Two pieces of fried chicken, fries, biscuit … about $4.79 at Popeyes.
A container of salad from the salad bar… anywhere from $7 to $11.
If this were true, I’d seriously do it. No joke. People who I am close to cannot escape being tickled and poked (and maybe bitten a little bit) by me. I am, of course, the biggest hypocrite on Earth about this, as anyone who attempts to tickle me promptly loses their hand.
Okay fine! I’ll have the damn salad for lunch! Get off my back!
???
Where do you live? In a NYC penthouse, or a cabin in the woods? Disney and Walmart ARE America. People everywhere save up to make the pilgramage to Disney. People everywhere take the kids to Walmart on a hot summer weekend to buy toilet paper and liters of Pepsi. The rich and the thin go skiing in Colorado. The rich and the thin buy artisan cheese at Trader Joe’s.
Re: Healthy food is more expensive and less convenient.
Dispute:
Let’s do some math, shall we?
I went to Chik Fil A last week. Spent about $8 on a chicken sandwich and a side salad (I hate the fries there; if fries aren’t crispy/crunchy, I don’t eat 'em). That was one meal.
I could have gone to my grocery store and bought a whole chicken for $8. (Actually, the fully-cooked rotisserie chicken is $6.99 at my grocery store.) Then I could buy lettuce, carrots, and some other salad ingredients for maybe another $5-7. I live alone and am only feeding me, so that whole chicken and all those salad ingredients can feed me for at least 4 days, depending on what I do with the chicken. I can get a lot more mileage out of it by boiling the carcass after I’ve picked off most of the meat, and then making chicken stock for soup. If I had to feed a family of four, that $15 I spent would feed the whole fam. If I took that same four people out to Chik Fil A, I’d probably have to spend somewhere around $30 to feed everyone – same food, same ingredients.
“But I don’t have time to cook every night! And I don’t feeeeeel like it.”
I know just what you mean. It’s a pain in the ass to cook a protein + a few veggies + a minimal amount of carbs, every night.
So I cook on Sunday. I make pots of soup, chili, stews, casseroles… all kinds of stuff. And then freeze single-serving portions. That way I don’t have to: a) waste a bunch of food I can’t finish before it goes bad and b) don’t have to eat the same meal over and over for a week (I have a three-meals-in-a-row limit and then I have to change it up or die of food boredom). That way, when I come home from work, I pop a container out of my freezer into my microwave and five minutes later, I’m eating a wholesome, healthy, no crap added meal for less than it would have cost me to go buy 7 frozen TV dinners at the grocery store (which can run anywhere from $3-5 depending. A week’s worth of frozen food could run you $35. I can make two weeks’ worth of lasagna for half that.)
Let’s say I buy a whole bag of carrots for my soup. I’m only going to use one or two carrots to make a big pot of soup (because there’s a bunch of other stuff in there). What I can’t/won’t eat out of that bag of carrots gets chopped up and frozen, so I don’t waste leftover veggies. Next time I need to throw carrots into something, I grab that baggie out of the freezer and dump a handful of carrots in.
It’s not that difficult, complicated, or expensive. When I’m feeling lazy and have money to burn, I eat out as much as anyone else and, occasionally, I’ll even indulge in a processed frozen block o’ food. Or eat something out of a can. But when money is tight, I’m very careful to use all of everything I bought and that requires some planning and a little bit of knowledge about food preservation. Also, you can reduce cooking time significantly by using a pressure cooker.
:: shrug::
I dunno, I was raised like this. Eating from a restaurant was a treat, not a standard “where should we get dinner from tonight, honey?” kind of thing. I think the real problem is: people don’t do math. The time it takes to drive to a restaurant, wait for a table, order, wait for your food, wait for the bill, and drive home is about the same amount of time or more than it takes to pull a couple ingredients out of the fridge and throw it on the stove for a couple minutes.
