Personal responsibility is a continuum, not a “either responsible or not responsible” thing.
I think that, in many cases, people do have some responsibility for their mental illness, crime, poverty, etc. But there are situations where they have no responsibility, and others where they have very little.
I think that, in most cases, obesity falls far towards the “the person is very responsible” side of the scale. Cancer would tend to fall towards the “the person isn’t very responsible” side of the scale. There’s a very strong correlation between leading a sedentary lifestyle and overeating and being fat. The correlation between not eating vegetables and getting cancer is much weaker (hell, even the correlation between smoking and getting cancer is much weaker).
That’s absurd. When I cook for myself, I have to clean the same pan if I use it to make bacon or steamed vegetables. I have to go grocery shopping approximately the same amount if I buy wholesome foods or junk. I have to eat a few times a day. But I can choose to eat healthy foods in reasonable amounts or I can choose to eat unhealthy foods or unreasonable amounts.
But when I hit the snooze button another few times instead of getting up in time for a bike ride before work, or when I sit around and watch tv instead of hitting the gym, or when I go to the movies and get the jumbo popcorn and giant soda because I didn’t bother to plan ahead and eat a sensible lunch at home, it’s because I was lazy and undisciplined, not because I’m “working hard” at maintaining weight.
I agree with Crafter_Man. I’ve been thin, and I know how much work it takes. It takes going to the gym on schedule every time. It takes eating right all the time. It takes real discipline and work. It remains to be seen whether I have the will power to regain and maintain a good body, but if I fail, it will be because I didn’t want it enough.
I agree that willpower is part of a continuum but I don’t agree that obesity is near the ‘we control it’ end of things. The reality is humans (and our ancestors) had hundreds of millions of years to evolve ways of dealing with food shortages so the idea that willpower alone can overcome what biochemistry has spent hundreds of millions of years creating is completely untrue, which is why weight loss fails so much that a person has a better chance of surviving stage IV cancer than of losing weight and keeping it off. Dieting is just a nouveau food shortage and a weird social experiment where we are encouraging wealthy people with ample food to gently starve themselves and see how long they can keep it up. The vast majority of people who want to lose weight cannot do it without massive amounts of willpower. I had a much easier time overcoming depression than I do of losing more than 50 pounds and keeping it off and I have met graduate students who feel losing weight is a bigger accomlishment than getting a graduate degree. If that holds true (grad school is somehow easier than weight loss) than to claim willpower is the solution to everyones obesity is like claiming sending everyone to medical school is a solution to rising medical costs, just train people to become their own doctors. If some people feel getting a doctorate is somehow easier than weight loss the two arguments are the same in regards to how effective they are at working. Obesity falls near the ‘very little control’ end of the continuum. The only way to lose weight and keep it off with today’s technology is to hope & pray your genetics will allow a sustained weight loss and to become very, very motivated. I remember in the book ‘the case for yourself’ by susan estrich she said to lose weight and keep it off requires a 9 out of a 1-10 effort scale, and that losing weight would be a full time job no different than being a parent or being an employee.
Cancer falls towards the ‘person is responsible’ side of things. According to the ACS as I said most cancers could be avoided with changes in behavior including but not limited to healthier diet, exercise and things like meditation. But people don’t engage in these behaviors. But nobody I know wants to live in a society that is so uptight and darwinistic that people who don’t plan ahead for everything are insulted and left to fend for themselves. But again, with obese people being social pariahs people do not feel that same inhibition against such intolerance and cruelty so we have a society where cancer victims are pitied and fat people are insulted and told ‘its your fault’.
What is your evidence that the coorelation between healthy diet and exercise and cancer is low? And how strong is the coorelation between overeating, underexercising and weight gain? Do you feel all weight gain is due solely to these things? What about the hundreds of factors that can influence appetite and activity levels? As I said earlier the fact that people smoke less changes their biochemistry so they become fatter, so are rising obesity rates due to lower somking rates a matter of willpower or what exactly?
People become fat when their genetics and environment let them. There was no obesity in China before they became westernized but after that obesity rates shot up. So willpower alone is obviously not strong enough to overcome millions/billions of years of biochemistry, at least not for more than the most motivated 5% of the population because the second the option to become fat presents itself people by and large become fat. But even among that 5% we don’t know why they lose weight. That 5% will claim that it is because of willpower but we really dont know for sure why they lose weight and keep it off. Why did I have an easy time losing and keeping off 50 pounds but you are struggling with 50 pounds everyday? Is it because I have more willpower than you? Is someone who loses 100 pounds and keeps it off effortlessly posessed with twice my willpower? Nope, we really don’t understand the biochemistry of adipose tissue (which is why no working cures for obesity exist) so all we can do is speculate on why people can lose weight or not. I can’t wait until 20-30 years from now when working cures for obesity exist and these days of obesity, insecurity and dislike based on bodyfat will be relegated to the dark ages of our society.
