One thing nobody’s mentioned is possibly to require employers to give time off for working out or put gyms in the workplace or something like that.
For a lot of people who work 8-12 hours a day and who have families, the thought of tacking another hour or two every day or two of exercise is really more of a trial than something that they look forward to. In other words, if time’s limited, most people wouldn’t choose to devote a significant amount of time to exercise, especially when the alternative use is something like spending time with their kids, spouse, sleeping, etc…
A lot of people mention exercise, but the real change to fighting obesity has to be diet. It is trivial to overeat the calories burned during moderate exercise. Unless you’re doing Ironman Triathlon training, exercise alone will not keep you at a healthy weight. Exercise combined with diet works great at keeping off the weight. Exercise tacked on to eating whatever you want won’t.
I feel the biggest change would be within the schools. Cafeteria food should only be fresh, nutritious food. Get the kids in the habit of eating normal sized portions of healty food. PE classes should have alternate days between nutrition education and physical activity. The physical activity portion would be taught with lots of supervision with the goal of getting kids to enjoy being active. The current PE model of no supervision and of letting the tough kids beat up/taunt the weaker ones only means that the kids who need PE the most will do everything possible to avoid it.
Free cable or other such goodies like paid days off or tax rebates for people that completed a certain amount of exercise every week or month. I am basing this on what I’ve observed with my university’s fitness program. The gym was cheap, but not many employees used it until some genius came up with a fitness release program where employees could go to gym during their work hours (i.e., get out of work) for a few hours each week and bought some television sets for the gym. Now the gym is packed with people watching television while using threadmills and exercise bikes.
For kids:
-Mandate gym class for an hour ever day at school through 10th grade
-Mandate participation in intramural sports from 2nd-10th grade (varsity sports could be substituted at the appropriate age/skill level)
-Mandate ½ year of nutrition class is 5th, 7th and 10th grade
-Mandate a complete year of cooking class in 6th and 9th grade
-Make major improvements to school lunches and completely remove foods like chocolate milk, French fries and any kind of junk food
-Make illegal advertising food to kids or during times that kids tend to watch TV
-Identify kids at a young age (K onwards) that are overweight or obese and enroll them in a program identifying their nutrition and fitness needs; work with parents if possible
For community:
-Provide tax incentives to encourage communities to provide bike paths and bike friendly roads
-Organize a “bicycle benefits” program where local businesses provide incentives for biking to their shop (usually something like 5% off)
-Create a coalition of concerned community members and businesses that will pressure local health insurance companies to provide partial reimbursements for CSA and gym memberships
-Create percentage based weight loss competitions between competitor companies
-Create point-of-decision prompts pointing to healthier food and activity alternatives
Create incentives for food deserts to carry subsidized healthy foods and pre-package meal ingredients
-Create tax incentives for buildings have gyms and showers in their basements
Government/Entitlement Adjustments
-Mandate nutrition and cooking training as a prerequisite to receiving WIC or Medicaid benefits; would be 2-3 hours of training, several times to teach people how to prepare five basic, healthy meals with limited resources and perhaps only access to a hot pot and/or crockpot; perhaps expand to SSI if feasible
-Severely limit the types of foods that can be purchased using government funds
-Remove agricultural subsidies
-Revamp all of the nutrition information with vegetables forming the basis of any diet, and readjust all portions to be based on a 1500, not 2000, calorie diet
I would give free arable land to farmers who can grow genetically modified vegetables that taste like Twinkies and Cheetos.
Just kidding.
The only way to get massive amounts of people to lose weight is to totally turn our way of life upside down. Force every business to make employees do an hour’s worth of calisthenics. Ban restaurants from advertising on the radio and television. Make fruits and vegetables practically free, while taxing unhealthy food so that they are prohibitively expensive. Limit broadcast hours on TV to prime-time and the early morning. Put stimulants in the public water supply.
People who care about walking and exercising already do. People who do not will not suddenly change their minds if you put in some sidewalks. People who want to eat vegetables are already doing so–making them free will not make them more attractive to those who don’t like them. We can start teaching the children the right way, but I’m skeptical even this will make a lasting mark.
