BC season 2 episode 3 This is JB talking to you about Political Correctness which is killing us faster than COVID
Body Conversations® is a podcast that looks at our physical bodies to understand how they impact American politics and culture. Let’s face it!! We’re all deaf to this conversation even though it’s a threat to our economy our real lifeblood. Liberals and conservatives avoid it like the plague--which it is! It’s a taboo subject, even for someone like Bill Gates.
At a recent Trump rally, 50% of the folks are obese, yet no one notices. While COVID has grown Americans' bodies even larger, no one makes the connection. The mainstream liberal media merely blames Trump for America’s high COVID numbers and poor outcomes. Just read the CDC Diabetes statistics; they tell the real reason for our weakened immune systems.
Did Republicans use this scientific data to silence the Democrats? No!! They’d rather lose the election than touch this touchy body subject. Nancy Pelosi says, “Americans are just Wonderful!” even though she’s half the size of the typical American female. Meanwhile, the “Eat Healthy/ Beat Up the Body” wellness brands profit and grow their bottom line while American bottoms balloon.
Public Health chief Dr. Anthony Fauci refuses to use his new platform to criticize our size. The good doctor knows that Americans inhabit a Politically Correct Body positivity, size inclusivity, “everybody is beautiful” landscape. Wellness conversation ensures that no one’s feelings get hurt and everyone should feel good. Such a happy, happy wellness world. But, what about the coming unwellness from all the obesity-related sickness? Our solution is to simply euphemize it away by sprinkling the “healthy” everywhere. Like a benediction. Euphemize now and euthanize later. Fatness aka consumer gluttony is so un-PC that only Bill Maher has the balls to speak up about our huge bodies.
The CDC’s diabetes statistics show that a majority of Americans are already sick with obesity-related illnesses. 88-million of our 209 million adults are pre-diabetic. Prior to COVID, 34 million of us had the big D. Today that number has undoubtedly swelled in tandem with our bigger bodies. We can assume that some of the PRE-diabetics have migrated to full-blown diabetes. A nation of damaged bodies, invalids in the Making.
Our huge economy is also unwell. The solution…free food!! Hurrah! A recent CNN story out of San Antonio Texas showed lines of cars with their trunks popped open so that volunteers could shove in boxes of food for the hungry. The drivers of these cars were so obese that they had to move their seats all the way back so they could fit behind the steering wheels. Apparently, no one noticed. More food. Food Glorious Food.
Americans are currently lugging around eight billion EXTRA pounds!! Everyone here is hungry, even the affluent. Worldwide, ONE billion people are underfed and underweight. But they are on distant continents. They need many, many, many, many meals. But do American adults? Well, of course, we do!! Give us more all you can eat food joints & supersize me deals and don’t forget those “healthy” smoothies and the latest superfoods. Refrigerator-sized humans are hard to miss, but we’re experts at doing so. Obesity is a 35” waistline, but not in the good ole US of A. Japan’s obesity rate is 3.2%, Denmark’s 17%. We’re at 50% and growing…
Politically Correct phoniness is harming our bodies and our economy. It’s reinforcing our tendency to oversensitivity and weakness. Wellness is a phony word to distract us from the dumb diets & dangerous exercises that failed us physically but made us better, fiscally. We’ve been profiting for five decades on advising the public on WHAT to eat, never on how much to eat. Eating what you don’t want—aka “healthy” -- is a direct line to binging on what you do want. And we can eat so much food thanks to our overstretched stomachs. But it is not your fault. Blame McDonald’s, Doritos, Netflix, etc. What about Oprah? Her 25 years of daytime TV pitched thousands of diets and exercise programs that just messed with our metabolism.
The liberal mainstream media hates to hear about those weight loss stories that weren’t done their way. Let me tell you a quick story about Juan. He is the superintendent at the building where I have worked for the past 40 years. Back in 2005, I noticed that Juan had “sized up” if you will and was carrying about 25-30 extra pounds on his 5’3” frame.
One day, I told Juan he had to lose weight. We talk with a few words of English, a few words of Spanish, and a lot of points.
