Why Are Americans "Eating Themselves To Death"?

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Why Are Americans "Eating Themselves To Death"?

A) Because we have the best chefs and cooks in the world who make food so irresistIbly tasty.

B) Because of the folks at McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell. They made all this fattening food and tricked us into thinking it was the healthiest Mcstuff on the planet.

C) Because we lack self-discipline.

D) Because eating is fun and it makes you feel good.

E) Because we're basically no different from pet goldfish - if you keep giving us food, we'll just keep eating and eating and eating and eating until we're floating belly-up in the water.

F) Because we're the richest nation in the world . . . and what are you supposed to do with riches? If you're not supposed to eat yourself to death . . . what else is there to do?

G) Because overeating is a "disease."

". . . so when I grow up, I'm gonna look like what?"

H) It has something to do with evolution: we've spent the vast majority of our lives trying to stop powerful forces of nature from killing us, through typhoons, earthquakes, bad weather, wild animals, etc, etc. In a way, we've recently won this battle, and now the problem has switched to the other extreme - everybody is worried about us killing nature instead, or destroying the environment.
In the same way, we've spent the vast majority of our evolutionary lifetime battling starvation. Now - at least in America - it looks like we've basically won this battle. So now, the battle switches to the other extreme, and the new problem is eating ourselves to death.

I) We're gluttons.

J) The problem is that advertising executives - especially the ones who put on the late-night commercials - are just too damn good at their jobs.

K) The problem is that we're couch potatoes who sit around watching late-night commercials and getting hypnotized into shoveling mounds of glop down our throats.

L) We share the same basic DNA structure as hogs. So when it comes to our genes, blame the hogs. (Maybe we also share the same basic DNA as eagles and grizzly bears . . . but ignore that).

M) Come on, all those All-You-Can-Eat-Buffets are just too good a deal to pass up!

N) It's all based in our childhood and how we were raised. In other words, we were raised by parents who were fat themselves, and wanted their kids - us - to be fat too.

O) Because we aren't allowed to say things like "fat" nowadays - instead we've got to say "thinness-challenged" and "weight-special" and so on . . . which allows fat people to not think of themselves as fat, but as special, and allows them to say that people who use the word "fat" are "mean."

P) Because in addition to the possibility of being addicted to alcohol, drugs, bad television, and popping those air-bubbles that come in mail packages, we can also manage to get ourselves addicted to food.

Q) It's a matter of economics. In earlier periods of history, we had to work in fields and shops as farmers, blacksmiths, cobblers (not apple cobbler, Roscoe), and so on . . . and today, we're mostly stuck in cubicles or stuffy offices all day staring at computer screens before going home to collapse on the sofa.

R) Because we just haven't found the right diet yet.

S) Because we just haven't found the right diet pill yet.

T) Because we just haven't found the right home-exercise contraption (for only $19.95!!) yet.

U) Didn't some old smart guy say "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die?" After all, we're all going to die anyway. I'd rather die of clotted veins and overdosing on pork rinds than, say, getting run over by a steamroller while I'm jogging down the street. Either way you wind up huffing and puffing and dropping to the ground. And if it's true that "tomorrow we may die," I want to spend my last day stuffing my face with a wet, greasy, six-pound taco.

V) Maybe the real problem is sex. We got our pipes crossed, somehow, and now we've got a lust for food.

W) Because we're seeking the infinite within the finite.

X) Because it's natural. Eating is "natural." So it's "natural" for things to be this way. Evidently, Nature's plan for humans is for us to scramble around for food part of the time, and overeat the rest of the time.

Y) Because something's not natural. If it was "natural," why would we be having so many problems with it?

Z) Because food makes you feel good in the short-term and bad in the long term (at least when you eat a little too much of it) - and this sets up a vicious cycle: you eat a little too much food, it makes you feel good at first, and then bad; then, to make yourself feel better, you eat more. This makes you feel better for a little while, then worse, so you eat more. This makes you feel better for a little while, then worse, so you eat more. This makes you feel better for a little while, then worse, so you eat more. This makes you feel better for a little while, then worse, so you eat more. This makes you feel better for a little while, then worse, so you eat more.

AA) Because we have so many supermodels selling their diet books, exercise books, and beauty secrets. (Of course, they didn't become supermodels by reading their own books, or even following whatever advice they recommend . . . but we digress.) And since we're awake enough to realize, at some level, that no matter how many thighmaster crunches we do, we're still never going to look like them . . . we might as well give up and stick our heads into a bag of Doritos.

BB) Because we're all searching for happiness, and we think food makes us happy.

CC) Because we're all searching for "IT", and we think food it "IT".

DD) Because we live artificial lifestyles surrounded by media in the vast majority of our schooling, work, and vacation time. This artificial lifestyle - which normally doesn't require us to burn many calories - is largely physically sedentary, and so requires artificial exercise in order to compensate. This additional exercise required - say, spending an hour or two at the gym every day - requires another layer of effort that we just normally can't/won't do.

EE) It's Britney's fault. She makes us want Pepsi, really, really bad.

FF) Because deep down, we all have this powerful, insatiable hunger that drives us . . . this hunger for . . . something. We mistakenly assume that this hunger is for food, when actually, maybe it's a hunger for something else.

GG) Because people are unreliable, love seems hard to attain, daily experiences are often difficult to understand, and basically, life is hell. Yet food, at least, is fairly reliable, somewhat easy to attain, and pretty easy to understand.

HH) Because we're living in a time when our religion and spirituality largely consists of simplistic platitudes written at a fourth-grade level that are no deeper than a mud puddle in a Houston parking lot, and since we're completely unprepared to deal with Reality as it actually is . . . we eat.

II) I don't know.

JJ) All of the above

KK) None of the above.

LL) Some of the above.

MMGood) Other _________________________________

What Is Your Answer? ________

So . . . What's The Answer?

Nowadays - at least to us - everybody seems to have all the answers, all the time. And most of the time, they disagree . . . but that doesn't stop many of them from trying to ram their answers down everybody else's throats.

So, we figured we might do best to carve out at least one little place in the world that's generally more about questions than answers, and that's more about encouraging folks to think instead of telling them what to think.

So, we're going to leave it up to you, to discuss and mull over with your friends and neighbors and fellow buffet-goers. What do you think? Groove philosophical on our Discussion Boards.

- although . . .
you may have noticed that in a way, we do take a position that . . . well . . .

The way we see it,
if you're going to answer a question like "why do people eat too much?"
- that's a question about "human behavior"
or essentially "why do people do what they do?"

- and in order to understand why people do what they do in one area (for example, eating too much),
you need to understand why people do what they do in any area.
So in a way, you need a basic model of human nature to work off of
if you're really going to approach this problem properly.

And this is what we,
your fun and dashing friends at LiveReal,
are busy working on.

But for now,
that's all we can say on the matter,
because we've got to go head down to the buffet.
- but if any of you know
whoever's in charge of that trillion-dollar government program,
let us know. We'd like to meet them for lunch.

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