garbage junk food is cheaper than healthy food
let food manufacturers load up their products with so much salt and sugar that it's literally addictive
have fast food stores on every street corner so you can never escape the cheap high of eating junk food
Gym memberships are too expensive for lots of the population
no cheap public options for poor people work out
Cities are designed for cars, not for walking
claim "personal responsibility" when millions suffer physical and mental health problems as a result
I've struggled with binge eating for most of my adult life, and I'm not going to let the capitalists beat me
GET SWOLE AS AN ACT OF REBELLION, DONT LET THE BASTARDS WIN
I have a normal BMI. Literally in the middle of the normal BMI range. But everyone says I'm too skinny because obesity is so prevalent in the US it has changed the social perception of what a normal body looks like.
I get treated like a meth head for being skinny. I am a little underweight but I've never had a problem with how my body looks except when people comment on it. Shit really messes with you.
Human bodies looked like ours for millennia until the last hundred years or so. Like 1% of the population historically has been obese, mostly because of disease like thyroid issues.
And all of a sudden we're the unhealthy ones lmao yeah right :shrux:
It isn't so much that food is priced. It is the time required. To make a 600 calorie meal I could spend a half hour, might fuck up, and it will be okay, then I gotta do dishes. Or for a similar ammount of money I can eat a pile of tortilla chips that are scientificly designed to be more delicious than anything that could exist in nature and I am out mere minutes from my miserable day.
yes, the prohibitive factor for most, i imagine, is the time and psychic costs of putting something together, and cleaning up. people often, especially when ground down at work, will prefer to pay more (upfront; later, in terms of health expenses) for fast, pre-made meals, to avoid these psychic costs/ save time. the actual costs of healthy foods is low in my experience, when compared to pre-fab food.
If you are making a proper struggle meal it really is just as cheap.
A 2liter of cola is useually 99c and has days worth of calories and a bit of caffeine to keep you feeling alive. So a cup of that, some chips, and some MnMs gets you pennies on the dollar out the door for a reasonably pleasant meal you can get at a corner store and keep you going through even a hard work day. Doesn't need to be preped or refrigerated, can't go bad.
It just makes me sad to think how cheap and easy and helthy food could be if we put modern tech behind nice foods.
Without capitalism there'd still be vices like junk food, smoking, drugs (the harmful ones I mean),
gambling, but there wouldn't be cabals scheming and lobbying to grow them.Coffee is an interesting one.
Business case: people get addicted to this stuff and keep buying it. If we stimulate the desire, we can profit.
Without capitalism, it'd be drunk by maybe some traditional Ethiopians and maybe have spread a little bit, but not like this.
I will always remember the cute but fat squirrels begging for food at Grand Canyon...
And we get conditioned to drink basically sugar water when we're thirsty, and often times soda is cheaper than water at the store. So we end up basically eating a candy bar worth of calories whenever we quench our thirst.
Normal, healthy society.
I chug water all day. At this point pop just makes me feel thirstier
I would consider getting your blood sugar/A1C tested if you can comrade <3
It wouldn't be a bad idea just to mention it to your doctor next chance you get y'know?
I have t1 diabetes so I'm probably hyper sensitized to this but chugging water all day and soda (sugar rush) making you thirsty sure sounds like insulin resistance.
Even for normal people, soda is usually dehydrating because of the sugar and caffeine. I'm sure that if you're diabetic you experience it more severely than other people.
Gym memberships are too expensive for lots of the population
One of the best things about S. Korea was there was public gym equipment everywhere. Other then that and the awesome public transportation it's still a hyper capitalist hell hole though.
okay but have you consider that obesity is just a harvard malthusian pmc moral panic, or whatever brain dead drivel bmf is peddling today?
I don't know what most of those words mean but I know my body, and I know I was in physical pain before I started working out eating better
the human body isn't meant to be as big as I was (and still am but I'm working on it)
(no one does!)
glad you are feeling better, and are encouraged by results, and good luck as you continue, comrade!
