I seldom react to headlines in terms of letting them stimulate an idea for a story. But this week fat is everywhere. It’s in the newspapers, on the video screen, on the front page of magazines and featured Thursday in prime time on America’s national radio network, National Public Radio.

The Atlantic magazine has obesity as its cover story in its May edition. In that article, Marc Ambinder, a former obesity patient who took the surgical route to address his problem, states that in America “the debate on how to deal with obesity remains frozen” between “the proponents of individual responsibility” on the one hand and those who blame “powerful environmental factors” on the other. In the middle, of course, are the profit takers. They thrive on peddling their poisonous products wrapped in highly colored scrolls containing the fine print—unreadable without a magnifying glass—that documents anything from synthetics, to chemical additives, to high-sugar-dose ingredients designed to rob the body of its natural health. This, beside the excessive carbohydrates comprising much of the average American diet sold at fast-food joints, just helps pump up the body fat of the recipient while lowering his life expectancy.

But why exactly is obesity such a widespread problem in Anglo-Saxon countries, most particularly in America?

The real answer to the question will be accepted by few, and that’s the real reason we have a problem.

When I attended elementary and high school from the mid-1940s through to the end of the 1950s, there was not one obese child or youth among the hundreds at the schools I attended. There was the odd chunky chap and beefier young lady, but no one was obese. During the years that national service was compulsory in my home country of Australia, not once did the government have to lower the standards of physical fitness to attain its quota of recruits. In fact, in those days, people took a pride in being physically fit. The nation’s heroes were its warriors in battle, its civilian heroes and heroines being its high achievers on the sports field.

From elementary school classes we learned of the necessity to obey certain principles of physical fitness and diet for our well-being. School sports were compulsory, as were regular classes in physical education. The delineation between the sexes was clearly understood and unquestioned. Physical activity was constructed to recognize that difference and promote it. The emphasis was on litheness, athletic ability and endurance, not on muscle-bound bursts of brute strength.

In those days, apart from the fish and chip shop, takeaways and fast food was nowhere to be seen. People ate at the kitchen table as a family unit, three regular meals a day—no open-mouthed munching on the hoof.

Watch any newsreel from those days and you won’t see an obese person—except perhaps the infamous fat lady on display at the circus. The reason people paid to gawk at her was simply that those poor creatures were so rare!

What’s all this got to do with this obese 21st century?

Well, to the sensible mind that can still grasp hold of sound common sense, quite a lot.

Obesity has increased in direct proportion to the reduction of the nuclear-family, home-based lifestyle, in direct correlation with the breakdown of gender norms and the reduction of emphasis on physical activity in our schools and local communities. That is a demonstrable fact no matter the attempts of pseudoscience and peddlers of perverse lifestyles to prove the contrary. All legitimate science admits to this from countless studies which anyone can Google.

And there’s another societal factor: the massive reduction in standards of behavior, manners and morals that has removed shame from the equation. In my day, to be excessively overweight would have been seen to be a character problem, a social weakness that reflected no right pride in appearance out of deference to your fellow beings, if not to oneself!

Yet, the massive change in lifestyle in our Anglo-Saxon nations that has occurred in the postwar years—great reductions in levels of personal responsibility, the promotion of self-indulgence, sedentary living and significant environmental changes, plus the general destruction of moral standards that occurred in the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s—is not the sole, nor even the principal reason for the widespread disease of obesity.

In fact, the answer lies literally out of this world! Here we must leave the godless evolutionists behind and step into another realm—that of the paranormal, the spiritual realm! For therein only lies the answer. It emanates from the very Creator of humankind, the One who created man to be subject to certain laws which, if only he would obey them, would deliver a life of health, wealth and happiness—without obesity!

There is a powerful prophecy that speaks of this obese generation in your Bible. It is redolent with spiritual lessons for our society today. In the book of Deuteronomy, God inspired Moses to prophesy of the end result of the Anglo-Saxon nations’ rebellion against Him. It would happen as their national power waned following the period of greatest blessings that God has ever bestowed upon a single nation. Using the term Jeshurun to speak of the descendants of the nations of Israel, God declared, “But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation” (Deuteronomy 32:15).

Check any lexicon and that word fat literally means what it says! The Hebrew for the phrase “covered with fatness” means to be literally “covered with fat flesh.” The term thick comes from the Hebrew meaning “dense,” which may have both a physical and an intellectual application! Did ever one brief verse describe our dense and obese generation as this one? A generation which refuses to even think of the possibility that their collective national and their individual rebellion against their Maker may have resulted in the spiritual and mental denseness and physical obesity they exhibit today?

You need to read The Seven Laws of Radiant Health. It will show you the source of health and welfare and the method by which to obtain and hold on to it such that your whole life will take on a fresh new meaning. Also, request our book The Incredible Human Potential. It will show you how you can change your own whole lifestyle to reflect and to develop your own personal and very incredible human potential!

It’s a recipe for living life to the full!