New Zealand announces ‘Big Belly Day’. A world first, a day where Kiwis can acknowledge and reflect on that sad mental condition: Obesity.

I am at the point in my life I sometimes need glasses to read things.

Not all the time, at night mostly.

Being a miserable prick I have a pair of $5 glasses to assist where necessary.

In the mornings my eyesight is at its clearest.  

However this morning I had to focus three times to re-confirm the headlines in front of me on the computer screen: Third of Kiwis'need to kick food addiction'

WTF ‘Food is Addictive’?

Of cause it’s bloody addictive.

We’d all be dead if it wasn’t.

Evidently smoking, gambling and drug use are ‘so-90’s’ and grown unfashionable.

According to Christchurch-based Professor Doug Sellman the new battleground in human addictive products is the very thing that sustains us all.  

Food lures 1 in 3 humans into a destructive path, leading to health problems and premature death.  

Sellman even places the dangers of food alongside methamphetamines.

"Like people with methamphetamine, you don't get the shaking, but it's the craving, feeling deprived and really needing it. It's like they need those particular foods as if their lives depended on it. But they don't; they've got their wires crossed.”

“Like drug addictions, people addicted to food needed increasingly large ‘hits’ to get their daily fix.

"Even though they know it's bad for them they still just feel this drive to eat."

What a load of crap.

Firstly when he says these new-age addicts need ‘hits’: it is hits of Coke not water, pizza and not a salad.

They may-over eat but so do triathletes and our Olympic rowers etc. 

Then we need to place our lateral thing-caps on and ask…..

- Are there now signs affixed to the local bakery warning any fatty after a nocturnal  fix 'No Cream Buns Kept Here at Night'?

- Do we see obese people embezzling their relatives, work places to get more money to spend at ‘All you can Eat for $20’ Restaurants?

- Have you encountered large groups of dishevelled fat people hanging around KFC looking for scraps?

- Do fat people enter a life of prostitution so they can afford Belgium chocolates?    

- Do people live on the streets after wasting their lives away on Fish N’ Chips?

- Is the professor’s genomic affliction rare amongst the peoples of Sub Saharan Africa?  

In its base form: food is simply energy.

Humans need energy to live and function.

Some humans consume too much energy.

They become fat due to this excess energy.

Faced with this situation the over-weight then have two clear, accessible courses of action to normalise their weight (a.) consume less energy (b.) burn-off excess energy through exercise.

Obese people choose not to take these options of their own volition.

It is hard to get fit, re-focus oneself to show some self-control, change years of a life-style.  

It’s far, far easier to continue to blob out in the couch stuffing your gob with crap food.

What Professor Sellman is doing is allowing millions of Kiwi’s to abdicate self-responsibility.

Make them think it’s all down to their genes that made them obese and not years of poor health choices.  

Create an unwarranted victim mentality.

But it’s not that easy per Sellman, it’s actually not a physical craving.    

“it's exactly the same as drug and alcohol addiction. You just have this urge, even though you know you are not supposed to eat . . . and once you start you can't stop, you just keep eating and eating. It's not just a physical problem, it's mental."

Where I see ‘mental’ I read: weak-willed.  

When I see the the white-line in the middle of the road I know not to cross it. 

In the same article the spokeswoman for Overeaters Anonymous backed-up Sellmens claims, saying ‘food was irresistible’ as she ate her second sausage-roll for morning tea, washing it  down with a 1.5 of Pepsi.   

BTW I tried googling an Overeaters Anonymous group in Mogadishu but came-up short.    

And what is Sellman panacea to assist these poor folk in our midst who can’t be bothered going for a walk at night or resisting a second helping of desert, due to their brains being wired the wrong way?  

"The only effective way for an individual [to conquer their addiction] now is surgery”

Great let’s bankrupt the country.  

Let’s close down our cancer wards and have them full (pun intended) of far more deserving stomach-stapling patients.  

Poor things, I am in tears as I write this.

Being struck-down with debilitating disease like obesity that see’s victims sitting around watching hours of T.V and agonisingly forced to eat take-aways for breakfast, lunch and dinner must be share torture.     

Remarkably according to Sellman getting obese is in effect share torture and I am simply misinformed, an unsympathetic sod (the later is true)    

You and I should adopt the Professors sycophantic world view on obesity and therefore by rights come to the same conclusion as his research: 

Example 1: Mahe Drysdale (Single Skull Olympic Gold Medalist in London) will be 20 stone by this time next year with all the food his body craves.  

Example 2: Fat Kids are doomed to die prematurely, suffer ill-health unless they get a gastric bypass.     

Let’s therefore treat Professor Sellmans ascertains with the severity they pose and prioritise health care in New Zealand. Let Kiwi women give birth at home, on footpaths if necessary so that the mentally impinged obese can get the hospital treatment Sellman thinks they richly, as in the food they eat, deserve.

Sellman and Fatties Anonymous won’t rest until there’s street collectors on every corner chasing money for their worthwhile cause.  

An annual Fat-Belly Day!

A ten dollar donation will pay for one staple.

What a f#cking joke!

And we pay professionals to come-up with this contemptible load of horse droppings?!

The complete abdication of individual responsibility is now hoisted on to society as a whole.   

The vast majority of obese people are victims of their own actions, not their genes.   

Professor Sellman should pin the lyrics of this Tim Minchin song above his desk and recite them three times daily.