[Osx-nutters] *Big* government

[mmalc crawford]

On Aug 29, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Stefano Mori wrote:

> Now what Patrick says about hidden dangerous ingredients is valid  
> too, so a person may be eating more than they
> realise. But eventually this does become something that they can  
> very obviously see in the mirror, at which point it becomes their  
> responsibility to do whatever it takes to get back in balance. They  
> have to question their choice of foods and their activity levels.
>
Indeed.  Most of the "it's someone else's fault" arguments seem to  
somehow assume that eating is a one-shot experiment.  If you get the  
wrong ingredients in one meal, you become fat.  But you don't wake up  
in the morning weighing 350 pounds after eating one meal, you put on  
weight so as a result of "continuously" making bad choices and  
"continuously" failing to do anything about it.

As a word of warning for Stefano, it used to be the case that I to  
could eat almost any quantities of whatever I wanted -- and my diet  
consisted largely of cakes, chocolate, cream etc. -- but I've now  
reached a situation where that doesn't work.  There are probably many  
reasons for this, general slowing metabolism as I've aged my well be a  
significant factor, but I also do a lot less regular exercise than I  
used to (I own a car now, I don't walk a couple of miles to/from work,  
I don't spend a lot of time wandering around the city centre...).
But it's *my* responsibility to monitor my situation, and to change my  
behaviour accordingly, whether it's to try to get to the gym more  
often or to cut out foods that I don't need.  And sometimes even to --  
heavens -- feel hungry.  I appreciate that we have an inbuilt  
mechanism that affects our desire for food intake.  But we've also got  
an inbuilt brain that allows us to think a little more about what our  
body is telling us...

mmalc