Hmm… since you all seem interested in talking about governmental regulation, one idea that springs immediately to mind, is to basically abolish sedentary jobs. Sure, you can be a stock broker 7 hours a day, but rewrite OSHA such that even a stock broker has to spend 1 hour of the day doing manual labor.
All companies have some sort of manual labor. it’s the one thing the modern desk job doesn’t have.
The amount of arrogance and ignorance being tossed about in this thread is breathtaking.
How many of you have made it a point to educate yourselves about obesity, I wonder? And by “educate”, i don’t mean watching Dr. Phil’s challenge and skimming a couple of newspaper articles. I mean educating yourselves… seeking out the medical, psychological, sociological and statistical information, reading the studies, etc.? How many? Would that be just about none?
Thought so.
Carry on.
I wish I could say it a nicer way but when you’re seriously over weight, 3 doctors all tell you to loose weight and you don’t, no one else should have to pay for your mistakes. Remove subsidies for medical care of the over weight and let nature take care of those who don’t care for themselves.
That’s a great idea. Can we do the same for smokers, too?
How about people who eat red meat at every meal and have sky-high cholesterol levels?
Ooh! I know! We could rank people with a number from 1 to 10, based on their weight, lifestyle and family medical history. The closer you are to 10, the lesser your chances of getting medical help when you go to the hospital. People who were ranked one would get preferential treatment for things like ambulance service, organ transplants, surgeries and blood transfusions.
This might affect enough people to bother to take care of themselves. Even people who call themselves “big boned” might think twice about going to McDonalds if they knew they had to maintain a certain BMI (or weight range) to keep their medical insurance.
For me to get the BMI the government thinks I should have, I would have to get gastric bypass surgery, or, alternately, get cancer. There is no way I’m going to get to my “perfect” weight otherwise. I can get to a weight about 20 pounds above that, though, but I guess it’d be better for society if I got the surgery, lost my hair and developed severe vitamin deficiencies instead, walking around all day with a bottle filled with a protein drink because I’m unable to get enough protein by eating. As long as I’m at that magical BMI number, whatever works, right?
Oh, and Ranjwash: welcome, and hi, neighbor!
Well SnoopyFan, one question. Before medical care became nationally available for everyone in the US, how did poor people get good medical care? I would assume they got whatever they could get (or whatever the hospital could do). This could be seen (to my Canadian eyes) that only the “rich” (or working class anyways) got good medical care (but please correct me if I’m wrong).
So how different is that from having over weight people pay more for their medical care via higher insurance rates (or whatever you pay to get medical coverage)? A doctor could recommend “weight loss” to a patient and then when the medical insurance folks get wind of this they could increase the insurance costs to adjust for the person’s weight trouble. Kinda like driving record “points”.
This wouldn’t affect emergency care or non-weight related problems.
In Canada this would be difficult to use since no one person pays for medical care (my insurance just gives me “perks”). In this case I would probably opt to have many surgeries removed from the “free” list and changed to optional or only partially subsidized.
And AFAIK smokers already pay for more for life insurance (and medical) so that’s already taken into account.
I, of course, add the general disclaimer that over weight due to a valid medical reason would be exempt for all this.
My issue is to people who use the medical system as a crutch before considering weight loss (I know at least one women at work who tried to use the “I’m a type 2 diabetic” symphony card when she’s clearly over weight).
Before medical care became nationally available for everyone in the US, how did poor people get good medical care?
Nationally available medical care? In the US? Where?
There are tons of poor people in this country who go without necessary routine medical care because they have no insurance and no money.
So how different is that from having over weight people pay more for their medical care via higher insurance rates (or whatever you pay to get medical coverage)?
Because it’s discrimination? AFAIK smokers do not pay more for health insurance (life insurance they do, granted) – this is because most people lucky enough to have medical insurance get it through their employer, who gets a group rate (this may be different when a smoker buys insurance on their own: like anyone can afford to do that these days).
Plus, consider that overweight people in general have less money to begin with. To stick it to them in their premiums just because they’re fat is to deny coverage altogether to some people.
A doctor could recommend “weight loss” to a patient and then when the medical insurance folks get wind of this they could increase the insurance costs to adjust for the person’s weight trouble.
