Challenge: How to Stop Obesity?

Great Debates
81

I live in one of those suburbs designed for cars. The closest place to shop for food is the Target across the highway, about three miles away. There aren’t a lot of sidewalks, and the roads are very busy. BUT…
if the gas prices are just to crazy to make sense, there will be far less cars on the roads and, communities will be far more interested in spending their taxes on creating good public transportation, good sidewalks, etc.

The whole point, is that to most people, a car-free lifestyle is not an attractive alternative. Neither is exercising, or caring about what you eat. It sucks. But the problem with obesity is that it involves lifestyle changes, which are very hard to make.

Another plus to the car-free lifestyle would be less dependence on oil.
also, to address this quote:

Jacking up gas prices will increase the cost of the transportation of goods, especially, you guessed it, fresh produce.

I fully agree, it would make it more costly to transport goods (except that I did specify that those corporations that require vehicles to run could be expempt from such prices). It might not be the worst thing in the world if I didn’t get unripe, preservative-laden tomatoes from Mexico year-round.

82

This has been discussed before:

83

You have a point there. Still, jacking up gas prices and forcing communities to deal with it will be a little drastic. If you raise the gas price enough to make a visible difference, the effect would be a riot rather than a smooth transition to a car-free community. I think it makes more sense to build up the infrastructure first. Say, slowly diverting funds away from highway construction projects, and into public transportation and facilities for pedestrian/bike traffic. Or changing zoning regulations to encourage a more pedestrian-friendly distribution of shops, restaurants and other businesses.

Other benefits include less pollution, fewer traffic accidents, and less problem with drunk driving. (As it is, when drunk drivers get their licenses suspended, many of them continue to drive illegally because there’s no other way to get to work.)

84

If it doesn’t taste really good, no one except the health nuts will eat it, and we don’t have to worry about them. If it does taste really good, people will eat too many, no matter how filling it is.

85

SnoopyFan
Oh, and Ranjwash: welcome, and hi, neighbor!

And a tip of the hat to ya Snoopy…I was born and raised (and fattened) across the river in East Huntington, West by God Virginia.

badmana
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.

I know that weight is a self imposed dilemma for the most part, but genetics, mental/physical health, cultural and enviromental factors weigh in as well. Its a health issue primarily and not simply a lapse of moral fortitude, and unworthy of giving the least damn. This little rust belt area of mine is called cancer valley because the cancer rate is about 5 to 6 times the national average because of a history of heavy manufacturing and poor quality waste disposal. By your reasoning if a person should opt to remain here to live and raise his family, and upon the subsequent diagnosis of cancer for any family member, no health care dollars should be afforded because he only got what he deserves. Then all sport, occupational, and military injuries should get the health care thumbs down also, because they knew the risks going in. A person living in NYC, LA or Toronto, and being subject to an increased chance of being victimized by violent crime as well as any stress related illnesses from the wall to wall humanity would not qualify neither. I don’t know of any disease diagnosis that doesn’t contain a sliver of an ignored preventative measure somewhere. There wouldn’t be disease if there was not.
But I know from where your indignation springs, as with diseases such as Huntingtons Chorea, sickle cell anemia, or any other that contain a definite genetic link. I would be hard pressed to not hold the parents of such an inflicted child somewhat negligent when they were aware that they should have not reproduced in the first place. But I would not be satisfied to let nature take its course, but avail to them every medical procedure avalaible. We are all part of the whole here, fat, thin, short, tall neurotic, or just plain facist.
As for me I tries to do me best and exercise and not super size, but that damned clown haunts my dreams.

86

It’s interesting that you brought up the point about parents with genetic problems having kids. I do feel that almost exactly. If you want to have high-risk children (high risk of all sorts of genetic problems) you should pay for it. Just as if I want to race around in my car I should pay much more for insurance if/when I crash.

The fat problem is a merky issue with me. On one side I hate the idea of paying for problems associated soley with being over weight (my GF is a physiotherapist’s assistant and see’s plenty of over weight people with joint problems and injuries due to weight) while another side can somewhat place blame on the food manufacturing companies that put out junk.

