Obesity--A Thought

Being a tad overweight myself (some might say about 80 pounds or so), I take notice of all the publicity obesity is getting these days. Too much fat, too much grease, too many golden arches, too many French fries, portions way too big, too little exercise … .
All valid. But I’ve lifted weights strenuously for over an hour, I’ve swum laps, three and four times a week for a year without losing weight. I still walk and ride my bike. I’ve been on the Adkins Diet for months (Gadfrey, how you can learn to hate roast beef!), comes right back.
There are obvious problems with the American life style. Food is too easy and too cheap to get today. Our ancestors might walk miles to find a game animal to kill—and when they finished eating it they might not eat again for days. For us it’s just a run to the nearest store.
Two thousand years ago, in the Roman Empire, a daily meal might be nothing more than a couple of small loaves of Pita bread and a dried fish (tiny) or two. Some days you might not get that. Feast days meant just that—a few days a year you might get to eat the way Americans eat every day.
There would be luxuries like meat, cheese, honey (sugar wasn’t all that common until Columbus discovered the Caribbean) pastries, veggies and fruit. That was a feast day—in Roman times and in the Middle Ages. Then there were days and days of hard physical labor to burn it off.
We eat a “good breakfast”—often out of McDonalds—and then we go off to sit at a desk or stand at a machine. (Neither is great exercise.) Then comes lunch—anything from a thick sandwich and some cookies with a coke to a pizza. When we get home, the biggest meal of all, dinner—and an evening watching television. With a snack.
The real wonder is that anyone is NOT obese. However, I keep reading that obesity has become a increasing problem over the past few years. What changed just recently? I attended a lecture on obesity recently and suddenly realized there was one factor neither the physician, the dietician nor the exercise maven thought to mention.
Smoking. I was a chubby child. In 1957 (seven years before the Surgeon General’s “Report on Smoking and Health”) a friend advised me to take up smoking instead of snacking. It worked. Boy did it work! I had a cigarette instead of a snack; I lost weight.
A few years later a well dressed man on NYC’s Fifth Avenue stopped me to ask where I bought my clothes. (It wasn’t so much the garment as the fact I was thin enough to wear it well.) In 1973, for good and sufficient health reasons, I quit smoking.
Just a pound or two a year—I don’t binge eat and I do exercise—adds up in a few decades. A whole LOT of us have either quit smoking since then or never started. (I recall one of FDR’s sons was told to quit smoking by his MD about that time. In six months he had put on so much weight, his physician told him to go back to smoking—for his health.)
When we no longer had the ancient life style to keep us thin, smoking helped. A cigar, pipe or cigarette and a cup of coffee beats dessert every time, weight-wise. The vast—and needed—campaigns against smoking may just be another example of unintended consequences.
Light up—or chow down. Either may kill you.