This is the thing that really stood out to me when I was in America a couple of months back. Almost everyone I saw was either incredibly fit and toned or way, way overweight. There didn't seem to be anyone occupying the middle ground - no Dad with the beginnings of some lovehandles, no young women who were a little jiggly. It was either 6 pack abs or a belly that could shelter a small child from the rain. It's odd, to say the least. Most other countries I've been to don't have that sharp dichotomy going on. Causes: 1. Ignorance. I was fat for just about all of my life. I ate some shit which I knew was bad for me, sure, but that was fairly rare. I got fat on carbs and alcohol. I was 26 before I learned that rice, pasta, and bread were seriously screwing with me. This is partly due to the 'healthy eating' pyramid I learned in school, and partly due to being a poor Uni student and living on the cheapest, most filling meals I could find. I think this is probably not so much the case now given all the publicity around low/no carb diets but I would personally put 'don't live on carbs' front and center of any nutritional information I was handing out to school kids. 2. Apathy / Instant Gratification. It's easier, and (arguably) makes you happier in the short term, to grab dinner from a McDonald's drive-through and then go back to whatever you were doing, than the alternative; go shopping, do your prep work, then cook. One takes about 15 minutes, and the other an hour plus. Unless you can see (or force yourself to believe in) the long term reward, door number 1 works great until you can't fit through it. As a general rule, humans are terrible at sacrificing short term gain for long term reward, and the entire field of advertising tends to exploit this weakness; Stephen King knew what he was doing when he made the tagline for Needful Things 'buy now, pay later'. 3. Policy. Sweet obese Jesus does the American government subsidize grain producers. This leads to grains being cheaper than the other food groups, so people eat more of them. This just seems highly counterproductive to me, but what do I know? I'm not a grain lobbyist. 4. I was going to say death of exercise in favour of electronic pursuits here, but I'm on the fence. I didn't have the internet / video games when I was very young, but I read the shit out of some books. While the other kids would be playing football, I'd be on a bench somewhere reading. Then again, maybe there's a large cohort of kids who wouldn't be cut out for reading but who might be perfectly happy pawning noobs on Xbox. I just don't have enough background here to judge. Solutions: 1. To an extent I think this is a problem which will sort itself out. I'm maybe a little optimistic here because as mentioned, I was fat for the entirety of my life. I never exercised, I lived on carbs, and I drank far too much. I'm still about as far from a typical health nut / type A goal-driven gunner as you can imagine. However, one day I thought 'you know what? This is limiting my options, both in terms of travel and in terms of romance.' So I fixed it. It wasn't particularly hard, all things considered. Easier than learning a new career, or navigating a relationship. I tend to think eventually most fat people are going to hit a breaking point; either they are content to spend the rest of their lives fat, or they want to experience the opportunities that fat people aren't afforded. For those that want to get fit, the resources are there. For those that don't, I'm not sure any other intervention is going to make a massive difference. That said: 2. Portion sizes. Woah. Portion sizing in America is totally absurd. One of the first things I did when I decided to lose weight was to measure out the amount of rice / pasta in a single serve as recommended by our federal food nutrition body. It was around a third of what I was eating, lunch and dinner, at home, and probably less than a quarter of the amount I was served at every restaurant I ate in throughout the States. 3. Subsidize the farmers that grow vegetables and lean meat instead of grains. Incentivise people to undertake the behaviour that you want. Seems obvious. 4. The next generation. Today's kids are going to grow up seeing their parents slowly decaying in front of their eyes. Diabetes, Alzheimer's Disease (strongly correlated to Type 2 diabetes), heart attacks, strokes, joint pain, gout, all the lovely medical complications that come from living an unhealthy lifestyle. I hope that that will provide a strong incentive for rebellion against the attitudes that have led to the obesity problem, resulting in a new generation of more fitness-conscious kids. (Granted, it could go the other way and kids could assume that obesity is normal. However, each generation typically rises up against the norms of the previous, so here's hoping.) 5. Travel. Yes, this seems slightly odd, but seriously: I was in South America prior to the States, and I don't think I saw a single fat person in Brazil or Peru (who wasn't an American tourist). I tend to think that going out, seeing the world, seeing that in other places people a) are fitter and b) do not get served portions that could fill a trough, (and c) won't sleep with you if you are fat) would do people a lot of good.
