Fat chance

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

Isn’t it weird how much we worry about the fact that we’re fat?

And don’t think that we don’t all spend way too much time on this.

“Hannah says I’m fat,” my 7-year-old niece Rachel said, referring to criticisms from her sister, who is exactly one pound lighter, at 50 pounds, than her twin – and already thinking about how she’s going to shed that excess baggage.

“I’m going to become a vegetarian,” Hannah announced to me yesterday, explaining why she didn’t want a hamburger at the cookout that we had at the palatial Graham Estate in honor of Independence Day.

(That she was eating a hot dog as she said the words wasn’t at all ironic – we all know hot dogs aren’t meat-based, and haven’t been for a long time.)

So second-graders are weight-conscious these days – isn’t that just wonderful?

I can imagine how our caveman forebears would take this news.

“Me not worried about being fat. Me worried about sabre-toothed tiger. Them tigers getting faster and faster. Oh, and worried finding enough grubs and berries to increase life expectancy past 15. Yep, them more important worries than being fat.”

Heck, most of the rest of the world doesn’t have this problem that we have. When your annual income is in the range of $20 a year, for instance, I don’t know, there’s just not a lot of money in the family budget for Applebee’s and Little Debbie cakes.

At least folks in that situation don’t have to worry about finding money in the budget for gym memberships.

“Yeah, I’m just in here trying to sweat a little,” I caught myself saying to somebody at the Waynesboro YMCA the other morning.

I have to pay to sweat, for those keeping score at home, because my job – which pays me quite well, mind you – has me sitting at a desk coming up with witticisms and other musings on issues of the day.

(The sound you hear is of my burgeoning butt getting … wider.)

I could eliminate the need for the middle man, I realize, by giving up writing and working out in the fields to grow my own food – thus getting plenty of exercise and building for myself a diet high in nutrients and low in snack cakes.

(I’m guessing that they don’t grow Zebra Cakes in the field, anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong there.)

There’s only one problem with that – air conditioning.

If I could figure out a way to get air conditioning out into the fields that I would be working for myself – oh, and I would need plenty of bottled water, too; and I wouldn’t want to work too hard, if you know what I mean, so we’ll have to do something there – I’d be game for a return to the way things used to be.

Who’s with me on this?