Whatcha gonna do about someone like me, then? Perfect health, nonsmoker, work out 3-4 times a week, red meat about 1 time a week, still over 100 pounds overweight (I’ve lost 60 so far). Any doctor is going to recommend I lose weight, despite my pristine health. Gonna charge me extra because I’m fat anyway?
And you also have to take into consideration that insurance companies want people to lose weight, but refuse to help them do it. Last I checked smokers get more help trying to quit smoking than overweight people do trying to lose weight. Insurance companies typically won’t pay for gym memberships, weight loss programs and/or surgery – but they’ll pay for smoking cessation programs, nicotine substitutes, etc. The average wait for someone to get weight loss surgery is about 2 years, because they have to fight their insurance company to cover it.
SnoopyFan, I don’t want to trivialize the difficulty you face with weight loss. It’s one of the toughest battles many people will ever have to deal with. But if you can get to the lower weight (and I know that’s a big if), it won’t feel like you’re starving yourself and you aren’t denying your body of nutrition.
If you are 100 pounds overweight, it must seem like it would be unhealty to eat the amount of food that a non-overweight person would eat. And that’s sort of correct. It takes a lot of food to maintain your current weight. But once you get to the lower weight, you don’t need to eat that same amount of food.
So say you could get to be 150 pounds. At that weight you could probably eat one slice of pizza and be satisfied. That might seem like a trivially small amount of food, but at the lower weight your calorie requirements would be much less than they are now.
Anyway, keep doing what you’re doing. Losing 60 pounds is great! Just keep it up.
I’m telling you, I believe I have the answer, or at least part of the answer.
Americans use their cars too much. If you had to walk a half a mile every day to the bus stop to get to work, if you had to walk two miles to the grocery store and drag home those groceries another two miles, if you had to ride your bike five miles down the road to the post office to buy stamps or go to the library, or whatever, I’d bet most people would find it damn hard to keep that 100 lbs on.
So jack up the gas prices. $20 to 25 a gallon. The government could make exceptions for those companies that rely on trucks/vehicles for their livelihood. Or if you live way out there or if it is not possible to get proper public transportation to you, perhaps exceptions could be made there, too.
I consider myself moderately educated on obesity. Also as someone who is a weightlifter i hang out on other boards where many of the members used to be fat but have lost weight and kept it off for several years. Many of them are very educated about diet and exercise too.
I still stand by the opinion that drugs are the only truly effective solution. You can largely ‘cure’ AIDS by telling people to not have sex w/o a condom but that isnt a cure, its a lifestyle change that decreases the odds of getting the illness. same with obesity, there is no cure just lifestyle changes that decrease the odds of contracting it. If scientists pimped out ‘not having sex w/o a condom’ as the begin all/end all solution to AIDS like they pimp out lifestyle changes as the end all solution to obesity they wouldn’t be taken seriously. LIfestyle changes work (within reason) but most people cannot/will not follow them.
Besides, unlike other illnesses like AIDS the body dones’t respond to not having AIDS by releasing hormones or behavioral changes that encourage the individual to contract AIDS (if that makes sense). What i mean is a lifestyle change that prevents AIDS doesn’t cause the body to respond by trying to force the individual to go out and get AIDS by having sex w/o condoms. however a lifestyle change that encourages weight loss is met by multiple body responses that encourage the individual to regain the lost weight. The body holds onto fat stores, it increases appetite, may decrease metabolism, etc. etc. etc.
But if you can get to the lower weight (and I know that’s a big if), it won’t feel like you’re starving yourself and you aren’t denying your body of nutrition.
FWIW I’m not starving myself now 
All I’m doing is eating when hungry, stopping when full. That’s how skinny people eat, right?
It’s coming off much more slowly than it would if I starved myself, but that’s okay. I’m not going to starve myself to stay thin, I certainly won’t do it to get thin.
Well, there is still hunger in America, to be sure. But the phenomenon of severely overweight people in the lower economic bracket is an interesting phenomenon that distinguishes poverty in the U.S. from poverty in the developing world.
Taking the anecdotal example of a large U.S. city (let’s call it “Chicago”), one thing that struck me was that in economically poorer areas (such as near public housing projects), pretty much the only places to get food were convenience stores and fast food outlets. I remember when a Dominick’s supermarket opened near the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects. It was an amazing thing to the long-term residents of those projects, because they had never had such ready access to such a wide variety of groceries. Including and especially fresh produce.
