The American Spectator

Michael Fumento needs to stick to his war reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. He is becoming, like some other conservatives that should know better, a nag. Millions of Americans have obviously decided that the elite and the nags cost them their cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, but they are not going to do the same thing with their food. Oh, and heaven help you if you should sample an adult beverage or two. Nag, nag, nag!

I have noticed that thin people are ever so quick to take offense, to take umbrage, to find things to complain about, and to generally walk around with a chip on their shoulders constantly. I have pretty much decided that it is because they are hungry all the time. Laura Ingraham becomes a complete shrew when the subject turns to people that are not as thin as she thinks the population ought to be. I think she should put on 20 lbs to look healthy.

Now, I am not defending folks that are morbidly obese and who stuff their faces with high fat junk food at the drop of a hat. I do, however, insist that there are some relatively smaller number of folks that have physical problems that cause them to put on the pounds. Those who take several of the medications for diabetes find that said medications cause weight gain, the very thing that a diabetic is constantly fighting. My own workout schedule should have slimmed me down to a more societally acceptable size a long time ago. My diabetes medication, however, makes shedding the pounds almost impossible, and unfortunately, my genetic history for many generations is heavily populated with diabetics. I call it my family disease.

While folks like Michael Fumento and Laura Ingraham are reciting their statistics and studies in support of thinness, I keep thinking of the pictures of the wonderfully thin folks that were liberated from the German concentration camps, and who managed to survive the death marches and internment by the Japanese. I think of the movement afoot to save our modern society’s young girls by banning or restricting the “zero” sized fashion models.

Speaking of fashion, isn’t it odd that it is no longer fashionable to make note of the folks that are anorexic or bulimic? It is no longer fashionable in the entertainment world to look anything but severely undernourished. My heavens, but Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and many more would be considered overweight today.

I would rather that I and most in society would die at 75 to 85 and have enjoyed a relatively happy life, then to see folks live until 100 as dried up, unpleasant, prunes that are a complete chore to have to be around. My medical/genetic condition may have caused me to significantly alter my diet, but I still remember what comfort food is and what it tastes like, and I still remember how to be pleasant around folks and not be a nag, unless of course you are a liberal, in which case I don’t need to be around you anyway. I would suggest that the health/weight nags among us spend a little more time looking in the mirror and correcting what they see there, and leave me to try correcting what is not optimum in my own life.

p>No one likes a nag, and there are a whole bunch of once married but now single elderly men and women that can attest to that idiom. br> — Ken Shreve br> P.S. My dogs don’t mind my weight, and I trust their judgment about people. /p>