I was thinking about various places in world where I go, and one of the first things I thought of was a class that I was taking during the autumn. It’s a class on happiness and meditation. Except for one morbidly obese woman, everyone there is in really good shape. But it makes sense – people who take care of their thoughts are more likely to take care of their bodies. And the obese woman has lived a pretty messed up life.
An example was shown on a program about nutrition… when bagels became mainstream in the late 70’s and early 80’s the size of one bagel was about the size of your palm. Nowadays a bagel is the equivalent of five slices of bread.
This is a country of abundance… if a little is good a whole lot is way better. And a whole lot is what we have in America.
Over time I think the obesity will go down… as schools start teaching better nutrition at younger ages and start serving smaller portions.
Another example they cited is that french fries are the number one cause of obesity and potato chips are second. Yet bags of potato chips keep getting bigger and bigger, and BK just introduced their new thick-cut fries.
My guess is that Disney is one of the more egalitarian places in the U.S. It’s extremely ethnically and economically diverse. Even fairly poor families make it a goal to take their kids to Disney. So, if you are typically shopping at Trader Joe’s and not Walmart for groceries, and if you live in a college town/large city vs. rural suburb, and if you normally interact with upper-middle class white people, vs. people from all backgrounds and wealth levels, Disney is much, much more diverse and in many ways, a better picture of what’s going on with our country. I feel similarly overwhelmed whenever I visit any place near my parents’ rural farm in a relatively poor area- people are huge!
Perhaps that’s true, but it’s hard to make 5 pounds of carrots taste as good as an 18-ounce bag of Doritos. There are also a hell of a lot of people who a) don’t know how to make healthy food taste good or b) assume that because there’s a vegetable in the pot with the bacon fat, it’s healthy.
Also, labels on food products can be misleading. Many people don’t realize that fruit juice, even 100% fruit juice, isn’t a good choice for kids. Hey, it’s fruit, right?
And then there’s the matter of how much spices can cost that will actually make the food you’re eating taste good. Those can be an arm and a leg and hard to come by in some locations.
I don’t think it’s that these people lack intelligence, but certainly information and decent food and the means to make said food tasty.
There’s that, plus what do you do with a 5-pound bag of carrots? They’ll go bad long before I’d ever get through them.
I’ve seen some meal plan books that have you eating something different every night for two weeks before there’s a repeat. Some recipes will call for something like 2 tsp non-fat yogurt. The thing is, it’s impossible to buy 2 tsp of yogurt, and keeping it around for two weeks is not feasable.
The fat-apologists love to claim that the fat are fat “because healthy food is too expensive.” This is complete rubbish, obviously. The truth is that the vast majority of fat people love to eat *lots *of food, and they love to eat *bad *food. Most fat people would refuse to eat healthy food even if it was free.
Most food is bad if you eat it by the bushel. IMHO.
I’m just curious about where you’re getting five pounds of carrots for about a buck.
I’ll grant you fruit and vegetables don’t have to be more expensive than snack food, but they aren’t necessarily that much cheaper a lot of times, either, at least in the grocery stores I’m familiar with.
$25 for four home-cooked dinners? Are you on Atkins or something? Because the only way $25 would spread itself to four dinners only is if I were exclusively buying meat and cheese.
Huh. The thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult was sophomore year in college when the dorm I lived in didn’t have a meal plan. Rice, veggies, beans (which count as veggies, I suppose) and soups became my friends freaky fast. You learn how to make sauces so that pretty much whatever you make tastes good, even if it isn’t made from high-end ingredients. You also learn to cut down the cheese supply drastically (tragic, I realize) because even though cheese is the second greatest thing to happen to food, it can get pretty costly pretty quickly. But your model is different, and all of that.
Also, I don’t know where this business of healthy food not tasting good comes from. Nobody said you had to eat raw carrots everyday and that’s it. You can season things, you know. Seasonings and spices, you see, are what make food delicious. Even carrots! Your choices aren’t a bag of raw carrots or Doritos.
Anyway, we’re getting into the 1,000,000,000th iteration of “Why People Get Fat” and we all know how these go.
I’m headed to the grocery store right now. I’ll report back.
You blame The Economy for fat people at Disney World?
