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The Citizen, 1992-02-05, Page 5Arthur Black THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5,1992. PAGE 5. So you think you're fat? I've been on a diet for twenty-one days and all I've lost is three weeks. I don't know who said that, but let's face it: chances are pretty good that it could have been you, or me or that lady over there with her nose pressed flat against the bakery window. Seems like everybody this side of Twiggy is on a diet these days. Or planning to go on one. Or picking themselves up after falling off one. The statistics are telling. At any given time, 50 percent of North American women are on some diet. Men are only slightly less neurotic about fat - only 30 per cent of the males you meet are “cutting back on calories” in one way or another. And such ways! There are low-cal beverages, “Lite” foods, and a plethora of over-the-counter” appetite suppressants. Your friendly neighbourhood bookstore offers a whole flotilla of paperback diet options. You can choose from the Hilton Head, the Hollywood, the Pritikin, the Beverly Hills and the Drinking Man's Diet, just to name a handful. 13 International Scene Is economic doom and gloom justified1? BY RAYMOND CANON If negative economic news were any criterion, I should be the most depressed person in this part of the world. Not only do I have to hear about it constantly as the recession takes a deep bite out of Ontario but I read similar details of other countries which include not only the United States but the leading nations of western Europe as well. Make no mistake about it! What we are experiencing in Canada is being duplicated in many other parts of the world. The question naturally is what can be done about it. For once I wish people would stop looking around for scapegoats. The French, for one, are going through an economic malaise which equals if not exceeds what we are experiencing in Canada. Their target is President Francois Mitterand who is being blamed for everything but bubonic plague. It doesn't help that Mr. Mitterand has made a couple of bad decisions, but the worst one of which has to be the appointment of Edith Cresson as prime minister. She has shown an unerring knack of doing and saying the wrong thing and has come in for a considerable amount of criticism but ultimately the person how is getting it in the neck is the president who appointed her. George Bush, the erstwhile hero of the Gulf War, has hit new lows for him in the opinion polls and an ill-fated effort to turn things around by going to Japan to lecture them on protectionism has only made the situation worse. Pick up an American newspaper and, if you removed the names And if printed assistance isn't enough, there are always the surgical options: wired jaws, stapled guts and even liposuction - A.K.A. Diet by Hoover. But the saddest dieting statistic of all? This one: the fact that after three years, 95 percent of all the people who lose weight on crash diets or through radical surgery regain every pound they lost - and usually more. So let's have some good news. Number one: medical authorities are coming around to the point of view that being a few pounds “overweight” is no big deal - unless you're a fashion model or a jockey. Number two: You Are Not That Fat. I don't care if your kids call you Jabba The Hut and you haven't seen your toes since World War II. Let's face it: next to Walter Hudson, you're built like a garter snake. Mister Hudson first made the news back in 1987, when firemen were called to his New York apartment to free him. He was wedged in the doorway to his bathroom. The firemen must have felt like they'd stumbled into a horror movie. It took nine of them just to lever Walter Hudson back to his specially re-inforced bed. They brought in an industrial scale to weigh the man, but it broke down. The scale only went to 995 pounds. They got a bigger scale, used for weighing vehicles. They manoeuvred Mister Hudson By Raymond Canon and the places, you could be excused for believing that you were reading about Canada. Our friends to the south, it seems, are concerned by precisely the same things as we are. The buzz-word these days in Washington is “fair trade” but that is meaningless. What you are saying is that you want trade that benefits the United States, regardless of what it does'to your trading partners. The British are in a depressed state since their recession is taking an inordinate amount of time to come to an end. Unemployment is up in that country, industries are closing up at an alarming rate (does that sound familiar?) and, since there is an election coming up later this year, politicians are putting on their thinking caps to come up with proposals that won't bankrupt the country. Fingers of blame are being pointed in all directions. The former Soviet Union? We won't even talk about it! Price controls have just come to an end, the word “famine” is heard frequently and nobody is quite sure how the newly formed country is going to get through this winter let alone the rest of the year. As I have already written, consumers in the former satellite countries of eastern Europe are experiencing and will continue to experience uncertain times for the forseeable future. In short, it has been many a year since I have heard such widespread moaning and groaning. It has become nothing less than an international pastime. Allow me, therefore, to make some observations which, I think, are as pertinent for other countries as they are for Canadians. The first is that we have had such a long period of prosperity in the 1980’s that most people forgot that the business cycle still existed. When this prosperity stage came to a close about three years after it was supposed to, people chose to react in an unbelieving fashion. “How on to it. The needle showed that Walter Hudson, who was five feet ten inches tall, weighed 1,190 pounds. Which put Walter Hudson in the Guinness Book of Records - and brought him to the attention of Dick Gregory. The black