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elfsSeattle is considering requiring all restaurants to include a "nutrition facts"-like label next to every meal on the menu. As I was driving into work this morning, I heard local talkshow host Dave Ross (710 KIRO) discussing a newspaper article in the PI recently about how restaurants are fighting back. One of the stunts the restaurants pulled recently was to hire a man for 30 days to eat out morning, noon, and night in Seattle, to get all of his nutrition from restaurants, to demonstrate that one could do that, remain healthy, and even lose weight.
"And then," says Ross, "At the bottom of the article is a quote from his dietician. Welllll! I said, if you can afford a dietician of course you're going to lose weight! But for you and me and Joe Average, and I don't have a dietician, believe me, it's a whole lot harder! We don't have any idea!"
I don't normally get angry at talk show hosts. I know they get paid to act stupid (or, in Limbaugh's case, to be stupid). But this one absolutely infuriated me. Jesus fucking Wonder Woman (yeah, let that image percolate through your brain, it'll relieve the tedium), after forty years of "eat less, move more" and all of the other nutrition information we've been given, do people really need to hire a dietician tell them, "Don't eat at McDonald's every freaking day?" and "Don't supersize that," and "Don't stick the entire damn Denny's Ham & Cheese omelette down your gullet" and "For Gods' sake, the Starbucks Frappucino is a milkshake and you should treat it like a dessert and have it maybe once a week‽"
You do too have "an idea." You've got a simple one. Eat less, exercise more. Ignore it at your peril.
"And then," says Ross, "At the bottom of the article is a quote from his dietician. Welllll! I said, if you can afford a dietician of course you're going to lose weight! But for you and me and Joe Average, and I don't have a dietician, believe me, it's a whole lot harder! We don't have any idea!"
I don't normally get angry at talk show hosts. I know they get paid to act stupid (or, in Limbaugh's case, to be stupid). But this one absolutely infuriated me. Jesus fucking Wonder Woman (yeah, let that image percolate through your brain, it'll relieve the tedium), after forty years of "eat less, move more" and all of the other nutrition information we've been given, do people really need to hire a dietician tell them, "Don't eat at McDonald's every freaking day?" and "Don't supersize that," and "Don't stick the entire damn Denny's Ham & Cheese omelette down your gullet" and "For Gods' sake, the Starbucks Frappucino is a milkshake and you should treat it like a dessert and have it maybe once a week‽"
You do too have "an idea." You've got a simple one. Eat less, exercise more. Ignore it at your peril.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-23 11:28 pm (UTC)One that is a *very* sore point for folks who have gained large amounts of hard to lose weight to to medical problems.
Among other things "eat less" can cause the body to shift to "famine mode". Which means that from then on you'll be more apt to gain weight than you would if you hadn't restricted your food intake so much. This is one of the reasons why yo-yo dieting is so bad for you.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 04:56 pm (UTC)I can understand if someone is fighting weight gain due to a medical issue like diabetes; you're already under a doctor's care. (Even then, I'm not convinced entirely; two of my friends have gained weight after their Type-2 diagnoses, but only one is honest enough to admit that it happened because she "didn't want to" follow the doctor's diet and exercise advice; the other still uses the word "couldn't.") Most of the obesity in this country is not due to medical complications: most of it is due to people shoving too much food down their own throats voluntarily.