I’d do dna testing until we found “the fat gene.” Carriers would have their status tattooed on their foreheads. Eventually, Darwin will make us all skinny.
Or, limit cars, elevators, escalators, etc. Elevators and escalators would only be allowed on buildings over 4 stories tall. Cars are not allowed on city streets from 8 am to 5 pm. People have to park and walk to work. Buses do not stop at every stop, but every other stop, so people have to walk at least 5 minutes to get to the right bus stop.
But deaths from obesity only kills the one who commit the “crime”
I used inner-city homicide as a shorthand for what I think really needs to be addressed. Parking spaces and escalators are all fine and good, but my priorities are a little different.
When we know that the parents can read, then we can go on to forced nutrition. When we know that children understand they are not doomed to a life of grinding poverty, then we can address BMI. When we make sure teenagers understand what having a baby with no means of support equals for them and their children’s lives, then we can spend the money on traveling fruit wagons.
But, this is a hijack, and against the intent of the thread. My apologies. But I go crazy when I see people wasting time on problems that aren’t really problems. The obesity epidemic is happening because most people are too lazy and self-indulgent to pay attention to portion control, meal content and exercise levels. This is not a problem in the grand scale of things.
This is where I would start too. Without them HFCS wouldn’t be an appealing filler for things that aren’t even meant to be sweet.
I’d also require a lot more PE classes for kids, too. I hated the fact that we had PE every single day freshman year, but in retrospect, it would have been better if we repeated it junior year too.
I’d love to see an expansion of sidewalks, too. When I was in college my friends and I walked 15-20 miles a week, but I can’t do that where I live because I live on a state highway that has no sidewalks and meandering down the breakdown lane when cars are doing 50+mph right next to you isn’t very safe.
Nonsense. I don’t know where people get the ridiculous idea that we must prioritize all of our problems into one giant list and then work on them one at a time, starting at the top. It’s not an either/or situation. You can make the point that obesity isn’t a problem and doesn’t need to be addressed at all – I disagree, but I suppose it’s a legit stance. Saying that we shouldn’t work on obesity because there are other problems we have to fix first is ridiculous and is like saying, “Why are the police giving speeding tickets when they should be catching murderers?” Well, they can do both.
Start by reducing, then removing, gov’t subsidies for monoculture and ‘conventional’ farming and the industrial approach to the meat industry. Who really knows what treating hamburger patties with ammonia does to them and to you?
Give financial incentives to schools for teaching kids to grow their own food and serve that food in the cafeteria.
Mandate that kids have active recess breaks (even on snowy days) and are active in gym class.
Incentivize suburbs to have enough parks, bike trails or shopping areas that can be walked instead of driven.
Run health pledge drives as in “I will not spend more than one hour in front of the TV and/or computer each day.” They could even do the pledges as a fund-raising activity. What ever happened to all the “walk” pledges? The only one I see at all is the breast cancer one?
Show adults what plasma looks like after eating a bag of corn chips or KFC versus eating fruit and broiled chicken.
And maybe, just maybe, quit overscheduling ourselves and our children so we have the time to prepare family meals instead of Papa John’s or Burger Whopp.
I would create a board-certified medical specialty called “weight management” or some Latin version of the same. It’s RIDICULOUS that if you have cancer, you go to an oncologist, if you have a heart attack you go see a cardiologist, if you are pregnant you see an Ob/gyn, if you have kidney problems you see a nephrologist, if you have ACNE you see a dermatologist, but if you are fat, you see your GP, who probably knows about as much about weight loss as your average issue of Family Circle. Other specialties touch on weight loss, but they all are only looking for one solution–endos look for hormone/insulin issues, surgeons think surgery, psychiatrists think mental health–but no one is trained or certified in the big picture.
I mean, if you had cancer and your GP sent you first to a chemotherapist, then to a radiologist, and then to a surgeon–none of whom ever talked to each other or knew anything about each others fields–you’d think it was an insane way to cure cancer. But that’s how we treat obesity, which kills as many people as cancer, and makes many more miserable.
A board-certified weight management DOCTOR would know about nutrition (and way more than a dietitian, who has a bachelor’s degree and takes maybe 8 classes specifically about nutrition) and be able to talk about a variety of eating plans. A certified weight management doctor would know about physical therapy/exercise and be able to build a reasonable, steadily increasing and safe exercise plan for an individual. A certified weight management doctor would know about the drugs and surgical options, and would be able to recommend for or against them as best suited an individual patient.
Such a doctor could monitor your health and help with maintaining a loss. They could also work with people who need to gain weight–people on chemotherapy, for example, and children that fail to thrive.
And board certified doctors could have journals and conferences where they discussed their work and developed best practices.
