This is the most serious problem for our country causing diabetes and many other ailments to skyrocket. It’s the reason why our ‘heath outcomes’ are low in spite of excellent hospitals.
The cause is that we have the wrong attitude about what is a healthy weight. We need to adopt a middle ground somewhere between ‘fat shaming’ and ‘fat acceptance’. I would equate it to love the sinner but hate the sin.
I speak with personal knowledge, I’m on a journey to lose 100lbs in 2017, down 28 so far this year.
Congratulations on your weight loss!
Seems there are a lot of factors in obesity, and just about every one anyone names are true. Part of it, though, is the calorie vs exertion ratio. Ever see how many calories are in an MRE? It’s just unbelievable how many there are. But soldiers in the field burn a lot of calories and they’re young besides, so they don’t get fat.
Metabolism varies a lot with people. I had an aunt who ate two rib eye steaks, two eggs and buttered toast every breakfast. She ate a hamburger and a milkshake for lunch, and a full dinner, but never got fat. She died at age 94. She just had a racing metabolism. And too, she worked nearly all her life in a high-stress environment.
Ever pull an all-nighter when studying? You’ll lose 10 lb, overnight, guaranteed. A lot of it is water loss, but it’s also true that our brain is the biggest calorie burner we have. Yup, our brain. Would we be better off studying economics texts in the evening instead of watching TV? Probably.
One thing that has struck me as interesting. Recent immigrants from Mexico are usually fairly trim. But in no time at all, they get fat, sometimes morbidly obese. The diet down there is very different from ours, but they adopt more and more of ours the longer they’re here. They (like American Indians, who have the same problem) have an extra fat layer that’s suited to “feast and famine” living. But if it’s “feast” 100% of the time? I have noticed that their baked goods are far less sweet than ours. I remember talking to one of them who complained about American baked goods, saying he could hardly eat them due to the sweetness.
I have also wondered about our taste for sweets. Is it perhaps a misplaced “brain-hunger” for fruit? I do know that if there is no decent fruit in the house, I tend to get something sweet to eat. If there is sweet fruit in the house, I don’t eat other sweets at all. Maybe our brains (or at least some of them) tell us to eat something sweet when it’s really a primordial urge to eat something with Vitamin C or something else in it, but it gets displaced if the proper object of the hunger isn’t available or if we have simply aimed it at the wrong thing.
I had to take “man-made hormones” to conceive my daughter. And I’m below my pre pregnancy weight!
