Taste the excitement

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Longtime readers of the paper probably know me at least as well as my mom did when I was 17. They know that mostly I don’t give much of a damn about anything, or at least, not enough to get all heated up. I’m 44 years old, 6’2”, and a month and a half ago, I weighed 250.8 pounds.

Those who’ve read this newspaper for a couple years also know that I struggle with my weight. Every once in a while, I do one of those boomerang diets like Atkins or Body for Life, and then I write an embarrassing story about it. One year, I actually had my picture taken with my shirt off for before and after shots. This newspaper airbrushed a part of me so it wouldn’t provoke lasciviousness among the community’s youth.

So now I’m doing Weight Watchers, Mondays at 12:15 p.m. at the Nevada Museum of Art. It’s a wholly sensible plan, and it’s working pretty well. I don’t think I’ll bore you with the details in the form of a cover story (unless I get some kind of response to this note), but it’s the whole dieting thing that put me in mind to write about this topic.

We live in the fattest freaking country in the world. Go to any restaurant and take an honest look at the people there. The majority of people above the age of 24 are fat. The problem is that we don’t know what a reasonable amount of food looks like. If we ate three correctly sized meals a day, two or three nutritious snacks and a dessert of reasonable calories, we’d be fine. Add a little exercise, and we’d all look like Greek heroes.

None of that is news—if we eat more calories than it takes to run our bodies, we store them. End of story.

Anyway, here’s what’s irritated me. One of the biggest causes of porker America is fast food. It wasn’t enough that they had three meals to plaque up our hearts and asses with, now Taco Bell has come up with Fourth Meal, the hip late-night meal between dinner and breakfast. Hey, way to go, Taco Bell, give the people what they want. I’d sooner eat a scab.