Ate and Ate and Ate

My Christmas? Oh, it was lovely. What did I do? Oh, I ate and ate and ate and ate. Then I ate, ate, ate, ate. After that, I ate some more, then had dessert, after which I ate and ate and ate and ate and ate. Once I was finally done eating, I took a nap (yet somehow continued to eat, even while asleep). I woke up, then had a snack, after which I ate and ate and ate and ate. Then I fixed myself a well-deserved dessert.

How did I feel? Lousy. Huge. Awful. Sick. Stupid. Guilty. And not guilty in the sense of, “Oh, gosh, I really messed up my diet! Shame on l’il ol’ me!” But in the sense that I’m ever conscious of the fact that there are so many people who don’t even remotely have the privilege of over-indulging. It really bothers me that so many people struggle to support themselves and meanwhile I sit around moaning oh-gee-I-just-can’t-stop-eating. As if that’s a problem worthy of anyone’s sympathy.

I actually touched on this near the very end of my book. For those of you who don’t have a copy (or do, but never got that far) here’s an excerpt:

The diet industry takes in an absolutely astounding amount of money. I’ve read figures ranging from eighteen to thirty five billion dollars or more per year in the United States alone. You heard right, people are spending upwards of one hundred million dollars per day for one reason: they just want to be smaller. They spend money on diet foods and diet programs and diet surgeries. They spend money on supplements and herbs and magic pills. They buy books and magazines and videos. They join health clubs and purchase equipment for home. One hundred million dollars per day and all we have to show for it is endless news reports all saying the same thing: we’re getting larger and larger and larger, and there’s no end in sight.

When confronted with that thirty-five billion dollar figure, many people are appalled that such an obscene amount of money changes hands each year. The next reaction is predictable: “All they have to do is eat less and exercise! There’s no reason to spend that much money on such a simple problem with an obvious solution.”

I won’t even bother to respond to that statement. That’s what the rest of this book is all about.

What slightly fewer people pick up on is the raw, dark irony of the total picture. By some estimates, thirty-eight million people in the United States are “food insecure,” meaning they cannot sustain minimum food needs due to a lack of money. And almost a third of those are truly hungry and malnourished. This country is wealthy enough to feed itself many times over, yet millions go without. An extremely overweight population is a growing concern at all levels, yet hunger is on the rise. In one household, a woman will spend $100 on diet pills while only a few miles away another woman is unable to put food on her table. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

And that’s basically what I think of every time I gain five pounds over a ten day period. I can tell myself I work hard, and I deserve a break, and in the big picture it’s okay to stuff myself and then write a funny post about it afterward. But I was assembled with an over-active guilt chip; and it doesn’t have an off switch.