Even though my parents taught me to be frugal and plan carefully with food/cooking/groceries, the reasons they are obese are: 1) They don’t exercise; 2) They still snack on junk after the healthy meals; and 3) When they do go out to eat, they don’t consider it a good value unless they get like five pounds of food for $1 (“Take her to Thailand. Buy her a lobster dinner. Pay more than a dollar!” :D). They’ll go to one of those feeding trough buffet places, take two or three plates of food and then wonder why they’re so fat. Well, dad, it’s probably because you ate like three meals in one sitting. You don’t need that much food. But my parents do understand the economics of shopping and cooking for yourself (they taught it to me). The more broke I am at any given point, the more you will find frozen portions of huge meals I made sitting conveniently in my freezer. This also saves me a fortune as I normally eat out for lunch every day. Last night, I made a pot of broccoli soup. I spent about $12 on the ingredients and most of that expense was cheese and milk. I will get at least three meals out of it, so my per-meal cost goes down to about $4 a pop. I can’t eat at Taco Bell for $4.
Missed the edit window:
Add to that last sentence in my post above:
Also, I will be going home to nuke my leftover brocco soup for lunch today, which will take about 5 minutes. I can’t get to Taco Bell, order, wait, pay, wait and drive home to eat in less than 15 minutes. I’m not only saving money, I’m saving time and gas as well.
P.S. The reason my brocco soup was that expensive was because I used four kinds of cheese (2 for $5!) and had some brie leftover.
• Pound of broccoli - about $2.50
• Store brand cheddar cheese - $2.50
• Half-gallon of milk - $2.50, give or take
•2 TBS of butter - Let’s say I get two whole sticks for $2.50, but I’m only going to use two Tablespoons, so my total butter cost was about $0.65.
•Salt, pepper, dried herbs from the garden - basically free.
I could pretty much make this soup for just less than $10, driving my per-meal cost down to about $3 something.
There are a few barriers in Ireland to American levels of obesity IMHO.
First there’s the fact that restaurant food is more expensive and portions are significantly smaller for the most part. A number of my friends and family have pointed out is that even when main courses aren’t that big in US restaurants, if you order a side dish it’s often almost as big as the main again. Endless refills of soft drinks, or salad bar etc. are also almost vanishingly rare.
Public transport, at least in our cities, is more popular, especially among teenagers and early 20s whose equivalent in America would be more likely to already have a car, or at least access to one.
And related to car usage, in our towns, apart from newer mall-type developments there’s rarely enough parking so that if you live in a town and need to do a few messages it’s often as handy just to walk to the store than to get in the car and find a parking space somewhere.
Having said all that as I said above there are plenty of us fatties here so while these factors provide some bulwark against being very, very, fat they’re not enough to combat the modern imbalance between food intake and exercise levels that seems to be occuring across the world.
And they have gym memberships that include child care! I sure miss my gym. (Yes, I walk/jog 3 miles every morning at 6:15am, and I do other stuff. But oh, how I miss the fancy weights and the ellipticals and the POOL…maybe next year.)
The fact is that as human beings, we are programmed to like and seek out foods containing stuff that is scarce in untamed nature–sugar, salt, and fat. Now that we’re wealthy enough to build a society specified to our tastes, we have built one that will give us all the sugar, salt, and fat we want. We have neolithic appetites that were developed in response to a different environment than the one we’ve got. It’s no wonder really that there are so many overweight people (like me, because I like sugar).
But there are also still elements of living in poverty that make it more difficult to construct a healthy and fit lifestyle.
If the salad was free, they would still choose the fried chicken and fries.
If you ever find yourself in Ohio, hit me up and we can hang out. I’ll let you tickle me while I giggle like the Dough Boy and then I’ll give you a big warm bear hug. We’ll cure your fat anger one fat American at a time!
I think this deserves more attention. At a certain level of poverty, a few bucks here or there is all you ever have for luxury or entertainment once in a while, and as luxuries go, ordering fast food out is one of the cheapest. That $12.99 for dinner is a treat for all your three kids, compared to buying just one of them a movie ticket, for example. Food’s going to win out every time.
I made The World’s Best Mac & Cheese for a friend’s party last year (and pretty much everyone there gave it that moniker…it was the only part of the meal that everyone had seconds, thirds, until it was all gone. ) and it cost about $50. Cheese. Lots n lots of cheese.
