Tag Archives: health

A Guide To A Good Life

Fat clothes for fat people

This post is a bit of a rant, but it’s something that’s bothered me for some time. Now that I’m married, I’ve found that Ligia has the same problem as me. We have a really hard time finding clothes that can fit us. It seems that clothing manufacturers out there have geared all of their clothes production toward fat people. I would even go so far as to say that we (and by we I mean thinner people) are being discriminated against. (I’m grinning as I write that…)

Every time we go to a department store, we can’t find clothes our size. For example, my pant size is 30″ waist x 32″ inseam. There is no such pant size in most places. I kid you not, try finding it. My shirt size is 16-16 1/2″ neck with 34-35″ sleeves. At that size, the shirt’s waist is gigantic. Somehow, they must think only extremely fat people wear those sizes. Have a look below to see how one of those shirts fits me. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

A shirt made for fat people

Ligia took these photos. As you can see, any way you look at it, there’s a ton of extra material around the waist, and on the sleeves. That material doesn’t belong there. I’m trying my best to manage a goofy expression, and yeah, I look pretty goofy…

A shirt made for fat people

I always have to find all sorts of creative ways of tucking my shirts in my pants, and I’m fed up with it. If I want well-fitting shirts and pants, I have to pay more. I shouldn’t have to pay 40-70% more for a piece of clothing simply because clothing manufacturers think everyone’s fat. Not everyone is fat!

Ligia has it even worse. She wears XS or size 2 clothing, but most of the time, those sizes are much too large for her in adult clothes. She has to go hunting around in the children’s department to find clothes that fit her. She’s a full-grown woman, past 25 years of age. She shouldn’t have to do that just so she can dress herself. We’ve honestly tried all sorts of stores. We’ve been to more expensive stores, including specialty petite stores, and still we have a hard time finding clothes in her size at reasonable prices.

I realize the trend these days is to get fat and fatter. We Americans have it too good. We’ve all got our particular excuses, but that doesn’t excuse our nation’s collectively huge waistline, and the lack of clothes in anything but large sizes.

Some people, like us, choose to remain thin, and it seems we’ve been forgotten by mainstream clothing manufacturers. We’re a persona non grata, an unpleasant reminder of what a waistline could look like. We have to shop in children’s departments to find clothes in our sizes and to get decent prices. Is it so hard to make clothes that fit us? It wasn’t so long ago when things were different. Clothing manufacturers, remember, it takes less material to dress us…

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Lists

Condensed knowledge for 2007-09-19

A bit of a health theme to this edition of condensed knowledge:

  • A new CPR technique was discovered. It’s called OAC-CPR (Only rhythmic Abdominal Compression). As its name implies, you only press on the abdomen, eliminating the risk of broken ribs, mouth-to-mouth, and fatigue from pushing so hard. Definitely worth looking into this!
  • Prozac found in the drinking water in the UK. Apparently so many people are on the anti-depressant in England, that it can now be found, diluted, in the water supply, after having passed through their bodies, into the sewers, through the water treatment plants, etc. Although the “experts” are saying there’s no risk, I doubt it. I mean, this is a drug, found active, in the water supply!
  • WD40 turns out to be a great help for bad joints. Despite the precautions written on the cans, rubbing it into the skin was of tremendous help to a man suffering from joint pain. Not sure that I’d recommend this.
  • Aspartame is the behind the spike in suicides for teen and pre-teen girls. Apparently, it’s a powerful mood-changer — it causes depression. Something to think about the next time you buy your children something with Nutrasweet or Aspartame as the sweetener.
  • Exercising in traffic is bad for your heart. Now that’s something I’ve known was wrong for some time. It just didn’t make sense to me when I saw people running on the sidewalk, next to heavy traffic, breathing in all those noxious fumes. When I run, I want to breathe fresh, healthy air, not someone’s nasty car exhaust. I just couldn’t get why they’d put themselves through something that unhealthy. It turns out the particulates from vehicle emissions decrease our blood’s ability to clot, and restrict the amount of blood that reaches the heart immediately upon exposure.
  • Mobile phones are as dangerous as smoking. So reads a recent headline… People have gone back and forth on the safety of mobile phones for years. Now the EU has finally decided to pick a side and take action. The article’s in Romanian, but what it says is that governments are starting to take mitigating action, first by warning people of the risks, and then by looking at ways to minimize exposure to WiFi radiation. They’re recommending that people go back to using wired Internet connections instead of wireless ones.