87

I am naturally thin, and you are correct. I eat when I’m uncomfortably hungry, and stop as soon as I feel full. This is mainly because I don’t enjoy eating. (filmore doesn’t sound like a naturally thin person to me. If you stop eating because you know that it should be enough, as opposed to because you feel full, then you are not naturally thin; you are consciously thin.)

I had a girlfriend who (she later told me) felt very heavy at 125 pounds, which was her weight when we met. (She was 5’2" or so.) We eventually moved in together, and she began eating in the same pattern (and the same foods) as I eat. My diet consists of a hugely unhealthy percentage of fast food and delivery pizza. Despite the poor content, the amount was the difference. Within a year she had dropped to 105, and felt (as I did) that she was a bit too thin. (We later split up and she gained the weight back.)

Basically, to anybody who felt they couldn’t lose weight no matter what they did, I would wager if they lived with me and relied on me to feed them, they’d lose more than they ever wanted to, and the amount of healthy food consumed would be at a minimum.

For a glimpse into my world, go a month without buying any food you like. Stock the frig, but only with crap you hate. See how hungry you actually need to be before you break down and eat something. You’d be amazed how easy it is to go to bed hungry.

Regarding all the ideas that involve mass transit: it’ll never work in suburban America. I laughed when I read scr4’s post and thought “that doesn’t sound like someone in the US” and then noticed the post came from Tokyo. There’s 16,000 people in my town, and my last 4 jobs were all 15 miles or more away by highway (bicycles prohibited), or 30 miles by backroad. What should my little town do…build a subway? It would need to be longer than NYC’s to be effective.

The best idea I’ve heard in this thread is the video game exercise machines. I say hook up an exercise machine to the television, and it only plays for an hour per 100 calories burned or you have to do some low-effort motion the entire time it is on. That would end obesity as we know it within the decade.

88

Having been both fat and exceptionally thin, I know what caused each.

When I was young, I was a soda fanatic. I must have drunk at least a dozen or so cans a day. That, in addition to eating habits I picked up from my father–two big macs, two cheeseburgers, and a large chocolate shake became my average meal at McDonald’s–obviously contributed to my weight gain. At the apex of my weight, I was 280.

I hated what I ended up doing to myself, and I didn’t have any idea how to lose that weight. I ended up working a physically hard job after high school for six months–a UPS loader–and got down to about 240. Those first few months were pure hell; I thought I had broken something permanently inside.

Losing those forty pounds was a bit of a motivator, and I started running and keeping an eye on what I ate. This took me down to 213, and then I enlisted in the Marines, which took me down to 160. Their diet was a simple amount of food desgined for health and little else, and in addition to the daily PT dropped weight off of me like a rock. I thought I would have been hungry, but it turns out I hardly ever was. Or maybe I was, but it just blended in with the rest of the pain that came with recruit training.

After I got out of basic and infantry training, I bounded back up to about 230 because of the amazingly large civilian portions. Then I was shipped to Iraq to fight the last war and again got below 200. In the month and a half or so since I’ve gotten back, my weight has returned, but I’m losing it again by only eating salads and meats.

Now that all of that is out of the way, here’s what I’ve learned–and what I think will fix American obesity.

  1. Lower the portions of foods. The amount you’ll get for your money at some restaurants is simply amazing. I almost always feel guilt at throwing food away, so most of what I get usually goes in a bag for later. Hell, usually appetizers at most restaurants will serve as a main course, and a main course is a feast. Eating this way is a sure way to gain weight.

  2. A lot of people hate exercise, and for the most part, I’m one of them. The trick is to teach people that there are more than one way to exercise, and that it should be determinant upon that type of person. Myself, I don’t like exercising unless it has another purpose other than health; I like to have something to show for what I do. This involves everything from gardening to splitting firewood. Not everyone needs to run or bike or lift. It helps to teach people (perhaps as children) that exercise doesn’t have to be a sweaty, painful experience. A lot of people suggest sports, but I never had much of a need for them either. In short, it should be modified for each person.

