But that message doesn’t work for most people. It isn’t enough to overcome human nature and the way modern society burns and makes calories available. That’s why the way to approach this is to look at society and how to change it. In the mean time I suppose you can spread this gospel, and it will help a relatively small portion of overweight people with extraordinary abilities (and/or luck), but the big thing we need to is to look at how society makes calories available and how society dictates that we move.
I agree. It’s like playing piano: simply hit the right keys at the right time, and you’ll be a concert pianist.
Like I’ve said before: obesity is a mental problem, not a physical problem.
Technically, if there is the will to move, there is the will to move. There are treadmills in gyms or at home, or, if nothing else, one can walk around in one’s home 5,000 steps a day in circles or jog a mile in most neighborhoods in a circle. I don’t mean that in a snarky way, but just as a matter of fact - where there is a space to walk/run in circles, one can get the necessary steps in.
I think it’s more useful to identify it as a societal problem.
Humans are humans. Drop a few million humans into a society with X junky calories cheaply available, and only requiring Y average calories burned for most jobs/lifestyles, and we’ll end up with Z1 overweight and Z2 obese humans. There’s no psychological message that will change this. The way to change this is to change the values of X and Y.
Also W is a good pronumeral.
W being the amount spent promoting bad food and bad diet information.
“How much money is spent on food advertising in the US 2018?
Total U.S. ad spend in 2018 reached $151 billion”
“In total, Chick-fil-A spent approximately $63 Million in advertising in 2016, the same amount as Starbucks.”
Absolutely, thanks.
You think it’s human nature to stuff yourself so full of calories it becomes a physical burden? I don’t think so. It’s simply a bad habit you form while having open access to tasty, calorie-heavy food. Human nature is to move more than most of us currently are, yet we stick to the habit of sitting in one place for hours on end.
I’m not really sure what you want me to say. There is no magic way to get people to eat less. People have to choose to do so, themselves. I’m in favor of making good information widely available. I’m in favor of spreading the word that getting to a healthy weight is 100% possible. I’m in favor of leading the horse to water, but no one can make it drink.
Stop spending billions spreading bad information.
EDIT:
Bad information, designed with knowledge of human psychology to encourage people to act in ways that will hurt and kill themselves.
Reported
Assume you’re reporting a spammer who latched onto this thread and tried to push more junk food. It’s insidious. Everywhere is food marketing that is very cleverly designed and the marketers will not hesitate to use any human trait to push their products.
Using colour was a new one for me
The “pro-fat” movement seems like a sad desperate cry for help. Washing hands and wondering why people are so terrible at ignoring very powerful, well resourced interests with scientifically proven tactics seems cruel.
Unfortunately the aim of US health system is to make obesity a disease.
A disease that can be diagnosed and treated with drugs, like the diabetes.
I don’t think any official message will be spread, maybe strong adv campaign will be organized to cure obesity with drugs.
What?
So it’s the doctors, administrators and nurses who’ve been keeping us fat?
Most physicians will recommend moderate exercise and food consumption as ways to avoid making medication necessary for obesity related health problems. I don’t think the problem is with health care professionals here.
Of course not! They don’t keep you obese. They don’t stress how important is a lifestyle change in fighting obesity, they will prescribe you a drug
It’s personal and professional ethics that must guide phisycians. I am happy to read what you just wrote. Decisions makers are planning to change obesity, from bad lifestyle habit to disease.
That’s correct as far as it goes, but it is possible (based on personal experience) to confine your eating to mealtimes and go cold turkey on noshing.
I had a friend when I was in college who told me the following story. He was a grad student with an experiment that he could not abandon to go home for the holidays. His mother sent him a large box of cookies. For the next two or three weeks, he had a glass of milk and 3 or 4 cookies every evening around 9. Finally the cookies were finished. The very next night come 9 O’Clock he felt hunger pangs. This happened a few times and then subsided.
I never forgot that story. So when, on one diet, I had lost 30 lb, then gained back 10, then as a side effect of metformin lost another 20 and then stalled, I decided to stop noshing. Nothing between meals and nothing after dinner. Eventually (over a few weeks or a month) the craving to eat between meals dissipated and I lost another 20 lb so I am now 80 lb below my top weight. That was 9 years ago and I am still there.
So while you can’t stop eating cold turkey, it is possible to get past the between meals craving.
Bad lifestyle habit and disease aren’t mutually exclusive.
In my opinion obesity is exclusively a bad habit. Try to change it in a disease will just benefit Pharma Companies businesses
I’ve come to think this is not entirely correct. Yes, we need to eat, but we don’t need carbohydrates. It’s possible, although for most of us it would likely be extremely difficult, to cut out carbs.
This is very not true.
We absolutely do need carbohydrates. They are a biological necessity. But we don’t need as many as we typically consume or in the form we typically associate with carbohydrates. They can come from a variety of sources - beans and various mushrooms have a fair amount of carbs and even beef has some small small amount and fruits and vegetables have some carbs as well.
When people talk about “cutting out” carbs, they generally mean reducing (not necessarily eliminating) the carb-heavy foods, like grains or sugars, especially the heavily processed ones.