Eschewing the Fat, or Fidget Goes Hawaiian

Thank goodness for human beings, and their penchant for moronic declarations, or else we wouldn't have all these potential nominees for the Idiocy of the Year award. I wasn't planning on establishing this honor, but it seems that with 6 billion Earthlings, maybe 5 billion of which are IQ-challenged, we can't help having monthly candidates for Top Honors. Last month it was the Angels brain trust (brain "rust" would be more apt) and their "The The Angels Angels of Anaheim" redubbing (which has actually been upheld in Court). This month it is the "scientists" who tested a score of couch potatoes and determined that if you fidget enough, you can lose weight. (The word "potatoes" here encourages me to name the award the Dan Quayle Idiocy Award. Whatever happened to Dan Quayle, anyway?)

So these experimenters compared two groups of overweight TV addicts, (one of which, I presume, was the remote-control group), attached wires to their fingertips and elbows or whatever, fed them Doritos and discovered that those who were twitchier did not put on as much flab. Well, all right, but how can we put this knowledge to use? It's not as though we can teach people to be fidgitier. I suppose we can suggest they get off their duffs, watch less TV and maybe, just maybe, get a little exercise. But that wouldn't win a grant.

As a society Americans are generally 1) too fat and 2) overly consumed by that fact. Quick-diet books are perennial best-sellers. The late Dr. Atkins is personally responsible for the revival of bacon and mayonnaise, though his crash diet, like everyone else's, is now getting the societal heave-ho. Hey, almost anything works short-term. I once went through a month in which every night I'd prepare a giant ice cream sundae with the works, and found myself losing weight. Maybe going to the gym also contributed to some weird metabolic shift, but soon the ice cream started to take its toll again.

As long as we continue to be a nation of plenty, and fast food remains the simple fare of choice, Americans are going to stay overweight. Evolution has not caught up with modern dietary excesses; our metabolisms are still geared to our hunter-gatherer profiles, and prefer to store much of the fat we ingest to insure against potential famines. Thus we continue to amass mass. Health warnings simply are not enough to undermine this trend.

I think what we need is an attitude shift, a notion that perhaps Big Can Be Beautiful. There are signs of this dotting our popular culture. "Hairspray" celebrates convexity. Ruben Stoddard wins "American Idol." Camryn Mannheim is not thrown out of casting offices. Now there's an upcoming comedy series on HBO starring Kirstie Alley called "Fat Actress," the promos for which she is shown gleefully gobbling down mounds of pasta. What would it take for "Rubenesque" to again be an acceptable synonym for beautiful? Perhaps it would take a fat president (as opposed to a fathead president).

Whatever happens, I do hope the expression "couch potato" stays in our lexicon. If these folks fidget enough--which could happen if they're fed an endless diet of reality makeover shows-- maybe they could reduce themselves to something like couch asparagus, but the term just doesn't cut it.