Campaign to Save Kathy Griffin from Starvation!

D-List celebrity Kathleen Mary Griffin, 50, is starving. She is shown in the photo being supported by U.S. troops who are apparently on a humanitarian rescue mission. Ms. Griffin’s plight is just one example of anepidemic among Hollywood actors most of whom are under the influence of the insidious “energy balance paradigm” which which can be traced back to Adolf Hitler. This paradigm causes some of them to voluntarily undergo alternating binges and cleanses often combined with physical exertion to the point of exhaustion.

The whole sordid tale is recounted in a new book by Gary Taubes entitled Why We Get Fat and What to do About It. Taubes is working hard to save people like Kathy, having already saved Drew Carey from a similar fate of “being cranky and hungry all the time.”

Below is a dialog from Taubes’ blog that shows just how hard it is to resist the paradigm:

The experts: Obesity is caused by over-eating, by consuming more calories than are expended. There’s no getting around the first law of thermodynamics.

Us: But all that law says is that if somebody gets fat, they have to consume more calories then they expend. So why do they do that?

The experts: Because they do.

Us: That’s not a good enough answer.

The experts: Well, maybe they can’t help themselves.

Us: Why can’t they help themselves?

The experts: Because they can’t.

Us: That’s not a good enough answer either.

The experts: Because the food industry makes them do it. There’s so much good food around and it’s so tasty, they can’t help but eat it.

Us: But obviously some of us can, because we don’t all get fat. Why is it only some people can’t help themselves?

The experts: Because they can’t.

Us: Try again.

The experts: Well, it’s complicated.

Us: What do you mean complicated? We thought it was easy. Just this eating-too-much, exercising-too-little, calories-in-calories-out, thermodynamics thing.

The experts: Okay, how about this? [Now quoting from an NIH report published in 2000.] “Obesity is a complex, multifactorial chronic disease that develops from an interaction of genotype and the environment. Our understanding of how and why obesity develops is incomplete, but involves the integration of social, behavioral, cultural, physiological, metabolic and genetic factors.”

Us: So what do all those have to do with eating too much and the laws of thermodynamics?

Experts: They contribute to making fat people overeat.

Us: How do they do that?

The experts: We don’t know. It’s complicated.

Us: Then maybe there’s another way to look at it. Maybe when we get fat it’s because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that’s why we eat so much and appear — to you anyway — to be kind of lazy. We’re compensating for the loss of calories into our fat.

The experts: Yeah, well, maybe. Your guess is as good as ours.