When did we decide to become a supersized nation? Whom do I blame? I could perhaps begin with Ronald Reagan. Reagan made us believe that being an American was all about thinking and living large. He told us that it was okay to get obscenely wealthy; indeed it was a virtue. He was our Gordon Gekko: greed is good. And he said as much in such a convincing aw shucks Boy Scout sort of way that it was impossible not to believe him. In the 80s we began to think big again. Enough was okay but suggested you weren’t really trying. More was better. A lot more was fabulous!
But I can also blame Bill Clinton. Bill never met a millionaire or billionaire he didn’t like. During his tenure Americans reaped the rewards of being the world’s only superpower. Our 401Ks bulged with inflated stock values. Our home values went through the roof too. We leveraged our housing prices to trade up to larger houses. We used those low interest rates to buy bigger and better cars. It was during the Clinton years that the sports utility vehicle craze took hold in this country. It was during the Clinton years that a single-family house with a one-car garage on a modest lot became simply insufficient. For those with the resources an opulent estate surrounded by acres of ranch or forest became our dream house. For the rest of us we settled for boxy McMansions on postage stamp lots. Three or four bedroom houses were out. Why not six, or eight even? Why not have a deck that wraps around the house? Two-car garage? Why stop at two? Why not demand a three or even four car garage? Hey, you only live once baby! You and your wife and your 2.2 kids may not need all that space, but buy it anyhow! This was the time to live the American dream!
As for food: to heck with normal portions. Normal portions were for wusses. It’s not enough to buy a hamburger anymore. Go for the double cheeseburger instead, or the triple burger with the sesame seed bun. Forget the regular fries. For forty cents more you can supersize them! Let’s make the new fast food standard to get as many calories in one sitting as we used to consume in a whole day — all for five bucks or less. And let’s add a whole lot more salt, fat and cholesterol to the meal too! Supersize that Coke while you’re at it! Have two hot apples pies, not one.
Not surprisingly our waistlines expanded. Because all the lots were taken in town, our McMansions naturally were built out in the exurbia. So walking to work or even to the grocery store was out of the question. We’d better hop into our SUV and drag the 12-mpg behemoth a dozen miles to our local Costco. There we supersized our pantries with mega-sized cases of detergent and frozen hamburger patties by the gross.
Whatever happened to David Thoreau’s simple life? Are you a little bit mad to want the simple life in modern America?
I must be a little bit mad. But first I will confess that as a former townhouse brat I was glad to go single family when I finally had the option. I was tired of the teen next door sitting on my car hood to smoke his cigarettes. I did not enjoy his loud bass-centric music, particularly when I was trying to sleep. My mental health improved markedly when we moved into our house.
Our house, as houses go, is fairly modest. The garage fits only one car. It has three bedrooms, but only two of any consequence since the third is small enough that it was turned into a TV room. We have a guest bedroom in the basement that doesn’t really count since it is mostly below ground. There are only three of us though and it is big enough. Our lot is a third of an acre and way more than I really want to manage. We’ve been in the house ten years. Only now have we completed giving everything a first coat of paint. In short it’s too much already and I want to downsize my life.
I wonder about people who own McMansions. I wonder primarily why they do it. Maybe they are masochists. Or maybe they like spending every free moment keeping the house up. Maybe they don’t mind taking out a second mortgage to put furniture in all those empty rooms. I can spend a day just picking up and vacuuming in my modest house. I would think you would either need to be a full time housekeeper or hire a couple cleaning ladies to come by once a week to keep these houses presentable. When do they find the time to relax on that screen in deck with a mint julep?
And why is at least one SUV a compulsory item in the driveway? It’s not like there are any mountains with gravel roads that must be traversed on a daily basis around here. As best I can tell the primary purpose for an SUV in my neighborhood is to take the kid to Taekwando or to get through the drive-thru pharmacy lane. Most of these families are not large extended Mormon families. They are a mother, father and two kids. A Camry sedan would have been a much more sensible choice. Why did they supersize their car?
Are they mindful of the effects of their lifestyle choices on the rest of the world? Or do they simply not care if they drive something that spews twice the toxins into the environment as my modest sedan? I guess to them it’s not that big a deal. When the summer ozone levels become unhealthy they aren’t affected. They live their lives indoors anyhow. They can drive right into their three-car garage. No need to exercise outdoors either — get on the treadmill in the basement instead.