I’m not sure why you think that people with obviously unhealthy lifestyles leading to cancer are treated differently than obese people. Smoking (a big cancer causer) is becoming more and more socially unacceptable. What other obvious causes of cancer do people turn a blind eye to?
Another huge difference is that cancer comes up suddenly and is difficult or impossible to cure, while obesity is continual, obvious, and has a simple, known cure. You can say over and over that the cure doesn’t work or that we don’t know how to cure obesity, but what’s really happening is that people aren’t sticking to it. Because it’s hard work.
If there were pills that cured cancer 100%, but 95% of people wouldn’t take them reliably because they tasted bad and made you feel hungry, would you claim that “we don’t really know for sure” why those 5% were cured, or that “all we can do is speculate on why people are cured”?
Cancer doesn’t come up suddenly and isn’t impossible to cure. If you are screened properly for the most likely cancers (breast, testicular, prostate, colon, etc) you may be able to catch them in stage I or II, when they have a high treatment success rate. However most people don’t get screened properly and they only realize they have cancer when it is stage III or IV.
There are endless ways to avoid cancer. I gave a link earlier showing a 66% reduction by eating healthier, exercise, getting screened properly and not smoking. Here are other things a person can do
Take folic acid, not eat red meat, meditate, avoid carcinogens, avoid stress, avoid the sun, eat various foods which may cut cancer risk (some mushrooms, green tea, avoid alcohol, eat a diet of varied foods instead of a handful of staples, etc, etc.
I’m certain there are tons of studies on ‘this or that’ can help you cut your risk of cancer by doing it or not doing it but I can’t think of anymore offhand. However most of these aren’t obvious things. Most people don’t know that a diet high in fruits or vegetables or fiber is good to prevent cancer, or how strong the link between cancer prevention and exercise is for many kinds of cancer.
I don’t get your comparison. You seem to feel that the amount of willpower is somehow tied into weight loss. But can you explain why I’ve lost 50 pounds effortlessly and kept it off for two years while others like Crafterman have to struggle daily to keep off 50 pounds? Nobody can, that is because we don’t understand how adipose tissue works. If we did we would have a cure for obesity that didn’t fail 95% of the time. We can explain why one person is 6’6" and another is 5’11" though, but not why one person is 300 pounds and another is 250, or why one person can lose 50 pounds easily and another can’t. All we understand is that starvation/dieting/calorie restriction leads to temporary weight loss but that is about it. Even common sense ideas about bodyfat like ‘fat in the diet causes people to get fat’ are starting to be questioned. And other macronutritents that were overlooked for years are starting to become more important. Things like carbs in the diet, fiber or protein are starting to be more important than fat when it comes to dieting, so it is more an art than science right now.
My point is that the amount of willpower necessary to lose weight varies. I had no trouble losing 50 pounds but cannot lose 70 for more than a few months at a time w/o radical lifestyle changes. Some people cannot lose 20 pounds unless they make radical, drastic lifestyle changes. So it is not a simple equation of willpower is proportional to weight loss because the amount of willpower varies from individual to individual just like their weight or rate of weight loss will vary from individual to individual.
We don’t know how to cure obesity in any reliable fashion. We know that varying degrees of starvation (from gentle to harsh) which violate billions of years of evolution and that our bodies will fight like hell to stop can lead to weight loss, but that is about it. To cure obesity we’d have to bypass/overrule all the genetic and biochemical tools our bodies have created over the millions of years to become and stay fat. Right now we can’t do that.
On one level I agree that people can lose some weight but because individual biochemistries are so different I do not feel it is realistic to ask people to exert the level of effort necessary to lose weight. As I said, asking people to ‘use willpower’ to solve the obesity issue is like asking people to ‘go to medical school and become your own doctor’ to solve the healthcare crisis.
If you can not realize you have it, but then suddenly produce symptoms when you’re already in stage III or IV, at which point it’s hard to treat, I count that as sudden and hard to cure. Certainly it’s more sudden and hard to cure than obesity. Ever known somebody who didn’t realize they’d gained any weight until they were 150lbs overweight? When I notice that I’ve gained a few pounds, I start hitting the bike and the salads a little more often than the couch and the In ‘N’ Out.
No. temporary dieting/calorie restriction leads to temporary weight loss. That 95% that you keep bandying about aren’t people for whom the cure didn’t work, they’re people who didn’t continue the treatment.
I don’t dispute this. Right now, it’s easy for me to lose weight down to about 180 lbs and keep it off. All it requires is the exercise that I do anyway because I have fun doing it and eating foods that I like to eat (which are generally healthy). However, I weighed 165 lbs for several years. I was in college, and I rode my bike everywhere and danced 15 hours a week. That’s the level of activity it required for me to be that weight. I’ve also weighed 150 lbs. I was in high school, and I was on the X-Country team and the swimming team. I ran or swam (or sometimes both) for 2-3 hours a day. That’s the amount of effort it takes for me to maintain that weight. For others, it will be different, but I know for a fact that I could get back to 150 lbs. All I’d have to do is spend 25 hours a week exercising. The fact that I don’t means that it’s either not important enough to me or I lack the willpower to keep with it.
