问答题 Since thin people can"t enjoy life, we eke out pleasure by telling fat people how to lose weight, as if they don"t know. Cook! Plant a garden! Read this posting of fast-food-menu calories! Buy fresh produce! Bike to work! Do stuff skinny folk would never do.
So I wasn"t surprised when two recent studies concluded that obesity isn"t reduced by opening supermarkets in poor areas—the so-called food deserts without access to affordable fresh produce that food writer Michael Pollan has railed against and the Obama Administration has funded an initiative to fix. Sure, people can"t eat healthy if there isn"t a store nearby selling pomegranate seeds and kale. But most obesity isn"t caused by a lack of access to affordable produce or time to cook. It"s the result of short-term over long-term thinking. Cooking sucks. Eating a salad takes forever. Fast food is delicious, easy, fun, cheap, reliable and can be scarfed down so quickly there isn"t time to fight with your family. One Thanksgiving meal does more emotional damage than a lifetime of Wendy"s.
The times when I"ve felt stuck in my life, I"ve made horrible decisions—avoiding work, blowing deadlines, going on seven dates with a woman during which I watched a movie on her bed and met her parents and yet did not kiss her once, there by starting, I"m sure, a rumor that I"m either gay or lack a working tongue. And my version of being stuck was hating my Manhattan magazine fact-checking job and living at home with my newly divorced dad. So, less like being poor and more like being in a 1980s sitcom.
But if you"re living in an impoverished community where the future doesn"t look like a rewarding adventure and instead requires all your energy to figure out how to get by this month, you"re unlikely to focus on activities with long-term benefits such as studying, saving, marriage, being drug-free and spicing up quinoa. In their 1988 paper "A Theory of Rational Addiction", economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy argued that shooting heroin is a logical choice when all you"re giving up is a crappy existence. It also explains why so many people do drugs when listening to Phish.
When I ran my theory by Marie Gallagher, the researcher who invented the term "food desert", she actually agreed with me. "That"s why we don"t have to combat food deserts but jobs deserts, crime and so many other things," she said.
I asked Charles Duhigg—whose brilliant book The Power of Habit is about how to trick your brain into making better decisions—what a better solution is. He said telling people to eat well so they"ll live longer is idiotic. "The No. 1 way not to form a good habit is to say, "In three months I"m going to look a lot thinner." There is no way you can say the long-term reward is going to outweigh a sugar rush," he said. "If you see doughnuts on the counter, it will feel really urgent that you need a doughnut. That"s your basal ganglia." One proven way of turning people off doughnuts is to talk about basal ganglia.
I asked A. J. Jacobs, who lost a bunch of weight for his hilarious new book, Drop Dead Healthy, how he did it. Jacobs, who has never been poor, used to think fatalistically about his future, as a poor person might: "I rationalized it and said even if you eat right and go to the gym three times a week, you get hit by a bus, so what"s the point?" In his head, Jacobs lived a chaotic, violent Upper West Side life where young homies were constantly being iced by the M79 crosstown.
So Jacobs tricked himself into thinking long-term results were immediate. "I try to visualize what that doughnut would do to my body. I do that CSI thing where you go inside your body like a bullet, and you visualize the arteries and a big chunk of doughnut blocking the artery," he said. He also stuck a computerized image of himself at 80 on his refrigerator. He agreed to start a company with me that would create an app that updates the elderly-you photo in real time, depending on how much you eat and exercise.
Jacobs spent that evening looking for food at the airport, which is the only food desert rich people run into. "I went to a place called something like the Health Shack. They sold gummy bears and chocolate-chip cookies," he said. Jacobs resisted temptation. Though if this book doesn"t sell, next time he probably won"t.

问答题 What is the real cause of obesity according to the author?

问答题 Why does the author mention the times when he"d felt stuck in his life and made awful decisions in paragraph 3?

问答题 How did A. J. Jacobs lose weight successfully? Cite an example.