The Health Institute of Nutrition

Fat People Make Poor Genetic Choices

Thinspeak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:45:09 +0000

BBC News: “For Obese, Mistakes Begin At Conception”

Article Highlights:

In a study of 5,000 pairs of twins, scientists discovered that up to 77% of the poor moral decisions made that make people fat may be due to the genes they chose to be born with.
The fact that inalterable genetics account for a vastly higher percentage of a person’s weight than any other factor such as environment or lifestyle is no excuse for the obese to stop spending their lives trying to lose weight and keep it off because, like, it isn’t.
Not yet confirmed that “evil” twin is more likely to be fat.

Steps To Take

Pick better parents.
Examine your genes under an electron microscope. Use a centrifuge to separate out the heaviest ones and discard them.
To maximize your odds of beneficial genetic mutation, try to be bitten by something both skinny and radioactive.
If all else fails, consider reincarnation as a viable form of weight loss.

Mail Slot: Fat People Steal Happiness

Thinspeak — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:43:32 +0000

Self-Esteem Is Not For Everybody

Dear Institute:

A year ago, I lost a lot of weight. I already know that I’m not going to be one of those rare 98% of people who can’t keep it off for more than five years, either, because I was able to keep it off for one year and now I just have to do that four more times. That’s the same way I figured out I could hold my breath underwater for five minutes if I really needed to.

Anyway, though, the problem I’m having… well, this is embarrassing. The problem I’m having is that I’m having problems.

I am 5′6″, I weigh 115 pounds, and my life is not perfect. I worked so hard to lose weight and I’m still working hard to keep it off. Aren’t I entitled to something for that? Yeah, OK, when I first lost the weight I felt great and it seemed like I got more attention from men on the street, but that didn’t translate to finding my soul mate and having the dream wedding that completes my life. I also got more compliments around the office but my career never really took off, either. What gives?

The worst part is I’m not feeling particularly happy. When I was fat, alone, and stuck in a dead-end job, I always knew that if I could just lose weight that I wouldn’t care about the other things. Well, I lost the weight and I still care, for some reason.

Worse, I see fat people all around me who are happy. Not just with their size, but with their whole lot in life. They love their jobs, they love their homes, they love themselves, they love the husbands and wives they claim to somehow have attracted.

This is what I really want to know, Institute. If I’m the one who did all this work, why do they get to be happy and not me? Do I need to lose more weight?

-Sadly Lacking in Waukegan

Dear Sadly

We feel for you. We truly do. While we hasten to point out that you could stand to lose more weight, as your current BMI is 1/10th of a point over the low end of the normal range, we regret very much to tell you that this alone will not make you any happier. What you’re feeling is a sign of the times, unfortunately. You may consider yourself another casualty of the “fat acceptance” movement.

When you skip lunch to go to the gym, you should feel awesome. You should feel incredible. The great feeling you get for making the right decision should last all afternoon and into the evening.

Yet it doesn’t, does it? In fact, you probably regret the decision within minutes of making it and then feel terrible for the rest of the day.

And there are fat people—perhaps in your office, even—who will have a hot dog for lunch or a slice of cheesecake for dessert, and instead of feeling lingering guilt with every bite they eat… instead of ordering a second round of everything to try to fill some invisible void and then feeling bloated and gross all afternoon… instead of obsessing the whole time about what they look like and what passersby must think of them… they simply enjoy their meal for what it is and then go on with their day!

How can this happen?

It’s tragically simple. You see, happiness is what is known in scienterrific circles as a “zero-sum game”. This means there is only so much of it to go around. The happier other people are allowed to be, the less happiness there is left for you.

When you were fat, this lack of happiness was not a problem for you in particular, but now that you are thin and entitled to greater happiness you’re running into a situation where the level of happiness you’ve earned is simply not available.

Past generations were able to successfully manage the supply of happiness by severely restricting access to it based on a variety of criteria. Race, sex, religion, socio-economic class, sexual orientation—all aspects of a person’s life, in other words—were all carefully examined in order to determine how much or how little happiness a person would be allowed to accrue. These factors still come to bear, but throughout the last century they have all fallen out of favor to varying degrees.

