would immensely appreciate his resting place he/you have chosen.


Comment from porknbean
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:11 pm

Mmmmm….pork fat.

RHjunior, don’t forget the dairy. Cow milk was intended for baby cows to put on weight quickly. Much of the west ingests much dairy way into adulthood than any other culture. Especially us. Dairy lobby has lots of money invested in our large patooties.
Then on top of that, they inject the animals with hormones to make them produce more. Which gets passed on to us.

Then we are so wealthy and our standard of living so high, we snack round the clock.


Comment from KC
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:38 pm

Add in climate decline (and not talking about Al Gore’s Global Warming mismessage)… increased air pollution and the chemicals found in virtually everything we ingest from the ‘from scratch’ meals to the frozen, pre-made, nuke for 5 mins meals… It was bound to f@ck up our systems. Add in the invention of microwave that kills any and all nutrients to our already chemical infested, nutrient lacking foods… and voila! Physiologically… it takes a toll. I know. I’m there. Add in stresses of every kind… exhaustion… and I’m stuck buying mumu’s at Plus-Size stores. And I’m bigger… but I’m not FAT. It doesn’t help that many of my parents generation cure to all the problems in the world was to EAT… that they pass it on to their kids – who are now a bunch of emotional eaters because we learned a terrible coping mechanism… and you might as well screw it all… and eat that tub of ice cream.

Why? Because you can. Because we like the instant gratification that came out of the 1980s years of excessive behavious. Because its easy to find blame in everything as to WHY we are a bunch of lumpy humans.

I am voluptuous. I am a thick chick. I got curves that only a race car driver would dare take. If ya don’t like it… my arse is big enough to kiss it many times over.

(errh… that wasn’t intended for anyone above… just sayin is all…)


Comment from Lemur King
Time: July 17, 2008, 1:52 pm

Thanks so much, everyone.

As my granddad used to always say when we parted ways: “Be safe. Stay out of jail.”


Comment from pajama momma
Time: July 17, 2008, 3:01 pm

And the so-called obesity epidemic occurred around the same time they moved the obese category down again.

Oh that’s another thing that makes me grrrrrrrrrrrrr! I’m very muscular and my frame, as in my bone structure is large. If I held my hand up to my mom and sister’s hands I would dwarf them. I have a size 10 shoe at 5’4″. I wear a size 12, but according to the BMI, I’m morbidly obese. MORBIDLY!

And can you believe this girl, a size 10 is considered PLUS SIZE? come on! Plus size stores don’t even sell size 10. How sad is it that rail thin with bones sticking out is normal? http://www.nypost.com/seven/05152008/tv/a_plus_model_110903.htm

you must have been rich Stoat cuz there’s no way we could afford processed food when I was a kid. I would have killed to have chips in my lunch at school. πŸ˜‰


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: July 17, 2008, 4:15 pm

So sorry about your cat, LK.

It’s the kindest thing, but I know how it hurts.


Comment from Gabriel
Time: July 17, 2008, 4:23 pm

I’m coming to this party late, but my two cents:

I agree that obesity has been defined down. But that’s not all of the problem. People are in fact eating more than the used to. They just don’t remember it that way. They remember that they ate a “normal” portion back in the day, not the exact amount. There has been a lot of portion creep, where the amount of food we eat at one sitting has increased. Portions are gigantic these days, but we still think of them as the “normal” amount.

That’s why, whenever anyone says “I’m not eating any more than I used to” I am immediately suspicious. Our memories are just not that good.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: July 17, 2008, 4:37 pm

Hey, Gabe: Like the new look of your site.

Weight is one reason I’d be hesitant to give up my diabetes if given the choice. It forces me to be healthier than I would otherwise have been. I don’t want to think how I would be like without diabetes.


Comment from Gabriel
Time: July 17, 2008, 6:50 pm

Whoa, Musli, that boggles the mind.


Comment from Nicole
Time: July 17, 2008, 7:24 pm

Condolences, LemurKing.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 17, 2008, 7:44 pm

Gabe, we are ABSOLUTELY eating more than we used to. I know this, because I quit smoking and saw the process in action. My contention is that something is making us eat this way. Something we’re doing is making us crazy hungry.

There were people who worked in our Boston office who could barely hobble around with canes, they were so huge. I’m sorry; nobody lacks the self control to avoid that kind of pain, unless the pain of not eating is even worse.

If you’re hungry enough, you WILL eat. No matter what. And something is making us that hungry.


Comment from Gabriel
Time: July 17, 2008, 8:39 pm

I don’t think that something is making us hungrier. I think that we’re just used to it. I’m sure you’re familiar with the way the stomach expands or shrinks over time given how full you usually make it.

For example, these days I’m full after 9 chicken nuggets. As in, I could eat one more if my life depended on it, but there’d be a fifty-fifty chance we’d all be seeing it again. But when I was in high school I used to put away a 20 pack without discomfort. The only thing that’s changed is the size of my stomach. It’s much smaller these days (bad eating habits in college and law school), so it gets full much faster.

I’m thinking that the same thing has happened to society as a whole. It takes more for people to get full now because their stomachs are larger. A little portion control would go a long way.


Comment from nicole
Time: July 17, 2008, 10:58 pm

Speaking just from personal knowledge here, I don’t eat because I am hungry. I eat because I am stressed, bored, depressed, etc. I haven’t been *hungry* in a very, very long time. My eating is linked to emotional distress.

It is probably any and all of the reasons folks have given. If people are hungry all the time, I wonder if it might not be that much of the food we eat has gotten to the point that it doesn’t have enough nutrients to satisfy our bodies. So people feel hungry more than they used to. And we tend to eat what is convenient rather than what is good – which probably just makes the lack of nutrient more pronounced.

Along with all the other reasons cited by everyone else. πŸ™‚


Comment from surly ermine
Time: July 18, 2008, 9:50 am

I have to agree with the corn syrup thing. We consume far to much of it. It’s in damn near everything. Not since the potato have people been so dependant on one crop and we all know how that turned out. I am convinced it is a major contributor to the weight/diabeties explosion. Soda pop will kill you faster than beer. As if I needed another excuse to consume. psskt…glug..glug…


Comment from RHJunior
Time: July 18, 2008, 7:18 pm

Before a meal, you take the pill. It has to be taken with a full glass of water and a half-hour walk to spread the pill’s chemicals throughout the bloodstream. Water and and half-hour water before each meal. Oh, and the pill.

You can ignore the pill.

It’s terrifying. This would actually work….

and someone would get rich selling tic-tacs as weight loss aids.


Comment from enlargement extender
Time: September 20, 2014, 9:56 am

Thanks for finally writing about >S. Weasel <Loved it!

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