  3. Lower the prices of healthier foods. This is a fairly obvious part of the solution. More, though; people need to be educated about the true effects of unhealthier foods. People need to be taught how detrimental to weight loss even one or two sodas, or cookies, or pieces of cake really are, and how hard they are to work off.

  4. Finally, teach moderation. This has been said before: almost all food isn’t necessarily bad; having unhealthy things now and again won’t kill you, because even without exercise, you’ll work them off over time. But having a lot of them all of the time will obviously lead to weight gain.
    What it comes down to is a shift in American culture–hard, to be sure, but possible.

89

See, you guys don’t understand the change in attitude that getting rid of your cars would require. Your job is 15 miles away? Move closer to your job/get a new job closer to home. Also, why would you have to build a subway? Why could you set up a bus system? You don’t think that your town, with all the gas/ insurance/car payment money saved among 16K people couldn’t afford to have a VERY nice mass transit system?

Lemme tell you how I grew up. Tiny village: my job was 7 miles away. The bus came once a week to take people to the major towns, if they wished. I rode my bike to work. When I wanted to hit Cambridge or Bury, I waited for the day of the week to take the bus there, and walked the half mile to bus stop. If an emergency came up, we called a taxi. Nearest grocery was 2.5 miles away…a nice bike ride to the store and a ride back with some groceries in the bike’s basket. A lot of the mothers would push big strollers with their kids in them, and then pack up the groceries in the stroller for the way back.

It CAN be done. People all over the friggin’ earth do it. The thing is, they do it because they have to. You’ll never get Americans to adopt such a situation, unless they absolutely have to. That’s why I’m thinking $250 every time I fill up my tank might just do the trick.

90

I’ve spent 8 years in the US, including two years in LA. I know what it’s like there.

Your town can start by designating one lane on all major highways as HOV lanes, and using it to run a decent bus service. With HOV lanes, the buses will be far more reliable and faster than what you have now (if any). You can establish enough bus routes so that all residential areas are within 1/2 mile of a bus stop, or you can allow bikes on buses so you can bike to the bus stop. Light rail systems and monorails may also make sense for high traffic routes, but that can come later. Your town should also allow shops and stores in residential areas so people can buy the bare necessities without using a car. Is there any obvious faults with this?

91

No, those are good thoughts. Especialy the “allow bikes on a bus” point; I would expand that to include a bike rack car on trains.

There’s a pretty decent train system, but it is almost entirely geared toward commuting the people in my county down to NYC. With not much extra effort, it could be really helpful for in-county commuting.

Btw, ouisey, the solutions of getting a new job or moving to a new apartment are ridiculously impractical and unhelpful.

The basic problem is the size and population density of the rural and suburban US. Even car-centric LA could conceivably move toward mass transit. But expecting 16,000 people to foot the bill for a mass transit system is incredibly naive. It would easily go over a million, as a single bus is a couple hundred grand. And at a cool million, we are talking about a $600 out of pocket expense for every man, woman and child in my town. That’s $2,400 for a family of four. Seems a little steep, doesn’t it? And that’s assuming a single million would cover it. People in my town work all over the place. Discounting the NYC commutters (55 miles away), most people commute over a dozen miles by highway, and the backroads double that distance. So we would need something that wasn’t human-powered, i.e: motorized transport, which defeats the original purpose of increased exercise.

There are plenty of grocery/retail stores within 2 miles of almost everybody in my county. But office complexes are a different story. The dozen or so major areas of office jobs are spaced about a dozen miles apart. Everybody has one, and only one, area in their town. If you work in the next town, you’re over 10 miles away. The vast majority work in towns other than the one they live.

Keep one thing in mind: I live in New England. Not sure if you guys have ever been to NE, but the ground is exceedingly rocky and hilly. That means that all roads are bare minimum in width, and no matter where you go, there will be a steep, long hill you have to go up. Great for mountain bikers, bad for bringing groceries home. Also, because of the incessant turns and hills, these roads are unbelievably fun to drive fast on. That means pedestrians (of which there simply are none) would be taking their lives into their own hands. (Even schoolbus drivers fly around at breakneck speed.)

