It’s Easy To See Why Americans Are Fat
I’ve spent the last few weeks in the US with my family launching The Clothesline Diet which was really enjoyable. We love the States, but wow, we don’t like some of your lifestyle and eating habits, and frankly I can see why so many of you are way overweight.
We went into a grocery store to buy a few basic things to get us through a couple of days, your everyday stuff, like milk, cereal, juices etc and I couldn’t believe the sizes of them. I only wanted to buy a small carton of milk but the smallest was 4 litres. It was the same for the cereal box, it was enough to provide for the four of us for at least two weeks. The smallest box of tea bags was 400 and the smallest bottle of juice was 2 litres. I can’t understand why everything is packaged in such large quantities? I guess it’s ok if you want to buy in bulk to last for a long time, but the risk here is that you can consume the items more quickly than you should and of course, put weight on quickly too. If the food is there you may as well eat it right? Another really striking thing - and what I believe to be a big contributor to American obesity - is your outrageous portion sizes. Take pizza for example, a slice of pizza was around 10 inches long by 8 inches wide. For an adult, one slice of pizza that size is more than enough for a meal, but for a child or young teenager, these portions are way too big. Nobody needs to eat that much pizza, and for children this is simply too much food. A small soda is the equivalent size of a large soda in Australia, so we shared it between four people. Clearly Americans are accustomed to these bad habits of big portions of bad food. Whenever we refused fries with a meal or declined to take our leftover food home in a doggy bag, waiters would look at us like we were freaks. You guys are eating yourselves to death. I also noticed a huge amount of buffets which are “all you can eat”. They consisted of mostly fried foods or carbohydrates. It just seems that food is in extreme abundance and everywhere. With the price of fast food so cheap and a fast food restaurant on every corner it’s no wonder Americans are so overweight. The food industry is just making it too convenient to eat bad food and it is showing in people’s waist lines. We spent some time at Disneyland and of course had the time of our lives, but some of the things that I saw truly shocked me. People were actually queuing up to hire electric scooters to get around the park. I’m not talking about the elderly or disabled who genuinely need a helping hand, but people that are slightly overweight and obviously too lazy to walk. Interestingly, each ride at Disneyland provide queues for the disabled and elderly, which people with electric scooters would take advantage of too, even if they weren’t disabled or elderly. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned courtesy and walking for exercise? It was clear to me that Americans are so overweight because of how cheap and easy fast food is to buy. There is hardly any encouragement to exercise or eat healthy, despite knowing that America is the most overweight country in the world. Australia is very fast becoming the same and if we don’t do anything about it, Australians will easily become the biggest nation in the world. Kind Regards Karen GattThe Clothesline Diet