No point in thinking about the costs of our lifestyle choices on others or even on ourselves. Live for the moment baby! Those who die with the most toys win! Hey, if we tear down another forest to put up more McMansions and shopping centers, well, that’s just the price of progress! And we’re doing God’s will. Because the preacher tells us it’s right there in Genesis: God gave us the Earth to shape as we see fit. God is saying: it’s all right to supersize your life! Go for it!
Still, how quaint: those seven deadly sins proclaimed by Pope Gregory in the Sixth Century: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. These are all American virtues now baby! Let’s put the Bible back on the shelf. We paid lip service to it anyhow. We don’t need it anymore. We have a new American religion. It’s called Capitalism. Adam Smith is our new God and Ronald Reagan was his only begotten son.
We will live well and die well. We will fill up our lives with possessions. Our credit cards may be maxed out but our net worth will continue to soar. Let us stay focused on our lifestyle. If we get a twinge of remorse from time to time let us pay some therapists and pop antidepressants instead. Let us never, ever dwell on just how meaningless it all is.
February 22nd, 2004 at 10:47am
Posted by
Mark |
Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy |
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Last June I wrote about my adventures losing weight. Well they weren’t really adventures. Those who claim losing weight is fun are fooling themselves. It’s never fun to diet. I looked forward to the “adventure” as much as a root canal. Still I knew I was putting on more weight. It wasn’t anything dangerous but I was afraid to get near a scale and learn the awful truth. The awful truth turned out to be 198.8 pounds. For the record that’s 8.8 pounds more than I should weigh to avoid the stigma of being “overweight”.
Now I certainly didn’t look overweight. I get complements all the time about how trim I look. I’ve never been one to neglect exercise either. For two years my exercise has included not just aerobic, but weight training too. I’ve probably converted quite a bit of fat into muscle. I have been conscious for years about what I eat. I can’t eat anything anymore without thinking about the tradeoffs. Even so food is apparently an enormous pleasure to me. When opportunities present themselves (like Christmas cookies arrive from friends) I find it impossible to just say no. So mostly I try to keep these foods out of my house.
Clearly eating less and exercising more was a great weight loss strategy while it lasted. I lost weight regularly, but it was a hard thing to sustain indefinitely. The body resisted. My last attempt at a formal diet was The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. It didn’t work for me. I stayed pretty much where I was. This was due to the fine print: you can have carbohydrates at one meal a day, but you have to limit them to about a third of your total calories for the meal. I went overboard. I found I couldn’t limit them that rigorously. But more importantly, the diet did nothing to solve my craving for carbohydrates. I still had thate underlying addiction.
So now it is about a year later and I’m trying the South Beach Diet. Much to my surprise here I am two weeks later and I’m still on it! And I was also surprised to find that I dropped four pounds in one week! I have never lost that much weight that quickly before. But I had never tried a carbohydrate free diet before either. The first two weeks of the South Beach Diet are a lot like any day on the Atkins Diet, except the meals are supposed to be low fat. Carbs: just avoid them. And I have. No bread. No milk. No jellies. No fruits. I really crave fruits at the moment.
No, it wasn’t always easy. The first couple days were the roughest. After a few days I found myself at the CVS buying sugar free candies and making a lot of sugar free Jello. The mornings and afternoons weren’t difficult. Substituting eggs for cereal in the morning was easy. For lunch I chose salads or lean meats. String cheese worked for my midmorning snack. A hand full of peanuts was often my afternoon snack. Dinners were heavy on low fat meats, and lots of steamed vegetables. My broccoli and cauliflower consumption has gone way up.
I found sugar free Crystal Lite hard candies and have been eating them as dessert. They taste good thanks to the Splenda in them, but eating more than four or five made my stomach upset. My indulgence lately has been these protein bars. Some of them are excellent. I may be cheating a bit because they while they have only 3g of impact carbohydrates (the type that make you crave more) they have more of the non-addictive type. But mostly they contain protein, so it is balanced. They taste really good, but they are expensive. They remind me of a Snickers bar.
