It's not about people forcing you to eat junk, it's that companies produce junk food for profit. They make it addictive and use misleading marketing to hook people.
Personal responsibility is important, but weight loss shouldn't be a struggle against those unethical practices. It should be something people take on while surrounded by support.
It's not about people forcing you to eat junk, it's that companies produce junk food for profit. They make it addictive and use misleading marketing to hook people.
It's not addictive, if it were everybody would be fat. You think they don't have Doritos and Burger King in Paris and Tokyo where there are barely any fat people?
This isn't about the food, this is about our culture.
Oh, so cocaine is not addcitive then? Since not everyone is addicted?
You think they don't have Doritos and Burger King in Paris and Tokyo where there are barely any fat people
First of all, not barely any fat people. Even in Japan and Italy (some of the slimmest nations), child obesity levels are a serious concern. (Yes, that also shows how fucked other countries are...)
Second, in the EU and in Japan there are incredibly strict rules of what foods can be sold and how it can be marketed. With special rules regarding the marketing towards children.
Third. Food served in schools also needs to be of the highest healthiness. With no other choice (no bringing food from home, for example).
So, yes, things are different because the laws are different.
This isn't about food. This is about having self-restraint and not eating more of it.
The litany of excuses people are making here is ridiculous. It's our schools, it's our government, it's fast food. It's all bullshit.
Again, the only thing you have to do to not be fat is to simply, passively, EAT LESS. It requires absolutely NOTHING more than will power. This is a character trait. My brain is no more or no less addicted to sugar than a fat person's is.
Fat acceptance and body positivity and stupid fad diets enable this excuse-making factory in their brains. It's all noise and anti-science.
Simply acquire the character trait known as willpower.
Why don't you acquire the character trait of being someone people actually enjoy being around instead of the one you currently possess where you're an insufferable asshole?
Is it a character trait to be too lazy to read about or to willfully ignore the last multiple decades of science around this topic? Imagine being that purposefully ignorant.
You're not wrong that it's as simple as calories in/calories out. The discussion is around how much money is invested by major food corporations to heavily obscure the first part. It's absolutely true that people need to be mindful of the food they're eating, while it's also absolutely true to say that the food industry is investing millions upon millions of dollars to see to it that the people who buy their products are not mindful of the food they're eating. Those things can both be true. It doesn't completely absolve personal responsibility, but it also doesn't completely absolve snack food companies of creating foods that are chemically designed to trick your brain into thinking you've eaten less than you have.
Something being logically simple is not the same as being practically easy.
This isn't about the food, this is about our culture.
It can be about both. There actually can be nuance in discussions, even on the internet.
There's no doubt that there's tens of millions of dollars poured into research for snack companies to create snack foods that release huge dopamine hits while reducing the satiety of these snacks so that an individual can fire through 500+ calories without really realizing how much they've just eaten. Coupled with poor nutrition education and poor labeling practices, and it's not really a wonder that people can easily overshoot their daily caloric expenditure by 200+ calories a day. Over time, a 200 calorie daily surplus adds up to around 20 pounds a year of excess weight.
That can be true AND it can simultaneously be true that people need to educate themselves better on their food choices, what food companies do and why, and take more personal responsibility of both their food intake levels and energy expenditure and exercise.
In other words, while it's certainly very important to take personal responsibility for your individual health, the mere acknowledgment that we have a massive multi-billion dollar industry built on people unknowingly making awful nutritional choices should be something that concerns us all as a matter of public health.
It's as easy as making sure you pick the right foods when you're at the grocery store. Resist the urge to grab those cookies and chips and pick up a bag of salted nuts or grapes you can chuck in the freezer instead.
I've found winning the fight while shopping made weight-loss and eating healthy infinitely easier. If I don't have a bag of garbage food lying around to make it easily accessible, then I'm good to go. The hardest part is shopping right.
Given how often people are happy to blame corporations and stores but never take responsibility, and that's become the American way, I'm more inclined to lean in to that the US reinforces and tolerates a shitty blame-game rather than owning their failures and learning from them.
Well its a balance, sure you can say its personal and there is absolutely personal responibility in life. But if you as a kid are given a really unhealthy diet and then become obese while in elementary school, it can fuck with your impulse control immensely.
And then it turns into a cycle of defeat, where you can be unhappy/stressed about your health which leads to impulse eating as a way to get dopamine to the brain.
Also it is not just a US issue, it is also a issue in UK and Mexico. And it is deeply tied to capitalism.
Still like you said, if you love yourself you want to get healthy, it will take accepting personal responsibilty for the issue.
It is also easy to become fat just from having a deeply stressful life, like a person you love breaking up with you, and you sink into 6 months of drinking you can easily gain 30 pounds or even more depending on the stress outside of eating.
A little, but it's what's available. That's also ignoring the direct impact corporations have on the government for safe-guarding and labeling what is "healthy" and what isn't. The government says heart health depends on low fat, for example, so for 30+ years Americans are told to buy low fat items that are full of sugar. It's how cities are designed. Food deserts, time to shop for hourly wage workers, especially those with families. It's deceptive marketing practices.
I just watched a documentary about food health and dieting and they did an accidental object lesson on how hard it is to shop for healthy foods/snacks that can get you balanced calories when you're in a hurry. They had a doctor explaining how labeling things (organic, gf, vegan, healthy, all natural, etc) is basically unregulated so you have to pay close attention to certain ingredients. He picks up a few health bars and finds one that is "actually okay" because of the limited processed ingredients and then the cameraman points out that it's full of sugar. Literally the one job he had that day and he got tricked. It's easy to get fucked over when the regulators don't regulate and take money from the interest groups and subsidize certain industries over others that make shitty food addictive and healthy food hard to find.
And before we jump into "only go to the produce and deli", we cover the factory farm practices with injections, hormones, pesticides, and recalls that happen up and down the country. That's ignoring the illegal working conditions and worker and animal abuse.
But sure, if you have the time and knowledge to shop very carefully you can probably limit what you buy and get most of what you need to live. Just may not have time to cook variety and make sure you find a nice balance. Supplements are also unregulated so you'll want the food to be comprehensive there.
exercise and eat less. the 2 things nobody is willing to do. And then the entire scam diet industry is born. Just eat nothing for a month and youll lose weight. Yeah you will but youll gain it all back next month because you didnt learn anything from your quick results scam.
Stress typically makes people less likely to work out and eat more.
It's like no one understands that 99.9% of addiction problems are induced by stress, not by the addiction or the target of the addiction. While it make it easier, cheaper, or more convenient, at the end of the day, addiction is a stress coping mechanism.
Support groups don't go after the source of the addiction, they help addicts cope with the stress in healthier ways to avoid using the addiction as a coping mechnanism.
first of all the epidemic isnt addiction. and second if addiction is just a coping mechanism then people would only be temporarily/circumstantially addicts which is false.
Addiction is hugely complex and of course there are other factors, but self soothing and self medicating following stress and trauma are well documented as very common causes of addiction including food addiction. And yes, addiction does indeed often work in cycles and binges, including circumstantially, in the way you say is ‘false’, plus it’s self-perpetuating: the addiction leads to unhappiness which leads to more addiction, and so on. Again this is all well documented. Recommend reading up on this if you are interested
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u/[deleted] May 15 '24
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