Pain Eaters
M Alan Roberts

Fat bottom girls, you make my rockin' world go round.

Freddy Mercury, "Queen "

Modern humans are huge eaters. They sure love their health-destroying burgers, pizzas, Ben and Jerry's. Oh, how they love just about every other sweet, unctuous little morsel of food they can fit down their throats.

In the United States, an average woman now weighs more than 160 pounds and about 191 pounds for the men. We now know that diabetes mellitus type II, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, many cancers and just about every other disease are not only preventable in the vast majority of cases, but also reversible.

We also know there are two factors that especially affect how healthy we are: what we eat and how much we move. What we eat are fast, fried, deep fried, quick, convenient, preserved, modified foods that provide next to no nutritional value. Then, we sit at home, sit at our jobs, sit in our vehicles in between the two and grow fatter and fatter, like pigs in syrupy slop.

Most people will tell you that they don't have enough time to plan and prepare healthful meals at home. They say that they're just too busy. They're busy trying to advance in their careers. They're busy parenting, partying, coaching, volunteering, worshiping, socializing and trying to keep up appearances. That leaves them absolutely no time to consider the fact that what they put into their bodies, year after year, will strip away all of the glory they're trying to develop for themselves in the first place.

When will it become clear? When their natural, youthful vitality evaporates, they'll understand. When their skin doesn't snap back into place as easily as it once did, they'll understand. When diseases are surfacing and they face mortality, which is when it will become clear to them, if they're lucky.

Unlikely; most people will continue their gluttonous ways until they literally drop dead. They know they're doing it to themselves all along! There's always that little voice in the back of our minds telling us we will begin soon. It tells us that tomorrow or maybe the next day will be the perfect day to begin that detoxification program we've been thinking about for 14 years now.

The voice tells us well modify our dietary intake choices to be based on water-rich foods, bursting with vitally necessary nutrients. We see ourselves working out regularly. We envision being fit, increasing our metabolic rates, looking better, thinking better, feeling better, acting better and living with more contentment.

Then we go for a super-sized Quarter-Pounder meal at McDonalds - with a diet coke. We are pain eaters. Food brings us pleasure.

Almost every human activity centres on food. We feast after weddings. We dine on dates. We celebrate birthdays with cake and ice cream. We binge at business meetings. We hog the holidays away. We even eat at gatherings to memorialize the recently deceased. We reward our children with trips to fast food joints. Eating provides a link between almost all human activities. It makes us comfortable, makes us feel secure and helps us to relax and enjoy good times with self-perceived close ties.

Eating is also 100% legal. It is completely within the limits of the ever-so-just legal system to stuff your body silly, with genetically modified organisms. There will also be no court date needed if you grow yourself to 300 pounds on beef, pork and poultry, which is thoroughly saturated with pesticides, herbicides, steroids, preservatives, antibiotics and flavor enhancers like MSG. You wont go to jail for not fitting in a single seat of a Boeing 747. Food addictions are amazingly common.

The longer these eating trends continue, the more people will come to accept that it's normal to live like fattened calves; sustaining our idle, flaccid bodies with synthesized chemical concoctions from government-buying pharmaceutical companies.

Many experts believe we eat so much because we are trying to cover the pains of life. We turn to our understanding, fat food friends to help us shed away the agonies of living. Absorbed in self-pity, we place another Bon-Bon to our lips.

Poor perceptions about how unrewarding our lives are, we fail to consider the truly hungry as we spoon in some more 4-cheese lasagna with double rations of bovine muscle. Never stopping to consider the poisonous environment that we are creating within ourselves, we satisfy our empty minds with emptier foods. What brings us pleasure, in our mouth, soon vanishes down into the unseen areas of our systems. No matter what you ingest, regardless of how good it may taste, your body still has to assimilate, digest and attempt to derive nutrients from it. Poor food choices are hard to filter and deal with efficiently before more poor food is ready for metabolizing. Over time, a disease-breeding toxic sludge develops along the linings of your intestines. You count the salads that should have been. Pleasure becomes pain as your health begins to fail you - and you are left with little save to repetitively wonder how many people will actually show up at your funeral.