For many years, I asked roomfuls of doctors and nurses how employers might help stanch Americans’ rapid increase in obesity. Their answers usually fit this cloistered stereotype:
“My office had a walkathon competition.”
“My company opened a gymnasium for employees.”
“My employer pays 50 percent of gym membership costs.”
“We have twice-weekly yoga classes in the boardroom.”
“Human Resources offers wellness classes.”
“Our cafeteria offers healthy options.”
Ask the same medical professionals what the government and other employers ought to do to fight obesity, and the answers reflexively veered toward “encourage or require employers to do all those things my employer does.”
The problem is that many of America’s most serious health problems reside in people whose lives and jobs do not remotely resemble those of healthcare professionals or policy-shapers.
Sticking sugar in bread doesn’t help.
Doctors and nurses rarely look like they are in incredibly good health.
There was one guy I went to see at a walk in clinic for a minor injury lifting weights. Dude was in amazing athletic shape. He actually died in his 40’s years before that was ‘normal.’
When my late wife was dying of cancer I walked into her hospital room one day and there was a slim young woman, who said she was the hospital dietician, sitting by her bed – I told her she couldn’t be a dietician because she wasn’t obese.
The obesity problem in North America was caused by the poison in the fast-food, processed food, soft drinks, snacks, sweets. Stop eating/drinking those and you’ll be fine. Cook at home and ignore all the idiotic diets and weight loss programs (all are concocted by charlatans). Get your sugar from fruits, North American desserts are horrible.
The problem now is that this obesity crisis has started to alter people’s genes and it is transmitted to their children. You see fat toddlers. They have no chance. Their genes are f**ed up.
Mostly I agree with you. Obesity is a direct result of changes in diet, lack of exercise. Your recommendation about sugar is fine: eat more fructose, less sucrose. And indeed ignore dieting advice; they all fail and make the dieter feel depressed and worthless when they fail.
All humans evolved with an appetite for particular chemicals. These include salt, fat and sugar. Being far wealthier than primitive humans of thousands of years ago, we are able to indulge in these addictive substances. And because of our wealth, we do less hard exercise to burn them off. So they collect as fat deposits and produce high blood pressure.
This is not a recent genetic thing, which is the only place where I disagree with you. Our entire evolutionary past has resulted in addiction to these three things. Consume in moderation, and they are fine. But that takes discipline, and many of us don’t have that any more.
You’re forgetting about epigenetics.
Calories in … calories burned. It’s really THAT simple. In our lands of plenty we eat farrrrr too much for our cushy lifestyles. Even those who work hard … like construction workers of all sub trades burn more calories than the average worker … but they don’t burn calories like serious aerobic workouts do.
Eat less. Except … eat all the salad and veggies you want.
No, it’s not that simple. There are good calories and bad calories. There’s an excellent book by that name, actually, whose subtitle is “challenging the conventional wisdom on diet, weight and disease.” Well-researched and very helpful. (By Gary Taubes.)
Nonsense. Utter nonsense.
Bach lover is right. It’s not a question of calories. It has to do with simple vs complex carbs, when they are eaten and what your insulin is doing when it transports sugar and makes fat.
I can show you 2 people eating the same amount of calories with the same calorie burn. One will be fat and the other thin.
Nurture, not nature. Poor eating habits are learned, not inherited.
Shoving too much food in your face is the primary cause of obesity.
Eat fewer carbs. Of course, there’s no money in that.
Since the invention of agriculture the average human has got the vast majority of their calories from carbs. Bread, potatoes, rice. It’s only in the last 20 years that obesity really took off. Right around the time computers and the internet enabled people to live while never getting off their butts.
They burnt up the carbs in the past because they were so physically active, and they didn’t eat as much.
You are absolutely right. Cut carbs and sugar as much as possible (about 75%), reduce your daily eating window to about 6 hours (lunch and dinner) and engage in moderate exercise (walking) near the end of your daily fasting period. Simple and it doesn’t cost anything.