Fast food has the advantage of being relatively cheap and consistently warm. If your gas or power has been cut off or is being rationed, if you don’t have a functioning refrigerator, microwave, or conventional oven, or if you don’t have time to prepare meals for you or your family, fast food is a quick and easy hot meal. Meals involving fresh ingredients (meat, fish, produce) can be more expensive, more time consuming to prepare, require equipment that poor people might not have, and can be subject to serious variations in price and availability. Plus, one may have to travel to find those ingredients, often on public transportation.
Now, it’s not really fast food’s fault that they are the only food option in many blighted urban areas. There’s a larger social and economic dynamic at work there. But it is a noticeable phenomenon.
I can’t speak for all skinny people, but I don’t think that’s always true. I’m sure there are people who eat until they feel full and that matches what they need to stay at a healthy weight.
However, I’m pretty sure a lot of other people have to be aware of what they’re eating and manage their appetite on an intellectual level. So rather than eating until they feel full, they eat an amount that they know will be enough. So rather than eating slice after slice of pizza until I feel full, I’ll stop after a couple of slices because I know that’s all I need. Sure I want to eat more, but I know I don’t need to eat more.
I hope they come up with a drug as well because it seems people can lose an amazing amount of weight when they don’t have to battle their brains telling them to eat more.
So instead of adding something useful to the conversation you simply wag your finger at us in admonishment.
Marc
I agree. But it’s going to be difficult to convince most Americans of this; they love cars too much.
That won’t be enough though. Most suburbs and many cities are already designed for cars. There are no corner drugstores or neighborhood markets; you need to drive a couple of miles to get to a strip mall or Walmart. If you need to buy something too large to walk back with, the only alternative is a taxi. Buses are unreliable because roads are so congested. Some places don’t even have decent sidewalks, bike lanes and pedestrian crossings. You need far more fundamental changes before the car-free lifestyle becomes a valid and attractive alternative.
Well said, scr4.
Jacking up gas prices will increase the cost of the transportation of goods, especially, you guessed it, fresh produce.
I’m kind of frustrated here. In the middle of all the posts about government regulations and taxes, I’ve suggested two courses of action that I believe are not only viable and effective, but could make a corporation a big bunch of money to boot. And nobody’s seen fit to comment.
To recap:
Create a snack food that has all basic nutrients, is filling, is moderately tasty, and is low-priced, as a means of compensating for the fact that eating well is expensive and time-consuming.
Make exercise more accessible by designing exercise machines that hook up to existing game consoles.
I think either of these could make a dent in the obesity problem, without having to involve the government. Perhaps there are some flaws in the plan that I’m not seeing; if so, I’d appreciate having them pointed out.
I’d like to see this happen, but the major problem with the idea is that people don’t like health food. Not because it tastes bad or is expensive, but just because it’s health food. When McDonald’s came out with the low(er) fat McLean Deluxe, it reportedly did very well in blind taste tests but when brought to the market, it was a complete failure. Many people think this is because the McLean Deluxe was advertised as the healthy option; people reacted negatively to that moniker. This might be true only for the kind of people who frequent McDonalds in the first place, but that’s precicely the people you need to target.
Again I want one if it were affordable. But it would naturally be more expensive than a regular game console, and how do you make people spend the extra money? If you advertise it as a “healthy” game, people who want to lose weight would buy it, but they’d think of it as “work” and it ends up collecting dust in the garage next to all their other mail-order excercise equipment. Also, not everyone has the means and desire to buy an elabrate game system, or the free time to use that game system.
I think both ideas can be made into successful businesses. But I just don’t see them having any measurable effect on the obesity problem.
I had the opposite experience; I absolutely hated PE in Japan. I even did Kendo in one school but I found no enjoyment in getting my head whacked with bamboo sticks. (Kendo armor has no padding inside, except for a thin towel you wrap on your head.) When I went to the US, I chose a tennis class to fulfill my PE requirement and had much more fun there.
Anyway I just wanted to say that I don’t accept Japan’s PE program as any sort of ideal or goal. And I doubt that school PE education is the answer to obesity; school can force students to do certain things, but they can’t force them to continue it for the rest of their lives.
