I've been working on losing weight over the last five years. I've gone from 270 pounds to 175. Have been fluctuating for the last year because I kinda stopped giving a fuck for a bit tbh.
I do intermittent fasting/low carb. I am not rich in money, but thanks to a lot of luck I have more time than the average poor person.
My quick thoughts on the obesity epidemic as a person who has managed to lose weight:
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Food that has long shelf life and is easy to prepare is all heavy in carbohydrates. Hamburger helper, rice-a-roni, top ramen etc... That stuff is nothing but starch and carbohydrates. It's cheap and quick to prepare. I know that when I was at my poorest I ate a whole lot of stouffers mac and I gained about 60 pounds and type two diabetes.
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American prepackaged food is often loaded with high fructose corn syrup. Even stuff that you wouldn't think would have sugar in it has more sugar added to it. Sugar is addictive, as addictive as cocaine, and it is in just about everything. I don't think companies realize this consciously, but they do notice that more sugar = big money line go up.
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Carbs and sugar lead to insulin spikes, which leads to more hunger, which leads to more eating. The wretched thing about being poor in America is that you are starved of nutrition while also being fat. Then people shit on you for being "fat and lazy" while you're working your ass off trying to make rent. Oh, and more insulin spikes lead to type two diabetes, and hormone irregularity. So not only are people fat, nutritionally starved, they're also emotionally unstable. Long term, these dietary issues lead to painful bodily complications that ultimately shorten the lifespan.
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Losing weight takes research, and research takes time, and proper research takes a skill in disseminating information. When I decided to lose weight I had to spend hours looking up facts about diet and nutrition. I knew how to disseminate bullshit fad diets from helpful information, but a lot of people don't. A lot of people take marketing at face value, and they don't have time to look any deeper. Then, when the fad diet fails (as it is designed to), people give up and go back to their original way of eating.
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Cooking takes time. I do meal prep and plan a lot of my weekly meals out, but planning those meals, researching recipes, and cooking a mountain of food (that I am privileged enough to have access to) is work. Finding healthy recipes that I can stand is work. Tracking my diet and macros is work. Exercising is work. Sometimes, I just don't feel like I want to dedicate 4 hours of my Sunday to cooking, and it is the same for many Americans who are exhausted after working their two jobs in the retail mines. I can't blame them!
tl;dr our system is fucked and it fails to provide a sustainable life for all but the luckiest and most privileged and fat people are not at fault for being fat.
Forgot to add one more thing: Access
Thanks to America's poor urban design there are many areas in America where there are 'food deserts' where the only options are tiny convenience stores that carry overpriced, prepackaged garbage. For many poor Americans you have to take a car trip (gas) or bus trip (time/money/limited carry space) to get food. Shopping daily isn't an option. You have to buy food that lasts, which also makes buying fresh food less incentivizing, because fresh food spoils and spoiled food means wasted money.
I remember visiting europe in the early 2000's and I was shocked at how there were small grocery stores everywhere. That doesn't happen in America unless you live in the city, and good luck w/that with the way rent is in urban areas.
America Sucks Shit thank you for reading my Ted Talk.
Damn this sums up the struggle quite well. Also planning my meals for the week by cooking a bunch, and I gotta say it's really hard not to just grab some fast food on the way home from work or frozen meals.
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Considering how health and fitness crazy everyone is in comparison to 20 years ago, these numbers surprise me. But then again there is more inequality than 20 years ago and obesity is a symptom of poverty.
obesity is a symptom of poverty
This is mostly western phenomenon, though. There is poverty all around the world, and those people are hardly obese. If you consider what resources you need to grow vegetables and what resources you need to get a steak, the vegetable diet with occasional meat that most poor people in the world consume is obviously cheaper then the diet that poor people in the west consume. I would hazard a guess that obesity in the west is not really caused by poverty but by the policies of countries and fast food and food companies.
It's so fucking weird how exercise has turned into a bougie hobby. We've reached the point of capital accumulation, where the expectation (and force) of profit/labour value is so high, things like exercise and homegrown foods like vegetables are for the entitled.
Speaking as someone who managed to pull off a massive body transformation....it doesn't shock me in the least.
Like others have said, poverty and access to nutrition is a factor, but I also find the fitness industry to be an interesting microcosm to many other crisis/contradictions in capitalism. The problem is that just like any other industry, the fitness industry is built around selling you something to fix the problem. The whole thing is built on finding the magic bullet exercise, or the flavor of the week diet, or the new superfood that you've been missing all along.
