Our national strategy for dealing with a virus that attacks fat people has been to order everyone to stay home and make trips to the fridge every 15 minutes since mid-March.
Since our coronapanic lifestyle shows signs of becoming permanent, how about the following: timelocks on the refrigerator and/or kitchen doors so that cower-at-home Americans can hit the fridge only at mealtimes? No more midnight snacking. No more second breakfast.
Readers: Would this be a good strategy for minimizing the Covid-19 death rate going forward (a thinner population is a safer population!) and also for minimizing the deaths associated with our shutdown?
Bacchus, from my Boboli Gardens photos (on film!).
Every day, every meal or snack the same, perfectly balanced, food and nothing else (the spiritual equivalent of soylent green). No other options, ever. That will make the motivation to overeat or snack drop to 0, because of the magic of boredom.
Federico: That’s basically Mindy the Crippler’s diet! She is a paragon of good health!
Philip – if you had an “all powerful” master dish out a cup of kibble for you on a schedule you could look like Mindy! Getting you some PeopleChow.
Roll these out before or after we are all eating government issue gruel? If you can prove you only think the correct thoughts once in awhile you get dessert.
When I print a daily meal plan for the week and tape it next to the refrigerator, I tend to follow it. Without a plan, I tend to eat more snacks and over-eat in general. Simple, but it works?
I once learned to stare down a cheesecake and not eat any of it. Since then, I actually have to struggle to eat enough. Now, if you are alone and not “under control”, I suppose you might have to resort to locking the food and snacks in Fort Knox, but, I once got one of these cookie jars for the supply of small cookies and such. Worked pretty well. First time, I didn’t tell anyone how it worked and there was some screaming in the middle of the night! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LH8oOamCaM
Phil – it is utterly false that it is a virus that attacks fat people and you should be ashamed to be spreading such crap. Any research that contains the term “BMI” should be put in the same stack with those containing “cast the runes”, which is hopefully already in the recycling bin.
@alan I agree that the contention that it is a “virus that attacks fat people” preferentially is not correct. I’d suggest a do-over for Phil, and take it straight from the CDC:
“…underlying medical conditions that put individuals at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19…” include “Obesity (BMI> 30)”, and the level of evidence for this is the “Strongest and Most Consistent Evidence”.
Reference: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/evidence-table.html
There isn’t evidence that the virus attacks fat people, but there is evidence that being obese significantly increases your risk of death if you contract Covid-19.
^ found the fat guy.
@steve – read all those studies – they all say “associated” with – shoddy statistics, like saying states that phil flys himself to have twice the death rate as other states.
@anon ^^^ found the stupid guy
Not specifically relevant, but this is an interesting article from 2020-07-01. Specifically, autopsies reveal that COVID causes large numbers of “microclots” not just in the lungs, kidneys, and liver, but alsobut also in the heart and BRAIN.
Given that even asymptomatic infectees showed CT scan abnormalities way back in March, it is very reasonable to assume that infection frequently leads to microclots and stroke damage. Fun times!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/01/coronavirus-autopsies-findings/
https://archive.is/ZjDPq
Only the very wealthy had any kind of commute short enough to actually be better off commuting. The rest of us spent hours sitting in traffic & trains going nowhere.
We could try to institute food rationing a-la the British, during and after World War II. Of course, their rationing was necessitated by extreme shortages of foodstuffs, which actually got worse after the War ended and weren’t partially ameloriated until the 1950s.
Still, the food rationing was credited with improving the health of the general population, because everyone received the same rations, which meant that the very poor received enough to eat a decently balanced diet and gluttony wasn’t an option except for the ultra-wealthy.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/9728#1
Here in the United States we’d have to ration restaurant dining, fast food takeout, etc., etc. and that might prove to be problematic. Americans are spoiled and I don’t think they’ll enjoy sitting in restaurants like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Members_of_the_public_enjoying_a_meal_in_one_of_the_chain_of_British_Restaurants_established_during_the_Second_World_War,_London,_1943._D12268.jpg
Everyhing’s possible right now. Since we’re moving at warp speed into a centrally-planned economy, and particularly if the restaurants all go out of business in the next six months, it might be an idea whose time has come again.
“…the only negative results were the increased time needed for meals to consume the necessary calories from bread and potatoes, and what they described as a “remarkable” increase in flatulence from the large amount of starch in the diet.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom
One thing Americans are going to keep getting much better at is establishing new Ministries in our government, and we’re just getting started. Here’s the British Ministry of Food’s Potato Pete, star of the “Dig for Victory” campaign.