These roadways have been around for a couple hundred years. There are no sidewalks (or bike paths), nor is there room among the boulders and giant trees to carve any out. Not to mention the rock walls that line just about every square inch of road on both sides. Those rock walls were all made from the rocks the original settlers dug up to create the original roadways. That’s a lotta rocks. And that also means that no town in these parts would allow them to be knocked down in the name of progress. (Historical societies like to preserve that kind of thing, don’tcha know.)

92

Yeah, I still don’t buy the public transportation argument in this country. Its not that it can’t be done, its just can’t happen anytime soon. It would require a total reorganization of the way almost 300 million people live their lives. You would have to move stores, rearrange communities, change work schedules, actually CREATE the infrastructure for the public transport, and change basically just about every little detail about the way Americans run their lives. The American way of life is not built around public transportation currently and you can’t just change that overnight. Its not that some things couldn’t or shouldn’t be done to move towards more walking or biker friendly communities, but that is completely different from expecting everyone to give up cars and walk or bike everywhere, including to work.

      Go to the grocery and bring things home in the bike or stroller?  OK, I guess we'll be going to the store every single day or every single meal.  That won't help.  That will just cause MORE people to eat out.  They won't bike to a grocery, they'll bike to the restaurant.  

      Oh, sure, just simply move closer to work.  Only live close to where you work.  It just can't happen, again, without completely rearranging the sctructure of where we live and work.  Most people just can't live near where they work.  Its either too expensive or, probably most importantly, their simply isn't enough housing close enough to where everyone works to support this idea.  Even then I sure am not going to be BIKING to work in a shirt and tie in the middle of the winter.  You know how cold and windy it gets in the Midwest in the winter?  Its bad enough just walking from the parking lot half the time.
93

That’s nothing compared to what people spend on cars. You said you drive 15 miles to work. Assuming fuel efficiency of 20 mpg and gas price of $2/gallon, you are spending $750 per year on gas just for commuting. And consider the additional savings if the bus system allowed your family to get rid of one car. Assuming $50/month for insurance, $20/month for vehicle maintenance and nothing else (i.e. the car is paid for already), that’s an additional $840/year saved. Throw in a $150/month car loan payment and the total jumps to $3400 per year.

No, you still need to walk to the nearest bus stop or train station. Which is a lot more than many of us do.

94

I agree, but unless we start making changes in that direction, things will keep getting worse.

Stop by the market on the way back from work every other day. If there is one by the bus stop, it won’t be a hardship at all. It may even encourage you to buy more fresh produce and fewer processed food.

And in my experience, a moderate excercise actually suppresses your appetite. I used to drive to McDonald’s and KFC all the time. These days I bike to one and realize I’m not in the mood for something so greasy. (Unless you listen to logic too much and convince yourself that you should be hungry, or that the excercise entitles you to indulge.)

Then live near a bus stop or train station.

95

scr4 you are in another world.

Lemme just snap my fingers and buy another house, mmkay?
Money grows on trees, after all, and houses abound. Especially houses that are located near a grocery store, drugstore AND a bus stop.

Taking the bus where I live is way impractical. Why? It only runs once an hour! If you have a 2 major errands to run in this city and you take the bus, it will literally take you all day.

I can walk to school in less time than it would take me to ride the 2 miles on the bus. Of course, I might get hit by one of the 5,000 or so people who habitually, blatantly run red lights in this city every day, but as long as my thighs don’t jiggle …

55k people live in this city and the bus system barely exists. The only reason it DOES exist is because it’s written into the city’s budget every year.

And what’s this “live closer to where you work” nonsense? The days where people work at Company B from the day they graduate college to the day they retire are GONE. People change jobs constantly. Sorry, but I’m not going to uproot my life and buy a new house every 3-5 years or so just for the sake of not using my car and getting more exercise. That’s why God invented gyms.