There are 26 board-certified medical specialties out there, and not one to deal with the greatest single health issue in this country.
I would start with the children. Nutrition and exercise classes beginning at a very young age. Teach them how to eat properly and make the right food choices, and to look forward to exercise.
Also, require the PE teachers to actually teach how to play sports and do other fitness activities, rather than pointing to a pile of sticks and balls and saying “We’re playing floor hockey today.” (News flash: if I’ve never played floor hockey before, odds are very good I don’t even know what the rules are, nevermind any of the techniques involved in playing.)
And maintain them, for god’s sake. There used to be basic fitness/calisthenic equipment along the Lakefront Trail in Chicago, but it hasn’t been maintained in at least a decade. More than a year and a half ago I called the city to report that one of the parallel bars had gone missing. It’s still missing. The inclined sit-up thing completely disappeared years ago.
Yes. I can’t imagine why anyone decided it was okay to provide junk food in schools in the first place. If anyone thinks that the kids will just run off-campus to buy their junk, then have a closed-campus policy and provide a standard set of penalties for leaving campus during the school day without written permission from the school. Communicate with parents so junior can’t forge a note saying that he’s got a doctor’s appointment – call the parent and ask if that’s true.
I don’t know that there’s any realistic way to reduce the sheer volume of chemical-laden convenience food out there, but perhaps there’s a way to make whole foods less expensive? Currently it’s the other way around; it’s the unhealthy junk that’s cheap. Also, teach people to cook! Maybe it’s better these days, but when I was in school the cooking portion of home ec was maybe two or three weeks long, and the only thing I remember learning to cook was how to broil s’mores in the oven. Firstly, I think cooking should come at a time when it’s more likely the kid will use it (and thusly retain it); in high school. Secondly, teach basic principles of how to cook, how to flavor, so it’s perhaps a bit easier for someone to throw a “what’s in the fridge” meal together and have it actually taste good. Having them end up with a recipe book with a variety of meals (not just of the slab of meat, starch, and soggy green beans variety) that they keep would be good too.
I suppose this may be unpopular, but given that obesity starts at home and there are any number of other good reasons to do this, it would be nice to require all first-time parents to go through parenting classes. It’s nice that the parenting unit is becoming more common in middle school and high school health classes, but I don’t think it’s in depth enough, nor is it immediately relevant enough to a 13-year-old for the lessons to stick until they have kids. Part of it would cover how to choose and cook healthy meals, what’s age-appropriate in terms of what they should eat, their physical development, and types of exercise, and stuff like that. There’s an appalling number of people who just don’t know how to make food that didn’t come out of a microwaveable box. (And seriously, if someone is going to be responsible for another person’s formative development, the least we can do is make sure they know how. You wouldn’t trust a doctor who hadn’t gone to med school, after all, and I don’t see that being responsible for another human being is any less important.)
In any case, I think really pushing education is the only clear-cut way to balance getting people to eat and move better, with their right to choose for themselves whether they want to. We need a very fundamental change in how we approach food. There’s an attitude that something must be swimming in grease in order to taste good; when the reality is, it only “tastes good” because that’s what you’re used to. Many people have adjusted their diets, and their palates followed. Now, the idea of eating at a fast food place like McDonalds makes me a little queasy. I still (rarely) eat french fries from a local mom-n-pop pub or something, but not the mass-produced, preserved, treated, frozen fast food ones, and not often.
Get rid of High Fructose Corn Syrup. That shit’s in *everything *nowadays, even food which doesn’t need to be sweetened. Have you tried to find unsweetened fruit juice lately?
Make more communities bikeable/walkable. I tried riding my bike to work one day last year and halfway there I had to call my wife to come pick me up because I felt like I was going to get run over. I only live four miles away from work, but there are no bike lanes anywhere around here. Now I drive two miles, park at the train station, then walk the rest of the way just so I can get some exercise, as only the last two miles have sidewalks.
As someone who is very overweight, I would second this. It is often hard to judge what you are taking in and where you might be stumbling into calories you do not realize are there. Having a consistent yardstick makes it much easier to make good decisions.
I was doing weight watchers but have since flipped to using an IPhone app called “LoseIt” as a calorie counting/weight management tool. being able to track it on the spot without overlooking a stray cookie is very helpful.
Stick. I’d restore shame and humiliation. As one blogger put it, “I’m old enough to remember when fat people got fingers pointed at them in public.” Get rid of the whole “fat acceptance” movement, “real women have curves” tropes and the like, get rid of the taboo against calling people on the carpet for being fat, disgusting slobs, and the obese will soon stop cramming so damn much food down their gaping maws.