That sort of social progress is laudable, we suppose, but it leaves us with the basic problem of too many people and not enough happiness to go around.

Fortunately, the obesity epidemic provided us with a simple and obvious solution to the conundrum: if fat people are miserable, then thin people can afford to be happy. And unlike the other forms of happiness rationing that were popular in the past, this one is based on actual merit. Everybody knows that thin people deserve to be happy, just as they know that fat people deserve to be miserable as their punishment for choosing to be fat.

The new system worked very well for years, but it has been breaking down recently. Why? Because fat people—being naturally lazy—have stopped keeping up their side of the bargain. They’ve stopped feeling miserable. They’ve started feeling happy. Since they have not done the arduous work that you and every other thin person has obviously done, this is the same as stealing.

The solution is obvious. If you want to feel happier with your own life, the solution is not to lose more weight… it’s to make fat people fell less happy with their lives. Cut a fat person down today! There are many ways to do this. You can stare at them, or even point. You can ask them questions about their health and eating habits. You can encourage your leglislators to score political points by proposing outlandish laws that will marginalize them even further. Go nuts. There’s no wrong way to do this. You don’t have to feel guilty about it. Remember, they stole your happiness in the first place.

You’ll know that you’ve succeeded when you feel happy with yourself and secure with your place in life*. If you make a lot of other people feel miserable and still aren’t happy, it only means you aren’t trying hard enough.

*Results not typical.

Good Facts: The Cost of Obesity

Thinspeak — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:46:40 +0000

Recently, many in the embattled anti-fat community have felt their oppression rights particularly oppressed by the findings coming from a Dutch study on the true cost of obesity. This study suggests, using little more than logic and mathematics, that as obese people are likely to die younger and faster than thin people, they end up saving our health systems money.

At first blush, this seems pretty ironclad. After all, everybody knows that obese people are more likely to die than thin people, period. According to that criterion, this study’s conclusion would seem to be a good fact.

For the two other “good fact” criteria, however, things get a little bit murkier. It is definitely fair that fat people die sooner than thin people, but it is not fair for a thin and obviously healthy person to cost the system more in healthcare over the cost of his thin lifetime.

Most importantly, it is not convenient. If fat people don’t cost the system more, that imperils the ability of everybody from politicians to insurers to the little (i.e., thin) guy on the street to make sweeping claims. It calls into question our God-given right—enshrined, we’re fairly certain, somewhere in the Constitution*—to yell at fat people about how much they’re costing us in taxes and health insurance premiums. This in turn limits our ability to dictate how they must live their lives.

These findings, in short, constitute a very, very bad fact, indeed.

So how are we to interpret this flawed study, then? Is there nothing useful to take away from it? As it happens, it does contain some invaluable insight for our modern society, if we recall another recent study which determined that “body image” had a more direct effect on mortality than body size.

You see, fat people who are die early are the ones with a fitting lack of self-esteem. The ones who stubbornly insist on loving themselves just the way they are may live longer, using up money and valuable resources in their old age that would otherwise be available for treating more deserving thin patients.

Thus, the best fact we can draw from this study can be expressed as this:

Fat people who feel good about themselves cost the health care system billions of dollars.

Remember that, the next time you feel like not pointing out a fat person’s obvious shortcomings. When fat people die an early death, everybody wins.

*We think it might be somewhere near the part about interstate commerce.

Follow-Up

In a closer examination of the study, the Institute discovered some serious and obvious problems with its methodology.

First, it is important to understand that the Dutch live in Denmark or some place, which is not even part of America.

Second, it must be realized that Denmark, also known as “The Lesser Antilles”, uses the metric system of measurement. The metric system is as un-scienterrific a system of measurement as has ever been devised. Whereas reputable scienterrific researchification institutes such as THIN use “pounds” to measure weight, the metric system uses “grams”.

