[dba-Tech] Over-eating and Gaining Weight and Other Issues

I listened with astonishment and disbelief at your piece about over-eating
and gaining weight. I am 60 years old. When I was 16 I weighed 140 lb and
currently I weigh 140 lb. There was a brief spell in which I tried to gain
weight (to beef up for the hot girls in university), eating steak and eggs
for breakfast every day for a couple of months, and made it to 160 lb, then
quit the diet and promptly dropped back to 140. The increase in weight did
not affect the laid-frequency, which I eventually concluded was due to my
propensity to be a sphincter.

Mind you, I don't eat any kind of sweets -- not cookies nor cake nor
flavoured yogurt nor ice cream or pudding or anything like that. I don't
sugar my coffee or tea. I do eat lots of fruit and very little meat, and a
fair amount of fish, and I do bicycle frequently (not frequently enough, I
confess, but that's because in the snow it's tough).

I am most definitely not recommending my lifestyle as a model. God knows
I've made numerous mistakes. I'm just wondering how it happens that a person
puts on 20 lb and doesn't think something is wrong? Except for that brief
protein-injection spurt that I went through 30 years ago, my weight has
remained constant since I was 16. I just weighed myself and I'm exactly 140
-- which is what I weighed when I was 16 years old.

Several conclusions ensue:

The number of books you read or write has no effect upon your body-weight.
The number of lovers you have has no effect upon your body-weight.
The number of sonatas you have memorized has no effect upon your
body-weight.

About the other side of this question, I cannot propose many theories. A
few, to be sure:

Don't eat sweets.
Don't frequent McDonald's and its ilk.
Don't drive less than five blocks or take an elevator less than five floors.

These are not exhaustive lists. I invite contributions to both.

But I do wish to raise a few questions. Given that the battle against
cigarettes has essentially been won, then should where should we direct our
energies?

1. Should we ban junk food and soft-drink machines from schools? Make what
is available entirely nutritious and non-damaging, and educate the kids why
this is so?
2. Surtax everyone deemed overweight on the health-care payment system
(given that they are demonstrably observed to cause more care than those who
are not)?
3. Surtax the purchase of any vehicle that is incapable of 50 mpg with a
penalty of say $5000? And if not, why not?
4. Ban sugar-coated cereals, which are entirely directed at your kids?
Cereal corporations, not to mention snack corporations, are entirely devoted
to hooking kids on sugar. Should this practice be regarded as just another
form of crack sales?
5. Give every current smoker a tax benefit for proving s/he has quit? This
is readily testable, and anyone caught cheating would pay a price.
6. Should we move to a musical concept in which you do not own a physical
copy of any given title, but instead have the (purchase-able) right to
listen to anything anytime anywhere? (This approach would eliminate large
amounts of plastic being shipped from here to there, and also the
counterfeiting that occurs in certain countries.)

I could go on, but that will do for a start. These questions, IMO, are
important, and to be sure, they directly impact upon the dba-Tech world, so
I don't think this is off-topic.