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Some people definitely do choose to be poor. Others don't. But both kinds of people certainly exist. I have been physically fit my whole life. The comments peo
by RPLong 8y ago
Some people definitely do choose to be poor. Others don't. But both kinds of people certainly exist.
I have been physically fit my whole life. The comments people make to me in casual conversation might raise your eyebrows. They don't say, "I wish I weren't overweight, and I feel powerless to do anything about my problem." Instead, they say things like, "HAW HAW HAW I don't run unless chased HAW HAW HAW!" They say, "I hate vegetables, I can't stand them. How can you eat steamed brussels sprouts? How do you go without sweets?"
They can't figure me out. They just don't understand how it's possible to work out twice a day, take two 15-minute walks, and restrict my daily calories to 2000. They can't figure out why I don't eat bacon all the time, like they do. They can't figure out why I don't eat patty melts and biscuits-and-gravy.
These folks are not fat for medical reasons.
- cm2012 8y agoPeople are obviously born with various IQ levels, right? Doesn't it stand to reason that people are born with certain levels of willpower about food (or in general)? Also, you can predict someone's future weight and bmi pretty well from the time they are children or teenagers. There is a ton of research on this. One of them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20927643/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20927643/
- RPLong 8y agoI'm not making the strongest claim about obesity, I'm making the weakest. That is, my claim is merely that some people choose to be fat, not that all people do. It seems altogether unreasonable to suggest that there are no fat people on Earth who choose to be that way. And, as I noted above, the people who talk to me don't generally discuss a lack of willpower. They discuss their willingness to eat things they know are bad and their unwillingness to be active. It's possible that this is all part of the hocus-pocus of cognitive science and that they're merely verbalizing a chemical predisposition, but I'm not quite so cynical about human consciousness to believe that.