I see the similar problems from those who formulate “health and safety” policy…
The last one was a demand that everyone wear long sleeve shirts on site, which the company provided in a heavy duty cotton, which I’m sure went over well with those who approved the plan, all of whom work inside nice climate controlled offices, but everyone else hated because it was illogical for those of us working outside in the sun in 30 plus degree weather…
The warehouse I work at recently mandated safety toe shoes for all employees. Why?
Because some dumb corporate office worker on a tour of the warehouse tried to kick a pallet out of the way while wearing flip-flops and stubbed her toe.
Now everyone’s feet get to hurt.
Honestly, all of these safety half-wits really need to spend a day actually doing the work they’re devising all this BS for. They’re either stupid and completely disengaged from reality or absolutely sadistic sociopaths. Possibly both.
Oh yeah, and their beloved Hi-Vis? Deceptive camouflage. Look it up. Back to topic…
Most obese folks I know fall into the “binge eater” category. And in my circle of friends and acquaintances I think the percentage of fatsos in the public sector (educated, well-paid and perked) is about the same as in the private sector.
I think obese people have a food addiction, and much like addictions to drugs or booze, change will only occur if and when fatty (a) admits what the problem is, and (b) resolves to do something about it.
Until that happens, preaching and offering diversions will have a pretty small effect.
Agreed. A fully grown adult in a sedentary job and ” normal” lifestyle needs less than 2000 calories a day. Most people would be shocked at how little food 2000 calories is.
They feel their glucose levels drop and want to raise it with more food. Try a low carb diet and you’ll realise how you don’t feel hungry very often.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them go to the gym, eat well, reduce stress or get enough sleep.
You can lead a horse to water, but can you lead a horticulture?
LOL, my dad used to say that. He was born in 1905!
Tee-hee. ;>)
I’ve heard that you can, but you can’t make her think.
Plenty of ‘junk’ food was consumed in the 60’s and 70’s. Things changed in the 80’s, what happened? Beef bad, chicken good. I can eat as much chicken as I want because it’s ‘better’ than beef. Obese rates sky-rocketed.
Bad information once again. Not complicated – over eating + no physical activity = fat.
Fructose, sucrose, high fructose corn syrup.
Surplus cheap calories.
I am a fatty and I blame my body temp
..when I run a normal temp ,I am sick and
lose a pound a day..
gain it all back when I lose the fever..
My husband felt that way – years of calorie counting from trying to lose weight, at first worked. But then he started gaining it all back and was constantly cold -literally half a degree below normal, and often said he felt cold right down to his bones. Calorie counting killed his metabolism. They used to diagnose low thyroid by measuring body temperature. Low-carb, high fat and fasting have helped him feel warm again, but haven’t resolved everything.
Every fatty I know drinks a lot of pop or sugar with coffee in it.
The least healthy people I’ve ever met are in the”health” profession. I take no advice from them on anything. Modern “food” is poison. At this point everyone knows this, if you keep eating it the health effects you receive are a choice you’ve made.
A lot of Health Nuts are pretty sick folks. They are tightly wound up like 7-day clocks, constantly checking cholesterol, heart rate, weighing calories, and monitoring sleep patterns.
You can give people all kinds of tools, but those tools are useless if no one has the genuine motivation to utilize them,
Ummmm…I learned about healthy eating and exercise in middle school health class. I’d venture to guess that such topics have given way to WAY MORE nuanced issues having nothing to do with “health.” I subscribe to the philosophy that you teach someone to access the opportunity (i.e. you teach them how to avoid obesity). If they choose to become morbidly obese anyway….they are on their own and their health costs should reflect their refusal to apply self-discipline.
Also, it would help if the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue didn’t describe morbidly obese women as brave.
It would also help if we were not constantly bombarded with images of people unnaturally thin and attractive and told that this is normal. Hence the rest of us are inferior. Advertising has been destroying our self-image and self-respect for most of the past century.
I’ll let Bill Burr provide my response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCN_zdiEMMs
I’d only add that I don’t see a lot of males (who still harbor a smattering of testosterone) giving a flying eff what other guys look like. That’s the more recent generations (who aren’t harboring more than a thimble full of testosterone).
It seems to me that lots of people have the equipment on hand for exercising and then just wait for it to start exercising them.
I guess similar with diets
Throughout most of human history people lived on the edge of starvation.
