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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Mike Huckabee, Arkansas' newly skinny governor, weighs in on the humilation of being fat, why government shouldn't police our grease, and whether he's planning to diet his way to the White House.
May 31, 2005 | Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas is the incredible shrinking Republican. The smaller he gets, the larger his national profile becomes.
The former Baptist minister, a conservative Republican who embraces covenant marriage, in the last few weeks has transformed himself into a national weight-loss success story, complete with "before" and "after" pictures. Since being diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 2002 and suffering a heart disease scare in 2003, the governor has drastically changed his diet (fried everything with an extra-large side of refined sugar) and his exercise habits (nonexistent). By getting religion about healthy food and fitness, he has lost 110 pounds, down from 280. He used to dread climbing the steps of the State Capitol to meet the press waiting for him at the top because he knew he'd be sweating and out of breath by the time he reached their microphones. Now slimmed down, he recently ran his first marathon.
In his new motivational book, "Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork," Huckabee uses his own experience to try to inspire others to eat better and get off the couch. He inveighs against the plagues of transfat, refined sugars and highly processed foods, while extolling the virtues of whole-grain breads, fruits and vegetables.
If anything, Huckabee's book sets out to show that he feels the pudgy public's pain. He shares personal humiliations and his mantras -- like "stop whining," "stop expecting immediate success" and, above all, "stop sitting on the couch." He confides that he once made a ceremonious entrance into a room in the State Capitol, where 53 Cabinet-level agency directors all rose to stand in deference to their chief. But when Huckabee took his seat in the antique chair at the head of the table, the chair collapsed under his girth. He wanted to cry, he writes, but made a joke instead to cover up his humiliation. The supposed jolliness of fat people -- that's all just a defense to hide the pain inside, he says.
"Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork: A 12-Stop Program to End Bad Habits and Begin a Healthy Lifestyle"
By Mike Huckabee
Center Street
176 pages
Nonfiction
Earlier this month, Huckabee announced a nationwide initiative with former President Bill Clinton -- whose own recent quadruple bypass has made him seriously rethink his lifelong love of fried food -- to try to halt the rise of childhood obesity. Since then, Huckabee has been on a media blitz around the country, appearing in People magazine and on the "Today" show and "Good Morning America," to promote his book. The tour is raising speculation that by penning a diet book instead of the traditional candidate biography, he's trying to diet his way into the White House in 2008. After all, don't Americans care more about dieting than they do about politicians?
Arkansas had an 80 percent increase in obesity among adults from 1991 to 2002, and 61 percent of adults are currently overweight, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet it is taking some serious steps to fight the problem, too. The University of Baltimore's Obesity Initiative ranks Arkansas as one of the top states in the nation for its attempts to take on citizens' widening waistlines.
But some of those steps are controversial. For instance, public schools measure kids' body-mass indexes and send the results home to parents. While public health advocates applaud the state's first steps, they say they stop short of any actions that would potentially upset industry, like banning junk food in public school vending machines -- an idea that the governor opposes.
Huckabee, who'd run 4 and half miles earlier in the morning, spoke with Salon recently by phone from a hotel in the San Francisco Bay Area, a stop on his book tour.
What has been the reaction in your state to the initiative to measure kids' body-mass index in school?
There was this perception that we were going to line kids up in the hall, and say, "Here's a 160-pounder." When people understood the method of testing -- pinching with calipers -- and that these reports were going to be mailed confidentially and discreetly to parents, independent of the report card, it took a lot of the sting out.
We had a very small number of parents who reacted unpleasantly. A hundred to one, the reaction from parents was: "Thank you. We really weren't even thinking in terms of how much this could affect my child's future health."
As crazy as it may sound, the truth is that when a parent looks at 30 kids in a classroom, and they're all bigger than they were 30 years ago, they don't even see it in terms of "my child's overweight" because the frame of reference is skewed by the fact that [being overweight is] so universal. The BMI gives the parents something objective: "You know, we really need to be more thoughtful about the exercise our child is getting, and the food he or she is eating." It has really caused people to go to their pediatricians and say: "Give me some help."
