Preventative Care

I am getting fat.  It's not too noticeable to the naked eye yet, but it will be soon if I don't do something about it.  See, I noticed that my jeans were feeling a little snug lately.  (This is not something I do particularly often; as an emancipated woman I feel able to shed the pressures of patriarchal society and not worry about my weight.  This time, however, I was faced with real empirical evidence of weight gain, and I don't want to be one of those emancipated fat girls.)  Needless to say, (and without mentioning any specific figures), I was a little surprised, and quite disappointed, by the results.  Wearing tight jeans has proven to be an effective early warning system, but now that I am aware of this trend, I am unsure of what to do about it.

You see, as far as I can tell, there is no medical consensus on this issue.  Some say carbohydrates make you fat; others say fat makes you fat.  Some say exercise; others, dieting.  Every time I turn on the TV there is another weight loss method advertising itself as The Solution.  One would think, with the amount of money being poured into this problem, we would be able to have some doctor come on TV and give us the real answer.  But then I suppose nobody would be able to profit from the general lack of health and self-esteem.  Now, it seems reasonable that a combination of exercise and a reduction of overall caloric intake would probably be most effective, but that sounds hard, and I don't want to commit to the long, difficult path without hard scientific evidence.  I want a decision to be made for me.  If we had Marxists running the show, somebody would have already reached a consensus, and we would all feel a lot better about ourselves and our habits.  Everyone in the gulags was thin.