Obesity, Deadly Sins & The American Plague

The first part of July was very full of relatives here at the homestead, and my relatives run the gambit in ‘size’ designations between morbidly obese and thin as rails. I’m a sort of in-between person. Weigh the same now (approaching my 40th anniversary next month) as I did the day I graduated from high school and the day I got married. Don’t tend to gain or lose and never have. Hubby is one of those ‘high metabolism’ sorts who could look like a starving Ethiopian with little trouble just by skipping a few meals, but keeps firm muscles under the no-fat covering by getting way more exercise than most guys these days. Comes from the homestead lifestyle, heating with wood (thus cutting and splitting), maintaining the acre of up-and-down yard, and playing lots of ‘challenging’ disc golf.

Our daughter takes after him. You’d swear she’s got a giant tapeworm or something watching her woof down more food in a single sitting than I’m likely to eat all day (or over two days!), never gains an ounce and has to eat lots to maintain what little she’s got. Her son takes more after his father, and could easily put on significant weight if he’s not careful. Of course his diet is worse than ours – he likes fast food burgers, fries and soft drinks, whereas we are mostly vegetarian, seldom eat out, and drink primarily our great spring water in herb/green teas or plain, or mixed with straight fruit juices like blueberry, cranberry, pomegranate or some combo. All of us get sugar cravings occasionally and are known to pig out on chocolate or other candy, but that’s rare enough not to be a big deal, living as far from town as we do. Daughter likes a little coffee in her sugar, when she’s not here a pound of sugar can last for months. Hubby and I don’t use it in coffee or on cereal (though we do like fruit on our Cheerios), and don’t drink milk straight-up ever. Daughter can consume a gallon a day without even trying.

Out of five kids in my family, 4 of us siblings tend to be slender like me. Yes, the poundage has rearranged quite a bit over the course of my 58 years, but you’ll have this (it’s a gravity thing, I think!). The youngest, my baby sister who had a 17″ waist when she got married, is now morbidly obese. She and her three children spent four days here, took grandson back with them to Florida. Her two sons are like her hubby, high metabolism guys whose plain old nervous energy keeps them skinny. They don’t exercise or even go out of the house much at all, so that’s not a factor. Her daughter is just now ‘chunky’, risks being fat as she gets older if she isn’t careful. Our parents weren’t fat folks, in fact, Mom was a runway model with long legs and perfect posture, lots of grace and beautiful chestnut hair – a real beauty. Grandparents weren’t particularly large on either side, though my father’s sister was a fat woman as was my mother’s grandmother. So there are no doubt a few fat genes in the mix, where there seem to be none on my hubby’s side.

And indeed genetics do play a role. Primarily, I suspect, in how metabolism is regulated, along with hunger signaling and tendencies to store fat. But my observations also tend to support my strong suspicions that most of it is diet and exercise habits. Primarily diet. This was doubly confirmed during their four-day visit, when we had to be the food suppliers.

Now, I’ve an ample garden and the apples are ripe, the pears are dropping, and there’s plenty of juice, tea, milk, cereal (Cheerios and plain Shredded Wheat), whole grain bread, cheese, pickles, canned veggies, etc. I cooked dinner every night, usually a bean dish (Mexican), potato soup, salads, vegetable plates, linguini or ravioli, etc. None of them would eat a bite of any of it. Over those days the bring-home from work for hubby consisted entirely of a 24-pack of Coke, a gallon of whole milk and two giant-size boxes of Frosted Flakes. Sis and her daughter ate bowl after bowl after bowl, finishing off both boxes every single day. Niece also whined constantly for someone to drive to McDonalds and get her bacon cheeseburgers, though we never did.

When I visit them I observe their diet too. Bags and bags of fast food burgers and crap piled on the kitchen table, cabinets chock full of snack foods, a fridge full of fatty lunchmeats, ice cream, chocolate milk, etc., and boxes, bags and wrappers piled in corners and along the walls of every room. They haven’t had a working stove/oven in 15 years, but sis doesn’t cook anyway so there’s no need for anything more than the hot plate her hubby and sons use to make themselves occasional Campbell’s Soup or canned spaghetti and meat sauce or beef stew. Adding it all together in my head, I figure they must spend 5 times what we do for a week’s worth of food, and not a single bit of it is what I’d considered healthy.

