Fat governors, fat taxes, and me

Last updated on April 12th, 2017

I’ve had trouble deciding on the topic for this blog post. This is a sure sign that someone is taking his blogging too seriously. When I started out, any post with the words “low carb” in it was good enough.

Good enough for me, anyway, if not my readers. But in the early days, I didn’t have any readers. (The way this post is going, that could come to pass again.)

Enough stalling. Let’s get down to picking a topic. What has been the big food, diet, weight or nutrition news of the last few days?

One possibility is Chris Christie’s weight. Christie is the obese, Republican governor of New Jersey.  Some people wanted him to run for president. Others suggested he was too fat to run, or too fat to win, or too fat to serve if he somehow managed to run and win. A couple idiots even suggested that being fat meant he was lazy and undisciplined. Right. They just give away high elected office in New Jersey.  

I was hoping Christie would run and that someone would whisper the words “low carb diet” in his ear.  Having a candidate for president drop a hundred pounds on the campaign trail by cutting carbs would be a wonderful thing. But Christie has wisely decided to stay out of the race. In my book, that makes him a more compelling candidate.  However, he isn’t much of a blog topic for me anymore.

Another possible topic is Denmark’s tax on saturated fat, which went into effect on Saturday, October 1. The Danes are not an especially fat bunch; only 10% of them fit the clinical definition of obese. Apparently, though, they have the ambition of living longer. They think cutting saturated fat in their collective diets will reduce heart disease and add a few years to their lives, a small step toward immortality.  Denmark already has taxes on sugary foods, so fat must have seemed like a logical next target.  I think they should have reviewed the scientific literature before they enacted this tax, but I can’t bring myself to argue about it. I just re-stated my opposition to the taxation approach to public health a couple weeks ago. All I have to say now is that if the Danes cut the saturated fat out of their diet, it will certainly feel like they are living longer, whether they add years or not.

On the theory that the best topics are those closest to home, I could write about me. Again. This topic has the advantage of requiring almost no research. True, I’m not as fat as Governor Christie, nor as taxing as Denmark, but I’m endlessly fascinating to me.

But I need a pretense.  Is there any news about me worthy of noting?

Yes, there is — and thanks for asking. My mini-stall seems to be over, at least for one week. I lost 3.4 pounds between September 24 and October 1. I am down to 214 pounds, a new low for the campaign, and I have had to tighten my belt a notch to keep my pants up.  So I am off the 215-217 pound plateau.

I didn’t do much to bring this about, aside from sticking to my low-carb guns.

It isn’t much to hang a blog post on.

But there you go.