I think the misuse of exercise is as problematic as misuse of food sometimes for people trying to lose weight. People try to make the effort, but they still want it to be easy. Look at how many middle aged women in your office are eating Healthy Choice meals at lunch. Shit has ridiculous amounts of sodium and aren't great for you, but hey, its low fat! Those are the same women who don't understand why they aren't losing weight when they go on the treadmill for an hour every day. Like DCC, endless cardio isn't going to get the job done, unless you are also working with a serious calorie deficit as well. Its great as opposed to being completely sedentary, but its not going to get you as svelte as you desire or balance out a shitty diet. As some have already mentioned, prevailing cultural backlash has made criticism of the overweight a taboo of sorts. I could go on, but I don't feel like conjuring up the anger that usually accompanies anything thoughts I lean to when I see shit like "Big is beautiful." There is appreciating all body types, not just models, and then there is turning a blind eye to sloth and excess.
I don't know about all school districts, and maybe it's because I live in the suburbs, but most schools in the area offer recess through sixth grade, and the government is involved in school lunches. This doesn't mean that I think the lunches are great, but they are better than they were. Here's a letter I got about a week ago from one of my kid's school. Spoilered for length: Spoiler New School Lunch Program Information Students can expect benefits from healthier and more nutritious food in school. Thanks to the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act the new standards went into effect on July 1, 2012 but many schools were already well on their way to meeting the standards. The new school meals have more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; lowfat milk; and less salty and fatty foods. Our school meals continue to provide your children the healthy foods they need. Each lunch offered includes five components: a protein meat or meat alternate, a grain, a vegetable, a fruit, and eight ounces of fat free or low fat milk. There are choices of entrees that are available each day, including both hot and cold selections. There are also a variety of vegetables and fresh fruits and fruit juices to choose from and a variety of cold low fat and fat free milk. While all five components are offered each day, your child may choose as little as three foods to complete a meal. A MEAL MUST INCLUDE A 1/2 CUP OF FRUIT OR VEGETABLE or the meal will be charged as an a la' carte purchase. Second student lunches will only be offered to Junior and Senior High students at a slightly higher cost. Any portion of the meal may be purchased by all students at a la' carte pricing. EXAMPLE LUNCH MEAL: Chicken Nuggets – Provides 1 Meat/Meat Alternate Whole Wheat Roll- Provides 1 Grain Tossed Salad- Provides 1 vegetable Applesauce- Provides 1 fruit Choice of Milk My kids are allowed to buy lunch one day a week. They pick whatever day, then I pack the other days. They have all said that other kids have commented on how little they have to eat. They normally get a sandwich of some sort, then a healthy side and a snack. Apparently this is too little to some of the other kids. When I eat lunch it's not even all three of those things. Not only is buying every day expensive, but all I can think about is how much sodium they are consuming every day, if they were to buy. I try to teach my kids that it's okay to splurge once in a while, but you need to balance it out with normal and healthy meals at other times. My daughter has said that her gym classes involve them doing quite a bit of running, as well as showing them how to work out and use weight machines. However, I think in schools today, kids have easier outs if they don't want to participate. It's practically impossible for kids to fail. I'm not even remotely joking about that. In regards to the sports issue, while there are kids that do nothing, the ones that are involved, seem to do too much. And there is a down side to that. They burn out. I read a study a while ago that said there are less kids doing high school sports because they are exhausted by the time they reach high school. So many sports are year-round nowadays (even cross country). For example, my kids swim. They get a break about 2-3 months the whole year--about a month or so in May and a month or so in August. I try to balance this out by taking them to age-appropriate number of practices per week (my 11 year old only goes 3 times a week, my 13 and 16-year-olds go 4-5 times a week--7 practices are offered, not counting doubles). But there are kids that go from one sport to another with no break, as well as going to soccer practice after school 3:30-5:30, then swim practice 7:00-9:00. Then go home and try to squeeze in school work. These kids start rebelling and want to do NOTHING by the time they reach high school. Then they go to college and I think just enjoy not being so regimented, and start putting on the weight. Maybe at least with the education they received when they were younger--since they can't say they were raised unaware of the obesity epidemic--they have the knowledge not to let it get out of hand and stay on track. The alternative is just scary. Edited because I keep thinking of things to add. Stop me!
