Honestly, enough with the governing of our eating habits. If you are too daft to know what's good and bad for you, you have much larger problems than your diet or lack thereof. Did it ever occur to Michelle Obama or any of these health crusaders that perhaps I don't care to know how many calories are in a Shamrock Shake, donut, meal at a restaurant, or greasy fast food burger? Sometimes people want to splurge and eat stuff that's bad for them, can't they just enjoy it, please. The next person who feels the need to inform me about how bad Coca Cola is for me, I'm going to shake the rest of the bottle up and send a geyser of delicious, godly fizz directly into their face. Coke is perhaps the greatest beverage ever created. Focus on something else, please.
Thanks to government officials posing as over-protective parents, I now have to be uber-conscious of such trivial crap as how many calories a rushed fast-food meal contains, and feel guilty for drinking more than eight ounces of soda. We can't seem to do anything about any of our other societal ills: our lackluster economy, drug addiction, drunk driving, immigration, threats of nuclear war; why not focus on the obesity epidemic. Epidemic sounds more immediate too.
Here's an idea, do something about student loans. Except, let's call it the student loan crisis. It is a legitimate problem. Nobody from this generation is going to be buying anything even remotely soon; the majority of them are in a Draino-gargling amount of debt from student loans. According to a USA Today article: nationally, student debt has surpassed $1 Trillion, yet nobody has really said much about it.
I can't even go out to dinner and enjoy it anymore. I went to On the Border for lunch with my wife awhile ago. There is a breakdown of the caloric content of EVERYTHING on the menu. Instead of having something awesome and delicious as a special occasion, I sat there nervously scanning over the entire menu, trying to find something under 780 calories. What a drag. I couldn't help it, I ended up with a boring salad. Eeecchhh. I was going to get the Ultimate Fajita, it would have been epic. While the calorie listing had its intended effect, it was soul-crushing. After shoveling down my salad, I had the audacity to look at the dessert menu. Looking at the dessert menu, I realized the healthiest dessert is 700 extra calories. The numbers stood staring at me, as if to say "shovel it on fatty." Needless to say, I passed on the dessert. It was a cheap bill, but that wasn't my mission.
Don't get me wrong. I was never under the impression that restaurants specialized in low-calorie yet tasty cuisine. I don't expect, nor want them to. I was perfectly happy being blissfully ignorant to the caloric content of the average restaurant menu. Going out to eat at a restaurant, is a special thing to do with someone else in order to sit back and relax.
Not to mention, this must hurt business. With a teetering economy, do we really need to give people reasons not to spend money at restaurants. In addition, more often than not, the lower calorie items on a menu are the salads and appetizers; generally cheaper than anything else on the menu. So now, instead of the restaurant making the $20 average on a meal, they just sold an $8 appetizer as a meal.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg's failed soda ban is the worst of all. The ban, which was touted as "arbitrary and capricious" prior to being shot down, would have banned the sale of 16 ounce drinks which have more than 25 calories per ounce. It would have crippled businesses and restaurants, who make boatloads of money on drink sales. I know that you could get a diet soda, but have you tasted one. It's reminiscent of dirt when compared to a real soda.
Seriously, this is what the mayor of New York City has to do? What's next, three drink a night maximums at NYC bars? One candy bar a week limit? Not to mention, it is frivolous. I am sure you could still purchase a two liter bottle of soda at a supermarket. Even a dunce could figure out that buying two eight ounce bottles equals the golden number 16. God forbid I might buy a 12-pack I might be doing hard time for that one. I didn't know that our "free country" was cutting us off at one eight-ounce soda a day.
By the way, a 150 lb. person burns 63 calories per hour of sleep. That same person can burn about 300 calories in an hour of walking. If your a real go-getter, 30 minutes of low impact aerobic exercise will knock off 207 calories. Is it really that big of a deal if you consume some calories? After all, you can burn off a "controversial" 16-ounce Coke by sleeping for four hours. Does our fetish with calorie counting seem a little ridiculous?
Now, I don't mean to sound insensitive, after all, we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Obesity EPIDEMIC, huh? That really says something for what we perceive as a problem. What a bizarre epidemic to have. There are children dying every hour of every day of starvation, and we are fighting the good fight here in the USA to end the War on Over-Eating. If the biggest epidemic in your country is obesity, I think its time to shut up.
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