At lunch the other day I walked past two women and their assorted offspring.
One of the women herded the taller tots into a Green Valley ice cream store. The other held the door with one hand, chatted on a cell phone, stood sentry over a baby carrier containing a sleeping infant and asked her older child a question:
"Do you want a burrito or ice cream?"
The little girl looked to be about 4 years old and of normal height and weight. But with choices like that, how long will she stay that way?
We absolutely must learn to live with the bodies we are given, and some of us will be overweight. There are as many reasons for weight gain as there are people.
But health experts say the predominant reason is linked to the choices we make, and many of us make insalubrious ones. U.S. Health and Human Services Department figures released Tuesday show 30 percent of adults are obese, and 15 percent of children are overweight.
Even 10 percent of our preschoolers are fighting the battle of the bulge.
"The problem is getting worse," Tommy Thompson, the agency's secretary, said in a written statement excerpted in The New York Times.
Worse, in an age when more of us are joining health clubs and buying exercise equipment than ever before, Thompson is right. We are a sick society in terms of the increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure and some cancers that our pudginess brings.
But we also are sick in the manner in which we look at our bodies, our food and our lives.
We make fun of the fat kid. We swoon over the emaciated movie star. We label foods "bad" or "good," rather than slapping those labels on the choices we make when arranging them on our plates.
We look at being overweight as an embarrassment or character flaw. We seem unable to just look at ourselves as an ever-changing project, our food as something we need to sustain the engines of change, and our character as a collection of intangibilities that have nothing to do with a size 2.
We constantly measure, plan and analyze.
We don't stroll around the block. We power walk. We don't go for a bike ride. We train. We don't go for a dip. We swim laps.
We don't play. We "work out."
In fact, all we do is work -- at work, at play, at the dinner table.
And when we actually sit down to a dinner table, we calculate -- grams of fat, grams of sugar, calories, nutrients. We talk about what we can't eat and how we're going to work off what we do eat.
Yet, all the work isn't working. Every choice just adds more work to the pile -- either in what we have to justify now or live with later.
So maybe we should choose to work less and live more. Put away the cell phones. Leave the carrier in the car and hold the baby in our arms. Focus on our dinner companions rather than our dinner. Focus on the trees overhead, not the number of miles that pass under our feet.
Good choices get to be a habit. The more we make, the easier it gets.
"Do you want a burrito or ice cream?"
Tough call. But it's easier to learn at 4 than 44.
Giver her a banana, and go hang out at the park.
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