3 ms·
I live in the US. In passing I have noticed quite a bit about our culture which lends to being overweight. 1) Structure: it is way too easy to get food that i
by Ccecil 6y ago
I live in the US. In passing I have noticed quite a bit about our culture which lends to being overweight.
1) Structure: it is way too easy to get food that is horrible for you. Not only that but in a way which you can eat it in the car on the way when you are only "slightly hungry".
2) Commercial interests: Go into a Walmart and pay attention to the organization. Everything which makes you fatter (and therefore consume more) is directly in front of you and on the end of the aisles. You need to search for the healthy food, and for some reason in my experience their limited produce selection seems to spoil faster than other stores (how can my bananas be green and rotten at the same time?)
3) Rewarding excess: It is in vogue to be wasteful. Being able to live in excess and be wasteful is very popular in our culture this is not limited to food, just look at the flatscreen TV count in houses, large inefficient cars and houses, etc.
4) Exercise as an excuse: "I have a gym membership, I went this week...so I can eat an extra 3000 calories today" That coupled with the lack of walking from the car culture and you have a very low rate of calorie burn vs intake.
5) Sugar substitutes: Why does everything need sweetener? Does this sweetener have effects we don't know about? There have been studies that say it also causes obesity and diabetic issues. It is very common for people in this country to drink several "diet" sodas a day and using that as reason to allow themselves to have extra dessert/sweet things.
Just my observations, also, I fall into the overweight category even knowing these things and making efforts to not continue the path which I was brought up on. If I had not made an effort to change diet and exercise...who knows how big I would be.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago3 really resonates. People tend to dramatically overestimate the number of calories they burn when exercising. You have to work really, really hard to burn more than 500 calories in an hour workout and most people probably burn more like 100-200 calories when they exercise. Then they go home and drink a 16oz double IPA that is 400 calories by itself.
- skim_milk 6y agoI agree but I wonder if there's more points? 6) Emotional support. I see less and less large people out and about and more mostly attractive people hanging outside over the past decade. I have to wonder if this is in part due to social media: a) Less attractive people feel like they deserve less social status (not sure if this is a USA-specific cultural thing but it's definitely a thing here) b) Because of point a, spend more online because of the heightened feeling of not deserving of making friends c) Social media is absolute junk, the more time you spend on it naturally the worse you're going to feel d) Feedback loop of spending more time online, feeling bad, spending less time outside with physical contact causing worse physical health, causing even more time spent online, repeat for decades More attractive people are naturally going to feel more deserving of love and emotional support and more likely to seek it out because of our culture, despite really we should all feel equally deserving of love and support. But this feedback mechanism I think exists breaks that feeling of deserving mental/physical fitness which is causes awful mental/physical fitness.
- yodsanklai 6y agoThere is a lead cause which is unregulated capitalism. Food corporations are becoming more and more efficient at selling lot of low-quality food, which ultimately ends up in people's bodies.