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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (101637)	2/22/2005 12:54:01 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793782

Fat is sinfully complicated Guest blogging this week for Glenn is Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she teaches constitutional law and the jurisdiction of courts. Her regular blog can be found at Althouse.blogspot.com. • February 22, 2005 \| 10:36 AM ET Yes, of course, Americans are fat, but we're not just fat, we're incapable of dealing in a straightforward way with the fact that we're fat. The federal government mocks us with ever-more-stringent diet recommendations. You thought it was hard to eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day? Well, you've got to eat nine now. And shut up, or it's going to be fifteen. We overreact and say I'm only going to lose weight in some excitingly transgressive way, where you eat a lot of butter and bacon. There are those who want us to be good, and those who like the idea of being bad. We can't think about obesity as a simple problem. We must complicate it – enrich it! – with ideas about sin and virtue. Look, here's Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee showing off his massive weight loss and packaging dieting as a religious ritual: "If my body belonged to the Lord, I was not following the design of the Designer … "I was living in a way that made my body unfit as a temple where He might live. It was not only unhealthy. It was sinful." Americans tend to be religious, and we also tend to be fat, so maybe turning dieting into a spiritual quest is not such a good idea. Even though eating too much is normally the stuff of sin –a sin with its own special name, gluttony– we can try to turn it into a virtue with some infusion of gourmet values. That's what Mireille Guiliano tries to do with her book "French Women Don't Get Fat." In this theory, we're fat because of our American attitude toward food. Instead of fearing the sin of overeating and atoning with dieting, we should, like the thin Frenchwoman, eat a joyous array of delectable, elegant foods. In fact, why don't you start seeing yourself as sinful because you fail to appreciate the beauty of life – you lack the French joie de vivre? But here's Jessica Siegel to shoot down the French woman theory. It's not the food, she says, it's all that smoking. The French are thin because they've embraced the devil tobacco. We in America have sworn off the smoking sin. We have made our bodies a temple, Governor Huckabee. A fat temple. msnbc.msn.com