Suck My . . . Fat!

Obesity was everywhere.  Food was cheap.  Bad food was cheaper.  What is the average person to do but to sit in their climate controlled office and eat that afternoon snack to marginally satisfy a hunger that they should have been more than willing to let hang on until dinner.  But it was distracting.

Yes, there were a few good signs.  Though nobody could explain it, obesity among children under 10 years old briefly dipped in the early teens.  But it was short-lived.  Beltlines and BMIs quickly returned to their long-term pattern of increasing.

And so it was that Matthias was hailed as the savior of the first world.

[I really should stop here, but I will not.  I will instead ruin everything and forge ahead]

The idea came to him as a young man, but to a young man with an engineering and business background, but nothing in biology.  But as these worlds were increasingly dependent on each other, a fortuitous job change to a hot new Maryland biotech start-up and several chance encounters later, he solidified plans to pursue the dream.  And as anyone who has attained their dream knows, it never goes quite how they thought it would.

At first the clinical trials showed "promise".  As their data set grew larger and their sites higher, they became "encouraging".  Ultimately, the results proved too exciting to keep under wraps.  It was no less the surgeon general who wholeheartedly recommended use of the device to 80 percent of the adult population in the US.  That's when he went from bio-nerd to mainstream nerd and when the adult population suddenly found its optimum BMI.

It was almost as simple as InvisAlign.  Just hop in bed, plug in and let the blood processing equipment do the rest.  In the middle of the night (at the optimum portion of your sleep cycle), the machine would start withdrawing a small amount of your blood and reduce the energy flowing in the form of simple sugars.  The body would have to work a little bit harder to remove some from your fat stores, but that was the point.  The machine shuts off at the right time to ensure you have a restful nights sleep.  If you spend extra you can even have a bit of a bonus: hang-overs are a thing of the past.

But just as behavior with no consequences doesn't always lead in the direction you'd hope, so it was here.  At first, we as a society basked in the ability to dial in body fat percentages.  Sure, muscle size was still a thing, but one no longer had to worry about their BMI.  We should have known that it was too good to last . . .