The “gram”, it transpires, is not actually a unit of weight but is instead a unit of mass. Scienterrifically speaking, the difference between the two is as simple as it is profound: large amounts of weight are bad and everybody knows it. The same cannot yet be said for mass. You might well wonder why we as a society have spent years assigning moral values to the property of weight if so-called “Dutch scientists” aren’t even going to bother to measure it.

Cows Suffer Because You’re Fat

Thinspeak — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:34:50 +0000

Salon Book Review: “Bitch Gives Fat Women Everywhere The Benefit Of Eating Disorder, Guilt”

Article Highlights:

Skinny Bitch, a highly scienterrific weight-loss plan written by actual vegans, explains how everything you like makes you fat because it cuts the beaks off live chickens.
This hot new diet book functions as a powerful “guilt supplement” by making fat women complicit in the rape of the universal mother, Our Planet Earth.
Helpful advice like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore” allow fat women not gifted with a weight-loss-enabling eating disorder to experience the benefits of ringing condemnation running through their heads.
Readers report appreciable loss of self-esteem in even the first week of following the book’s plan.
Reviewer Julie Klausner raves: “Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model and a former modeling agent putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong.”
Contains no actual weight loss tips.

Steps To Take

Stop killing baby animals for fun, you fat jerk.

Some Good Facts About Dieting

Thinspeak — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 19:30:14 +0000

We at the Institute apologize for the lack of an update yesterday. Though, being that we are thin, we can expect you will have inferred that this was because we were so busy and not because we were lazy.

We are still very thin and very busy today, but showing the effective time-management skills that allow thin people to go to the gym every day and cook nutritious meals from whole foods like our ancestors did*, we’ve managed to come up with three highly good facts to share with you.

The first two facts have come about primarily as a result of highly scienteriffic analysis of data gleaned from this site:

It is never safe to lose more than about one and a half pounds per week. Unless you’re overweight, of course. Since everybody knows it is always healthier to be thin than it is to be fat, no amount of weight loss can possibly be unhealthy if it moves you from fatter to thinner. Moreover, not only will any amount of weight loss be healthy, no amount will be enough unless it ends in thinness. If you drop fifty pounds in a couple months and are still fat, you’ve endangered your health for no reason if you stop. If you do the same thing and are now thin, you’re clearly in perfect health.
Anorexia nervosa is a heart-breaking disorder which results in the death of hundreds of thin girls a year. It is, however, a perfectly valid dieting technique if you’re overweight. Just remember to stop being so anorexic when you reach your target weight. Try not to recover so completely that you begin to regain weight; just enough that you don’t die. Nothing is more tragic than the loss of a person with a societally acceptable body.

And, inspired bythis site:

Though many people compare dieting to starvation, the fact is they couldn’t be less similar. In a World War II era study of the effects of starvation, participants were given 1600 calories a day. Many diets will restrict calories to 1400, 1200, or even 800 a day in order to prompt weight loss and get past plateaus. See the difference? Dieting isn’t just like starvation… it’s better.

*Results not typical.

Good Facts: Body Mass Index

Thinspeak — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:23:42 +0000

The BMI, or Body Mass Index, is an oft-misunderstood concept in the scienterrific community.

The number one misconception we must address about the BMI is the mistaken notion that this simple number somehow determines how much an individual is worth as a person, his or her value to society, and overall fitness as a human being.

This is simply not true, and we must do everything that we can to banish this all-prevailing myth from our consciousness if we are to understand the BMI and how to apply it correctly.

What it actually measures is how little an individual is worth.

Higher is bad, people.

Now that this has been established, let’s talk about some facts.

It is by no means an exaggeration to say that the BMI represents the single greatest leap forward for the art of scienterrific diagnostication since the invention of phrenology. Future generations will speak of it in the same tones as they will the theory of four humours.

With just two statistics—height and weight—a physician can determine who is healthy and who is not. Everything about you as an individual—your exercise habits, eating patterns, lifestyle, and general moral rectitude—is laid bare with a single table.

