Mr. Love Handles, put your shirt back on!

George Le Masurier

of the Gateway

Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t spent the last two months preparing your body for the summer skimpy clothing season, forget about it. This means that men with love handles the size of Montana, or that could at least keep Dumbo airborne, must not go shirtless in public.

No one needs to see someone with enough extra skin for a family of four.

Women, of course, have it worse. A woman who is not as impossibly thin as a supermodel or Hollywood celebrity – formula: you may not weigh more than the combined weight of your swimsuit and your flip-flops – must keep a towel wrapped around her at all times.

How do all those famous people stay so thin? Well, besides personal trainers who make them inhale reduced-fat oxygen, they get plenty of help from their government.

That’s right, the City of Los Angeles requires fast-food restaurants to post the number of calories in every meal on their menus. Of course, who reads a menu in a fast-food restaurant?

But why stop there? The LA city council is also banning new fast-food restaurants in South LA, because in such poor areas the children suffer from obesity at much higher rates. The council members themselves can’t really believe that a ban will keep children from seeking out a Big Mac, but maybe they will benefit by walking further to get one.

Even New York and Seattle have flirted with similar assaults on junk food. It’s an easy political target. Everyone knows junk food is bad for you, but you want to eat some anyway. Some people will go into restaurants and intentionally order fatty, fried foods, “Bring me a plate of saturated fat, and a deep-fried soda.”

Here’s how to tell if you are personally overweight: Go to your kitchen window, place your hands on the bottom ledge about shoulder width apart, keep your back straight and your neck in alignment with your spine and look straight ahead.

If you can see Gig Harbor, Fox Island, Raft Island or the Key Peninsula, either you or the person laughing behind you is fat.

According to acting U.S. Surgeon General Rear Admiral Steven Galson, 36 percent of Americans are overweight and another 23 percent are classified as obese. There is no official public health term covering both ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’, so we might call them ‘fat’.

Galson says nearly three times as many teens are overweight today as were 20 years ago. He also says nearly as many people die from being overweight and obesity as from smoking.

In fact, fatness is the new smoking. Every government agency is looking for ways to impose sin taxes on those determined to become overweight.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine proposed taxes on soda pops and most other drinks composed of mostly sugar, which the author said is “the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic.”

The latest diet guru, Dr. Dean Ornish, says the “obesity epidemic (is) spreading like cancer, mestastasizing across the country” like an “alien force.”

Well, now perhaps we have something there. For years, I have suspected that aliens have been sneaking into my closet nightly and putting a single stitch into the waistband of all my pants.

And you might also recall a theory widely tauted a number of years ago that suggested 25 tons of space debris was landing on Earth every day, including holidays, causing an increase in our gravitational pull.

So without eating a single French fry, people all over America are gaining weight, at least as its measured on a bathroom scale.

Publisher George Le Masurier can be reached at 253-853-9248 or at publisher@gateline.com.