Now some philosophy. Don't you want to have done something difficult in your life? It may seem a rather small thing to be proud of, if you are a 5'3" female, say, and have managed to stay at 110 pounds for five years, ten years, twenty years. Especially when there are women 5'3" tall, weighing 110 pounds, who never thought about what they ate in their lives. What counts is that it's hard for you. If you can't take satisfaction in knowing how hard it is to do something difficult, and in having done it, then forget it.
I'm not begging you to do this. I'm just writing the first chapter of a book on life and what it all means, and it turns out that what clutters the unexamined life is, you guessed it: fat. Everybody in America relates to fat these days. The worry about being overweight is largely a pseudo-fret, as I have shown, but there is something under it. Somebody out there is putting a lot of pressure on us to lose weight. If this diet appeals to you, try it. Whether you do or not, keep reading about it. It's inspirational. And it has a certain form we can use.
If you succeed, you will be entirely different from the usual American dieter. The norm is up and down, up and down. These people have a lot of fun with their ostentatious periodic diets. Diet talk fills up space at American cocktail parties, and that's helpful. You can tell people all about your diet over white wine, skimmed-milk cheese, and wheat thins.
There is a qualitative difference between what I'm offering and the usual diet game. How likely do I think it is that many people will take me up on this challenge? Not very likely. Not many people. That doesn't matter. There will be a few. Like world-class marathon running, this is not the sort of thing that many people are going to go for. But it is worth doing, just for the doing of it. Is it you?
Before you answer, let's consider another question. What does fat mean in America today? Throughout history a fat baby has been a healthy baby. Fat men were rich, and fat women sexy. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, but the Christian middle class in Europe and America has overwhelmingly outweighed any other class one-for-one ever since the industrial revolution. Walk through the shopping centers and restaurants of middle America today. The men have bellies like barrels, the women arms like hams. They eat, eat, and eat. Where can you see their like? Women in Greece. Men in Germany. These are big people. Their backsides come one to a bushel, and not one in a hundred of them has read a book on losing weight. For the masses, for the proletariat, for the workers and bourgeoisie, fat means affluence. Fat people are made fun of on television, but the real hee-haws are for people on diets. It stands to reason: if you can afford it, you would be a fool not to eat good.
Who, then, are the millions who read diet books? Of what class? Movie stars? Jet setters? The rich, powerful, and visible? Some, but mostly the same middle classes, city folk. Still, dieters crosscut all income brackets and geographical boundaries. What's the matter with them?
They can't all be frightened by scare tactics used by those in the diet and health-food industries who profit from this obsession with fat. Look how many Americans have successfully stopped smoking. These are people running scared. Now consider how many people manage to change their lives in a similarly drastic fashion by losing weight and keeping it off. Very few. Is maintaining a diet any more of a change of life than stopping smoking, any more difficult? You wouldn't think so, but count your friends. A lot more of them have successfully quit smoking than have kept off weight. I don't think many of them take their dieting seriously. They are not running scared.
Fat does have a bad press, though. Some even say that fat equals death. They exaggerate. Of course, extra weight does strain the system. Your muscles and organs have to work harder when there is all that fat to maintain and carry around. A strain on the heart, they say. And there are those plaques of cholesterol, packing up your blood vessels, breaking loose and clogging the bloodstream. Cholesterol has a mixed press these days. What seems to be settling out is what we knew all along: the body has to have fat, and if you don't eat cholesterol, you will manufacture it internally. People with high cholesterol counts do have heart attacks. There is a causal relation here more easily traceable than the track from that first cigarette to death from lung cancer. But you don't have to smoke. You've got to eat.
In the past, East and West, fat always meant life, fertility, beauty, health, happiness, and joy. Today you hear people saying such things as: "A fat ugly man." "She lay there like a mound of fat." "There goes old lard-ass." Yes,these do ring true. They have put across the notion that fat is ugly, which leads to the pop-psychology notion that a lot of fat is defensive. It protects shy boys and girls from having to interact as sexual beings with other girls and boys. Wives put on fat to turn off their husbands, who read Playboy (but did you ever see a skinny Bunny?). Men get fat so they won't have to fulfill their marital duties. How about fat as a sexual turnoff? It sounds good, but I doubt that it cuts the birthrate. The fact is that in times of famine, women quit ovulating. What is truly ugly and the true sign of death is emaciation.
I think this is why people often don't take fat very seriously as a threat. They recognize it as a sign of well-being. As people mature and get on in life, they just naturally get bigger. Nervous, skinny people are annoying. Even if they advance in the world, they don't seem quite to have made it. My brother Jim (a China scholar) would ask: "What's wrong with them? If they're so rich and successful, why aren't they fat?"
Yes, the good things about fat seem to be too strong for most people to resist. To resist? Isn't there something wrong in a culture where the traditional image of the good life is denied? Anybody who has to ask what it all means is in trouble. And a culture in which millions of people are alienated from fat is also in trouble.
We'll come back to this. Meanwhile, back at the fat farm ...
When someone trains for the marathon, he or she does not pay much attention to pop psychology like the above. I'll talk about running in a later chapter, but now I want simply to remark that readers who have seriously decided to fight fat have probably yawned their way through the last few paragraphs. It does not matter what fat means or has always meant, nor that one is healthier in the lower weight range than in the upper, all else being equal (which it never is, but no matter). It just does not concern the serious weight watcher that the rest of the world can get along as slobs, any more than it matters to the marathon runner that the world walks or rides.
I approve of attacking fat because it is there. This battle harms no one. You who are fighting fat, take notice, be aware. A few of us out here appreciate what you are doing. We know how hard it is. They say 95 percent of the people who lose weight gain it back, and 90 percent gain back more than they lost. If you're really worried about fat, taking it off may lead to putting more on. With those statistics, success in keeping it off has world-class potential.
Carry on.
FOOD
PHILOSOPHERS SIT AND THINK A LOT. I sat a long time in front of the typewriter trying to think if there is anything in the world that can give more lasting pleasure than good food. I think the answer is no. Descartes votes for friendship and conversation, but he always enjoyed them over a good meal. Freud says that our very dream of paradise stems from the enjoyment of sexual pleasure, and I would not deny it. Sex merits a chapter. But friendship and sexual pleasure would not last long if you didn't eat. You may think I'm making a logical blunder here. "Is not food," one of my colleagues asks, "merely fuel?" Being well nourished is a necessary condition for enjoying the pleasures of friendship and sex, but it is not a sufficient condition. Am I not confusing the dance floor with the dance?
No. This is one place (there are others) where logical analysis leads to a silly conclusion. Without good food, friendship languishes, and sex goes stale. Show me a person who does not think that good food is both the sine qua non and the well-marbled muscle of the good life, and I'll show you someone who thinks Velveeta is cheese.
Yes, I know you want to know how long you have to stay on that 900-calorie diet to reach your desired weight. Let a philosopher tell you that it will take longer than any of the other books say.
Most readers of this book are obsessed with food. Nobody who toys with the