I long for the day when people start asking the really important question, which is not “why are they so fat?” but “Why are they eating so much?”
Someday…
I also think time poverty may have as much to do with poor eating habits as financial poverty does. The times in my life where my eating habits were the best were those when I had the most time and energy for shopping for and preparing healthy food, and the times I’ve eaten the worst were when I was most pressed for time. I’ve noticed relatively little correlation between my eating habits and my financial situation.
For poor families that are stuck working long or irregular shifts, especially if they have kids and other family obligations, I’d guess that time poverty has a huge impact on their eating habits.
I absolutely agree and if two parents are working 2 jobs at, say 60+ hours a week each, even cooking on Sundays for the week is going to be a time issue. But for those of us who work a single 40-50 hour job, most of us could probably use our time more wisely and efficiently to plan ahead for our family’s needs for the week.
The salad bar is the most expensive way to buy veggies, though. If you buy a thing of lettuce, some carrots, some cucumbers (unless you’re a Muslim woman!!), etc. all separately you’ll get many salads out of it at a much cheaper cost.
Would it be too much to ask for the exact recipe? I know you give amounts but you didn’t say which herbs, or the actual steps. Broccoli soup is one of my very favorites, one of the ones that tastes the least good out of a can, and one I happen to never have made on my own. A known-to-be-good recipe would be a good starting place (I always prefer some real person’s “I eat this, this is good” recipe over a random recipe found through a Google search).
Yes, the POOL! Especially in winter. Swimming is my favorite exercise (I don’t like getting sweaty and I have bad knees) and access to a pool is the thing I miss the most about the gym membership I had ages ago. We could join the YMCA in the next town over for $75/month for the family, but that’s over our budget, and really, since it’s a 20-30 minute drive each way we’d probably end up making excuses not to go half the time anyway.
Regarding vanity sizing: I am a size 4, very rarely a size 2 (depends on the manufacturer). When I graduated high school in 1998, I was also a size 4. I weighed maybe 100lbs at graduation, today I weigh 115lbs.
When shopping for clothes in high school, I went for the smallest pant size which was a 4. Some stores/brands carried a 2, but it was rare. Today stores carry 0, 2 and then size 4. If vanity sizing did not exist, I assume I would be a size 8.
While I was in China, I went to a silk shop and tried on a dress. I picked up a medium; I could not get it past my hips. That just may be the difference between body types of western and eastern women, but I noticed that I did have to go up an 8 or a size large to find clothes in Chinese boutiques to fit me.
I know! One of the things that really stunned me when we moved here–there is no YMCA. (That can happen?) There is no public pool! :eek:
I’d be willing to bet that nearly 100% (if not 100%) of the responses having to do with cooking being hard, evolution making us fat, cheap food is unhealthy so I can’t afford to eat well, etc, are overweight people.
I’d also be willing to bet that the people who are saying that people don’t walk enough, that walking isn’t that hard, that it’s not too hard to cook good healthy food and plan ahead even with a busy schedule, etc are not overweight or not by much, and probably have high health indicators as well.
The reason people are fat is because people are VERY good at rationalizing why they are making poor decisions. If you are overweight, you can eat healthy and exercise. You know that you can, because you know that there are plenty of people who are your age who have families or similar burdens who are not overweight. But in order to remain happy with yourself, you start rationalizing by saying things like, “well I’m not as fat as THAT person,” or “I’ll have a salad tonight and that’ll make up for the triple cheeseburger I ate for lunch.” And then sometimes people actually work up the motivation to start working out, and because they don’t see immediate results or because they start overeating to “reward” themselves for working out, they get demotivated and rationalize that they are the kind of person who “just can’t lose weight.”
When I weighed double (almost exactly) what I do now, walking was extremely painful. As I already mentioned, I have bad knees, and the extra weight put a lot of strain on them. It’s really hard to rationalize your way out of exercises that are so painful to do. And they don’t really get better until a significant amount of the weight comes off–it’s not like the couple/few weeks that it takes to get used to a cardio workout routine for a thinner person.