See the subject above? I’ve stuffed my stomach with buffet foods (courtesy of Korean foods) in the two days span. One on Friday night and last Sunday. There’s something so American about buffets. If you wanna know why more and more Americans are becoming obese, look no further than buffet places.

We love the idea that we can EAT for all we want and with that psychological effect, we CRAM as much as we can into our stomachs so the money we paid for the buffet would be better spent. We love the word—unlimited—so we have unlimited data plans for our pagers, and remember when AOL starts offering unlimited hours plan? We all jumped on this bandwagon and remain logged till computer monitors get burned.

So, buffets also means unlimited foods and we pretend we have bottomless stomachs and fill them in. As soon as we realize our stomachs are no longer bottomless, we start spitting out comments like “I’m gonna throw up!”, “My stomach is gonna burst open!”, “Oh, I gotta make a dump! Where’s the bathroom!?”. Isn’t that sound sad, doesn’t it?

One pro thing about the buffet, actually two things, is you can try a small portion of the dish and see if you like it or not instead of blind-order the dish and pray that you’ll like the dish. Second thing is that you don’t have to wait for your order to arrive and you can quickly look at all the foods and decide which one you’ll eat first. My dad would often fall victim to a bad dish or wrong order—maybe it wasn’t large enough or it simply tastes awful—and you’re basically stuck with your order unless you’re bold enough and demand another order.

So, what’s my point? While buffets may be a convenient way to “preview” choices of dishes, it lies at the root why Americans are becoming heavier everyday.

Tonight, I gotta hit the gym and burn those buffet calories to avoid becoming into yet another obese American.