“To the best of my knowledge my health is fine. I have an annual physical. I should lose weight, everybody who tells me I should lose weight, they are all correct. I just find it really hard to lose weight.” ~ Newt Gingrich
While Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, LBJ, and Bill Clinton could have lost a couple of pounds, we haven’t had a seriously fat President since 332 pound William Taft allegedly got stuck in White House bathtub a century ago.
Most of our Presidents in the last half century - John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and President Obama - fit America’s idea of what a president should look like: fit, healthy, nimble, and slender.
In 2012, three of four of President Obama’s ostensible Republican opponents fit that physical image.
Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum appear to be fit, healthy, nimble, and slender - NOT fat and lumbering - like Newt Gingrich.
Seriously, who among us wants a President who can’t control his weight because he’s fatally attracted to food?
Americans prefer a fit, healthy, nimble, and slender President because we recognize that the image of our nation is reflected in the image of its leader. In other words, we understand that friends and foes around the world see a direct link between a physically fit President and our nation’s economic, military, and political fitness.
As a self-described historian, 68-year old Newt Gingrich must recognize that an aging, fat, lumbering President will be perceived as representative of an aging, fat, lumbering nation.
Though Gingrich obviously doesn’t care about the image of the presidency and our nation, we do. And, since Newt has a chance to become President Gingrich, I have a responsibility to help him figure out how to not destroy an agile, powerful national image so many good Presidents have worked so hard to preserve.
Don't I?
But before I say anything to the fat man who would be President, I need to understand why he’s fat.
My research indicates the obvious: that Newt Gingrich is fat because he consumes more calories than he burns; in other words, the man eats too much, too often.
It’s no more complicated than that.
Please bear with me while I offer Newt the following useful techniques he can use to stop stuffing himself before, as a fat man in the White House, he would destroy America’s image around the world:
- Eat calmly . . . not on the run, not in a rush at a food bar, and definitely not in a car between campaign stops
- Eat to eat . . . not while reading books, listening to music, watching yourself on television or arguing with Callista
- Eat only in public . . . not in secret (no more midnight ‘wolf-downs’ of gallons of rocky road ice cream)
- Eat only what you want . . . not what Callista insists you eat because she’s ‘found a new recipe for chocolate cake stuffed with sugar balls and slathered with Carmel icing’
- Eat only when you’re hungry . . . NOT because it’s ‘time to eat’ or as a distraction or to relieve the stress of another debate
- Eat smart . . . if you’re as smart as you constantly say you are, use your ‘smarts’ to choose healthy, low-calorie foods
- Eat until you’re no longer hungry . . . not until you’re ‘full’; you’re not a little boy anymore, Newtie; mommy isn’t hovering over you, insisting that you ‘clean your plate’
- Enjoy eating . . . but within reason, without obsessing on the pleasurable aspects of taste and of feeling full, safe, and secure
- Exercise . . . regularly, consistently, vigorously to lose weight, to improve your quality of life, and to live long enough to finish at least one term in the White House
If Newt Gingrich is a serious candidate for the presidency, he’ll follow the simple steps I’ve outlined here and if he wins in November, a leaner President Gingrich might actually have a chance to change the future of the nation.
I hope Newt will read this and take to heart everything I've said. After all, even he must admit that a fat man shouldn’t be President of the United States because a fat man doesn’t have to be fat.
Does he?
Comments? Questions? Contact the author at: davyjones@ethicscount.org or Tweet: @DavyZJones
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