Blaming individuals for obesity may be altogether wrong...
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I might not get to reading the full article for a bit but there's a lot to prove that blaming individuals is both pointless and incorrect. Social factors, environmental factors, physiological factors... obesity is incredibly complex! And if "eat less, exercise more" really worked, then obesity rates wouldn't be increasing, as the CDC has been telling people that for decades!
? Um actually yes, eating less and moving more DOES work. Most people are just too lazy to do it.
For you.
In the short-term.
So did everyone just become lazy in 1980? Please tell me more! You alone can solve the problem of obesity curing people of their laziness!!! O_O
No, in the long term.
People have always been lazy. They have also been stingy with their money. It's a recent phenomenon that delicious, calorie-dense food has been available to anyone so quickly and cheaply.0 -
whats it say for those of us who can't see0
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The author's point seems to be, "obesity is so complex, let us not blame a single individual for it."
It's appealing because we like to hear the egotistically comforting words, "It is not your fault".
A "General model of obesity in society" may indeed be complex. But that's not the point of weight-loss. We're not looking for nor do we need the equivalent of "Einstein's theory of obesity" to begin losing weight.
Millions of us on MFP (and outside) have shown that losing weight can be done through a sustained lifestyle of moderate eating (and the common accompaniment of exercise).
Does it work for every single individual? Of course not. But does that mean the average individual should stop taking responsibility for making responsible choices? Do the freedoms given to us mean we should put the blame right back on the society that gave us those freedoms? Or does the old saying, "With freedom comes responsibility" apply?0 -
On this site, we're looking at it from an individual perspective. In a broader public health and societal sense, it's logical to look at the overall aspects that are resulting in such high obesity rates.0
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the book Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolatta (sp?) changed how I think about this topic forever. I highly recommend it.0
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I might not get to reading the full article for a bit but there's a lot to prove that blaming individuals is both pointless and incorrect. Social factors, environmental factors, physiological factors... obesity is incredibly complex! And if "eat less, exercise more" really worked, then obesity rates wouldn't be increasing, as the CDC has been telling people that for decades!
? Um actually yes, eating less and moving more DOES work. Most people are just too lazy to do it.
For you.
In the short-term.
So did everyone just become lazy in 1980? Please tell me more! You alone can solve the problem of obesity curing people of their laziness!!! O_O
Sorry, people have to want to cure themselves.
eek! I don't think these two ideas are mutually exclusive.
yes, the individual needs to want to make a change and needs to eat less (calories) and do more exercise!
Culture and society DO play a role tho. First and foremost, our food is more calorically dense than it needs to be. A sammich is not a sammich (ok that sounds dumb but hear me out!)...getting an egg sammich at starbucks is more calories than an egg sammich made at home. Extra calories are lopped into their drinks with syrups and high sugar soy milks, etc. I think sometimes people haven't a clue how many calories they are actually eating. That small bag of combos that is easily just a tiny snack is also easily 300+ calories. It is also void of any nutrition which will leave you feeling hungry. The sugar in your starbucks will cause your blood sugar to rise and crash, leaving you feeling again hungry and your body starving for nutrients.
Yes, you can learn these things and change your eating habits.
Also, exercise- we all need more exercise but society and culture play a role there too. I am not making excuses, but we live in a world where you commute 2 hours a day by car to and from work then you gotta take the kids to practice, do homework, figure out dinner, blah blah blah.... It's not like we have lots of leisure time like we did say in the 1950's. We still have choices, of course...but I am just saying it is a combination.
Both culture/society and the individual play a role in the situation we are in. But guess which one we have control over??
Learning how to eat healthy is a choice and taking time to exercise is a choice. I did it as a single mom working full time paying back my student loans. I got my butt out of bed before my kid did and went running while the stars were still out and began spending my sundays preparing meals for the entire week. Now my son is older, I go to the gym from 10pm to midnight every night. I slip up here and there, but I do what I can. Sometimes I get take out and eat the 700 calorie meal that I probably shouldn't. But I do so with awareness.0 -
On this site, we're looking at it from an individual perspective. In a broader public health and societal sense, it's logical to look at the overall aspects that are resulting in such high obesity rates.
you so smart.
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I might not get to reading the full article for a bit but there's a lot to prove that blaming individuals is both pointless and incorrect. Social factors, environmental factors, physiological factors... obesity is incredibly complex! And if "eat less, exercise more" really worked, then obesity rates wouldn't be increasing, as the CDC has been telling people that for decades!
