From Where I Sit SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE SINS
	NOVEMBER 2005

by Richard Koscher, Publisher

I gained some weight since I gave up hockey and sky diving in order to become a husband and then a father. I tried a few things to shed the extra pounds — spending a month eating Special K cereal every day for lunch, for example.

I thought I might be able to lose weight by exercise and began running three miles a day. I reasoned that the extra physical activity, together with no increase in food, would naturally result in serious weight reduction. Even though I was running a marathon distance every week or ten days, my weight remained constant. A supposed authority tried to give me some explanation about my metabolism not keeping up with my exercise that made absolutely no sense to me.

A couple of months ago I joined one of the national weight loss programs. So now I’m on a regime of carefully measured eating together with a cycle of weekly trips for weighing and measuring. All of us in the program look forward with a combination of expectation and dread to those Monday check-in sessions, hoping for progress. I’m actually doing good and have lost 21 pounds during my eleven weeks of participating in the program.

My progress has been somewhat irregular — sometimes down a lot, usually down a little. During my best week I lost five pounds; several times I lost only half a pound. I’m doing better than my Editor In Chief who is trying to lose weight by simply exercising and not eating so much. One week he actually gained four pounds, even though he has managed to lose 22 pounds since he started almost five months ago.

It isn’t easy shedding pounds in America. Attaining weight-loss goals requires passing up a steady stream of delicious and tempting entrées and desserts at whatever celebration, meeting, reception, or party you are invited to during any given week.

Even many churches, rather than being a refuge from temptation for overweight people, turn into positive dens of culinary iniquities. On the way to the pew or kneeling bench on Sunday morning, corpulent worshipers are often forced to pass tables full of coffee cake, cookies, chocolate-covered fry cakes, bagels slathered with cream cheese, or Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

For some of us, a sanctuary for the worship of God ends up housing a sub-shrine to the Great God of Gluttony. I once suggested that my church abandon the practice of offering fattening snacks to worshippers. My wife told me I was nuts, but the suggestion made perfect sense to me.

Most churches wouldn’t supply a smoking room, for example, with free cigarettes and cheroots. They wouldn’t provide a bar offering complimentary glasses of Budweiser and shots of tequila to the post worship communicants. Most people would imagine the church should take a stand against promoting addictive products that destroy health and contribute to the dissolution of people who consume them too much.

We are concerned about friends and family members when they are overtaken by alcoholism or any other compulsive behavior, so it shouldn’t be illogical to attempt to make an intervention when a person 30 pounds overweight — or 300 pounds — reaches for a cream-filled chocolaty delight. But we would have to be totally out of touch with societal norms, to ever dare to do any such thing.

Nevertheless, according to the March 11, 2004 issue of Time Magazine, obesity is now the number one cause of preventable death in America. Health problems associated with being overweight are now responsible for more than 400,000 deaths per year. Every 48 hours more Americans die of health-related issues having to do with obesity than have died in Iraq since the war began.

Over a thousand people die every day who would have been alive had they simply controlled their eating. In other words, more than two Americans die every three minutes from being overweight.

Have a healthy Thanksgiving! Maybe you should try to cut down a little on the turkey and candied sweet potatoes. Maybe you can’t load your plate with raw carrots or Brussels sprouts, but you might substitute an extra helping of three-bean salad, or whatever healthier side dishes are available. You might have a better weigh in on the subsequent Monday. If you make table temperance an actual life-style change, you might add a decade or two to your life.