You know why there is an obesity epidemic? Because 90% of people ARE lazy and hate change of any kind. That and soda. That shit is the most evil substance on the planet. I don't understand the concern really. If people want to eat themselves to death, so what? More of everything for me and mine. Food, space, peace and quiet, jobs, cleaner air, etc.
But that food culture only really came to Chicago in the last decade. Otherwise its beer, Italian beef, deep dish pizza, etc... Any traditional Chicago food culture is basically calorically dense and not super healthy for you. Its the Midwest as a whole really. Growing up in Milwaukee, you're gonna see the same thing. But I guess that is all a bit beside the point.
I'm overweight. I'm 33 years old. I work in an office. The equation is simple. I am going to die unless I lose weight and get my shit right, and that's a difficult proposition when you're nearing middle-age. My window for change is getting smaller and I'm getting fatter. There are no two ways about it. Convenience and laziness are the big contributing factors for my fatassery. Surprisingly, I'm relatively active. I'll get to that in a minute. It's that I was picking up $10 in fast food after walking the dog for an hour or two or fishing until dark. After reading a lot about weight loss, big ag, and what we ate when we were in good health, I decided to follow the Primal Blueprint which is a diet based loosely on what we ate about 10,000 years ago. My energy comes from fat and protein. The few carbs that I consume every day come from vegetables. The few preservatives that I eat come in the form of cured meats like bacon and sausage. I've cut out all grains and all processed sugar. I'm not hungry. I don't experience carb crashes, and I've lost a little over 20 lbs. in a month. Frankly, I can't tell that I'm dieting when I can eat bacon-wrapped deer loin, grilled vegetables, and a salad. Having yo-yo'ed in the past with dieting, this is a totally different approach as I'm not rifling carbs down my throat and weighing portions of boneless skinless chicken breast under the guise that whole grain=healthy and fat=bad. By the way, my blood pressure is falling as well. As far as exercise is concerned, weight is 80% diet and 20% activity as is the case for most mammals. If your dog is overweight, you vet isn't going to recommend that he run more. She will suggest that you feed him less. People talk about change and government as if they hold some magic answer that will make us healthy. The reality is change is going to have to be societal, and that's proven repeatedly. Take smoking, for example. Smoking became offensive to the majority of the population and you saw a drastic decline in the number of smokers. A lot of that stems from people losing loved ones to smoking related maladies. I think at this point, the numbers have leveled out and I doubt that we'll see a bigger decline in the smoking population, but look at what it has done in the past 30 years. If anything, it will take a bunch of parents losing limbs or dying at 40 for their children to realize that they are traveling down the same road.
Regarding food - We need to stop allowing pseudo foods to be passed as food. Your food SHOULD NOT HAVE chemical stabilizers in it. Your food should have a foreseeable expiration date. Your food should have an ingredient list of REAL FOOD. Fillers, additives, etc...are not food. If food has to be "enriched" so it's worth eating...guess what...IT ISN'T FOOD. Regarding cooking - Home Ec was required when I was in the 8th grade, and a semester was required to graduate high school. Invaluable. Like was mentioned before, budgeting, cooking, cleaning, and generally maintaining a household was taught. These life skills aren't necessarily taught at home. Regarding playtime/PE - Jesus yes. Recess and physical education are essential for our kids' development. My boys have had PE every day since kindergarten, my daughter has not. Her schools have always alternated or had some kind of block schedule that precluded it. The difference in their physicality is obvious. Not to mention the behaviors of their classmates. There are so many gaps in our current society, emotional gaps, coping gaps, physical gaps...I can't see anything but a stripped bare restart as being beneficial. The fuck did I just read? 33 is a vital age. Vitality should ooze from every pore. Yeah shit will start to slow down but damn. Take care of yourself and your thirties are fuckin' fun.
Life expectancy for the average white male is about 75 years. I would call 33 nearing middle age, considering dead-ass center is 37.5.
I've been living by myself for over a year and am nominally an adult.... and still don't know how to do that. I'm entirely serious. If it can't be cooked on a grill, in a microwave, or in a pot of boiling water, I'm at a loss. Even scarier, I'm not that atypical for people my age. It comes down to, as others have alluded, we live a life of unheralded convenience and plenty. This is, in most regards, a good thing but the side effects have caught up. It's not as if previous generations had some sort of virtue that we lack. They just had less food, less enticing food, more back-breaking manual labor, and fewer alternative activities. It's an unintended side effect of the prosperous society that we've built for ourselves. I'm often a pessimist about this sort of thing, and I'm worried that we're on the wrong side of human nature on this one. Are people en mass going to willfully stop eating food that is tasty, cheap, and convenient for their own good? Perhaps, but it seems unlikely. That being said, I'm a lazy lardo, so maybe I'm not giving people who are not me enough credit.