? Um actually yes, eating less and moving more DOES work. Most people are just too lazy to do it.
For you.
In the short-term.
So did everyone just become lazy in 1980? Please tell me more! You alone can solve the problem of obesity curing people of their laziness!!! O_O
Sorry, people have to want to cure themselves.
eek! I don't think these two ideas are mutually exclusive.
yes, the individual needs to want to make a change and needs to eat less (calories) and do more exercise!
Culture and society DO play a role tho. First and foremost, our food is more calorically dense than it needs to be. A sammich is not a sammich (ok that sounds dumb but hear me out!)...getting an egg sammich at starbucks is more calories than an egg sammich made at home. Extra calories are lopped into their drinks with syrups and high sugar soy milks, etc. I think sometimes people haven't a clue how many calories they are actually eating. That small bag of combos that is easily just a tiny snack is also easily 300+ calories. It is also void of any nutrition which will leave you feeling hungry. The sugar in your starbucks will cause your blood sugar to rise and crash, leaving you feeling again hungry and your body starving for nutrients.
Yes, you can learn these things and change your eating habits.
Also, exercise- we all need more exercise but society and culture play a role there too. I am not making excuses, but we live in a world where you commute 2 hours a day by car to and from work then you gotta take the kids to practice, do homework, figure out dinner, blah blah blah.... It's not like we have lots of leisure time like we did say in the 1950's. We still have choices, of course...but I am just saying it is a combination.
Both culture/society and the individual play a role in the situation we are in. But guess which one we have control over??
Learning how to eat healthy is a choice and taking time to exercise is a choice. I did it as a single mom working full time paying back my student loans. I got my butt out of bed before my kid did and went running while the stars were still out and began spending my sundays preparing meals for the entire week. Now my son is older, I go to the gym from 10pm to midnight every night. I slip up here and there, but I do what I can. Sometimes I get take out and eat the 700 calorie meal that I probably shouldn't. But I do so with awareness.
I totally agree with you. There are definitely larger societal factors that work against us. I was just disagreeing with the pp that moving more/eating less doesn't work.
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*edited* because my own post was TL;DR for me.
basically my point was...even tho I exercised more and ate "better" I wasn't exercising enough and didn't understand how calorically dense my food was.
I needed MFP to come along and help me understand these things.0 -
On this site, we're looking at it from an individual perspective. In a broader public health and societal sense, it's logical to look at the overall aspects that are resulting in such high obesity rates.
Good point.
What did make America fat? The fiscal model blames it on overeating and inactivity. That will control it but doesn't really answer the question of what makes people fat.
Eric Schlosser blames it on fast food, yet the explosion of the fast food industry predated the increase in obesity. Obesity rates barely budged during the 50s 60s and 70s.
In a survey of obese adults done by social scientists at the University of California it asked women when they had started dieting, nearly two-thirds had gone on their first diet before age fourteen. Maybe dieting actually promoted their obesity. In Losing It, her expose of the billion dollar diet industry, author Laura Fraser believes it to be bingeing and diet foods.
In a study where researchers compared people with similar diets and physical activity they found that those experiencing food insecurity were the ones that were overweight. Once again, binge eating.When their food stamps ran out or their children's medical expenses used up the food budget they ate very little. When food became available they binged. Over time, their bodies adapted to the alteration by converting more of what they ate to body fat.
There are so many possible causes but I'm off to a Vietnamese place for seven courses of beef. Love those meatballs with peanuts, onions, lemongrass.
I'll reply to the original article later.
*most of these thoughts are influenced by Glassner's Gospel of Food book.0 -
I think it's pretty simple. People, in general, are lazy and stingy. Previously, the relatively involved process in obtaining and preparing food, coupled with its relative expense, kept people from eating too much. The powers of lazy and stingy more or less overcame the gluttony.
However, through the past several decades, calories have become easier, tastier, and cheaper. The effort and expense bars have been lowered so much that, on average, the gluttony motivation overpowers them.
The end.0 -
It's not the end. Isn't it better to give people something to think about than tell them what to think? :P0
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It's not the end. Isn't it better to give people something to think about than tell them what to think? :P
No, because they're generally not good at it. It's better to give them the right answer
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I'm tending to see morbid obesity as a symptom of an eating disorder +/- manifestation of self-hatred. Shame people thus afflicted get virtually no support or even sympathy.