I kind of want to address the school thing: When it comes to PE, the problem is with budgeting. School budgets are getting tighter and tighter, and the money has to come out someplace. When you consider the fact that the amount of money a school gets largely depends on standardized test scores, where are they going to cut when the budgets take a hit? Are they going to cut academics? Fuck and no, they need to focus on those to make their yearly progress in test scores. They cut arts first, followed closely by P.E. P.E. classes will still be taught, because they are required, at least through freshman year of high school, but don't expect them to be a focus. I know schools in this area that offer a ton of P.E. courses, everything from general P.E. to specific sports to weightlifting and conditioning. They, coincidentally, are in the more affluent areas of the county, where test scores are higher, and budgets aren't as tight. Other schools offer general P.E. and maybe an "advanced" P.E. course, and that is it, because their budgets are shit and they can't afford to offer any other P.E. courses. My local high school has 4 P.E. teachers. The lower-income school I student taught at has 1 P.E. teacher. It is hard to blame schools for this problem when schools have way, way, WAY more important shit to worry about (like test scores, test scores, and, oh yeah, test scores... none of which involve P.E.).
Yeah, I get that, but there are several studies that correlate physical activity/play/recess and higher test performance. You can place that on socioeconomic or other factors, but there is a link. P.E. or recess shouldn't be a focus of school, but you're saying a school district can't set aside 30-45 minutes a few days a week for kids on the playground? I can think of several teachers along the way that, during the school day, probably wasted at least that much time due to poor planning and busy work.
Actually, yeah, that is exactly what I am saying. When I was student teaching, they were implementing a new teacher evaluation tool, to go along with test scores. One of the tools was "not wasting time." If you wasted 1 minute of classroom time (and I am being literal there), you'd get a low score. They were exceptionally focused on not wasting ANY academic time. This was a school that had been on academic probation, and the state was threatening to come in, take over, and literally fire the entire staff, until they finally managed to bring their test scores up enough. As long as budgeting is tied to standardized test scores, low-performing schools are going to focus entirely on bringing up those scores, which means literally everything but Science, English, and Math will be on the table in terms of cuts. The first to go will be arts, the next on the chopping block will be P.E. You say that setting aside 30-45 minutes a few days a week isn't much. They look at it as 30-45 minutes of classroom time that is lost. If you were a teacher in that school district, and your job and livelihood was on the line, would you rather let those kids have 45 minutes 3 days a week of recess, or 45 minutes 3 days a week of Math/English prep for their standardized testing? It is nice to think "I'd want them to have recess," but realistically, you'd want to spend that time cramming them for their testing.
I can back D26 up on that. Arts is the first to go, then they normally throw out P.E. In our case, it was more of a "Let's save the money we spend on the teacher", rather than testing scores, but I have no problem believing they would do the same for testing issues. Bad scores=no State money.
