How to be a loser

Yet so much emphasis in put on diets and dieting these days.

Everybody talks about losing weight, exercising and being fit. We count calories, carbs, and intake.

Yet Americans are grossly overweight. American obesity rates are among the highest in the world with 64 percent of adults being overweight or obese, and almost a quarter being obese.

Thinking back, I remember my own family's lifestyle. There were six of us in the family; mom and dad, my sister and two brothers and me.

We were all relatively slim. We didn't diet or talk about dieting.

Each evening we gathered round our dining room table for mealtime. I don't recall a single time when, as a family, we ate in a restaurant. It just didn't happen. My mother cooked our meals

What did we eat for supper?

If mom had fixed pork chops, we each had one pork chop. She cooked just one for each of us. Also we had mashed potatoes (sometimes called creamed potatoes), green beans or collard greens, corn on the cob, white bread, iced tea. Sometimes that was complemented with sliced tomatoes, or cucumbers.

We normally had some kind of dried beans, either butterbeans, or soup (white) beans or blackeyed or purplehull peas.

Often we had meatloaf, or fried chicken (with brickles) or homemade vegetable soup.

One fried chicken fed the whole family.

We left the table filling full, but not stuffed.

Occasionally mom baked a cake or a pie or made banana pudding. She used granulated sugar, not Splenda or other sugar substitutes, which were nonexistent.

I do remember that mama sometimes bought saccharin, which was a sugar substitute, but it had a sweet bitter taste we didn't like. It was the only substitute available to us. I remember it came as tiny pills in a brown bottle.

But getting back to diets and our obsession with diets and losing weight today.

Perhaps oversizing and dining out contribute to our weight problems. We eat portions that are too large in oversize plates.

It is said we would eat less if we ate from small plates. I think we eat more at buffet meals because there is such a selection.

In high school in days past, we had physical education which was a scheduled class the same as math or English. My older brother played basketball and my younger brother played Little League baseball for years. My sister played tennis and I enjoyed intermural basketball between homeroom teams. We had no organized basketball team for girls, only a boy's team. My brothers practiced basketball shots on a dirt court in our yard.

We didn't have home computers or iPods or other electronic devices. My family had a combination console radio/record player in the living room. We had one dial telephone, black, which was used by all. It had a prominent place in the living room. It was not cordless; there were no cordless phones or cell phones.

When I was in high school, dad bought our first television set. It had a poor quality black and white picture and only four or five snowy channels. Therefore, it didn't hold much attraction for me. I preferred the outdoors or visiting with school friends.

What I'm trying to say is that we weren't confined by modern day electronics. We did more walking, less driving from place to place. There was one vehicle in my family and it belonged to my dad who used it as a work truck. It was rarely used for pleasure driving. My mother never learned to drive, therefore, we weren't chauffeured from place to place..

Maybe the answer lies somewhere in what I've written.

Could the answer to losing weight and maintaining weight loss involve better food choices, less eating, more action, less sitting, more walking, more natural exercise, downsizing.

I'm convinced those things will prolong life and produce a healthier body.

Being a loser can make you a winner, you know...