I'll take the calorie counts, easy on the nanny statism, please

I know I'm fat. Not pleasingly plump, not extra padding, just plain, ugly, disgusting fat. The battle of the bulge has been going on for nigh on eighteen years, ever since I left working at a shoe store and found myself at a love affair with a computer and sedentary living. My doctor and I still can't understand why my blood sugar and cholesterol are so outstanding, but the dirty zone is the old gullet. Once in awhile, I hear hushed English voices trying to determine if I'm the second pregnant man in the world (or the first authentic pregnant man), but rest assured, you will all be the first to know if that gut was either a ectotopic newborn or just my huge stomach. I'm definitely not proud of it.

However, parents have been sort of looking the other way. They're too busy holding two jobs, watching their 401(k) dwindle to nothing, and basically surviving on the smell of an oily rag. A trip to McDonalds is Tavern on the Green, so why not fill their cherubs with stuff that will keep them happy while they try to beat the debt collector?

The things I've noticed in my gustational journeys are many. The more I think about it, though, I eat because (a) I'm hungry, (b) I'm bored, (c) things ain't going well in Cleary Squared land, (d) it's there.

What I've noticed in my eating habits is as follows.

- A few months ago, I went to Cambridgeside to grab some dinner. (I've been learning to eat at 5:00 because if I eat later, I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, leaching off that meatloaf or cheeseburger pie.) Taco Bell is one of the best places to get Mexican food, even though Qdoba and Chipotle make theirs much fresher. I couldn't get near the place, or even the register. Couldn't have been the 79, 89 or 99 cent taco/burrito specials, couldn't it? Cheap food = popular food, and no wonder - BK's value meals were clocking in at $7 minimum! And places like Sakkio (great chicken teriyaki) were also busy as beavers as they had $4.99 chicken teryiaki with maki rolls! The other specialty shops, however, were bare. The Indian shop hardly had a person there, as well as the Thai place and the mini-bistrots.

I think what bothers the health scolds is that when people don't have a lot of money, they're going to see what they can get for as little as possible - both monetarily and nutritionally. They can't swing over to Souper Salad or visit the local vegetarian place and hope that $5 will fill their tummies, when a single bowl of mugilltawany soup is $4.99 before taxes. If these health scolds want to introduce healthier foods to the public, bring down the exorbitant prices of healthy foods! Is it too much to say, "to hell with the bottom line and profits...let's make healthy food cheap!" This includes all of the trendy food items like organics and fair trade items - which are marked up considerably over plain Jane foods. I don't care if my blue corn chips came from an labor faction in Ecuador - all I want is affordable (and delicious!) food.

- I don't like Weight Watchers. Period. Most of the leaders are very nice, and have lost anywhere between 60 and 100 pounds. Weigh-ins I liked, because it was in front of the nice leader instead of my doctor, who keeps on (sarcastically) suggesting stomach surgery. The points system is pretty neat and scientific. The culture of meetings every single second, however, are the deal breaker. Weight Watchers is food's version of AA-I'm overweight, not injecting myself with 98% pure heroin and selling my kids to feed my habit. If my weakness is food, wouldn't a more rounded program of (a) one-on-one with a qualified nutritionist, (b) one-on-one with a qualified trainer, and (c) one-on-one with a qualified psychologist to dig deep down and figure out why I'm gaining all this weight? Forget all the fad crap, like Hydroxywhizbang and Dr. Lala's Cabbage and Lemongrass 30-day fast. I'd like to lose the weight and keep my sanity, thanks.

- Health eugenics - raising a more perfect human race through nutrition - is a dangerous thing. Self-righteousness is even more so, as the assumption that Your Way should be Everyone's Way is not merely arrogant, it's dead wrong. For every vegan (militant, obnoxious, or just a fussy pain in the ass) who throws a fit every time someone dares to bring in a hamburger, there is a long-time practicing vegetarian who can whip up a 100% vegetarian meal that looks like the real meat-laden McCoy and no one ever suspects a thing, and will not be bothered in the least if you drink skim milk in their presence. The way to introduce healthy eating and avoiding obesity is not to jam it down people's throats - although that hasn't stopped politicians from hiking cigarette taxes through the wazoo while redistributing that money through everything else but health. Sure, I don't mind calorie counts on the menus, and I hardly notice the missing trans fats. (It's a nice test in math to see if you can make a filling meal for under 500 calories.) When the busybodies (pardon me, the "concerned") delve into the holy nonsense of taxing sodas and pulling out vending machines because Heaven forfend there's a molecule of trans fat in it, that's when people get turned off into getting healthy, and do their best to sneak around it. Hey, prohibition really worked for Al Capone, didn't it?

The only person, believe it or not, who gets the health thing right is Richard Simmons. Kids are so overprotected and hovered over these days is that they don't get to run around and get the pent-up energy out of their systems - yet when these same kids get fat, the administrators and teachers panic and overcompensate. The best solution for this is bringing back physical education, something I give huge support to (even though back at Latin Academy, we had a huge floor that passed for "gym".) You get kids who get exercise and maintain a healthy life, and teachers get more attentive kids. Not a bad deal.