One thing that has seriously died in public schools is Home Ec. I took this shit elective because I didn't want to do music in middle school and it was by far the best fucking part of that year. I learned not just how to cook bullshit in a microwave, but how to experiment and use things like a crockpot (which is the best thing on Earth for making healthy food taste good). I never learned to sew, but I did learn that when something was fucked up, my first reaction should be to try and fix it, instead of tossing it out. I also learned how to make a budget in middle school, something half of my AP high school buddies were clueless at. PE was great, and we had beautiful facilities, but it was pointless to only analyze one half of the equation. In college, I went from 245 to about 160 in 6 months. It was awful, but it made me despise the lazy fat ass. It also taught me to pay fucking attention to what was going in my mouth. I focused on sugar, because my grandmother was a diabetic. In the average college diet, there were literally shovels of that shit going into bodies that couldn't hope to deal with it all, much less burn it off. It also made me realize how pervasive unhealthy food truly is. If you want to buy an apple in my state, you have to travel to a supermarket. If you want to buy a half pound of chocolate you simply find any store that sells anything. They sell bags of candy and soft drinks in every store I can think of: Best Buy, Advance Auto, Office Depot, etc. You have to walk past a half dozen diabetes dispensaries to buy clothes in a mall. The truly remarkable thing is that as cheap as fruits and veggies are, they've made bullshit food even cheaper (which is something that can be undone by caloric density taxes). For me, the solutions come from a lifestyle change that D26 was talking about. If you don't have to commute two hours to work each day (average time per day in a car for Americans), you are less stressed and I would think most people would spend that time pursuing healthy hobbies. If you don't drive at all, you buy food every day or so, which means more fruits and veggies, less frozen bullshit. It also means you don't stuff an SUV full of mac and cheese, because you have to carry your shit. Less stress for me equals less bullshit food and it means less "emotional eating" or exhausted stops at a pizza place because I'm simply too beat to cook. The idea is that you slow the pace of your life down, you don't depend on fast food and you can take the time to spend your money wisely (buying local, farmer's markets, etc.). One of the worst, hardest behaviors to break for me was the idea that was ingrained in me as a child, that saw food as a reward. You do good, you get a treat. It's your birthday, eat some pizza and ice cream. That shit does more damage to the "everybody wins, no one fails" cohort of children than anything else, because it creates this lifelong habit of emotional eating.
Of course they're real, but the amount of people that have them compared to the amount of people that take pills for them is obscenely one-sided. These days, if someone tells you you're sick, that means you're sick. So many doctors are dealers nowadays, subsidizing illness in America. The American pharmacutical industry sold $300 billion in pills last year. Somewhere around 80% of lethal overdoses nowadays are caused by perscription drugs and NOT street drugs, mostly from downers which along with steroids are the WORST drugs that there are. We won't stop being sick until we stop making ourselves sick.
Over diagnosed and over prescribed go hand in hand with the magic pill mentality. D26 brought up a good point about medical practices run off a Rx pad. My GP when I was still drinking and drugging was a prime example. I could pretty much get any Rx I wanted by telling him the right symptoms and complaints, but that's anther thread. But here's an example of how high the Dx rate for ADHD is in our area. My wife has idiopathic hypersomnia, similar to narcolepsy and is prescribed Adderall. The DEA regulates how much controlled substances can be manufactured in a year. Last fall, she couldn't get her Rx refilled due to a shortage of Adderall because the manufacturer reached quota earlier in the year, a quota that didn't account for all the newly written Rx's for ADHD kids. Moms and dads tell the doctors little Johnny can't sit still in school, can't concentrate on his school work (but is in the top 10 on an Internet Xbox game) and a rush to label him with ADHD is made. Of course, there are real cases out there as well as alternative therapies (neurotherapy and biofeedback chief among them), but GPs and run of the mill padiatricians don't bother to take the appropriate course of action ( refer out to a psychiatrist for assessment) because with an amphetamine Rx, the patient has to be seen every 3 months to get a renewal. Steady cash flow. But America loves its pills, so it's a push-pull system. Doctors and big pharma are only too happy to provide the easy, convenient and lazy choice America wants.
