I was thinking about going on a diet, again. I need to lose about twenty pounds, but I am having the hardest time starting a diet. I want to, I need to, but I suffer from a bad case of inertia. I can’t get started.

It’s not only my problem, but all of America it seems. I googled the following phrase: ‘too fat America’, and I came up with 28,800,000 hits, that’s a lotta hits. Of the 28,800,000 hits, I read three articles and scanned a couple more. There are a lot of theories, but nothing startling or new. We eat too much, we eat the wrong stuff, and we don’t exercise enough. A couple theories are of the rebound sort, we, as a country, don’t smoke as much, so we eat more, and we have better drugs to combat cholesterol, so we don’t worry as much about downing all the extra groceries. But we are gaining weight as a country, especially in the south the statistics say. Good old southern fried chicken and/or pecan pie I guess, but whatever we are becoming a bunch of rollie-pollies.

The artist Fernando Botero, a hero of all overweight people, paints most of his subjects large. From the one picture I have seen of Mr. Botero he is slim, go figure.