Now I'm a medic, and some patients on long-term steroids become grossly obese and experience other horrific side effects. People are oh-so-sympathetic when they find out...why should if be any different because someone chose to manifest his/her self-loathing (which, by the way worsens as the pounds pile on) by eating into an early grave?
The role of the obesogenic environments we live in in the West cannot be ignored. I packed on about 20 pounds simply by moving to a developing country to the UK. Did I suddenly lose self-control or stop caring about myself? Pretty much everyone else I know who emigrated to a Western country has had a similar experience, and we've all hard to work hard to lose the excess weight and keep it off.
Boom.0 -
:laugh: Agreed....took me a while to figure out what I was looking at...Okay... a warning for that picture at the top would have been nice.
....not the best folllow-up to a locker room discussion at the gym this morning (my gym is owned by a hospital, so a lot of the morning peeps are nurses) about various items found in fat rolls of morbidly obese patients :sick:0 -
Societal and economic factors can shift the pressure on an individual, but cannot absolve him or her of personal responsibility.
I was fat, and it wasn't anyone's fault but mine.
AMEN brother !!!!! I was about to post the same thing.
Oh, I also want to add to all those people above that say society does play a part to pull their head outta their "tushy". What the heck ever happened to personal responsibility???? We are now a society on the search of people or things to blame for our problems. Dang near everything right or wrong in our lives has something to do with decisions we have made.0 -
Society sucks, man. Totally bringing me down with the force feeding . . .0
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So did everyone just become lazy in 1980? Please tell me more! You alone can solve the problem of obesity curing people of their laziness!!! O_O
I'm not saying that people suddenly became lazy, or even that they are lazy, but LIFE has gotten steadily easier over the past few generations.
My family didn't have a microwave or dishwasher in 1980. I was the last of my parents six kids, born in 1972, and was the only one to have used disposable diapers. For their first few kids, they didn't even have a washing machine, but a ringer washer. Until 1977, my parents had one car, so if Dad was at work and Mom wanted to go somewhere, she walked, even if it was just a couple blocks to the bus stop. I think we got an Atari around 1982... before that, if we were playing it was outside and active, climbing trees, riding bikes, etc.
I also think the diet industry, and all the really dumb fads and bad advice along with it, contributes to obesity.0 -
in 1980, we also didn't have ROWS of fast food options, one after another, everywhere we went in the car (at least not where I live). These days, its altogether too easy to grab an inexpensive and unhealthy "convenience meal" on your way home, to or from anyplace you have to go....So did everyone just become lazy in 1980? Please tell me more! You alone can solve the problem of obesity curing people of their laziness!!! O_O
I'm not saying that people suddenly became lazy, or even that they are lazy, but LIFE has gotten steadily easier over the past few generations.
My family didn't have a microwave or dishwasher in 1980. I was the last of my parents six kids, born in 1972, and was the only one to have used disposable diapers. For their first few kids, they didn't even have a washing machine, but a ringer washer. Until 1977, my parents had one car, so if Dad was at work and Mom wanted to go somewhere, she walked, even if it was just a couple blocks to the bus stop. I think we got an Atari around 1982... before that, if we were playing it was outside and active, climbing trees, riding bikes, etc.
I also think the diet industry, and all the really dumb fads and bad advice along with it, contributes to obesity.0 -
I'm tending to see morbid obesity as a symptom of an eating disorder +/- manifestation of self-hatred. Shame people thus afflicted get virtually no support or even sympathy.
Now I'm a medic, and some patients on long-term steroids become grossly obese and experience other horrific side effects. People are oh-so-sympathetic when they find out...why should if be any different because someone chose to manifest his/her self-loathing (which, by the way worsens as the pounds pile on) by eating into an early grave?
The role of the obesogenic environments we live in in the West cannot be ignored. I packed on about 20 pounds simply by moving to a developing country to the UK. Did I suddenly lose self-control or stop caring about myself? Pretty much everyone else I know who emigrated to a Western country has had a similar experience, and we've all hard to work hard to lose the excess weight and keep it off.
Boom.
Riiiiiiight. Obesogenic environments? What a joke.
Understand your caloric needs, avoid obesity.
Boom.0
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