ex- comedian-turned-nutrition-guru flew to Walter Hudson's bedside and vowed that he would help the man return to normal size. Dick Gregor made good on his claim, too. Over the next two years, thanks to a special diet devised by Gregory, Walter Hudson melted off an unbelievable 670 pounds. Imagine - the guy shed the weight of four normal-sized men! So here's Walter Hudson at a relatively svelte 520 pounds - able to walk and go outside and lead a normal life after three decades of crippling fatness. Did he live happily ever after? Alas, no. Walter Hudson fell off the diet wagon. In less than a year he nibbled his way back up almost to the level that got him in the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest living human. But Walter wasn't living any more. He died last month of a heart attack at the age of 46. And when they rolled his body into the Nassau County Morgue, it tipped the scales at 1,125 pounds. dare this happen to me (us)? It's not fair; what have I (we) done to deserve this?” Sound familiar? The answer is that we have done a great deal. In many countries including Canada and the U.S., consumer debt soared to new heights during the 1980's. This had, in effect, the lengthening of the prosperity stage of the cycle to which I referred above. It also made the recession, when it did come, that much harder to handle. One statistic which is not released is how many of the bankruptcies we have read about were self-inflicted by poor management during the 1980's. I would imagine that it is considerably more than is generally believed. I get tired of hearing the same weary cliches of blame. Everywhere the government gets it in the neck. In Canada we throw in free trade, in the U.S. it is the Japanese, in France it is any foreigner that comes to mind, in Germany it is reunification. It is nothing less than a cop- out to concentrate on finding scape-goats and in assessing blame; what countries have to be doing right now is finding ways to increase their productivity and the quality of their products. What are the essentials for long term growth? Get them in place! Get inflation down to the bottom third of that of the industrialized countries. Concentrate on retaining programs and be prepared to change at short notice. Many of the jobs our post secondary graduates will do some day have not yet been created. One of the less desirable side effects of our massive social welfare program is the increased readiness to rely on others (i.e. govts.) for our security when the going gets tough. Instead of taking as much of the responsibility as possible and continuously carrying out re-adjustments, financial or otherwise, we wait until the axe falls and then engage in a colossal round of wailing Continued on page 6 TheShort of it By Bonnie Gropp It's a dog's life Given the advent of the February blues, I find myself drifting through nonsensical notions, lately, which seems to relieve the doldrums. Therefore, please accept the following as the piece of whimsy it was intended to be. A group of my friends and I were sitting together recently, bemoaning the state of things, when one uttered a time-worn phrase, "It's a dog's life." Now, I've got to tell you that that metaphor really made me pause. (Or perhaps I mean paws.) After thorough consideration, I'm not so sure a dog's life is such a terrible thing. Looking at it from the perspective of one who has a coddled pooch, I know of what I speak. My dog's day begins the same time as my husband's - before the crack of dawn- with one large difference. While she goes for a quick run outside, her human counterpart, is getting ready to embark on an hour's drive in the wee cold hours of the morning to his place of employment. Sometimes, when he leaves for work, she is ready to come in; sometimes she's not, in which case she frolics for a time, then barks until she rouses another member of the household, usually me, to let her in. Thus that's when MY dogs day begins. By utilizing her inate ability to annoy me, she times it so it's too early for me to get up, but late enough that there is no point in going back to bed. As I fumble around in a morning fog, she is curled up all toasty on her thick-as-a-mattress rug. There she remains. We go to great lengths, placing boards and furniture across a door, to make sure she can't leave her little nest while we are away. So, as I'm outside reclaiming my buried car from the snow, my fingers frosted, my boots full, my canine friend is curled in peaceful solitude. A fate worse than death according to my mother who always exclaims "Poor Buffy!" when she thinks of the dog being "locked up" for the day. Poor Buffy doesn't contribute to room or board, yet her meals are received on demand and she has a soft place to lay her head. If she wants affection, she ultimately gets it as she has this uncanny way of laying right in your path until you notice her. And as if she doesn't get enough to eat the soft touches at our dinner table, always save a little extra for the furry butterball at the end of the meal. For all this her only responsibility to us is to be family friend and protector. Giving her her due, she does both jobs well, though she has taken the latter a little too seriously at times. Yet, her transgressions seem quickly forgiven and with husband and children championing her cause, her place in the household remains secure despite her displays of ill-temper. I wish I was so certain of my own! While people are confronted by stress and responsibility during a regular day, dogs' lives are a carefree existence by comparison. By their ignorance they are unconcerned about the economic hardships we are facing. They need not worry about education or health care. And in the next election, it is not their problem if, God forbid, Mulroney gets re-elected. There are more and more days, when I shut the door on my pooch, that I think there is something wrong with this picture. Maybe I'm losing it, but I can't help wondering... Are we really the smarter mammals, here, or are the rest of them laughing at us?