Now for some funny stuff:

And some economic discussion:

  • Greenspan on Iraq war, oil link. He confirms what I’ve thought and said for some time. In his talk with Matt Lauer, he touches on the housing bubble and the fiscal irresponsibility of the current administration, but he has no compliments for the Democrats, either. Last, but no least, he says the dollar may be replaced by the euro as the reserve currency of choice.
  • Transparent Investing: what your broker doesn’t want you to know. Here’s a site that offers a purportedly frank discussion of index investing. Definitely worth a look.
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Lists

Condensed knowledge for 2007-08-21

  • Knight News Challenge: Round 2 Launches. The Knight News Challenge, in which winners get grants ranging from tiny to huge, is in its second year. It awards big money for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. The contest is run by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last year’s winners won awards ranging from $15K to $5 million. If you’ve got a worthwhile idea that’s news-related, by all means, submit it!
  • ProBlogger.net has a great post that points out five WP plugins that can help with managing your comments and responding to readers.
  • Brian Auer of the Epic Edits Weblog has a post on the differences between exposing for highlights, shadows or midtones.
  • A couple of Russians put together a wry video where they demonstrate a new product, the Americanizer. Their English accent is a bit thick, so pay close attention.
  • On the same blog, English Russia, you’ll find another post with HDR photos of the Moscow sewers. These are pretty well done, and I do believe I spotted a crocodile in two of them…
  • The top tech blogs are revolting against Wikipedia’s “no follow” link policy by using the same rel=”no follow” tag in their outgoing links to Wikipedia. Alright! Wikipedia’s been getting a lot of link love for years, and I think they’ve been entirely ungrateful by not responding in kind.
  • Sal Marinello, writing for BlogCritics, has a few words to say about the famed “300 Workout”, the physical regime that prepared the actors for their roles in that movie. A lot of people got it wrong. Also very worth checking out is the site of the physical trainers that put together that workout and trained the actors, Gym Jones. Have a look at the Video section. Very different stuff from what you see in gyms today, but you can’t argue with the results.
  • Mental_Floss has a GREAT post on life before air conditioning. Why is it great? Because it points out why today’s construction is so horribly shoddy — our overreliance on air conditioning lets builders get away with using cardboard and plywood for what passes for homes in the DC area. The homes of old were built with thick insulation, out of stone or brick, and they could do just fine without A/C. If we’d be without A/C nowadays, we couldn’t live in our homes. Kind of makes me sad for all these people buying McMansions on River Road and Georgetown Pike and the like. I see the way they’re built, and it’s an insult to millenia of good building practices…
  • The Daily Mail has an article on spotting illness by looking at our faces.
  • On a similar note, Deputy Dog has a post on the 5 scariest medical mistakes. Don’t read it during lunch…
  • Have you ever wondered about the 100 Inuit words for snow? Here they are.
  • Hans Rosling gave a speech at TED this year, and they’ve posted it to their website. It’s really, really good stuff. You will not regret the 19 minutes spent watching it, I guarantee it. It’s about poverty and developing countries, but he’s got a very different take on things.
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How To

The best tomatoes are homegrown

You can go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, MOM’s, Safeway, Giant, Publix — you name it — and buy the most expensive tomatoes, but they’ll still taste just as flat as the cheapest ones you’ll find. I don’t care if they’re organic, hydroponic, vine-ripened or whatever — they still have no taste.

It’s a fact of life in America. I don’t know what our farmers do to their fruits and vegetables, but nothing tastes good when you buy it from the store. Most stuff tastes like cardboard, and if you’re lucky, it might have a semblance, a sad little ghost of the taste of the real thing. I call it the great American taste theft. It doesn’t matter if the stuff is cheap or expensive, it still tastes like crap. While I expect the cheap stuff to taste like that, I find it offensive and downright thieving to charge $3-7 dollars for a pound of tomatoes that tastes just like the ones that cost $1-2 dollars. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you haven’t gotten around much.

Our families have always grown their own vegetables, even when they lived in cities. Now that Ligia and I are on our own, and we’ve only got a terrace, we still grow a few vegetables, mostly tomatoes, every year. Let me tell you that there’s a world of difference between the tomatoes you grow at home and the ones you buy at the store. The ones over there might look better, cosmetically-speaking, but the ones you grow with your own love and care, without pesticides or fertilizers, are the ones that will blow you away every time you taste them. They may have a few blemishes, they may not be as big or pretty as the ones in the store (you know, the ones full of hormones and all sorts of crap that’s not good for you) but when you bite into one, that fragrance and taste explosion you’ll feel is proof of their pedigree.

Homegrown cherry tomatoes

Trust me, there’s no substitute. You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t try it out. You may lose a few tomatoes to disease, but if you let them fend for themselves, and only feed them water, till the ground once in a while and prune them carefully, you’ll come to find out what I mean.

Homegrown tomatoes
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Thoughts

Montgomery becomes first county in nation to ban trans fats

A few days ago, on May 15th, Montgomery County (my county) became the first county in the nation to ban trans fats from restaurants and marketplaces. Basically, anything made and or cooked in this county will have to contain no trans fats, or at least close enough to that — only 0.5 grams of trans fat are allowed per serving. There’s some leeway, and some establishments can continue to sell foods with trans fats for a while, but let’s hope the wiggle room doesn’t turn into a ballroom.

I think this is pretty cool, and it’s a step in the right direction. The law is meant to address the growing waistlines of Americans everywhere. While foods with no trans fats are great, we also need to limit our caloric intake (that means smaller portions) and get more physical activity. Legislation can only go so far. People need to take some personal responsibility if they wish to stay thin. Complaining about their weight at the water cooler won’t solve anything.

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