Reducing your intake is hard enough as is, and since there isn't really a good way to sell or make money off that....the food and fitness industry through advertising and lobbying have done everything they can to convince people they just need to not be so lazy and exercise more, and that if you buy this product or this food it will make it just a little easier.
When I was a little kid my mom went out of her way to try to get us healthy food. This was back in the 80s. She had a neighbor who knew a farmer and they'd get fresh seasonal produce. Tiny little apples that looked goofy but tasted better than anything from the store. Shit like that. I can only imagine it has gotten harder and harder to find healthy things as time has gone on.
A lot of food has corn in it. Animal feed has corn in it. I feel a lot of it is simply too much of one thing over another.
That's not to say that corn alone is the problem. Carbs/etc. is a problem, just a lot of shit that you'd think doesn't have corn in it does and that helps bulk up animals/etc.
The demographic data only makes this more depressing. The richer you are, the less likely you are to be obese, likely because buying healthy food is expensive and folks have to make rent. Racial minorities are more likely to be obese than whites, probably thanks to food apartheid. Predatory advertising doesn't help by targeting minorities and children.
I'm all for personal responsibility for fitness, but the deck is stacked against disadvantaged groups from the get-go when it comes to nutrition. As always, white capitalists are more than happy to get rich off the death and suffering of poor people of color.
Personal responsibility is great when you're making personal decisions. But you can't reverse social trends with personal responsibility - fat people have been trying to lose weight forever, most don't succeed. You need social policy to change to change the way society works - it's not like 50% of Americans just decided to be fat all of a sudden.
not surprising. Technically I'm obese at 6'6 292, but over quarantine i've lost like fifteen pounds, which is nice.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11894-017-0603-8.pdf
If you want to lose weight, here's a quick guide:
Diet
(easy) Reduce calorie intake, this does not have to be major. Reduce portions bit by bit, if you're getting hungry earlier before your next meal it's working.
(hard) Fasting is better, but difficult to maintain. Also hypothesised to increase life expectancy to one of the greatest extents. The only thing that significantly extended healthy rats lifespan. Also measured in humans and turns back the clock on many age related diseases and the immune system (hard to study mortality in humans, they live forever, need lots of time/money to follow, and you can't sell 'eating nothing' after).
Exercise
THE best exercise is HIIT, it boosts your metabolism, effectively giving you a workout even when you're not working out. It's intense so do whatever you need to do to get into it (not completing a session at the beginning is fine, walking or jogging at the beginning is also great, go at your own pace). The first time I tried HIIT I puked, but you come back. That's what counts. Here's a great link https://youtu.be/Mvo2snJGhtM
MyFitnessPal doesnt cost money? There's a pro version, but you dont need that.
Here's one: Stop fucking stuffing your face with sugar and more calories you actually need, you dumbass. Then also go take a walk every day.
Capitalist grifting apps won't solve your fucking problem.
EDIT: this post was made by Europe gang. Cope!
god imagine being this much of an asshole for literally ZERO reason. Someones got some insecurities!
This isn't r/fatpeoplehate. r/fatpeoplehate got banned years ago. Sorry you had to find out this way
"bro just stop having an eating disorder fucking degenerate fatty lol just fix it stop eating dumbass" die
What are you proposing as a solution to people eating too much unhealthy food with too little excercise?
Health care for people with binge eating disorders, not just "lol degenerate" /pol/ garbage.
I did not call anyone a degenerate. The vast majority of people are not overweight because of mental disorders, but because of American culture being unhealthy as fuck. If you have a eating disorder, well yeah, you need therapy. But that isn't ultimately going to make you less fat.
So what's your point here? Just yell at people with addictions to stop being addicted? Does that work with porn addicts, with alcoholics, with people addicted to heroin?
You act like 70% in America is addicted to food. The vast majority is not. It's the fact that you get a fucking litre of coke with a fucking meal that makes you all fat.
Yeah, you're right, that doesn't give children addictions to the sugars they've been exposed to their whole lives. Wow, genius.
So what's your solution to addiction? Keep doing it? And keep the culture of eating unhealthy shit going?
Did I say that? Of course it needs to be changed. You solve absolutely nothing by being a prick about it like this, though. Leftism is about sympathy and helping people. Not yelling at them like a fucking /pol/ bastard about things they know are a problem, but is incredibly difficult to break out of because of the capitalist systems which created the problem in the first place. Like I said, you don't get somebody to stop smoking by acting like a fuck like this. You get people to stop smoking by punishing cigarette company execs and gradually banning the sale of cigarettes.