The South Beach diet emphasizes restoring a good blood chemistry. It does this by turning off the craving for carbohydrates. I find my physiological craving is gone but it is still there on the mental level. Tomorrow I will begin phase two. I can’t wait to introduce some carbohydrates back into my diet. Perhaps that is not a good sign, but right now the taste of a fresh apple, or even a bowl of Raisin bran in low fat milk sounds delightful. During phase two of the diet I am supposed to reintroduce carbohydrates slowly. That will be a tough test for me. Even though it could have been much worse I feel like I have been suffering. But I can’t deny the results of this diet so far.
I have learned a lot from this diet. I didn’t understand how addictive processed carbohydrate foods were. I didn’t understand what it was about being “processed” that made them bad for me. Dr. Agatston’s clear writing was an eye opener. I never made the connection that a processed food was essentially a partially digested food. This means the carbohydrates in them are readily absorbed into the bloodstream as sugar. And this raises your insulin level quickly and makes you physically crave more processed carbohydrates. So now I am wiser at last. I will be more selective about not just how much carbohydrates I eat, but how likely they are to make me crave more of them. I am armed with my book giving the glycemic index for various foods. I think with care I can add to my diet decent tasting carbohydrate foods that won’t make me want more.
I have noticed what people on the Atkins diet have told me: they often feel lethargic. I get winded easily. I still maintained my exercise routine, but at the health club peddling away on the elliptical machines I found that it actually hurt to keep up the pace. The blood sugar that I normally would have had running around my blood stream was not there, so it had to be drawn from my fat. It was weird; it was like I could feel the fat actually being burned off!
The rest of this dieting is monitoring what I eat and regular exercise. I will check my weight once a week to measure how I am doing. I will do my best to adjust my eating habits accordingly based on what the scale is telling me. I don’t ever want to be overweight again. I hope this time I am armed with the right information and the right attitude to fully accomplish my goal. I figure if Bill Clinton can lose 25 pounds on this diet, I can do something similar. There are no sure things in this life. But as I look at the numerous obese people around me, I know I don’t want to spend my fifties with cardiac or adult diabetes problems. I have a lot of life ahead of me and I want my good health to last as long as possible.
January 18th, 2004 at 04:49pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2004 |
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It’s not easy being lean. I’m thinking it is unlikely I will ever be lean again.
Something happened to me over the years. I think I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough. I joined the majority of Americans who are overweight or obese. I didn’t intend it to be that way, of course; it just sort of snuck up on me.
I first discovered that I could gain weight in my early 20s. A couple times a week I bought milk at the local High’s store in downtown Gaithersburg, Maryland. The Entemann’s pastries were right there and they sure tasted good. So I’d bring one home. And one day I weighed myself and was shocked to find I had put on some weight. I exited my teenage years a healthy 180 pounds (I am 6′2″). And suddenly I was 200 pounds.
Solution: eat less and exercise more. Basically I wasn’t exercising. I never got in the habit. So I took up running, starting with mile runs around the local high school track and working up to mile and a half runs four to six times a week. I was really out of shape and it took a long time before I could run and not feel winded. But I did lose weight and got back to 185 pounds or so, and I was more careful about what I was eating. Mostly though I was more concerned about exercising more than eating less.
And for more than 20 years I have been running and exercising regularly. So why am I not a skinny thing?
Those of you have met me would probably not call me overweight or obese. And yet technically I am. I should not get above 190 pounds, and I’m probably somewhere around 195 pounds. And I’m having a hell of a time staying where I’m at. It’s been hard work. It continues to be hard work. It’s a continual war I fight with myself. Emotionally I want the satisfaction of those lovely high fat foods. But my forebrain says I don’t want to in my 50s and having coronary artery disease. Every day is another skirmish with the Mr. Hyde lurking inside of me.
Back in 2001 I hit a new high: I was at 223. Bill Clinton and I had something in common. I had been overweight for years and years and though I still exercised I must have been packing on the calories. But I figured I was still running and thus healthy.
To some extent I think my overeating was facilitated by the excellent and cheap lunches conveniently available at the Ford House Office Building cafeteria. Those steak and cheese subs were hard to resist, and I would often throw on a chocolate chip muffin for dessert. I rationalized it by having a light dinner. It didn’t help that my personal life was in a great deal of stress in the late 90s. Eating became one of the few pleasurable things in life. It was agony to pass a Dunkins and not grab a donut or two.
Nonetheless I lost the weight at least twice before. In the early 90s I got to around 205 and brought myself down to 190, mostly through a lot more exercise. But then slowly, incrementally, the weight came back on.