About 100 years ago (arguably more like 75 given the Great Depression) we got rich enough in the West to have more than enough food to eat.
By the 1970s even poor people could eat more than enough.
And everyone did.
People also stopped having 2.1 children in the 70s. This has led to a rapidly aging population. As a result, the West is now old and fat.
That’s about it.
What would happen of people actually took responsibility for their own lives?
option 1: Penn and Teller method; stop eating so effin much.
Government will never stand for that.
Ah, yes. The invention of seed oils and the skyrocketing increase in Linoleic acid in our diets. Now stir in some of that nice old gut disrupting glyphosate and bingo, recipe for metabolic disaster.
Was remarking this to HB while we were driving, oddly enough. But we noticed a lot of younger obese people in the city we were just in. I recall walking a lot, I couldn’t afford a car, so bike, bus and walk. He had a car but was in sports and working P/T to pay for the car.
Not unusual for me to be walking for over an hour per day to get to and from where I needed to be – now we don’t even walk around the block. I’d walk 20-25 min to the bus stops. Just the way it was.
Now we walk for health and are choosy about what we eat., no junk food.
Now even more so I want to stay out of the clutches of the medical claws, they’ve made us very wary.
Bring back smoking
We all have our own genetic heritage and metabolic needs. My advice would be to stick to the traditional diet of your ethnic ancestors and then look at lifestyle changes. I keep my weight down by fasting, no eating between breakfast and supper three days a week. I also walk every chance I can get instead of driving and I do a lot of active stuff like gardening. For me it works. It may not work for you.
Oh and I stopped eating margarine and switched to butter. I really started losing then.
JB, Nicely stated.
My guideline: Never eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.
Margarine and other trans-fats are deadly, and typically hidden in processed foods, cookies, crackers, etc.
Eat less, move more. Lizzo is a blimp.
Stop eating anything processed/ready to eat.
Learn to cook, prepare your own food.
When I wuz 21 I weighed 145lbs, today I am 76 and weigh 145. I don’t watch TV, and still work on a regular basis.
And that keeps my exercised, and in reasonable shape.
Carbs, 30 grams per day max
In an era when personal responsibility is rapidly approaching extinction, this is unsurprising. Western society is littered with terrible situations, many of them analogous to refusing to take responsibility for one’s own health, and Progs and Wokes insist no one is responsible for their own behavior.
Just eat meat and veg. As much as you want No fruits, carbs, sugar or booze.
And if you can eat just once a day or within a 4 hour window even better.
Your body will do the rest.
I think most of the posts above miss the point.
There is a lot of argument on the best way to lose the excess body fat.
What I am not seeing is the best way to encourage people with excess body fat that the need to lose some.
And lets be honest, as a culture we need to bring back Fat Shaming.
And lets be really honest about being really honest, picking on Fatties is fun and safe. I mean what they going to do if they get angry? Run after you?
Fat is not beautiful. It is unhealthy. There are no fat elderly people. Muse on that and either start working out how you are going to deal with it, or start working really hard in completing that bucket list cause hard evidence shows that Fatties die younger.
Boxed and delivered or over-counter fast, pre-prepared foods are the MAIN cause of obesity. Read the labels = junk food. That tuna sandwich in a store with no labels will eventually kill you. The marketing folks know that more sugar, salt and butter makes things tasty, and I’ll bet that their focus groups are composed of people who are not of normal weight.
Parents: do not serve your kids “kid food”, like hot dogs and unhealthy spaghetti that you have not made from scratch. Both parents need to have good cooking skills, as both work now.
It’s not the salt and butter and tuna that’s bad. It’s the bread and the seed oil in the crappy mayonnaise.
Anyone else notice the difference in dinner plates via Canada versus the US, the US plates are the size of turkey platters. I suspect portion control and exercise is the key, but don’t ask me because I have trouble keeping my weight at 100 pounds.
I’ve been strength training for about 5 weeks. The biggest change I’ve noticed is my appetite. It has gone DOWN and switched from craving sugar to wanting protein. I don’t know why lifting weights is ignored. If you do it right, you will never be sore and you will recover quickly.