People keep talking about fat, the French, and what we should do (as Americans) regarding obesity and diet. However, what people often ignore are the leisure implications that accompany European lifestyle.

Americans often work on “off-days”. In stark contrast to our European counterparts, we have no national holidays or forced time off by any regulation of law. Americans are
free to work as many hours and as many hours consecutively as our employers will put upon us. Americans almost all work more than forty hours a week, most fifty or sixty a week to maintain our lifestyle. They overwhelmingly thrust food down their throats at lunchtime, seldom taking time to enjoy the meal or any other part of their weekday lives. Americans are not “fat and lazy” as some would argue. But, they are overworked, overnourished, and therefor overweight. Physical exercise, the enjoyable kind, is a luxury in America. We pack in exhausting work weeks, overloaded schedules, and what physical exertion we do enjoy comes in weekend warrior projects crammed into short two-day weekends, or what we like to call “days off”.

Posted in lifestyle jasonn's blog