The problem with idea number one is probably simply marketing. The popular conception–with justification–is that the healthier snack option == the less tasty snack option. People will buy the tastier option.
On the game-front–what scr4 said. DDR (the most common “dancing” game that you see people hopping about in at the arcade) has done well because it just sort of clicks together in a fun way. It’s made good sales on the home console markets because the actual accessory–the dance pad–is a pretty basic piece of work, and the DDR games only involve four buttons. More complicated physical-activity controllers–I’ve seen surfboards and skis and such in arcades–are going to run quite a bit more expensive, and bulky, then soft fabric dance pads that are only a few pressure-sensitive sensors in a roll-up mat.
Still, if they could manage to make such a thing affordable, and map it to a game that was actually fun, sure, it’d make a small dent. Much of the gamer market are rather sedentary, I suspect.
I expect the obesity problem to get worse for quite a long while before it gets better. I’ve heard it seriously argued, on these very boards and elsewhere, by otherwise reasonable people, that there’s really no proof that being grossly overweight is actually linked to health problems. That’s indicative that the whole idea really needs to sink in at the, er, gut level in a way that it hasn’t yet.
I just saw an interesting report on this. I’m trying to remember which 'newzine" it was.
It was on Sunday night IIRC, Nightline? 20/20? One of those shows. It was Peter Jennings if that helps.
Anyway, it was interesting that of the food crops that are subsidized by the government, the greatest subsidies are given to the food groups that are the least recommended by the exalted Food Pyramid (which I disagree with anyway).
Also, it was interesting to see the grocers and the Secretary of Health stating that they did NOT think that encouraging consumers to eat less was the correct thing to do.
They both said, in effect, that it wasn’t the foods that the American public was buying and eating, it was that we need to get more exercise.
Factoids, such as something like approximately 1300 new snack foods (in the candy/cookie/ice cream group) were introduced last year as compared to 131 fruit and/or vegetable ones.
Other factoids the show stated were that 2/3’s of Americans were overweight, and 1 out of 3 were obese.
And the food industry, for the most part, claimed that eating less of those products wasn’t a solution to weight control, that exercise was.
As a fitness instructor, my fellow fitness professionals and I generally consider that about 85% of a person’s success with weight loss is what and how they eat.
As to those suggesting that the answer is to be cruel and shame or otherwise mistreat obese people, WAY off-base and ineffective.
The WHY the people are overeating and stuffing down their emotions with foods in the first place, needs to be addressed for them to acheive permanent weight loss.
Shaming, discrimination, cruelty, they’re all just fodder for the emotional struggles that the person already faces, and just more stuff that needs to be pushed down and self-medicated with food.
If abuse was truly an effective solution, we wouldn’t have any fat kids in school. Because God knows they get no relief from abuse and shaming there.
The snack food you suggested already exists. There are a number of both balanced and carb or protein heavy bars.
They’re not Snickers, but they’re reasonably palatable. The bottom line is that there is MUCH more to why a person gets obese in the first place and why they stay obese than the simple useless WAY worn out mantra of “eatlessexercisemore”.
As to your suggestion that exercise be available at places of work? I agree, and so do some companies. It does need to be more widespread though. (and I’m not sure if companies would be willing to pay for “Video game workouts” :D, I worked for a local utility company teaching aerobic dance after work for awhile. The employees had fun, and if they didn’t, they likely wouldn’t attend. If “exercise” in people’s minds, evokes some Basic Training nightmare, they’re not going to do it.
The “fun factor” needs to be brought into it more. I always get at least 5 or 6 students every semester who say, (on their teacher evaluations), something to the effect of “I’ve never really exercised, I’ve always hated it, it was demeaning, too hard, boring [insert negative factor of your choice], but you make your class so fun, it’s different every time” and so on.
This just stuns me. I get the mental picture of the torture these girls must have gone through prior to college. Especially if it was coupled with disapproval from the teacher, and abuse and teasing from other students.
Oh yeah, THAT’S the answer. :rolleyes:
These are young college students. Ones that apparently spent all of their elementary and HS years in PE classes that more resembled boot camp from hell (as I can well imagine) than something fun and desireable.