Now Juan is not a touchy-feely kind of guy so I didn’t need to pussyfoot around. I went straight to the core: I pointed to his midsection and said “no Bueno” and “usted es con Bebe.” Since I couldn’t think of the words for “you look pregnant” so I said “with baby” and he laughed.
Typically, people would then ask me about “eating organic” as if it were a country!!! Or about Soul Cycle or Gluten-free diets or Keto or Vegan, etc., etc. Not Juan, of course. I just had to say in my Spanglish, “close your mouth sooner; stop eating so much and so often!! He laughed, shook his head, and said: “no problema.” A year or two later all his extra weight had disappeared.
And unlike the liberal mainstream media who sucker Americans into “healthy” diets and wimpy wellness retreats, Juan lost the weight permanently. He is now trim and handsome and in his 70s. I don’t know what he eats and quite frankly, I don’t care. He “shrunk” his stomach. Close your mouth sooner and stop eating so much and so often.
If you need more proof, get this — a Nutrition Professor literally went on a Hostess Twinkie diet. He lost 20 pounds just to prove that it doesn’t matter what you eat — you just have to eat less of whatever it is that you're eating. Of course, this is upsetting to the wellness crowd because they want to blame everything on “unhealthy” foods so they can continue to profit with their green smoothies and overpriced exercise programs and devices.
Inclusivity and diversity affect the sizing of our actors too. Every TV show and commercial has to show happy obese people. In this new world packaged by the mainstream liberal media, we have to make sure that every size is represented, even if doing so encourages others to “size up”. Every TV show and commercial has smiling obese people enjoying life and proving that fatness is OK. Even children’s programming shows chubby kids. We’re normalizing fatness for kids. The insinuation is that obesity is a genetic disease and no one has control over their size. Strangely enough, prior to the 1970s, there were few fat people and a fat child was truly unique. Have we mutated in the past 50 years?
Now that we’ve made obesity acceptable, we also have to enlarge our architecture. And we are doing it quietly. Since 2015 NYC taxis have grown to become VANS. Taxi drivers hate these huge vehicles that are hard to maneuver and park, and let’s not even get started on the gas-guzzling. Passengers struggle with the huge heavy sliding doors that threaten to close on a leg or arm before you get inside. Seeing a huge van with one-person seated screams waste. Why did we go BIG with cars? Do you remember 2008 and Wall-E the award-winning Pixar film that spoke to our over-consumption? We became so fat that we could not walk so we moved around eating nonstop in mobile lounge chairs. Today these mobility scooters are more and more evident-- even on TV in Antiques Road Show. Obviously, the older taxis can’t accommodate the mobile chairs so now we have the huge vans. And finally, disability ramps and extra-large bathrooms -- which are fortunately not used too often – will soon see more traffic.
And what about the World Health Organization? What’s their advice?
The WHO says that obesity isn’t determined by BMI but by the waistline. If your waistline is 35” or more you’re obese, plain and simple. But measuring people’s waistlines (which has been done in Japan since 2008 with great success) is very revealing. So, of course, we don’t do that in America because we think that no one should feel bad and everyone should have a seat at the table--even if they don’t know a fish fork from a dessert spoon.
Do you want to know the real reason why we left the WHO? These Public Health experts actually said that obesity will cost society more than smoking ever would. That’s why America had to leave because we can’t admit that we got it wrong. We traded our adult pacifiers — cigarettes, pipes, and cigars (which people have been enjoying for only 4,000 years) — so we would become healthy. BUT without our adult pacifiers to soothe us and reduce our gargantuan appetite, we ballooned. In fact, a recent article in TIME called cigarettes APPETITE SURPRESSANTS. They added that we used to have a culture where 50% smoked and 100% of us inhaled. Now we are at 14% who “smoke” and we are mostly fat. . So now that fatness is fine we need to keep pumping out the body-positivity size-inclusivity rhetoric and the phony approach to eating because that’ll make money for the wellness crowd who have the position and power to dominate the conversation.
Forget making America great again… we’re in WimpVille USA where everybody has an issue and everybody is touchy. It looks as if COVID will just be a warm-up for a never-ending unwellness. But there is a solution right from Shakespeare: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". Sorry substitute the Liberal Media. And then we can do the right thing: bring in the Economists to fix our physicality without harming us fiscally.