久久亚洲国产成人影院-久久亚洲国产的中文-久久亚洲国产高清-久久亚洲国产精品-亚洲图片偷拍自拍-亚洲图色视频

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
China
Home / China / Life

Let's lose weight together and beat obesity

By Boris Johnson | China Daily | Updated: 2014-08-02 07:45

Willpower or nannying is hopeless, but a dose of team spirit might shed the UK's extra kilos.

Phewee. I am feeling a bit wrung out because I have just got back from the battlefield - I mean the zone of moral conflict that I now enter every time I open the door of the fridge. The plan was to have an apple, and then I thought it might be nice to have something to go with the fruit; something sharp, savory - and before I could help myself I had wrenched open that Pandora's box and stood bathed in its lurid glow.

There it was, the thing that had been calling to my subconscious. It was the cheese: curvaceous, enticing, gorgeously perfumed. It seemed to be winking at me on the ledge, in a provocative way. Go on, said the great moldering lump of ancient cheddar; you know you want it, don't you?

Let's lose weight together and beat obesity

A passenger waits for a delayed flight at Heathrow Airport in London. Toby Melville / Reuters

As we stared at each other I felt the willpower start to drain invisibly through the soles of my shoes. The sweat formed on my palms; up and down went my gulping Adam's apple. I gazed at that full-fat, extra-mature, golden-skinned ingot of dairy-based destruction with the hopeless lust of the hobbit as he gazes at the Ring of Power, or a bishop unexpectedly opening the door of a brothel.

Failing willpower

With a gasp I tore my eyes away. I slammed the door shut, and having eaten that apple in two ravening bites I am here to tell you that this time it is different. This time I have found an entirely new way of losing weight, and on this occasion I am not relying on conventional dieting willpower; or to be more precise, I am not relying solely on my ability to act rationally in my own self-interest. From now on, folks, it is not just about me. It is about us.

Let me explain. It must be 20 years ago that I first wrote a piece about what was already being called a "national obesity epidemic". My thesis was one of pure and pitiless libertarianism. I scoffed at the notion that our collective fatness was somehow a problem of government.

If people were too fat, I said, then that was because they were too darn greedy; and if they wanted to get thinner then they should eat less. Simple, I said. The more we "medicalized" the problem, the less people would take responsibility - and the fatter we would all become.

Well, I am afraid that in the past two button-busting decades, I have been proved right at least about the last point. The UK is now the second-fattest nation in the world, and I am alarmed to discover that Londoners are now even fatter than New Yorkers. We have obesity levels of 67 percent among men and 57 percent among women. We are the official fatties of Europe.

Fat troops

Every year we have to widen our cinema seats and reinforce the floors of our ambulances. As reported recently, an increasing number of British soldiers are made to leave the army for being, frankly, too fat to charge at the enemy. Our charter jets puff and groan and spew out unconscionable quantities of fossil fuels as they lug our biomass to the Mediterranean - and the fatter we get, the greater the risk to our health. The more overweight we are, the more likely we are to have cancer, heart disease, stroke: the big causers of early and preventable death. The national fatness problem costs the National Health Service at least 16 billion pounds ($27 billion) a year in extra and unnecessary expense.

Nothing seems to stop us eating too much - neither my savage libertarian sermons in the Telegraph, nor the bossing and nannying of the state. We are akratic. We know what we should do, but we can't seem to make ourselves do it. We know what is in our interest - cut out french fries, cake, bread, cheese, chips, etc, and eat more fruit - but we can't summon up the consistent willpower to follow the rules.

Brooding on this problem, I wondered if we could construct a different psychological framework. What if it wasn't just about us: our selfishness, our weakness of will, our own abusive relationships with food. Perhaps people might be more willing to exercise discipline - to make a sacrifice - if it could be seen to be for everybody's sake, for everybody's health.

People are generally capable of amazing acts of kindness and altruism. Seldom are people happier and more energetic than when doing things for others.

City Hall initiative

So at City Hall we have all embarked - about 150 of us, I think - on a plan to lose weight together.

We all stood on some giant commercial scales; not individually, so that no one felt any personal embarrassment or pressure, and we didn't have the anxiety of other people seeing how much we weighed. We did it in groups of about 12 at a time. We recorded who was in the groups, and the total weight, and we agreed that in a few months we would try to lose 5 percent.

There is no coercion, no bullying, and it goes without saying that the whole thing is entirely voluntary. It is a joint effort and a bit of a laugh. But the key thing is that I now know that unless I keep it up - and refuse the lascivious winks of the cheese and the cake - then I will not just be failing to do the right thing by myself. I will be failing to do the right thing by the group.

I need to lose weight or I'll let the side down. In a few months' time we will all get back on the scales and see how we have done. Will it work? Every psychological textbook will probably say that you only get results by appealing to people's naked self-interest. Well, we have tried that, and it's going nowhere. Let's try team spirit. It's worth a shot.

Editor's picks
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
主站蜘蛛池模板: 国产高清在线观看视频手机版 | 久草视频免费在线 | 久久精品视频网 | 114一级毛片免费观看 | 亚洲欧美日韩视频一区 | 欧美成人做性视频在线播放 | 欧美一级鲁丝片 | 一级美女视频 | 国产精品久久久久免费a∨ 国产精品久久久久免费视频 | 99国产欧美久久精品 | 日韩黄色片在线观看 | 成人国产视频在线观看 | 一级片中文字幕 | 日本高清色本免费现在观看 | 中文字幕有码在线播放 | 久久一日本道色综合久久 | 岛国毛片在线观看 | 免费观看欧美精品成人毛片能看的 | 性做久久久久免费看 | jyzzjyzz国产免费观看 | 国产精品久久久久久网站 | 波多野结衣在线视频观看 | 国产91九色刺激露脸对白 | 国产片网址 | 亚洲国产精品乱码在线观看97 | 99re热视频 | 国产二区三区毛片 | 国产精彩视频在线观看 | 成人国产一区二区三区 | 中文字幕亚洲国产 | 国产高清a毛片在线看 | 亚洲一区二区三区福利在线 | 韩国精品欧美一区二区三区 | 中文字幕精品视频 | 一级美女视频 | 大香伊蕉国产短视频69 | 欧美一级视频在线观看 | a级片在线 | 九草视频 | 免费一看一级毛片全播放 | 久久亚洲精品中文字幕二区 |