Better Blind than Fat? I don’t buy it.
What!? People would rather be blind than fat!?
Apparently, shockingly, most people would rather be blind. “When you’re blind, people want to help you. No one wants to help you when you’re fat,” one respondent (of the 89% who’d lose their sight over slimness) explained.
I’ve never had a whole lot of pity for overweight folks, mainly because there’s something you can do about being overweight. It may not be simple and it may not be easy, but losing weight is at least possible, whereas curing blindness… well there’s not much you can do except live your life and hope that medical technology finds a cure before you die.
This sounds suspiciously like the oft-quoted “fact” that most people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying. Which explains why so many commit suicide just before going on stage. Or not.
Of course, the article that Ben links to floats the idea that losing weight is “impossible”:
But it seems less so by the end of “Rethinking Thin,” a new book about obesity by Gina Kolata, a science reporter for The New York Times. Kolata argues that being fat is not something people have much control over. Most people who are overweight struggle to change their shape throughout their lives, but remain stuck within a relatively narrow weight range set by their genes.
So if your weight is mostly genetic, you have almost no control and what you eat or how you behave doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone seriously believes this. And if weight is purely genetic, then why has obesity increased so dramatically in recent years? Are fat people having more kids? Did something happen to change our genes only recently?
I strongly encourage anyone trying to lose weight to check out Evolutionary Fitness at ArthurDevany.com. Art believes that the way you eat and exercise actually has a profound effect on how your genes express themselves. I’ve been eating “the EF” way for 5 months now and I can definitely say that it works (really really well), even if I don’t entirely understand why. Try it out before you give up.