I dont have the energy to make good food after work and classes, after at least trying to clean up the house, interacting with people to keep my friendship, helping my partner with depression, etc. Not even talking about exercise which will make it so that my ankles feel like they're going to explode for my next shift.
Most Americans fall into something like this as well. It's just a fucked situation. I would ride my bike around if I didnt have to ride literally on the highways and I didnt have hyperhidrosis which would make me too smelly and disgusting to even be accepted at work.
Spite is a very powerful motivator. You can do it! Godspeed comrade :rat-salute:
Still feels wild to think about how the old food pyramid recommended 6-11 servings of carbs every day. That's not even taking into account how they add crazy amounts of sugar into all that stuff too
not to undercut your general point (the additional psychic costs incurred under a regime of capital create the need and difficulty to find hours to exercise) but! i think this is a bit overstated: my old gym (a national chain, in an otherwise very expensive city) had fees less than 40$/month, and even then, bodyweight or similar exercises are free, or nearly free after initial costs.
i don't say this to be shitty, but only to say, that, these monetary costs can be much less than one might think. with a little ingenuity and good-faith effort, it can be done (again, not to ignore peoples felt difficulties and stresses WRT limited time and worn-down self-esteem; but only to encourage and assure).
(american infrastructure and car requirements and lack of subsidized housing in urban areas is awful though, no disagreements there)
Running with cheap or old sneakers will do that. Even running is more expensive than it should be.
as nagarjuna mentioned, worn-out shoes can really contribute to shin splints
one of the other things is that concrete is absolutely brutal for your legs when running, the impact forces are so much higher than other surfaces because it has absolutely no give. if you have the possibility to run on other surfaces (even asphalt is much better, but dirt or grass are ideal) for part or all of your run, your legs will thank you for it
and increasing mileage or intensity too quickly (and especially both) will really do it too, the general rule of thumb most people go by is to only increase one at a time and no more than 10% a week
ive heard overstriding can also be a cause (and its bad for a tonne of other reasons too) so trying to go for shorter quicker strides may help too
yeah with running you need to take everything you read with a massive grain of salt cos so much stuff is anecdotal and the actual running "science" is absolute garbage science with garbage methodologies and garbage statistics (they invented a new statistical methodology because p values were too rigorous lol). but there was a study that looked at the peak impact force and total area-under-the-curve impact for a person landing on concrete vs asphalt, and the impact was something like ten times higher for the concrete. of course it doesnt necessarily follow that it does 10x as much damage to your legs or anything, but i think its reasonable to think that the difference has some effect, and it seemed like one of the less garbage running science studies to me fwiw
and just anecdotally, if youve ever been running on concrete sidewalks and then cross the road (especially a freshly resurfaced one) it feels like youre running on pillows
but yeah sucks if youve only got concrete or dogshit nearby, i have to do a fair bit of my running on concrete too and i hate it but thats suburbia yay. id definitely suggest trying new running shoes if thats feasible (theyre really fucking expensive and about the least ethical thing you can buy under capitalism though unfortunately). and resting your legs and letting them recover, all my experience of trying to run through shin splints has been that it just makes it way worse
that's sick. i'm just finishing up a t-nation 10000 kettle bell swing program, but will be back on my r/bodyweightfitness grind tonight.
how do you program the pushups (is that a sensible question? or: how do you do your pushups? ?)
sounds sensible. pushups seem ideal for sequencing every hour, esp if working from home.
not quite at 50 reps/set yet, but shouldn't be too far off. i'll give that a go.
yeah, I'm able to afford my gym membership, but there's still gonna be people where that's still too expensive for sadly
now imagine a world where gyms a public service and not a private one, that would be amazing
They're a thing all over eastern Europe and West Asia. Look up street workout gym
I’ve lost 45 pounds over the past few months and it would be like 10 more if I didn’t get about 2k worth of junk food from a gas station/buy a pizza or something every 3 days. but my bmi is 23 so i think I’m alright, stuff is just so addictive lmao