This of course isn’t everybody’s story, but it certainly plays a part in most of the “obesity epidemic” in this country. Bad food, bad habits, bad choices. And sis, being an RN who actually knows the reality of such things, expects just like most of the rest of ‘em that medical science will simply come up with a “fat-pill” one of these days that will keep them skinny without them ever having to change a single thing about their choices in life. I find that terribly sad.

Now, I’m ten years older and will probably die long before she does of something or other. She could well be like my great-grandmother, who we called “Big Mama” and who lived to be an obese, chain-smoking (corncob pipe), happy and semi-healthy 100. So general health isn’t a terribly good argument to use if the person is perfectly happy as they are. She does have some issues with depression, but not considerably large ones (no more than the rest of us, I’d say). She and hubby love each other just as they are, the kids are well-adjusted enough to function, they seem to enjoy their life fine. So I don’t bitch, I just stand in awe and wonder.

I do perceive an odd American mindset in all this. Sort of flagrant indulgence in the deadly sin of gluttony (as popular these days as lust, greed, wrath, sloth, envy and pride) as a way of life, with full expectation that somebody will ‘cure’ the deadly results without the person having to give up the sin. I also am guilty of not feeling too sorry for the greedheads on Wall Street (who DO NOT deserve to be bailed out with my hard-earned money!), the lusty free sex addicts and serial semi-monogamists, the angry old racists who disrupt Town Hall meetings with their hatred, the evil torture-enablers who want to be tyrannical dictators, or the fat folks who live in a pile of empty food containers they can’t even manage to throw away.

That’s probably pride on my part, though I’ve nothing much to be proud of, so I’ve my deadly sin too. I don’t tend to fat. That’s because I don’t eat a lot, and I don’t eat junk. But if I WERE constantly hungry and DID eat junk, I’d weigh what she does. I’m too dumb to be greedy and too lazy to be rich, though I’d sure love to be not-poor for a little while in my life. Not ever likely to happen, though. Maybe I’d have been a loose woman had I not found my soul-mate early in life, so I can’t too much fault those still actively seeking The One in their own lives. And if I didn’t mind living in filth, I probably wouldn’t ever clean my house (or my daughter and grandson’s rooms, which qualify in spades for the ‘sloth’ designation). I do get mad enough to be considered ‘wrathful’, often at things I can do nothing about and sometimes at things I could do something about if I approached them differently. The Irish in me is just an excuse, so I’m no doubt guilty of that one as well. We’ve all got our issues and our weaknesses – our deadly sins – one is no better or worse than another.

So I just love ‘em. It’s all I can do. Try to encourage them to get more exercise or eat better when they’re here, but giving in and buying them most of the junk they want anyway just so they’ll be happy. Simply like being around them when I can, try to understand where I am overstepping and shouldn’t interfere, accept them as they are and as they come just because I love them. Life is hard on all of us, for sure. And no one can live anyone else’s lives, nor reasonably force them to be someone they’re not. So through the years I’ve learned to take things with a grain of salt, enjoy what little time I get with people I love, and try most of all to encourage their happiness. If what would make them happy is not something I can provide or they can ever provide for themselves, they’ll just have to learn to do without.

Like when some young relative who dropped out of school because he thought the requirements too stringent bitches that Bill Gates hasn’t yet made him the multi-billionaire VP of Microsoft (or some such ridiculousness), I just laugh. What’s the point of pointing out how silly that sounds? Or when another young relative bitches that nobody is giving her a nice car for free when she’s got two DUIs and wrecked the last one and is too drunk most days to hold a real job, what’s the point of suggesting that she quit getting drunk all the time, get a job and buy her own damned car? Or when another relative complains about achy knees and a bad back that make the stairs to the bathroom too difficult while weighing three times what a normal person weighs, what’s the point of pointing out that’s probably why she’s sore? All these things are entirely self-evident. They know that as well as I do. So they’re just sounding off, I make small noises of sympathy, then distract them with some other topic or project.

Still loving them, still glad to have them in my life, still thankful for the time in life I get to spend with them. And in return, I’m thankful that they don’t spend much time on my deadly sins and giving me advice I won’t take about how to ‘fix’ my life. Who knows? Maybe someday somebody really will invent a sin-pill we can all take to fix what our indulgences do to our lives and health!

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