It’s not at all surprising that Americans are fat: getting fat is becoming easier and easier every year. “Standard” portions of food and drink are getting bigger; fat-and-carb-heavy, empty-calorie food is becoming more ubiquitous, the need for physical exertion in one’s daily life is becoming less, and there are ever-more sources of entertainment that involve sitting on one’s ass.
shrug I like carrots and healthy food, and I’m a decent healthy cook, and I don’t even care all that much for cheese. I’m just telling you what it was like to get food from a food bank because I couldn’t afford to buy it. It was starchy and heavy on the fatty meat, and there weren’t a whole lot of veggies.
About being a poor college student vs. being a poor adult with a family to feed and a mortgage to pay–I’ve done both, and I’ll tell you right now, it’s a whole new level of stress. 
I enjoy a fat lady every now and then… as Frank says “who wants to ride an ironing board, that ain’t no fun, I tried me one. The bigger the cushion the better the pushin…” USA! USA! USA!
This is one of the things we noticed the most when we visit the US - the portion sizes are (often, not always) unbelievably big. We had lunch at a fast food place, and Jim had a Coke with his meal. I saw him carrying it out to the car after lunch because he hadn’t finished it, and I asked him what size it was. Apparently the gallon jug of soda he got was the SMALL. What chance do people have when they buy a small soda or small fries and they get more calories than one person should eat in a day? You can do the intellectual work and figure out how to fit a little bit of junk food into a healthy diet, but people don’t do that.
I sure do, and I’m even a little bit serious.
We’ve been focused on food in this thread, but another thing that’s really messed-up is how little we walk.
I’m an avid walker. I walk when it’s cold, raining, boiling hot, humid, etc. I try to do six miles every day. No power walking for me. I’m fine with just a leisurely stroll. But wherever I go, I always try to figure out if I can walk there first.
When you put in a lot of foot-miles, it’s strange how much your perception of distance changes. “Walking distance” to me is seven miles or less. “Far” is anything greater than 10 miles.
I have a co-worker who was bragging for some time that she was getting her daily exercise by parking her car four blocks up the street and around the corner. This isn’t a poor arthritic bent-over old lady, but someone just a few years older than I am. I know every little step counts, but for reals? A five minute walk is exercise? She said she was going to try to park a little farther every day, but she soon stopped.
My parents came to visit recently. Now, my mother does have bad arthritis, so I do cut her some slack. But when I asked if they wanted to walk to a restaurant that is only three blocks away, they had to think about it. My mother and I walked, but my father drove. We rode with him on the way back because my mother said she didn’t feel like walking back. I want to blame my mother’s arthritis because I know it does slow her down. But my father didn’t have an excuse.
Cars have really altered our perception of the world, I think.
All these discussions about fat people and foods - what needs to be acknowledged is that there is a multi-billion dollar industry of experts working tirelessly trying to convince us of what to eat.
They manufacture foods that contain junk, and make it extra tasty with fat and salt and sugar to get us addicted to it, prepare it for us so we don’t have to, put it in bright colorful packages so it catches out eye, and prices it low enough so we don’t walk away from it, and relentlessly advertise it through all media.
No wonder normal people are nearly helpless in the face of this onslaught.
For those who have the discipline and where-with-all to avoid it, good on ya’!
I think the sedentary lifestyle is key.
The last time I visited Manhattan, I was struck by how few fat people there were. I suspect it’s because everyone walks…
It is a walking city which does help keep your weight down, but there are a lot of really big people here.
Food Basics in Ontario. They frequently sell huge bags of carrots, beets, potatoes and apples for $1 - $2.
I know the ability to eat healthy is more complicated than simply buying a big bag of cheap carrots, but I just always find it puzzling to hear the argument that it’s too expensive to eat healthy foods when I actually find it to be the opposite.
This may help explain something commented on earlier in the thread: Disney World rents out scooters. IIRC you pay like a $20 refundable deposit or something. We went once many years ago to Epcot and I had done something to my foot or ankle and it was all Ace- bandaged up and couldn’t put a shoe on/weight on/etc… but the trip was already planned, so we went. I rented the scooter. It was actually kind of cool because they have a separate and much shorter line for those in wheelchairs/scooters. But anyway–the point is that a lot of the people you see on scooters at Disney don’t own the scooters.