Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge : OKC’s weight-loss campaign, and ironic uses of “irony”
May 13, 2008
Three months ago, I mentioned that the mayor of perennially zaftig Oklahoma City, having lost 38 pounds in 10 months himself, had launched an initiative aimed at getting locals to shed excess weight. By late April, over 17,700 official participants in Cornett’s program had lost a collective 68,700 pounds over 16 weeks, about four pounds per person and roughly a pound a month. The ultimate goal: one million collective pounds shed.
Clearly, the numbers are less important than the overall promotion of lifestyle changes that include healthful weight loss as onely one benefit. The site Cornett launched is hardly a “let’s-start-starving-you-lardballs!” production; it includes all sorts of information about exercise, nutrition, behavioral modification and so on.
As the wire story explains, fast-food megachain Taco Bell, having launched a new low-fat “Fresco Menu” in December, contacted Cornett after learning of his brainchild and his concomitant fears that fast-food restaurants would balk at it. Company reps told Cornett that once the number of dropped pounds of program participants reaches 100,000, everyone in OKC will be entitled to a free low-fat taco from the recently launched menu. And, save for the fact that Taco Bell’s food (in my opinion) tastes like shit warmed over, they all lived happily ever after.
Well, not exactly.
Check out this drivel. The comments are hysterical, with every definition of the term equally applicable. Head denialist-at-large Paul McAleer seems to think there’s something “sad,” “sick,” or “weird” about giving away free food to reward the city’s residents for taking part in OKC’s weight-loss scheme (or for simply living there, actually). And naturally, one of the commenters blares, “Can they not see the irony?” and offers a crass, off-base analogy about feeding normoglycemic diabetics candy bars.
here’s nothing “ironic” about a fast-food restaurant giving away free low-fat tacos as part of supporting a city-wide weight-loss initiative. The only “irony” is that a bunch of fat people who think that weight loss is the devil’s work and who routinely (and correctly) note that fat people do have to eat are complaining about someone handing out free food.
I feel almost as bad for these fringe-dwellers on account of their skewed world views as I do about their having spent a lot of their lives feeling cruddy about themselves simply because of their physiques; I don’t know what it would take to convince them that their outcries represent more than simple annoyance — there’s some frank paranoia there. There is nothing at all wrong with putting information about weight loss out there and providing incentives for people who want to become healthier to lose some poundage. No one’s being forced to do anything.
When Cornett says that OKC’s obesity prevalence of 28 percent is a problem, he’s hardly being a maverick. No amount of stupid-ass hollering by angry denialists of size has any bearing on the reality of obesity’s health perils. At some point, the wounded battle cry of “They just think we’re all swine and want us to go away!” is no longer effective in staving off the facts, and should be tossed back in the same bin of kindergarten-level retorts it came from.
Note that the one comment that says more or less what I have here was edited by the admin. That’s one way to maintain a stormy sea of denial — get rid of the voices of reason to keep the sanity bar at ground level where it belongs.
