Geez, four posts in one day! That’s gotta be a record for me. But I just finished reading The Hungry Years and wanted to blog this passage:

I don’t think there’s any real answer to the obesity crisis. Getting fat–it’s in the system. In a way, it is the system. I heard an item on the radio the other day, in which an obesity expert was asked, “If the government could do one thing to stop the obesity crisis, what would it be?”

The man paused, and said, “That’s the trouble. There is no one thing you can do. You have to do … everything.”

As a society, we’re getting fatter and lazier and more anxious and depressed. Why? Because the alternative is unthinkable. The alternative is to change everything. The alternative is to stop investing in extrinsic values. And that’s not going to happen is it?

Honestly, it’s hard for me to guess which is going to be the bigger crisis: the impact of the Boomers retiring on entitlement programs like Social Security or Medicare, or the seemingly inevitable conflict between public and corporate interests in the “war” on obesity.

I think there’s an interesting parallel to what Deepak Chopra talks about in Peace is the Way. In it, he suggests that the only thing we can do when faced with such a difficult circumstance is to get enough people to make personal changes and essentially create a change in consciousness globally. He writes:

If you and I demonstrate that peace is more satisfying than war, the collective consciousness will shift.

and (emphasis mine):

The single best reason to become a peacemaker is that every other approach has failed. No one knows what the critical mass must be before the peace becomes the foundation of a new order; your duty and mine is to bring about change by personal transformation.

The “war” on obesity is not dissimilar to other wars: there are lots of polarizing arguments like low-fat versus low-carb, personal responsibility versus government intervention, and fat acceptance versus fat discrimination.

Maybe what we need is our own equivalent of Chopra’s peace movement. One that includes personal transformation…not just weight loss, but oh so much more.