A good friend of mine is the director of a wellness program for a large municipality with roughly 18,000 employees participating in their health insurance plan. In an effort to battle higher premiums, deductibles, etc., they're incentivizing healthy practices. Right now, they're offering $500 off a plan member's annual premium if they get a basic health screening. There are other financial incentives for joining exercise programs offered for free by the wellness program, as well--all in an effort to continue to keep costs to the plan members lower. The kicker? They have to basically beg people to participate in these dead simple things. The health screenings take all of 20 minutes, maybe, and will save someone $500/yr. When I talked to her a couple weeks ago, she said that about a third of all plan members had done it. The free exercise classes and other activities are largely empty. To save $500 a year, I'd get a colonoscopy, nevermind sitting down with a physician to get my fucking blood pressure and maybe a couple vials of blood taken. When you can't motivate people to be healthy in order to live a longer, easier life, you try to stimulate their wallets. When that doesn't work, what else is there?
That's largely because the way the weight argument is constructed and delivered is basically concern-trolling bullshit. It's disingenuous to pretend that your major concern is fat people's health without also castigating the fashion industry. Being that underweight is also terrible for you, in most cases worse health-wise, and I refuse to believe that there is any rational mind that can be against a McDonald's diet but support a baby food and tea diet. People of most shapes and sizes CAN be beautiful, but more importantly, that isn't the same thing as being healthy. A huge part of the problem is that the weight-loss industry is pervasive and the message is FAT BAD SKINNY GOOD, rather than HEALTHY GOOD UNHEALTHY BAD. I don't believe this for a damn second. I know we on the board like to think we're special snowflakes sometimes, but when it comes to the mockery of the overweight -- and especially overweight women -- this board is quite in line with prevailing cultural norms. Don't confuse a few hand-wringing Jezebel articles with the prevailing cultural zeitgeist; making fun of fat people is generally quite accepted, on a micro level AND a macro level. Honestly, I don't get why it incenses you that somebody who doesn't meet your standard of beauty could have high self-esteem. There's a huge difference between "people are focusing on the wrong things to get healthy, we should help them" and "why are big people feeling so beautiful?"
Yeah, sure, let's all blame the pill people. You'll all take your xenical and you will all like it. Capisce?
Because I've heard the discussions among people either in the office or on public transit. I have nothing against people of all shapes feeling beautiful and confident. Shit, I wish more in shape girls I know shared the confidence. But when you have clearly overweight women saying "I don't need to change anything, I'm beautiful the way I am" clearly to the detriment of their health, that mindset is problematic. Its a lazy way of approaching it and basically saying that physical fitness and being in shape is purely aesthetic. Its like my old roommate who ate right and got in shape when he was single and immediately slid as soon as he got into a relationship, presumably cause as long as someone found him attractive, why should he work for it. Nobody is saying you have to look like Adriana Lima, but being 100+ lbs overweight isn't beautiful, its unhealthy.
Just because there's a few people pushing the big is beautiful thing does not mean it is how we as a society perceive the issue, it's just the opinion of a few people. Making fun of fat people is still widely accepted and most fat people are ashamed of their weight.
This is fair, it could very well be empirical based off of my experiences and exposure to things like social media circles. I won't dispute that.
I repped you this, but I also think it might be our locations, Chicago seems to embrace food culture more than New England.
It depends on what you mean by "food culture," because the sort of ambiguous hazy Instagram-my-meal, worship-Anthony-Bourdain, etc. sort of culture, while disproportionately urban, are also thinner than average in my experience.
Childhood obesity always comes back to a failure of parenting, the only way in our modern society with an abundance of cheap highly caloric food and convenient sodium filled delicious treats is discipline and education that requires constant attention and vigilance from parents to make sure there children are not only eating healthy food but also regulating there portion sizes and amount of liquid they consume. There is no public policy that is ever going to take the place of having your mother and father constantly monitoring a child's diet and enforcing rules. Putting this responsibility on our schools, and PE programs sounds nice in a political sense because no one is going to disagree that we could use more funding for fresh locally sourced organic vegetables and special fitness coaches and whatever else sounds like a wonderful idea to throw money into. But these kids spend much more time away from school than in it and unfortunately that's were the obesity starts constantly drinking Juice and Soda and snacks and this aversion to saying no and also making them play outside until dark or done with homework doesn't happen in our society. I would be fascinated to see research measuring childhood obesity compared to percentage of these kids living in single parent families.