Road To Ruin Diary, Day Two
This is CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski's Web-exclusive daily road report.
On The Road To Louisiana —
It's still amazing to me to really look at the size of people at the Houston truck stop. We are headed now to a casino hotel in Lake Charles, La., where they have a 24-hour buffet. Yikes.
It is going to be really hard to eat well on this trip! After live shots for several local affiliates, taping promos for the CBS Evening News and waiting around for the Evening News live shot with Bob Schieffer, I am starving! And the boys are hungry too. Jack Renaud, my producer, is driving the van now and I can tell he wants to eat ALL my wheat thins.
Mark LaGanga and Tom Piccolo — photographers — are driving ahead of us while Henry Roddam and Dan Black are in tow in our live truck.
I am officially a roadie! But that doesn't mean I will eat like one. I am determined to eat a low-fat calorie diet on this trip and I am writing this down again because I am feeling VERY weak right now, like I could devour an entire pizza!
But that is just the issue — indulgence and pleasuring our taste buds, constantly trying to quench our increasing appetites. While I was thinking about what to say in my live shot this evening — in only a precious 10 seconds — I wanted to say something that would resonate with the "food issue" that we Americans need to face.
I said to Bob that we have developed a warped sense of what a healthy meal is. And to add to that, it really has become all about indulgence and taste and not health. Advertisements at rest stops and fast food places show huge photos of drippy, juicy, cheese covered, oily foods — burgers, nachos, hot dogs. Taste, taste, taste.
We don't look at food as fuel anymore. We don't look at what nutritional value a dinner can offer us. We primarily think of what it is going to taste like.
I am so guilty. That's how I have lived most of my life and now I am proof of how hard it is to make a permanent change. I may not have a weight problem but I definitely have a food problem. And I bet I am not alone.
One week on a really good diet and I feel like I can't go on anymore! Some experts think our appetites are craving these bad foods on a very basic level after generations of eating badly. When I look around at how many fat people I see, I tend to agree.
And that's another thing, the word "fat." We have been working around it for years. Calling people "heavy" or "overweight" is skirting the issue. Forty-one states have dangerous levels of obesity. In many states, a quarter of the population is obese — or fat!
What does obese mean? It means someone whose weight is at least 30 percent greater than what is healthy for our body type. I hope we can open some minds on this trip.
It's really scary what's happening and how, in some ways, fat is a mainstream thing. People almost seem OK with it.
How did we get to this point? We are on the road trying to find out. Tonight we will be in Alexandria, La., to ask the question: Can you be fat and fit? I am going running with a 300-plus-pound triathlete whose goal is not to be super thin but healthy.