The perfect fit button

Oh-oh are those pants getting too tight to close? Oh no, that button is ready to pop! Stop! You need the Perfect Fit Button! The quickest, easiest way to add or reduce inches on the waist band of your pants!

This is the sweetest of messages that greets your ear when you click on the Perfect Fit Button website.

Without exaggerating, this is possibly the best invention America has ever come up with. Thanks to the Perfect Fit Button, you’ll never grow out of your trousers or skirts again!

Pile on as many pounds as you like – or indeed scale yourself down to a svelter you – and all you need to do when you heave into/slide on your favourite pair of jeans is take the ingenious adjustable, removable Perfect Fit Button and reposition it to the point in the waistband that best suits your newer heftier/slighter figure. You just pop on the button at the right spot, push the ‘lock tight cap’ and hey presto, you’re ready to go!

Forget having to keep trousers in four different sizes in your wardrobe to cater to your changing waistline, forget buttons that pop off your gaping heaving midriff after yet another splurge at the pizza parlour, forget having to sew on new buttons – the Perfect Fit Button will ensure that your trousers never betray you again.

Oh and these guys have thought of everything – the Perfect Fit Button comes in denim, khaki, brown and black, to suit all your colour needs.

Marvellous!

And don’t forget: Everyone needs Perfect Fit Button and you can get it now with this special internet offer! Get yours now!

And the biggest loser is……..

Seeing as I’ve barely scratched the surface on the infinitely fascinating theme that is Americans and their food/diet issues, here’s some more food for thought…

Forget X-Factor, forget Britain’s Got Talent, here in America, the biggest reality ‘talent’ show is none other than The Biggest Loser – where a group of  people who are larger than life in every possible way (or  in more simple terms, morbidly obese) battle against each other to lose the most amount of weight over the course of the series, so as to be crowned THE BIGGEST LOSER in the grand FINALE – and walk away with a neat quarter of a million dollars.

I just came across a repeat of said finale of the last series on the NBC website and quite simply could not believe my eyes.

Of course, this being America, the land of unrepentant and joyous exaggeration, everything about The Biggest Loser was super-sized and coated with sentimentality. It was a story of hyperbole heaped upon hyperbole, superlative slapped upon superlative: The FATTEST/THINNEST contestant ever! The MOST amount of weight EVER lost in a week! The SADDEST/HAPPIEST I’ve ever been! The MOST incredible experience ever! The hardest ordeal ever!

From the melodramatic weigh-in ‘ceremony’ of each contestant stepping onto a giant weighing scales mounted on a giant podium, to the deafening screams and whoops of delight of the live audience, and the ’emotional’ live marriage proposal between two ‘losers’ who met and fell in love on the show…

From the jaw-dropping vital statistics of the ‘losers’ who started off weighing anything from a hefty 250 pounds (18 stone/113 kg) up to a terrifying 480 pounds (34 stone/217 kg), to their even more dramatic weight losses – one guy broke a record by losing double-figure pounds for seven weeks in a row, not forgetting of course 40-year-old Danny, crowned “The Biggest Loser”, who lost a staggering 239 pounds, or 55% of his original body weight – this was larger than life even than by usual American reality TV standards.

The ultimate in sadistic, voyeuristic, vicarious viewing, you couldn’t help but watch in utter fascination and horror at everything these people go through to lose weight, not least of all the extreme cruelty and rigour of the shiny happy skinny practically-perfect celebrity personal trainers who lick them into shape week after week in a gruelling boot camp regime. It’s a no-holds-barred viewing experience – you see the contestants breaking down during exercise sessions, flying off treadmills, collapsing during practice runs, panting, sweating, screaming, sobbing, all dignity gone.

Yet, putting aside cynicism for a minute, the message of The Biggest Loser is pretty powerful. These people, many of whom have suffered all their lives with the trauma, low self esteem and physical limitations of being morbidly obese, are literally born again. Although they may not all have reached their target weight by the finale, they’ve all achieved something not easily done by the best of us – they’ve changed, on the outside and the inside, and they all without exception spoke about how they had ‘got their lives back’, or become the person they always wanted to be.

So in spite of myself, I watched every minute of that finale riveted, and I must confess, I was not averse to a tear or two.

Final word: For any American reader, rest assured, I’m not preaching superiority given that I come from England, where the rate of obesity is probably almost as high as over here.

The Kingdom of the Calories

So there I was browsing in Barnes & Noble (bookshop) in midtown Manhattan, armed with good intentions and a couple of fitness/losing weight magazines in one hand (“How I lost 100 pounds!”, “Say goodbye to your old self in 2010!”), drooling dreamingly over some to-die-for chocolately heaven in a cakes cookbook in the other hand, when suddenly I caught sight of myself and chuckled at the dramatic irony of the situation.

I realised that this is the perpetual conundrum people who need to lost weight have to deal with: that terrible battle between wanting to eat luscious foods and wanting to be thin. Because for people who love to eat, that revoltingly smug one-liner abnormally-sized Kate Moss recently threw out to the horror of most normal-sized people – “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – is just one massive deception.

And this terrible conundrum is most graphically played out here on the streets of New York, where CALORIES scream out at you from every shop window laden with delectable goodies.

You walk past a doughnut place – “Chocolate custard donut! (573 calories)”, you go into a Starbucks – “Gingerbread Eggnog Happy Holidays Iced Cinnamon Latté! (498 calories)”, you go into a supermarket and you walk past a section wholly devoted to packets of snacks that are all only 100 calories each, perfect for your average dieter’s treat of the day (assuming you don’t eat all six portions in one go, of course).

My question to the powers that be in America’s Grand High Calorie Council is as follows: Do you really think that a person who is about to take a luxurious bite out of a MASSIVE cream doughnut or an even MASSIVER squidgy blueberry muffin is benefiting from knowing its calorie content? Is this omniscient calorie display really going to do anything to tackle one of the highest obesity levels in the world? (I would guess that lowering the exorbitant price of fruit and vegetables in your average New York supermarket might be more effective, but that’s just a hunch.)

One final anecdote:  not long ago I attended a talk on the East Side, followed by an informal buffet. At said buffet, in the midst of having my usual internal battle between what I really wanted to eat and what I was resigning myself to eating, I found myself looking on aghast at a horrific image. This was of another participant, female, emaciated, obviously ravenous,  who was standing in the corner next to a sandwich platter and literally devouring these horrible tuna and egg sandwiches like this was the first time she’d eaten in 2009.

What was really tragic about this scene was that I soon clocked that the poor malnourished girl was shovelling in just the sandwich fillings just as quickly as she was discarding the main bulk of the sandwich, i.e. the bread, in a dustbin strategically placed nearby.

There was no doubt in my mind. I was witnessing a scene out of an Atkin’s Diet hell.

It was then that I wondered what would happen to me living in America – would I end up skinny or would I end up obese? Are there any in-betweens here?