It took me years to summon the energy to do anything serious again about weight loss. But my joints were beginning to notice the effects of my weight. My knees were hurting and the tendons in my foot were often inflamed. But one day, perhaps as a result of being on antidepressants, I suddenly had the will again.
Like most dieters I looked for a recipe for weight loss. For a while diet and exercise worked fine. I was losing a pound a week by eating salads for lunch and a bowl of cereal for breakfast, plus putting in a lot of time on the elliptical machines at the health club at work. I got below 200 and felt like cheering. And then I stopped losing weight. For weeks I hoped things would improve and I didn’t change strategies. I continued eating sensibly, and I still peddled the metal machines hard and burned off those calories. What the hell was going on?
I stumbled on the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet and tried that. Carbohydrates, according to the book, can be evil because they boost blood sugar and make you hungry for more food. So eggs or Egg Beaters for breakfast, a lean salad for lunch, and a modest (sometimes more than modest) dinner with carbs in my “reward meal”.
It worked, sort of. I lost maybe half a pound a week. But it was tough. I weighed myself every day to a tenth of a pound. I kept meticulous records. And I did it. I got to 190. One day I weighed myself and I was 188.8.
It’s been all up since then. My goal was to get to 180, the weight I had when I was married. But it wouldn’t work. This diet wasn’t working anymore.
My pal Lisa told me about her trainer Jason and his emphasis on building muscle mass. I went to see him and tried that approach for a while. But … I hovered between 190 and 195. Using all those weight machines helped I am sure, and maybe I have become more lean. I just wasn’t losing weight.
I finally went to see my doctor. What was going on? Why couldn’t I lose more weight? He didn’t have an answer but when he did say that where I was at, 195, was on the high but acceptable level. Maybe that’s where my body wants me to be because it is the right weight for me now.
So I’ve been maintaining it through a LOT of exercise and a LOT of modest eating. I’d like to lose more but I don’t know how.
Oh wait, I do know how. I’m sure I could do it. But it’s a question of how much pain I want to endure. I could increase aerobics to maybe 60 minutes at a time. But in the process I have to give up something: more time. And that’s the crux of the matter at the moment. Time is a limited quantity. I am fortunate I can exercise at work; it would be much tougher to do it in the evenings with all the distractions going on then. My days start at 5:20 and it is over 12 hours later before I stagger home.
What am I doing now? I exercise, with aerobics, 4-6 times a week. Most of the time I am on the elliptical machine, but I still run periodically. Every other day at the health club I add on weight training. In a week I can go through pretty much every machine they have. I do weight levels that would astound most people. I leg press 150 pounds, for example, and I do 125 pounds on abdominal machine.
Eating? A bowl of cereal for breakfast (all those eggs worried me), and usually something fairly lean but tasty for lunch. I like the broccoli and beef down in our cafeteria: a small portion, no rice. And for my midday treat, one or two Special K treats (90 calories each). Then a fairly large, but not obscene dinner.
All this diet and exercise though and here I am: 195.
Yes, I am sure my evening meals could be better. But they are not obscene calorie fests, and they usually start with a big salad.
On weekends my strategy is two meals a day: a large breakfast and a medium to large dinner. If I get hungry I’ll have a slice or two of cheese. I work out at least one day on the weekend too.
It’s something about being middle aged, I think. It doesn’t help that I sit at a desk most of the day, but the midday break at the health club burns a lot of calories. I am sure I could add more exercise on weekends: bike trips, walks etc. Mostly I just do the standard routine.
The good news is that my weight is stable and while technically overweight I am just barely overweight. Still, it’s discouraging. It’s quite a bit of work for me just to maintain my present weight. I must burn calories much more efficiently now. My health is excellent: I pass physicals with flying colors.
But if I set a goal why can’t I make it? It is discouraging. I watch what I eat very carefully now. Some days I do really good, some days I feast more than I should, but I am conscious of every mouthful and the consequences. If I eat more than I should one day I usually eat less the next day.
I’m lucky I have something that works, and I am glad I got rid of the gut and my love handles are largely gone. But I don’t understand why my body won’t let me be lean again.
What strategies have you used that have worked, particularly in the long term, at keeping weight off?
June 14th, 2003 at 05:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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