Why we elect fat mayors

Before voting for someone who is going to manage your city for four years, you look at their platform, their party, and perhaps their track record. Almost no one asks how they sleep, how they eat, or when the last time was that they moved.

And it is a political question. The person signing the budget does so with a brain, and that brain functions better or worse depending on how they treat their body.

What the scale doesn't tell you, but the waistline does

Let's be precise: weight alone says nothing about anyone's judgment. What matters is what usually accompanies a certain type of fat.

Visceral fat, the kind that accumulates inside the abdomen, is not an inert storehouse. It releases inflammatory substances like interleukin-6 and causes the liver to produce more C-reactive protein (CRP), the classic marker of systemic inflammation. It is low-grade inflammation: it doesn't hurt, it isn't visible, and it lasts for years.

Does that affect how you think? There are signs that it does. In a study of 125 adults between 42 and 82 years old, a higher CRP was associated with worse results in frontal lobe tests, the area we use for planning, inhibiting impulses, and changing strategies. Exactly the functions someone who makes decisions for thousands of people needs most.

The office makes it worse

Power has its own metabolic environment: work lunches with wine, an official car, a schedule that eats up exercise time, and cut-short sleep.

In the Whitehall II study, involving British civil servants, job stress was associated with weight gain in men who already started with more kilos. The opposite happened with those who were thin. Stress doesn't make everyone gain weight: it amplifies the tendency you already had.

And sustained cortisol pushes fat toward the abdomen, which is exactly the inflammatory fat. Add to that little sleep, which increases hunger, worsens impulse control, and makes people take more risks. You have someone making multimillion-euro decisions with their brain in survival mode.

Caveats

The CRP study is small and observational. The association appeared in overweight women, not in men. It is a signal, not proof.

You cannot diagnose anyone from a photo. There are thin people with a lot of visceral fat and inflammation, and large, strong, and metabolically healthy people.

And an uncomfortable fact: voters already punish being overweight. In U.S. Senate elections, leaner candidates received more votes. The problem is that we look at the silhouette for aesthetics, not for health.

What to do with this

The reflection is not "don't vote for the fat candidate." It is something else: whoever does not manage their own energy will have a hard time managing that of a city. Physical fitness is not an ornament. It is a reflection of priorities, discipline, and the ability to sustain a system over time.

And the question applies to yourself as well. You also govern something: a company, a team, a family. If you sleep poorly, eat on autopilot, and don't move, your decisions are made by an inflamed brain.

Your 1% improvement for today. Compound interest that accumulates.

Do not make any important decisions after ten at night. Write them down and resolve them in the morning. When tired, the part of the brain that inhibits impulses is the first to fail.
 

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