It works like this: imagine for a moment that you are 5′10″ and weigh 173 pounds. You have a Body Mass Index of 24.9, which falls within the normal range. Good! Now imagine instead that you weigh 174 pounds. At a Body Mass Index of 25, you are overweight. Thus, you are an unsightly burden on society, you lazy, stupid cow. You are also going to die of complications from diabetes and heart disease.

God help you* if you weigh 209 pounds. At a BMI of 30, you are obese, and little better than a criminal.

The value of such a useful tool for sorting people should be readily apparent to everybody, but there are a lot of bad facts about the BMI out there. They include the following:

The ranges for each category are arbitrary and in fact have been changed in the recent past.
The BMI is a poor indicator of overall health.
As it measures mass rather than composition, it makes no allowance for muscle, which is heavier than fat. Thus, many professional athletes are “obese” according to the BMI.

While each of these “facts” may be “true” on a strictly empirical level, they are not convenient or fair, and they conflict with what we already know to be true. Thus, they should be ignored. Of course, it’s good to have a strategy to deal with them. Here’s a specific rebuttal for each one:

Uh, so?
No… no. It isn’t. No.
Are you saying that athletes aren’t healthy? Because if you are, then you’re crazy.

Also, keep in mind this all-purpose refutation:

You’re just saying that because you’re fat

This one is key. It doesn’t matter how true something is if somebody’s only saying it because they’re fat.

Now, even armed with these rebuttals, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re faced with somebody armed with so many bad facts that you cannot find a way to avoid conceding that the BMI is flawed.

If this happens, do not panic. Simply say the following:

“But I think we can all agree that a BMI of (25/27/30) is not healthy.”

It does not matter what has just been said or what you’ve previously admitted… since you agreed with something, the only reasonable thing for your BMI-bashing opponent to do in this case is agree with you in turn.

It’s as simple as that.

*Note: God does not actually help fat people.

Wyclef Jean Films Safety P.S.A.

Thinspeak — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:04:59 +0000

This past past Super Bowl weekend, singer and health advocate Wyclef Jean took time out of his busy schedule of to make a public service announcement warning audiences about the dangers of Fat Girl Related Stage Collapse Syndrome (FGRSCS).

In layman’s terms, FGRSCS is when a stage collapses as an inevitable result of fat girls being allowed to “shake their thangs” upon it. FGRSCS is a very real condition as evidenced by the fact that people talk about it all the time, and yet not one study has been done on how widespread it is and the media is slow to report on the deaths that it causes.

However, it is far from the only danger of fat-girl-related-thang-shaking. Other hazards include:

Dangerously elevated levels of self-esteem in the thang-shakers.
Uncomfortable questions regarding the presumed fitness level of fat girls who—contrary to all scienterrific evidence—are able to shake their thangs for a sustained period of time.
Confusion over aesthetics and physical attraction arising from the attention said thang-shaking attracts.

In short, when fat girls are allowed to dance on a stage—or in public, or at all—they can end up feeling dangerously sexy, in clear defiance of literally decades of evolutionary biology which tells us that only thin girls may be healthy, beautiful, and fertile.

We at the Institute take our hats off to Wyclef Jean for doing his part to keep America’s fat girls in their place… and off the stage. We must do what we can to see that he receives proper recognition for his leadership.

Steps To Take

Drop Wyclef’s label, Columbia Records, a line to let them know how much you appreciate his taking a stance on this subject.
When you see a Wyclef Jean album on the shelves, remember that nothing sends a clear message like dollars and cents.

Dr. J Asks: Do Obese Litter More?

Thinspeak — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:00:03 +0000

Dr. J, a regular contributor at CalorieLabs.com, the same site which broke the important news stories that Disney wants your kids to grow up fat and that you can join MediFast NOW and get two weeks of MediFast food free, poses an interesting question in a recent post:

Do obese people litter more?

The answer, of course, is yes.

In a highly scienterrific research program, Dr. J regularly jogged along the side of a road. While doing so, he noticed that most of the non-cigarette-related litter seemed to come from fast food restaurants. Little or none of the roadside waste was found to consist of nutritious homecooked meals or food containers from the drive-up windows of organic health food stores or four-star restaurants.

