A morning breakfast buffet for guests in the US. Picture / Babiche Martens
The big food news this week is that New Zealand is leading the charge for the fastest increase, worldwide, in obesity rates. Our men are the world champions at fatness and we New Zealand women are not too far behind.
Go ahead, go on, blame the way the statistics are
stacked, refute the claim by rolling out the example that some of our All Blacks fall within the band for "obese" and all those other worn-out justifications, but let's get real - we're not talking about them.
We're talking about those of us who have a band of fat around our middles that jiggles, whose thighs rub uncomfortably when we walk so we don't, who keep on increasing our wardrobe with bigger sizes because we can, yet we are the same folk who refuse to believe it may actually be that what we're putting in our mouths, when and how.
We need to wake up to our ill-gotten gains if we are serious about the health of our nation. We eat for entertainment, we eat without even noticing. Sit in any city cafe and you will soon see countless examples of the constant stuffing of food in faces, most often buried in a phone. I should know, I do it, too.
Yes, weight gain is complex, but it's not impossible to figure out what we're doing to become fat. It's the excessive eating. How do I know? Because from what I've seen around the world, when people don't have enough to eat, they don't get fat.
