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If You Love Someone...Make Them Fat

I would have said, "...set them free," but there wouldn't be any comical reason to do so: the

cliche task was just too much. My attention comes to focus on the healthy habits we have

developed as a twenty-first century society (in the wake of such modern miracles as: fast food

and sprawling shopping centers: monolithic deities designed by their greater gods to be places of

commune and worship (no, I haven't slipped into Marxist/anti-capitalistic rant just yet)). So what

inevitably comes of this, is that we, as a nation of pigs and domestic bovine, must grunt and moo

to the sound of our ever increasing payloads bulging from the strained seams of our mass-

produced clothing. It's a scary thought when you realize that people too can reach critical mass.

Thankfully, we don't annihilate into enormous mushroom clouds of radiative energy, nor do we

incinerate large square-mile radii.

Our freedom to be fat should be neglected in that being fat, the state of a fat existence, is

itself a crux to humanity. It isn't discrimination when someone taxes your bloated ass to cart an

extra several hundred pounds of lard across an equal amount of distance via jet plane. What

worries me is that fast food, and even the nostalgic relics before the restuarant craze, have

become so ingrained into the social fabric that people fail to realize when they're being fed like

their companions on the industrial farm.

Love is such a funny thing: hilarious, really. This so-called love we have for our family,

or those closest to us, seems to be reason to encourage their unhealthy lifetsyles. We treat them

to dinners, give them gift cards for restuarants, send them boxes of chocolates on Valentine's

Day, and just for precaution, pick up the difference at the movies for a box of Goobers and an

extra large popcorn and soda with all of the trans fat, salt, and refined sugar one could ask for:

this is the bond which cannot be broken: enabler and enabled. Forget the cheap drug anaolgy,
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food has taken on its own unique context, because legality and brand marketing are something

that heroine and cocaine may never fully realize.

As you sit down to a juicy burger from MacDonald's, and the steaming fries waft their

fragrance through the chattering restaurant, there is a sense of nirvana as you take the first bite:

the hook. Fast food comes with its own attention-whore sentence, and the perfect thesis:

want/need more. There isn't a clear argument, only the pure thought of consumption. If there are

any supporting details to this feeding frenzy, they are: "buy more," and "no more." (Hopefully,

the second one isn't often used.) I could never shake the feeling, when digging through a fast

food bag, that I was going to find oats and a harness. I still eat fast food: it's convenient,

pleasurable, moderately priced, and nostalgic. Reward is the greatest of all human expectations,

and all expectations are proportional to their failure.

There are rehabs for the drug-addicted, there are gyms for the masochists among the

physically unfit, and there are hordes of books for the fat bibliophile and Weight Watchers

enthusiast. The average man is left to his own devices should he want to strike fear into his

metabolism. Diet pills offer a mild sedation to the financially and physiologically bold. I could

never risk the harm of damaging my constitution with drugs of any kind. It seems the redemption

of the unhealthy, at the hands of fast food giants, is most likely within some co-op or health nut

store. It may very well be, but whatever these may offer to console the ravaged body of the

unhealthy, are doubly tainted by waves of snake oil seeping from the remnants of the New Age

craze. If you're going to put your fate into the hands of a modern shaman, make sure he at least

has a Ph.D. in witch doctery.

Our designer genetics may inevitably be utilized to save us from ourselves. It's mostly a

fault of our altering the make-up of plants and animals, then the slow process of industrializing

our food distributors, which has left us a fat and impotent herd of sheepless cattle. Gene therapy
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could offer the most effective solution, but we still are not nearly addressing the cause: our food.

The term "natural" is as properly used as the term "gay." When a food purports to be "natural,"

either: a) the marketer is targeting the consumer; or b) the "low fat" and "diet" titles were all

ready taken by another product in their line. The solemn truth is that what you buy in the store is

never "natural." If it was, you wouldn't buy it wrapped in plastic, or pre-packaged in a cardboard

box. The only way to eat natural is to grow the damn thing yourself, and if you're too sensitive

toward the poor miserable life of animals, then allow a butcher or delicatessen to murder them

for you (bon appetite).

If anything, people should practice fasting more. When your life becomes so hazed by

work that you can't adequately starve yourself briefly, then there's a serious malevolence afoot. It

may sound like the distorted psychological pleas of an anorexic drama queen, but I have never

felt more relieved then when I fasted for at least a day. This doesn't mean restricting fluids;

people should drink more, much more. Most of us believe that urine is supposed to be yellow,

and for the most part that's okay; however, when you're adequately hydrated, urine is milky to

transparent. Eating is a very destructive force to our bodies: we're taking in alien matter directly,

breaking it down with what chemicals we can synthesize internally without killing us, and then

excreting the matter we can't fully digest or have no use for. This is a very excruciating process

to our body, and if your metabolism isn't up for the job, it's even worse. If one were to fast (first

consulting their doctor about what interval of time would be healthy), I postulate that many

people would live somewhat healthier lives. Of course, if you're still eating poison made from

chemically synthesized and refined compounds, I can't say that fasting will greatly help. There's

a great need for detox in our society, like a hung over priest needing a quiet congregation.

Having survived the largest portion of the rant, I wanted to reiterate that I'm not a doctor

of any kind, merely a humble witch doctor. People will always be ailed by their bodies (we're
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imperfect mechanisms prone to the same entropy as any other system), but we can still do more

to prevent things such as liver failure from occurring during a MacDonald's binge, or slowly

preserving ourselves with formaldehyde generated by unassuming aspartame in a diet soda. We

can only be more conscious about what we put in our bodies, and whether we should. When we

leave it to large corporations and pop dieticians to make our food choices, there is no one we can

blame but ourselves.