Scienterrifically speaking, everybody knows that fat people eat nothing but fast food and that eating fast food will, in fact, make you fat. Ergo, fast food is only eaten by fat people*.

Therefore, the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the amount of fast-food-related roadside litter is that fat people hate the environment as much as they hate themselves.

*The Institute stresses that if you do see a thin person eating fast food, you should conclude from their ongoing thinness that they must not do it very often and that they make it up at the gym.

Adequate Nutrition: Making Kids Fat?

Thinspeak — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 09:10:18 +0000

The Miami Herald reports “Broward County School Kids Not Given Insufficient Enough Food”

Article Highlights:

Despite progressive lunch programs which provide on average between 85 and 207 fewer calories than the USDA dietary guidelines currently require, there are still students in Broward County who are fat.
With lower calorie levels failing to curb weight gain, the obvious solution is for the USDA to lower the calorie requirements.
Until then, school officials may actually be forced to continue providing food to growing children and even encourage them to eat more.

Steps To Take

Contact your childrens’ school and ask if your children are being given enough to eat. If so, demand they be given less.
Encourage your child to skip lunch every once in a while, “just in case.” Set aside time to share tips for avoiding hunger pangs and lightheadedness.
School districts typically count calories by the amount of food on lunchroom trays, not the amount eaten. Suggest your child help out by taking extra servings and then throwing them away when nobody is looking.

Mail Slot: Elevators Are A Privilege

Thinspeak — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:02:59 +0000

Elevator Etiquette

Dear Institute:

I live in a hi-rise apartment building which has an elevator as well as stairs. I mention the stairs because apparently nobody ever told one of my fat neighbors about them. I got in the elevator to get up to my floor, and this huge guy gets in right behind me, like he’s never even heard of stairs, or something.

His arms were just full of groceries, too. I couldn’t see in the bags, but I just knew it was junk food and candy, because he’s fat. The sad thing is he had some stalks of celery sticking out of the top, like some kind of sad camouflage.

I wanted to tell him he’s not fooling anybody, but I was trying hard not to look at him. Anyway, my apartment was just on the second floor, so at least I didn’t have to put up with him for long.

What I’m wondering is, should I have said something about the stairs to him?

-Flatly Outraged in NY

Dear Flatly:

Yes, you should have. Elevator use is not a right, but a privilege. A “thin privilege”, if you will, which must be paid for through such things as a regular exercise program which anybody can plainly see you engage in just by looking at your body size.

As a thin person, you have obviously “paid your dues”, and so you may feel free to engage in the following activities without guilt or consequences:

Using elevators, escalators, electric scooters, or (if required) wheelchairs.
Driving to each individual store in a strip mall instead of walking from one to the next.
Appearing in public in revealing clothing.
Having a fulfilling, high-paying career and an active sex life.*
Eating ice cream, candy, fast food, and other such “treats.”
Not actually exercising.

According to the unspoken social contract, nobody will question your right to do these things, though any fat person who does will be greeted with suspicion and shame.

Unlike you, your upstairs neighbor has obviously not done anythiing to earn such privileges as elevator use. Here’s what you should do, should the same situation arise again:

Consider the possibility that he may in fact not be aware of the existence of stairs. Ask him: “Haven’t you ever heard of stairs?” If he answers in the negative, explain the concept to him, and—on the off chance that you actually know where they’re located—give him detailed directions.
If it turns out that he does, in fact, know of stairs, then it may be that he has the wrong idea about them. Put his mind at rest like so: “Hey, buddy… it won’t kill you to take the stairs every once in a while, you know.”
If he remains unconvinced, inform him that “Stairs won’t kill you, but a heart attack will.” Chances are that he is unaware of the current scienterrific thought which states that fat people die of heart attacks, or else he would have stopped being fat.

There are further steps which you could take, but as you’ve stated your apartment is only one floor up, this is probably as far as you’ll be able to get. Regardless, though, pat yourself on the back and treat yourself to your favorite snack as you kick back and relax in the comfort of your apartment.

You’re thin.

You’ve earned it.

*Results not typical