I was pulling a sleep last night and I noticed this tendon or something and I foot twitching and I was like,

is this how it begins? Once you turn 30s life like the fly, first you're gradually deteriorating and then you turn it to goo.

So welcome to You're Wrong About the podcast where we circle back to things misremembered and unremembered. I don't know. That's fine. I like this remembered and unremembered.

Because there are things that we are wrong to not even bother remembering. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.

I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for The New Republic in Buzzfeed for whom I'm currently working on an article that I have been thinking about for five months and I'm finally ready to start writing.

That doesn't sound familiar at all. I feel like you're constantly writing something that you have completed in like a reasonable non-geological period of time.

This is going to ruin this for you because today we're talking about obesity for which I have been working on an article that just passed its one year anniversary.

Oh, that makes me feel so much better. Actually, it's 13 month anniversary.

Ah. See, our article is like pulling itself up on the edges of tables and standing and walking around.

I mean, it's a little bit different today because we're talking about obesity, which is a societal phenomenon but is not necessarily a historical phenomenon.

Usually we talk about things that happened. Right. And things that people were freaked out about in the 70s but have moved on to, at least to, you know, other proxies for enduring fears.

But this is an enduring anxiety that's had the same outfit on forever.

I mean, we'll get into this. But this is what I think is really interesting about, quote unquote, the obesity epidemic, the original draft of this article that I've been working on for 13 months.

It started out with the sentence, the obesity epidemic is having a midlife crisis.

Ah.

There is something interesting about the obesity epidemic that for our whole lives, you and me, we've been hearing the same story about obesity, right?

It's like every summer or whatever the new numbers come out and it's like obesity is higher than it's ever been.

Right.

Obesity is higher than it's ever been.

And there's the CNN footage of like the headless fat people walking around where it's like, we're not showing people's faces.

Yeah. There's studies on this actually.

It's always like a headless torso of somebody who is overweight and they're like carrying McDonald's.

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