The day the donut was invented was the day we began to lose control. It’s too late to go back…unless you want to ban donuts and the delicious fat you fry them in. But then the Homer J. Simpsons of the society will rise up in a massive revolution. Do we really want that?
Some posters have mentioned tax-deductible gym memberships and other tactics for making exercise more affordable or more convenient. I think those are good ideas and I would absolutely support them.
However, I also don’t think that these measure would have much effect. That’s because the problem isn’t that exercise is expensive (it isn’t), or that it’s inconvenient (it doesn’t have to be). Rather, by and large, the problem is that the general populace doesn’t want to work out. People would much rather lounge around than get any real exercise. Go to the exercise room in any hotel, for example, and you’ll typically see a lot more people sitting in the hot tub than lifting weights or swimming in the pool.
The same holds true when it comes to eating right. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sat at a restaurant with people who’d say “Oh, I really need to lose some weight,” even as they order grease-laden meals that are caloric nightmares. I usually respond by saying, “That’s why I like to eat lean,” to which they almost invariably reply, “Yeah, well, tonight I want to enjoy myself.”
Ultimately, there needs to be a change in the culture. People need to understand that getting fit is hard work, and that you can’t burn off a doughnut just by spending a few minutes on a stationary bicycle. This information is readily available, but for whatever reason, it just doesn’t sink in for most people.
Supply and demand. If more people want it, then it will become less expensive. Now, I’m not suggesting that a healthy meal will become cheaper than a bag of french fries. However, as more people choose to eat healthy, the cost of nutritious food will go down.
Agreed. In fact, your comment is entirely consistent with the observations that I made earlier. Ultimately, the biggest problem is that most people just don’t care much about being in shape.
Obviously, there are exceptions. People who struggle with poverty have fewer dietary options, for example, and they may have less free time as well. Some people also have medical conditions that hinder their fitness efforts. By and large though, most people just don’t care a whole lot.
Heck, I even see this at the gym. I’ve talked about how a lot of people attend the cardio classes and yet put in very little effort. They generally sleepwalk through the moves – or worse, gab their way through the class. This frustrates the instructors, and for good reason. People just don’t understand that you’ve got to put in the effort if you want to get in shape.
I’m not going to support nanny-state solutions to mandate anyone’s personal behavior. I’d be happy if we’d just stop subsidizing the harmful crap, which runs the gamut from public-lands grazing for burgers-to-be to suburban sprawl enabled by our zoning and transportation priorities.
Conversely subsidize healthful foods, and/or bring them down into a more affordable range.
Good fruit is WAY more expensive than say, a McDonald’s “value meal”. Part of a company’s benefits package to it’s employees can be paid time to work out and a facility to do so.
Address all of the ACTUAL issues involved in the obesity epidemic. Blaming it all on food and over consumption of foods (and the wrong sorts of foods), is simplistic and ineffective. If it were merely a matter of “all fat people are fat because they eat too much” it would be a simple and quick fix.
Emotional issues and lifestyle issues figure heavily (no pun intended) into the causes of obesity. For instance, the rat race and its effect upon people, primarily the greatly reduced free hours in a day, the stresses and so on. When a person is working 70 hours a week to make ends meet, carting kids to dance class, hockey practice, football etc, trying to run a household, pay bills, keep vehicles in running condition and on and on, the time to prepare healthful food is a casualty of war so to speak.
The emotional issues that cause overeating (specifically overeating of the extremely fattening “comfort foods”) are many and well-documented.
One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’re eating at a fast food type place, it’s more expensive to order a la carte than it is to have a “Combo” or “Value Meal” or whatever they offer.
Say, for example, you want a Burger and a Coke Zero. It’s going to cost the same- or more- than buying the Burger Combo which has a Burger, Chips, And Drink. And most people who grew up in Western societies have been taught since an early age that it’s bad to waste food (“There are starving children in Africa!”), which means that, for a lot of people (certainly in my experience with friends etc), they can’t bring themselves to not eat the fries (or the Hash Brown, or whatever) because it’s “wasteful” to just throw them out (which it is!)… so they end up eating the chips almost because they feel they have to, not because they want to. Although, to be fair, more often than not they want to eat the chips as well.