I agree that for most people they can lose a reasonable amount of weight with lifestyle changes. But unless they enjoy those lifestyle changes it is not likely to work for most people.
In this thread some people felt losing weight and keeping it off was more realistic and just as big/a bigger accomplishment than finishing grad school. In my eyes bandying around the phrase ‘willpower can cause weight loss for everyone’ is no different than saying ‘the cure for the healthcare crisis is to train everyone to become a doctor’ or ‘the cure for cancer is to engage in radical lifestyle changes that cut rates by 80%’ or ‘the cure for crime is for everyone to become proficient at self defense’. On paper these ideas will work to solve these four problems and in theory it’d work if people actually had the time/money/effort/energy to do it but not in reality. IMO bandying around a solution that doesn’t work in reality helps no one, even if it works great on paper. To me, telling people to violate billions of years of biochemistry (which will work if people can do it and even though alot of people want to do it most cannot) to treat obesity is as realistic as telling everyone to go to medical school and become their own doctors to treat rising healthcare costs.
Full disclosure; I am thin, and always have been. I’ve struggled with this question for years. My job involves helping obese children/families try to escape from the health consequences that they will inevitably encounter if they remain obese. Is this a class/race struggle, yes, but not always; obesity does indeed reign among all socioecomic groups. Is it more prevelant, per capita, among the poor – yes, I believe it is. The reasons are obvious and pointed out by many in this thread – high calorie food, easily available, cheap, and requiring no fancy kitchen tools or prep time. Lack of exercise, also a factor, is worse in communities where there is no safe cul-de-sac for kids to ride their bikes, no nature trails for kids to explore, no swimming pools, and and NO CULTURE of the importance of aerobic exercise (and this latter point is certainly not exclusively a class/race problem).
So, what is the problem. Human beings are biologically programmed to make the most efficient use of the calories consumed - this allows our species to survive in times of deprivation. There is no rocket science here; when a human being consumes more calories than are necessary for daily activities, our bodies store the excess - FAT. There may be specific circumstances where metabolic signals are faulty, but the bottom line is that for the vast majority of us, if we take in less calories than we need, we will lose weight (or at least, not gain weight). It is the food that we choose (or are forced to choose by our socioeconomic status) that determines whether we become obese or not. Education can help - skim milk has amazing nutritional value with relatively few calories, soft drinks do not. A gallon of skim milk costs almost $4 where I live - a gallon of Pepsi (3.6 liters) also costs almost $4. You do the math. But, which one “tastes better”? We live in a culture where we eat what tastes good, not what is good for us. And that has no class boundaries. True, buying power can influence food choices, but the bottom line is that we have to establish that healthy eating has enough cultural importance to break us out of the obesity trend that threatens the health of our nation, rich and poor alike. For the affluent, I believe it IS laziness. For the less fortunate, breaking out of cultural food domains (e.g. fried catfish, corn bread cooked in lard, and collards cooked with fatback for the southern rural poor OR fast food for the urban poor) is the greatest barrier we face. And one other thing; many people who are unhappy, stressed, or live lives of poverty/deprivation/no opportunity often self-medicate with food. Obesity can be another form of substance abuse. Access to high quality healthcare, including culturally competent psychologic and preventive care, can make a difference. Too bad our society can’t see this.
But unless they enjoy those lifestyle changes it is not likely to work for most people.
In that regard, I think women have an easier time of it, because I’d say the pleasure of wearing beaaaaaautiful clothes for 14 hours outlasts the 5-minute pleasure of eating a 450-calorie Auntie Anne’s pretzel gutbomb.
On the other hand, that is outweighed (no pun intended) by the fact that it is far more socially acceptable for men to be overweight (ever seen a Farker complain about lardass men?) and the fact that men have far higher metabolisms.
YMMV.
And I’d like to see a cite that the average Asian diet has only 13-45 calories more per day than the average American diet.
I’m glad someone bumped this. I just read an article that covered a study claiming that the local price of fuit and vegetables affects childhood obesity more than the proximity of grocery stores and fast food resteraunts.
However, the study also noted that, if given an extra dollar to spend on food, poor people won’t necessarily spend it on fruit.
No of course they wouldn’t. If price is really the issue, then giving a person an extra dollar shouldn’t change their spending distribution - they’ll still likely spend the extra money on food that they don’t think is overpriced and get more for their money in their view. On the other hand, if they *dropped * the price of just fruit by a dollar and poor people still don’t by fruits - then *that * would be meaningful.