So, before we manage to change society, how is an individual right now, going to lose weight and change their eating habbits? What would be your advice for them?
Stop ignoring the point and acknowledge that being a prick like that does fuck all to help.
Again, would you tell somebody with a porn addiction to "stop fucking fapping more than you need, you dumbass. Then go on a date."
You're completely ignoring every single issue besides the most obvious one. "Go on a walk" is hard for people with depression because doing fucking anything is hard for depressed people. "Stop stuffing your face" is hard for people with addictions or binge eating issues for obvious reasons. Again, you don't solve anything by being a bastard about it.
You are right that I was an asshole. And for that I really do apologize. But I think the problem isn't all because of addiction and mental health. I think the root of the problem is toxic unhealthy culture normalizing overeating and consuming unhealthy stuff. Do people get addicted to eating in such a culture more often? Do depressed people take to eating as a coping mechanism in such a culture, yeah, they do.
Instead of telling people to "eat less", I've found it more productive to focus on other factors that could contribute to obesity and are far less vague and focused on shame. Your suggestion to talk walks and avoid sugar isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't really easy to put into action.
You do have to keep in mind that psychologically, shit's more complicated than just not doing the bad thing.
For example,
"I've found that avoiding anything that's more than 10% sugar is great. Processed foods with way too much sugar in it desensitizes the taste buds too, so now fruits taste much better to me."
"It helped me to sit down and read the ingredients of whatever I was putting into my body."
"Do you live somewhere with forest trails? Something I love doing is walking through them and looking for forage."
The difference is two-fold: It's immediately actionable and easy to envision oneself doing these things and even committing to them, and it's also not being a huge asshole about it in the process.
I never said that genius. Stop strawmanning my argument. Losing weight involves eating less. There is no way around that.
We need a new version of Godwin's Law, where as the conversation with an edgy internet kid goes on, the probability of the word 'strawmanning' being invoked approaches 1.
More free time so people can cook and exercise, more public education, better nutrition in schools and other public institutions, more access to athletic facilities/parks. You can't go for a walk every day if your town doesn't have side-walks. You can't just start eating healthy if your whole life people eat unhealthy around you and the food that is easiest to get is unhealthy.
Not my proudest moment. I'm doing better now. I think a combination of going online already pissed off and trying to be funny at the same time. Then spiraling out of control in the replies. I don't hate overweight people. I think what I wanted to say was "fuck unhealthy culture, and fuck capitalism trying to profit of creating those conditions in the first place, don't eat the unhealthy shit they pretend is food". But yeah. This came out instead.
Hey- I jumped down your throat pretty hard there, and thats kinda my bad- When you put your point that way, it's far easier to agree with :)) Hope your day gets better, comrade :D
These guys are all on six-figure incomes. They are just piggies at this point.
Pretty sure I heard Amber make a comment about losing a bunch of weight during quarantine, that was a while ago so idk
Ok but consider that fat people consume more and therefore make line go up 🤘🏾
https://jonnegroni.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1322337746_b504365daffc.jpg
I’ve ballooned over the past 4 years or so but I have managed to lose about 30 lbs since quarantine (gained some first).
I finally lost enough weight to get bariatric surgery scheduled for next month so I’m very excited and scared to be getting the help I need.
Though I’ll probably kill myself if they repeal the ACA after having permanent life-altering surgery that will probably come with regular medical expenses.
Either that or hope I lose enough weight in time and can afford to move to a country with healthcare.
So many people here have done so well over quarrantine! 30 lbs ain't, easy comrade. Do you think you could keep getting fitter over Xmas?
I was a fat kid, and my weight has gone up and down a bunch as an adult, but I've kept it down for the past several years, and people regularly comment on my ripped-ness. For me, it was simple, but not easy - ate less trash, worked out every day. Honestly, as long as you work out, it happens. Yeah, some exercises are more or less efficient to get you to a particular goal, but really the whole thing is just "calories in, calories out." Plus, working out is one of the few things that has ever helped my depression at all.
Switching to a veggie diet helped prevent me from gaining too much quarantine weight, and stuff like that, too.
Moral of the story: don't eat ice cream or fried food, exercise, and you'll be way happier with how you look, how your body feels, and how you feel in terms of mental health.
Using smaller plates and glasses can help limit serving sizes. One thing I’ve been doing is that when getting takeout, i serve the food on my own small plates. At a restaurant, you could offer to split meals with people you’re with or just order the to-go container along with your meal and portion it right there. Most restaurant entrees can easily be 3 separate meals.