Cute. But ultimately ineffective. If shame and humiliation were effective, there would be very few fat people. Most people hate being fat, and that’s not going to change based on a few websites and blogs promoting “fat acceptance” or whatever. The answer isn’t to increase shame and humiliation, unless you think that twice as much of something that is already ineffective is somehow going to magically make it effective. The answer is to make it easier to stay thin, and less easy to get fat. There have been some good ideas already in this thread, e.g. removing the corn subsidy, increasing access to parks and fitness equipment, and making communities more walkable.
Although personally I think this is a problem that isn’t going to go away any time soon as we live in an increasingly sedentary society where we have an abundance of food and where fewer and fewer people have to do physical labor as part of their daily job.
Not to mention that it’s common for people to self-medicate with food when dealing with low self-esteem (and there are bio-chemical reasons for this, too). Increasing someone’s self-loathing would more likely have the opposite effect.
I was fat when I felt worthless; there’s a big element of “why bother, it’s work and I suck anyway.” I got thin when I found my self-esteem.
Rather than attaching a ton of negative feelings towards being fat, let’s go out of our way to attach a ton of positive feelings about being healthy. That will make the work seem worth it.
I like this idea. I went to a GP years ago to talk about how to lose some weight, and the extent of his ideas was to stop eating dessert (he wasn’t wrong, but I think we can all agree that’s awful damned simplistic).
My husband loves Lose-It! too. We do like to eat out, and it is very difficult to make good choices and actually know what you’re getting when you eat out.
I’d be tempted to take ALL food commercials off tv, too. How many kilotonnes of junk do North Americans shovel down their gullets while watching tv in the evenings, do you figure?
Any idea I think would actually work for the country would probably destroy our economy.
Mostly because I’d say get rid of every pre-packaged food item in existence and don’t let them be imported either. Only allow fresh and frozen meat, fruit and vegetables be sold in stores. No butter no margarine and limited cheese, eggs and cream at a price few will waste money on excessive amounts.
See it’s ridiculous. Nothing else will help. I don’t think exercise is the answer. You have to do a lot of it to make up for even slightly poor food choices. I don’t think encouraging good food choices will help. We all know we don’t need daily desserts or treats. We know fried foods and simple pre-packed carb loaded junk foods aren’t good. We just don’t care. It’s like blaming a lack of formal sex ed on the teen pregnancy rates. They know how not to get pregnant. Nobody wants to take personal responsibility into consideration.
So how about this.
We implant a device in every newborn that gives them a painful zap when they’ve eaten too much or sat still too long.
Nothing workable. I’ve been battling my whole life with binging and weight issues. I wish I had a solution. Everything I can think of would be too extreme and detrimental to our freedoms and economy.
I don’t know if you’re serious or not because it’s hard to believe someone would be such a jackass, but I’m going to take it as serious because I know people with the same wrong-headed opinion.
I don’t know where you live but obese people are still made fun of every day. Fat acceptance is only for fat people to feel like they aren’t shit on a shoe because it’s enforced every day in the media and in real life.
Real women do have curves, like it or not. We aren’t stick people and I think the truth is just the opposite of your opinion. People think they have to be fat or skinny. Nothing in between and the goal is ALWAYS about weight, not health.
The focus needs to be on healthy choices for EVERYONE, not just fat people. I have a little sickly friend on Facebook who asked our group on how she could “get healthy”. Every single person encouraged her to eat junk food and lay around because they see she’s skinny as a rail and thinks if she’s that skinny the answer is putting on pounds. They are clueless. Sure she might put on belly fat then she’ll be in even worse shape.
I may be fat but I had the only sensible answer, to join me at the gym every morning after having some protein for breakfast, eat lots of nuts and avocados, lean meats and beans. I told her how many calories she needed to gain a little weight slowly, and showed her how to make good healthy choices instead of eating cupcakes six times a day.
Who do you think she’ll listen to?
And that’s the problem for 99% of us. It’s just easier and more temporarily satisfying to grab a packaged food. I really don’t think anything or any one leader will change this without taking drastic steps and if they do the entire sugar-deprived country will protest like you’ve never seen.
Most of the prepackaged stuff is really good, F&E’s whole schtick is no additives or preservatives, no HFCS, not alot of salt, etc. Also those prepacks are usually in the 400-700 calorie range making for a perfectly reasonable portion size for an average adult male.
For example:
My diet according to Lose It, budgets me 2,925 calories.
Breakfast was a Fresh & Easy branded breakfast bowl with ham (2.99) 680 Calories.
My lunch was a pack of Fresh & Easy branded Penne in creamy Tomato sauce 470 calories ($2.49). I was happy with it. I also had a pack of chips that was 280 calories.
I would honestly love to see more stuff packaged like this. Its easy, its not expensive, its healthy, and I am well on my way to an under calorie budget day.