Technology provides your hope.
Gah, I hate treadmills. Nothing rational about it, I just do.
But seriously, doesn’t matter how cool the exercise machines get, exercise hurts. Does it hurt more than death by heart disease? No. But again, it’s immediate versus long term, and the pain of exercise is immediate and definite.
They need to come up with a way to make exercise less painful. I won’t say “painless” because pain is also how your body says “STOP DOING THAT!” when you are pushing things too far. But something to take the edge off.
Maybe some kind og stimulant (for energy) with a mild analgesic (to dull pain).
Coffee and an aspirin? 
So, if our education system sucks, we shouldn’t look towards other countries with functioning education systems, but should instead wait until we come up with a smart pill? If our culture has a problem with broken families, we should wait until we have a happy marriage pill? Can I help fund research for the “accept gay people” pill?
Even if we do pill away all of our problems, any doctor will tell you that prevention is always, 100% of the time, better than treatment. Look earlier in this thread where a poster said her anti-depressants caused weight gain. Every medicine has side effects. Excersize and eating well have side-effects, too- but only good ones like increased energy and better moods. .
We have changed our culture thousands of times. In WWII we banded together for the war effort. In the 1950s we worked to render overt racism culturally unacceptable.
So where to start. I’ve got one simple idea. When we build new housing developments, we require them to provide access to roads, emergency services, schools, water, electricity, etc. Why do we let them get away with not building something as simple and life-saving as a sidewalk?
Things like marriage, tolerance, and education are a lot more amenable to influence via public policy than something like an entire culture’s diet.
I don’t think lack of sidewalks is a large contributor to obesity.
A country like China can do what it does because there’s no presumption of individual autonomy there. Here, people are assumed to be able to make their own choices. So even something as relatively benign as a “reverse nutrition tax” (which would be a tax applied to all foods, but which can be vastly reduced based on the nutritive value of the food) would meet huge resistance, from both consumers and the extremely powerful junk food industry.
Now, I realize I went off insufficiently cocked in my first reply, and for that I now fully apologize. I reacted to the phrase “fix our culture” and hence came off sounding like I thought any government action was futile. I don’t.
BUt I don’t think the basic problem of millions of people addicted to an unhealthy diet is something that is going to be solved via government policy. You can, sand should, do what you can to help. Sidewalks help. Education helps. Removing subsidies from sugar and high-fructose might help.
But the big problem is going to be solved by technology, not policty, IMHO.
I blame the Toba eruption and other similar events in human history. If there’s a catastrophe such as a supervolcano eruption or asteroid impact that kills off plants and animals and therefore makes food harder to find, who’s going to be better off- the people who have reserves of fat from earlier good conditions, or the people who don’t?
It wouldn’t matter if the people who didn’t have the fat reserves didn’t have them because they didn’t overeat when food was plentiful or because their metabolism allowed them to overeat and not gain weight, either. Either way, they’re going to be worse off than the people who did put on weight when food was plentiful. The people who did gain weight are going to be the ones who will survive and have kids.
If you’re female, it might make the difference between being fertile and not. Low body fat will cause women to stop menstruating a long time before starving to death is an issue. A woman who’s not menstruating due to low body fat is, of course, much less likely to have children than a woman who is.
I think it’s a symptom of something that is, though. The car culture, where people drive everywhere instead of walking, does mean people get less exercise. A neighborhood without sidewalks is probably a neighborhood that is built around the expectation that everyone will use a car to get anywhere they want to go instead of walking there.
Of course, I’m biased- I hate driving and would generally rather walk places than drive there, so of course I think the car culture is a bad thing and will look for things to blame it for.
Well, they kind of already have something like that. If it’s actually painful to work out, it’s probably because you’re not in good shape. Eventually it’ll stop hurting. And when the endorphins kick in, it does feel good. (Well, for some–I really feel good during/after exercise to the point where I feel bad if I DON’T go, but a lot of people say they don’t feel it.)
Thank you for acknowledging that exercise doesn’t feel good for all of us. I’ve never felt anything other than tired, sweaty (ick! I hate being sweaty!), bored, or sore while exercising.
The problem is that people don’t like to do thigns which are painful to them.
“Eventually it won’t hurt as much” doesn’t cut it. 
But isn’t that true for anything that matters? You have to work hard to save up money but eventually you’ll have more…taking care of babies sucks, but eventually you’ll have a cool little person to look after. What is it just about dieting/exercise that makes people not want to do it without immediate results?
Because the aspects of dieting and exercize that drive a person to stop doing them are biological, and there are no countering biological impulses to impell you to continue. When you diet or exercize you are essentially fighting against your own body, and that body has the ability to drain you of energy and will, to drive you to have moments of weakness, and to react the moment a moment of temptation and a moment of weakness coincide.
Contrasting that, there is no biological imperative not to work for money (unless it’s horrifically hard physical labor), and while caring for a baby does tire you out, you are also (I’m told) pushed onward by a biological imperative to care for your progeny.
We also tend to build bedroom communities, and want to live in them. I lived in Spain for a couple of years, and one thing that I did like about it was that I could go downstairs, and next door was a little grocery shop. I had other stores available to me that were quite close by, and I could take the train to places that were too far to walk. My Spanish wasn’t that great, and I’d been taught Mexican Spanish on top of it (which was reasonable, as I learned it in Texas) and I was still able to get around fairly well even though I was a foreigner, ignorant of the customs and not fluent in the language. I got a LOT of walking done, and it was good for me.
Even taking a bus or train generally means that you have to walk from your house to the station, and then from the station to the destination, and then do it all in reverse. We’ve also invented a great many labor saving devices, which are quite efficient and do save us labor, but we evolved to do a lot more physical exercise in the course of the day.