If I were made “Obesity Czar,” the first thing I’d do is to do my homework: Read up on the medical and psychological studies, and find out what we actually, scientifically know about why people are or are not obese, so we can address the actual causes. (For example, I’ve read that not getting enough sleep can contribute to weight gain/obesity. Is that something we can address, or at least make people aware of?)
It might also be worth investing in medical research. Some people’s bodies naturally maintain a healthy weight, while others have to work harder at it. And while part of the difference is due to diet and/or exercise habits, part of it may well be genetic or body chemistry, and it’s not too far-fetched to imagine some medical breakthrough that would help the latter become more like the former (for example, a drug that tells the body to burn carbs as energy rather than storing them as fat).
These are both good ideas.
I have some sympathy with these suggestions. When I was a kid, plenty of schools, churches, and other public buildings that were two or three stories tall didn’t have elevators, and no one thought twice about taking the stairs. Nowadays, buildings are required to be handicapped-accessible—which is a good thing, for the disabled. And that’s the problem with your idea: it might be a very good thing for normally-mobile people, but it would screw over those who, for some legitimate reason, have trouble getting around.
Good point. Subsidizing gym memberships might actually be counterproductive. How many people now only go to the gym because they say to themselves, “I don’t feel like working out today, but I paid good money for my membership and by God I’m going to get my money’s worth!”
Plus, the people who are really obese tend not to be the go-to-the-gym type: the idea seems horribly boring or difficult or just unnatural to them. The kind of exercise where I have to make a special trip, put on special clothes, and engage in repetitive, pointless activity is not the kind of thing I would find easy to make part of my daily routine.
This would be a good start, however, I must place most of the blame for the obesity epidemic and indeed most of the current problems facing our world today upon the failure of our leaders to apply the proper treatment during the 30 years following the second world war.
During that period of time there was still the possibility, the hope, for drastic life-style changes, that I fear is well beyond our reach now.
I am talking about Global Thermo-Nuclear War.
Had this simple societal restructuring occurred there would still be enough oil to last a thousand years. Off-shoring of jobs would not be a problem, neither would import/export imbalances. And the housing market…just think about all the new housing starts.
I get a little tear in my eye over the lost opportunites.
You guys aren’t reading. I said I’d RESTORE shame and humiliation. Meaning, the shame and humiliation we used to have (back when there weren’t so many fat people) but have since gotten rid of. It WAS such a success–it used to keep fatness at bay. More and more people have become obese as we have become more “tolerant” and less “judgmental” and begun to consider it rude to say anything about people’s weight.
Because junk food is cheap, cheap, cheap and parents won’t vote to raise their taxes to pay for schooling - mind you, better lunch offerings rarely enter the budget agenda anyway.
Schools argue that the kids won’t eat the good stuff or that they can’t afford the good stuff so they offer french fries, peanut butter sandwiches, pizza slices and corn dogs which they can get cheap on government surplus programs. Buckets o’ carbs and not an unsalted protein in the bunch. For veggies, there’s ketchup (thanks Ronald Reagan :dubious:).
If the obesity problem were able to be solved, then so would every other poor lifestyle choice that leads to ill-health. Some people are just too dumb, unmotivated, disinterested, or unwilling to get out of their own way; and no option, legislative change, tax break or sanctioned reward will prove a useful incentive.
If you’re too stoopid to know that you are personally responsible for your state of health, then I, as a country, a state, a school, a workplace, an-anything - can’t help you.
If obesity is the focus of this thread, and if, as an obese person who doesn’t notice that your clothing size is increasing, and you’re having difficulty moving around to get to the fridge and shove those 12000kjs down your gob three times a day, then you can blame your parents, or the government, or god, or the lack of one if it makes you feel better. But I’m sure an entire cheesecake will, and if ya wanna do that, you go right ahead because it’s fine by me.
Whinge about how ‘fat fated’ your life is, and how it’s hormonal, or genetic, or outta your control and it makes me wanna just kick your fat arse.
This is a good point, too. I usually just want a burger and the fries, not a sugary drink to go with it (just water, please), and the first hurdle is getting them to understand that (“No, not a combo, just a burger and fries”) and the second hurdle is actually getting the water (they forget it nine times out of ten).