96

Of course it’s impractical, that was my point!! I’m not telling you to abandon your car now. It’s impractical to switch to a car-free life now because of the lack of alternative transport, and that’s the main problem with American (and many other) towns and suburbs today. I’m saying communities should gradually shift to make car-free life easier. If public transport were improved, it will become practical for you to take the bus. This thread is about how we, as a society, can fight the obesity problem. It’s not about how you can lose weight.

I’m not the one who said “live closer to work.” I said live in a place with access to public transport, and/or improve public transport so that more houses have good access.

97

Sorry in advance for the loooong post :slight_smile:

And how would you propose that we do that? Either one? For instance, I live in Alaska, one of the wealthier states. But we have the suckiest public transport in the US.

We also have miles and miles of wilderness between populated areas, even in the largest city. The Municipality of Anchorage is about 70 miles N/S (from Girdwood, 40 miles south of Anchorage proper to Eklutna about 15-20 miles north of Anchorage proper).

I live on what’s called “Hillside”. The nearest bus stop is 5 miles away. So what does a person do? Walk when it’s 20 below? Spend 5 or 6 hours of their day commuting by bus?

This might be fine and dandy if one lived in a city with the population (and subsequent taxes) to help subsidize a good public transportation system (one of the best I’ve seen is HI’s, of course I’m guessing tourists probably pay for a lot of that).

A hell of a lot of Americans work 60 and 70 hour weeks, and have kids (with all their gear) to transport to and from daycare, work equipment (perhaps like me, I teach dance and bring my own stereo, wireless mic and music) and so on.

How does a person transport kids and large workgear by bike? And in the case of a person having many more places than just work and home, and to the market once a week, how are they supposed to get that done in a reasonably timely manner by bike or public transportation?

It’s not as if we can (and believe me, I bitch to Anchorage’s pathetic “People Mover” bus authority about their totally useless system all the time), just simply walk down to city hall and say “you know? We need to have improved public transit,” and have them actually respond with such.

As I mentioned earlier, the goverment spends a HELL of a lot more money on subsidies to foods we don’t need (corn and corn products, and the meat fed by corn and corn products) than it does on fruits and vegetables.

The Secretary of Health even admitted that perhaps the lobbyists for those sections of agriculture weren’t as effective as those for corn.

Bottom line, IMHO, does the government even remotely listen to Joe Citizen about his wants and needs healthwise?

What would it take for us to GET more subsidies to fruit and vegetable farmers?

To get completely effective public transportation and communities designed for foot, rather than vehicular, traffic?

To get companies, (particularly for employees with long road commuites) to allow for “exercise breaks” and for them to even provide a space for it?

We, the average citizen don’t seem to have the power to GET these changes to come about.

Even if we were to start and be successful, it would be many years before such programs were designed, put into effect and the public is able to use them.

What effective, inexpensive (TIME too!), and available NOW tools can we use?

As I’ve always said, proper education. The useless mantra “eat less, exercise more” is NOT "education.

A three pronged approach, with not the least of which being the emotional aspect, (if it truly WAS just the “party in your mouth” thing, do you REALLY think 2/3s of this large a population would have this problem?). The other two would be diet and exercise.

I’m talking about teaching people that “eating less” does NOT mean starvation. Yes, many obese people are so uneducated about food and their own bodies that they believe that it’s an “either/or” situation, that is that they can either eat “yummy” foods, or that they have to live a bleak existance eating rabbit food for the rest of their lives.

Ditto exercise. Too many people think that, in order to lose (yes LOSE, not loose!! argh), weight that they have to spend hours a day doing miserable and boring exercises sweating their butts off and feeling as if their about to cough up a lung.

A MUCH more effective, and can be had NOW, method of steering people away from obesity is education in these three areas.

98

Or its indicative that we need better science to move beyond correlation to causation, in a way that adequately handles the very serious problems of investigatory and selectory biases on both sides of the equation. (From researchers and their subjects.) Right now, there’s a lot of contradictory information out there, and a lot of conclusions based upon anecdotal evidence. Links are one thing; reasons are something else altogether.