I also have some suspicions about high fructose corn syrup, but for now they remain suspicions that aren’t quite in crackpot territory.
I think there is a genetic component to this. take the native americans of the Southwest (Pima, Papago, Navajo, etc.). Before the coming of the white man, these people lived off of a diet of corn, beans, seeds, and small amounts of meat (usually very lean meat).
They had a very physical lifestyle, and were quite healthy. Now, their lifestyle has been disrupted, and they consume high carbohydrate, high fat diets (lots of cheap, processed foods). the result? Epidemic obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. The fact is, humans are programmed to eat when food is available (our ancestors did not know where the next meal was coming from). So, we eat and gain weight.
The much laying around and eating of shit has a lot to do with it.
Google p90x. See the people who bought it and followed it and put the results on youtube.
You don’t have to be fat.
Come on, now. Are you really insinuating that it’s too hard to control your biological impulses?
Seriously, did you even read the OP? Have you been following this thread at all?
OBVIOUSLY, the immediate cause is eating too much and doing too little.
The question is, why does this happen? Why, for instance, do so many people eat far past where they should feel full? What bug in our genetic programming allows us to get so far, we become, on many levels, a lot LESS likely to spread our genes? Why hasn’t this been bred out of the species long ago? What, exactly, are we truly up against when we try to tackle these problems?
My thesis, in case you missed it, is that we’re up against strong drives which served the species quite well until the modern age of abundance. Eating enormous amounts and putting was a very sharp genetic advantage in times when you had no idea when you’d eat again. But now, in modern societies, where starvation is almost unknown and sometimes even voluntary (anorexia), the same genetic momentum is driving us right off the cliff. Couple that with the terrible Western diet, high in fat, sugar, and carbs, and it’s a recipe for death.
I don’t know what we can do about it. It’s probably going to take some brilliant scintific advance to be able to truly get a grip on the problem, perhaps coupled with or preceded by some sort of ingenious policy shift that manages to shift things in our diets while still maintaining our sense of individual autonomy and freedom of choice.
All caught up now? good.
But there’s no biological imperative TO work for money. And people often care for children that biologically aren’t their progeny. And what about all the other things that people are able to do that aren’t necessarily biological? Being ambitious in general isn’t tied to biology but people strive for fame and recognition. I just have a hard time believing that people can do so many other almost impossible tasks and yet can’t exercise. I mean, eating a lot is super tempting, and granted, I eat a lot of sugar, but I don’t really see what’s so hard about going to the gym.
Well I don’t know about them, but what I am saying is that biological drives are extremely strong, and none are stronger than the appetites. If an organism does not seek the right food and eat it, it will die, and those genes will not be carried forward. Compared to this, the sex drive is a passing fancy.
SO is it “too hard”? I’m not quite sure how to judge that. But what I’m willing to say is that if your plan calls on millions of people to completely ignore what their minds and bodies are telling them and go against all that for a long period of time, that plan is just plain doomed. Think of all the times in history that we tried to eliminate, say, premarital sex, yet it remained quite popular and all the admonitions really did very little to stop it.
And you can live without sex.
I think if you’re the sort of person who does not find weight loss difficult, then you are lucky, and you should not presume to know what it is like for someone else. If it was so easy for everyone, there would be no fat people, no alcoholics, no junkies, no crackheads, nobody would smoke, nothing.
Willpower is not infinite and you cannot simply choose to have more. Therefore, there’s only so much you can ask of it.
Are you going to tell me you have no bad habits?
You’re construing too narrowly.
We have a biological urge to care for children, period, and it’s so strong we’ll take care of not just children who are not our own, but animals whose features merely trigger this response (the cute ones).
We have a biological drive to compete for status and position in the tribe. This, in the modern sense, is ambition. The fact that the middle class is enormous merely makes the competition that much more fierce, because people are striving to accumulate wealth and “get ahead of the pack”, rather than feel like a “loser”.
And what’s hard about going to the gym? It hurts. And the more out of shape you are, the more it hurts.
Tell me, how many voluntary yet excruciatingly painful things did you do today, just for your health?
Oh, and in order to get better, you’ll have to do them dozens of times.
Don’t presume to know what it’s like being obese. You have no idea.
Speaking for myself, it is dam hard to go to the gym. I hate it. After work I want to go home and have a nice brisk sit. But no, I have to go and get all sweated up, which I hate, and do exercise, which I hate. I still go every other day, but it IS hard.
I would allege that in our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ time, it would have been a survival advantage to want to do things efficiently with as little energy expenditure as possible.
Regarding your other points – selection of the fittest is not about the individual, it’s about the genes. A group who likes to care for babies is going to have more descendents. Striving for fame and recognition certainly is tied to biology. Pardon the sexism, but women do tend to seek out men who exceed at something, whether it’s making money, creating art, or what ever. Status is a powerful aphrodisiac.
That’s an interesting theory. I have another one.
We’re lazy, and we lay around and eat shit.
I used to be 245 pounds and fat. Now I’m 165 pounds of gristle. I run ultramarathons, can do 200 pushups and 25 pullups.
I stopped laying around and eating shit. That’s really it. There’s no big mystery here. Processed foods suck. Eat a caveman diet (if a caveman could not have eaten what is on your plate neither can you.) That limits you to fresh meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. No bread, no sugar, no beer. Eat all the caveman food you want.
Now exercise for an hour a day, six days a week. Hard. Hard as you can. You can run or do a program, or whatever.
Do those two things and you will stop being fat.
The “why” is because our bodies were evolved to do work and eat good food, and if we don’t they turn to crap.
Park your car in the garage and give it bad gas and it’ll turn to shit, too.