FINES AND TAXES MORE ADDICTIVE THAN SUGAR

DARRYN Lyons: I must say from the outset that I look forward to reading your articles and appreciate most of what you say.

Your passion for Geelong is commendable. But on the subject of a sugar tax (GA 14/7), I’m sad to say, you are way off beam.

I would not have thought you would be in favour of increasing the powers of the “Nanny State” by agreeing with this proposal.

People today take little or no responsibility for their own actions and this is just another example.

It seems that people cannot be trusted to regulate their own diets so the nanny state will just have to do it for them.

Sad. Every time something goes wrong in a person’s life they immediately start looking around for someone else to blame. Then of course the lawyers get involved and before you know it the matter goes to court, or they get a payout to make it go away.

Governments then spring into action to protect the so-called innocent, after all, we can’t blame the “victim”. And how do they do that? The only way they know how. Fines and taxes.

This in turn feeds their own addiction. The need for more and more money to pay for their ridiculous excesses. And it is the little people who foot the bill.

Fines and taxes become so addic- tive that governments include them in their budgets. Proof surely that they do nothing to modify behaviour to solve the original problem but just become part of the revenue raising process.

As for your own battle with the bulge. You say you’ve tried to get it down. No you haven’t. The formula is very simple. The fuel you take in must match the fuel you use in daily activity for your body to remain in equilibrium.

If you take in more than you use, you put on weight. If you use more than you take in, your weight goes down. The problem is that most people love their food and dislike/hate exercise.

Now I don’t want to sound crass but the young lads in the cave in Thailand lost several kilos in the relatively short time they were cut off. Why? Because they had little food so their expenditure was greater than their intake.

So there it is Darryn. Regulate your diet and exercise. I might just add that one of the best times to exercise is just before you eat. This has a double purpose. It suppresses appetite and it raises your metabolism, which stays at a raised level for a time after you stop, for example, while you are eating. Bert Moritz, Lethbridge