As Stoid said, the problem with this “challenge” is that it’s based upon a lot of presumptions about everything ranging from psychological and biological factors to behavior and education. Moreover, fixes can be suggested until the cows come home, but when it comes down to it we’re eventually going to have to realize that like all matters of health, what people do with their bodies is only going to be affected by outside influences to a limited extent. People are going to make their own choices and some people are always going to be fat, some very much so. Changing that is a personal decision and has to be for any change to be useful, to the extent that change is possible at all. (And there is a lot of evidence that that extent is significantly limited.) I’m flummoxed why people who don’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak, are so interested in promoting this concept of people’s bodies constituting some kind of “crisis.”

99

I dunno; I don’t particularly consider it a crisis, or a fight–though I’m aware many do on both counts. I just think the percentage of obesity in the population is going to continue to rise, and so are the incidence of health problems correlated with that, to the extent to which health problems may be correlated with it.

There’s a loose parallel to smoking. Time was, smoking was common, and it’s not as if the information that there was–contradictory cases and evidence notwithstanding (we all know healthy old folks who’ve smoked like chimneys for decades with nothing ill to show for it besides the smell, and nicotine-teetotallers who die of sudden aggressive cancer at age thirty)–a significant correlation between smoking and health problems. It still took a couple generations to really reverse the trend; and personal choices being personal choices, it’s not as if smoking will ever really go away. I don’t see that as a crisis, either.

100

Having just gotten back from Europe, I have been struck by several (almost definitely related) things:

  1. In nearly 2 weeks, I saw exactly one morbidly obese person. There were more than a few people who could stand to lose 20 lbs., but only one who could have stood to lose 100 lbs. On my typical 10-minute morning walk from the train to my office in Chicago, I see at least a dozen morbidly obese people. There is no way genetics can explain such a huge difference; the overall genetic composition of the population of a city like London or Paris can’t be that much different from that of Chicago.
  2. Food portions in Europe, whether at home or in restaurants, are typically less than half the size they are in the U.S. The food was by no means healthier than what I might choose to eat in the U.S. (with the exception of a vicious sweet tooth, I’m a pretty healthy eater at home: I generally cook from scratch and eat lots of fruit and veggies, and not much meat). At home I normally eat probably half of the meat and cheese that I did there, and let’s not even talk about the pastry! But the overall volume and amount of carbs in a typical European meal was much lower. And yet I never left the table feeling deprived or hungry, and didn’t get hungry or have the urge to snack between meals.
  3. Overall, you rarely see Europeans eating on the run, carrying 20-oz. Frappucinos on the subway, or chugging from a 20-oz. bottle of Coke.
  4. I was staying with friends, not in hotels, so I had occasion to visit several supermarkets and observe normal household cooking and eating practices. Even supermarket packaging of foods is very different. There are no gallon jugs of milk; the typical size is 1 liter. There are far fewer processed and snack foods. I didn’t see a single can or bottle of soda in any of the three households I stayed in. And refrigerators were about half the size of the typical American household refrigerator; people don’t buy groceries in huge, Walmart-size packages, and they buy fresh bread, veggies, and milk every couple of days.
  5. The only commercial establishment I saw that had a large parking lot at all was a supermarket in a small town outside Paris. In European suburbia, you don’t see strip malls with parking lots; you see small shops. People either walk to the shops from home, or park some distance away from the shops and walk. Even my friend in a small village in England manages just fine with 2 small kids and no car (they have one, but she has never had a driver’s license). There is a bus that runs into town every 15 minutes, but she hardly ever even takes the bus. Instead, she bundles both the kids into a double stroller to run her errands, and when she goes grocery shopping, she puts the groceries in the basket under the stroller and pushes the groceries and her 2 kids home, on foot. She is in great shape!

As others have said, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It doesn’t take significantly more time to cut up some veggies for a salad than it does to microwave a frozen pizza. Even savings of 100 calories a day add up to quite a lot over the course of a year, and most of us can do a lot better than we do.