Chris Jepson: Insanity by reason of obesity

Some subjects are more “weighty” than others. (Haha!) Like obesity in America. Poor darlings. It looks like you can’t have your “gravy” and eat it too. Or cake. Or Coke. Or Quarter Pounder with fries. Without someone pointing it out that you are diseased.

Excess weight is problematic from an aesthetic perspective, too. I marvel at all the still-thin young daughters trailing their obese mothers into grocery stores. Do they wonder and shudder, “Is this my future? Am I someday going to be physically like my mother, a formless blob of blubber in a flower-printed muumuu?” Why do obese mothers not have sufficient pride in themselves to check their appetites at the door and be an example to their children? The same applies to men, their outsized appetites and guts and their sons. For shame.

Oh, it is argued the obese eat to compensate for “X” in their life – for disappointment, for sorrow, for failure. If I can’t have love in my life (or respect or joy), I certainly can stuff myself silly with junk food. It’s a logic and a practice that escapes me. But let’s say that is, indeed, the case. So what? Disappointed? Do something besides feed your face. Uh, move on. Briskly, at that. Is not much of the problem of obesity simple laziness to do a good thing? For yourself no less.

I’ve thought for more than a decade that you could balance the federal Medicare budget by simply requiring those who weigh outside the healthy range to receive less service or pay more. Include cigarette smokers and we’d be asking, “What fiscal problems with Medicare?” If you wish to live (by choice) an unhealthy lifestyle, why ask the rest of America to underwrite your decisions?

It is argued that a healthy diet is too expensive for “some” to afford. That may be the case in some instances (the profoundly impoverished), but are we to absolve all Americans for how they look and their health because the spoon in their mouth isn’t silver? I don’t think so.

And now obesity has been determined to be a disease. Is it the disease of too much of a good thing, so to speak? Folks, if eating too much is now deemed disease worthy, well, “Katy, bar the door.” Is obesity like smoking?

I am suspicious that the only beneficiaries of the decision declaring obesity a disease will be the pharmaceutical companies (their diet/dietary drugs) and the doctors who prescribe them.

Will obesity now be a mitigating factor in crime? It is a disease after all. Insanity by reason of obesity. I murdered him because he ate my last Ding Dong. Why not? Or, “I went to the refrigerator at 2 in the morning to polish off the Thanksgiving bird and my Gawd, I was drinking, drinking mind you, the last of the gravy right out of the tureen! I just couldn’t help myself!”

But food tastes so good! So sugary, so salty, so whatever it is that has one eating to excess. “There isn’t much in my life that is good or satisfying. I don’t have much control in my life. (Or, it tastes so damn good.) So I eat. I have control of that at least!” Exactly. Some disease.

My brother Uncle Stevie asks, “Is a sedentary lifestyle a disease?” If obesity is “served-up” as a disease per se, let irony be the relish.

Jepson is a 27-year resident of Central Florida. He’s fiscally conservative, socially liberal, likes art and embraces diversity of opinion. Reach him at [email protected]