What is your New Year’s Resolution!  Well, mine is to lose some weight!  I ran into a friend at the bank yesterday that asked “Have you put on some weight?”  Well, that pretty much summed it up for me!  It is time for someone to break my plate!  All of those holiday goodies have caught up with me and now I must pay!  

Huntington, West Virginia and Ashland, Kentucky took the prize though back in November of 2008 for over indulgence.  These two cities sit at the spot where West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio meet. And it's the fattest place in the country. This area easily had the most obese people at 45.3 percent; slightly more than 20 percent were at a healthy weight. Residents there tied with those living in El Paso, Texas, as the least likely to report participating in any physical activity in the past month, with just over 31 percent saying they hadn't exercised. It also has the highest percentage of people living with diabetes: an outrageous 12.7 percent.

If we look closer at the problem, we can quickly come up with some pretty good reasons for this dilemma. Just about every fast food restaurant wants you to Supersize or Biggiesize your meal for a small up charge. Then we have other restaurants serving food portions that are enough for two or three people. My wife and I ate at a Denny’s Restaurant last weekend near Indianapolis that clearly took the grand price!  We each order a breakfast called the “Grand Slam” You could pick any four items from a generous list of choices. My wife ordered grits, two pancakes, two eggs and two strips of bacon.  I also went with the eggs and bacon, but hash browns and toast was more to my liking.  Good grief!!!  My wife’s two pancakes were the size of large dinner plates. Her grits were served in a large soup bowl that was also as big as a dinner plate. Our eggs were clearly graded as extra large and I had enough hash browns for three hungry boys!  With coffee, our bill came to $20 including the tip. The sad part was the food was only marginal tasting at best. We both left there feeling stuffed and disgusted because we had wasted so much food. Of course that raises another problem that many of us baby boomers have been taught by our parents, Clean your plate! Think of all of the starving children in the world that don’t have anything to eat!

As a nation, we are truly blessed and we generally take our abundance for granite.  As I said before, my News Years Resolution is to lose some weight, but I am also going to take time to thank God for all that I have and the many blessing he has given me. It’s “My Opinion” that you might want to do the same, if you haven’t already, but that’s clearly your call.  I pray that all of you have a blessed New Year!

May God bless…

Ron Phillips