Same can be said for the south. You could take a cow chip, and if you bread and deep-fry it, they'll eat it. Go to a seafood restaurant in coastal Carolina and order your fish grilled. First you get the look followed by, "We're gonna charge ya a dollar more for that, y'know." The Texas State Fair takes deep-fried foods to new heights of absurdity each year (deep-fried butter? Really? Yes, really.) As overweight as I am, going to the state fair actually makes me feel good about my appearance.
I also think you can attribute alot of that to passing of anti-smoking laws in places. I remember being in college when the no smoking in bars/restaurants passed and the number of my friends who smoked cut drastically cause it became and inconvenience. As intimidating some of the anti-smoking ads are, they are a whole hell of a lot more ineffective than having to go outside a bar when its 7 degrees out for that cigarette in the winter. I still find it amazing that so many kids are so fucking lazy at a young age. I played tons of video games as a kid, but I was still outside ALL the time in the summer. You know why? Cause it was fucking fun. The kids whose parents set specific limits on TV and video games seemed to be the lazy ones who would try to avoid exercise at all costs. Yet again, encouragement and example setting are far more effective than restrictions and forced participation.
To get Americans to be less fucking fat we need to end socialized medicine. We need to let these people die. Allow hospitals and insurance companies to deny them treatment/coverage and you'll create a real incentive to lose weight (which can be done solely by proper diet, which in my opinion is the Paleo (or similar) diet). Force people to pay for their own treatments out of their own pockets and some progress can be made. The only alternative that could be effective would be totalitarian control over basically everyone's entire lives. Except the people running the show, of course.
In the south, smoking bans were voted in while places like malls and grocery stores opted to go non-smoking years before any type of ordinance was passed. The majority was already not smoking. The law had little, if anything to do with it.
I floated the idea of allowing insurance companies to charge more/pay less for obese peoples coverage so that the incentive to save money is put on the patient, not some sort of credit like has been suggested before. Of coarse it was shouted down as unfair as I guess all fatties are not created equal. I still feel that if your lifestyle of morbid obesity puts the system under undue strain you should pay a significant amount more for coverage.
Yeah, the issue is we do everything by BMI, so people like Shimmered and lhprop would be classified as obese.
Also, let's not make the mistake of assuming that ALL people are literate, well-read consumers who feel they have an active roll to play in their own health and are willing to experiment with lifestyle and diet to achieve a different result (i.e. people on TiB). The majority of people spend no time actively researching nutrition or exercise. They do the best they can trying to manage their lives from day-to-day, usually with not enough money and too many dependants (children and elderly). How much effort do you think a single mom in Chicago, or a Latino migrant worker who speaks poor English, or a family in Flint that's had no work in years are going to put into their nutrition? Most will never have a concept of what is healthy and what is not - not because they're lazy, but because the glut of info in the market is overwhelming and they lack the resources to make sense of it all. Ignorance isn't something someone does to bother the rest of us in most cases. Lots of people in our countries have the naive belief that the government wouldn't let something unhealth be sold, that their doctor has a good grasp on nutrition and that this "fat epidemic" is somehow not something they can change.
I don't understand. You can obviously read. You can obviously use the internet. I don't understand how you can't do this. It's beyond me. Then again, you're getting that need/desire filled other ways (grilled, whatever) so I can somewhat see that, based on not needing to know, you've never done it. Where is the inquisitiveness though? Overall (I'm not calling you out by any means...it's just a thought that popped into my head...)? I mean...where is the idea that "Hey. I don't know how to do that. I'm going to teach myself..."
Obviously I COULD cook a chicken. I'm not arguing that I'm literally physically incapable of cooking a chicken. It's largely that I'm a lazy sack o' poo who has spend his time (1) at home, (2) in college, or (3) with very little free time. Cooking has always fallen under things I have relatively little time and/or inclination for. Which, once you realize you need to start eating healthier, totally comes and bites you in the ass. I'm not arguing that this is an enviable position. It's not. I'm just pointing out that this is a situation where a sizable proportion of the population finds itself. Edit: And bacon and cheese, yes.
Maybe he looked at the top of the page and saw the banner ad for Chili's and said, "Screw it, I want something with bacon and cheese on it."
All I see is an ad for some cougar dating site or something, and I'm pretty sure sex counts as exercise. Hell, if I eat a salad and bang some older lady, that probably makes me healthier than the majority of Americans at this point.
I know I'm fat because I have terrible impulse control and I'm a lazy sack of shit. Where'd I get that? Who knows. I'll rationalize around it for a while but i'm smart enough to know that it's a rationalization, but not smart enough to deal with it.
I would argue the opposite. A huge problem is that our health care uses an incentive system that focuses on "repeat customers", not healthy independent people. Too many "solutions" in our health care system don't involve things like real lifestyle changes, preventative care and actually useful health information. If you want Americans to be less fat, raise taxes on high-calorie foods so that veggies become cheaper than pizza, create and establish systems of public transportation so that people walk places, and teach them how to cook using things like ovens instead of microwaves.