Tuesday, December 30, 2008

 

God Save Us!

neo-neocon reports on a story out of Manchester England:
It’s come to this, I’m afraid. Social engineering against obesity in England has reached new heights (depths?):
In Manchester, Britain’s third largest city with half a million people, residents will begin carrying electronic tracking tags that log how far they run or cycle each day. The tag will even help track how many calories residents burn. Those who hit the running trail every morning will be rewarded with coupons at stores and even days off work.

Although this new program may sound a bit Orwellian, in Manchester and eight other towns throughout England the British government is banking on it to help rein in the nation’s obesity problem.
They’ve got their literary references wrong, I think. The only Orwellian part is the technology; the rest is straight out of Brave New World.
Her link is dead, but a little googling turned this one up at the Christian Science Monitor.

OK, here are some "before" and "nearly after" (I still have work to do) shots of me over the last few years. I have never done this before becasue I do not want to brag. I do this entirely to establish some credentials on this matter. I have done this weight loss without gastric bypass or other "weight loss" surgery. There has been some post-loss plastic surgery with more likely to come, but the weight loss itself has been a matter of me making up my mind to do it.

The Britain scheme is a natural when you have third party payers for health care - in Britain's case such third party is the government, adding coercive force to an already volatile situation. The social engineering aspects are a bit scary.

But I am going to speak from the heart here - none of this is going to help. The recidivism statistics for obesity are as bad or worse than drug and alcohol addiction. This is not a government or insurance company issue - it is a personal/spiritual one.

Losing weight is easy - deciding to lose weight is hard. Keeping weight off is nearly impossible. I am not prepared to call it a sin, but I am prepared to analogize it to sin. A person needs an inner transformation to overcome this, no amount of monitoring, cajoling, berating, or otherwise will solve this issue. Speaking of analogizing, addiction to food is at best analogy as well. One cannot quit eating, unlike tobacco, alcohol, or drugs, one may not simply quit this addiction, one must learn to control it.

Finally, only Christ is capable of producing the kind of transformation this requires. The state is not Him.

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