Put Less in the Pie Hole
January 10th, 2010 by John Creighton in Dispatches
Tags: Personal, Public Leaders
Magazines arrive at our home on a regular basis since the New Year with tips on how to lose weight. The banners across the covers scream “Lose Six Pounds in Two Weeks” and “19 New Ways to Fight Fat” and “Your Best Body Ever: Lose 10 Pounds in January.”
Magazine publishers and Madison Avenue know that a common American resolution is to lose unwanted weight. In just one hour watching television the other night, all kinds of companies pitched their products as part of a weight loss regimen. Cereal, yogurt and soup companies trumpeted the benefits of their packaged foods. Even Taco Bell claims that their low end fast food can be part of a dramatic weight loss diet.
I have lost fifteen pounds over the past four or five months. I am down thirty pounds from my high of two years ago. I didn’t buy any books or read any magazine articles. I didn’t adopt any particular brand name diet – no Atkins, no South Beach. I call my diet “Put Less in the Pie Hole.”
I have lost weight with four easy steps. I try to exercise four to five times per week for thirty to forty minutes. But, exercise makes only a marginal difference in calories. It’s what you eat or don’t eat that matters. Exercise is not one of my four easy steps.
I quit eating sweets, except on occasion. I eat almonds and apples for snacks rather than Snickers and pop. I quit eating bread, except on occasion. I still love a cheeseburger and French Fries once or twice a month. I quit eating seconds at dinner. And, my wife and I split entrées at restaurants rather than stuffing down the grotesquely large portions most eateries serve.
There is an entire industry built on teaching people to lose weight. It’s not that complicated though. Burn more calories than you consume. That’s the ticket.
Do you recall the Saturday Night Live skit making a parody of American’s overspending and the personal finance gurus helping people get back on track? Steve Martin and Amy Poehler portrayed a couple that just couldn’t get their finances to add up. Chris Parnell brought them his one page book: “Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford.” The next two minutes of the skit Martin and Poehler try to make sense of this revolutionary idea.
My weight loss story and the Saturday Night Live skit illustrate a point. We often make things more complicated than they are. Losing weight and saving money may not be easy. (For years, I succumbed to the temptation of putting too much down the pie hole.) But, they aren’t complicated. Success is simply a matter of will and discipline.
The same principle applies in the public realm, too. We often make public challenges far more complicated than they really are. Education is one example.
We pretend that it’s possible for schools to prepare a child who arrives at kindergarten unable to identify the alphabet to achieve at the same level as a child who arrives at kindergarten reading at the second grade level when both students attend school the exact same number of hours and days. We blame the school when that does not happen. The simple fact is that some students need more support and more instruction time than other students to reach similar levels.
There is little political will to provide students who need extra help with the support they need. So, instead, we rely on the equivalent of “19 New Ways to Fight Fat Close the Achievement Gap.”
Fiscal responsibility is another example of an issue made too complicated. Fiscal responsibility is not synonymous with cutting taxes or cutting government programs. A fiscally responsible public official calls on the public to pay for the services they demand. No more but no less.
My father often told a story about our mutual political hero former Republican Kansas Governor Mike Hayden. As my father tells the story, then gubernatorial candidate and Speaker of the House Hayden went to the well of the Kansas House of Representatives on the last day of the legislative session. The state budget still included more spending than projected revenue. He told the body, “We’ve cut as much as we’re going to cut. We don’t have the votes to cut more. The only choice we have left is to raise taxes.” (In today’s Republican Party Hayden would also have had to end his candidacy for governor for making a call to raise taxes.) Balancing a budget is as simple as that. Revenues must match expenditures.
I sometimes wonder if we pretend that issues are complicated as a way to escape dealing with them. We would rather read about “19 New Ways to Fight Fat” rather than face up to what we all know. Getting things done is mostly a matter of will and discipline. It’s that simple. It’s that hard.
2 Responses to “Put Less in the Pie Hole”
Unfortunately our legislative process usually makes things more complicated than they need to be…I hate that education is sucked into the political realm and the bottom line of kids gets lost. And here we go again with major budget cuts…
But the difficulty, compared to your too pie in the hole, is that we know it’s certain foods that cause fat, so you can simply eliminate them and hence eliminate the fat; what do we eliminate in order to close the achievement gap? What is the simple answer to that one? Even as a teacher I don’t know the simple answer…not all families can afford pre school (or even afford spending quality/learning time with their kids), class sizes are growing making differentiating a difficult task for teachers, not enough time in the school day………….I grapple with this daily. I currently have a student that does not know his alphabet sounds, and I also have a student that is reading at a 6th grade reading level. Oh my.
ps
that was supposed to read, “too much pie in the hole” and then again, it really should have said, “too much in the pie hole”