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Yes I'm serious. I'm pretty sure that woman with the handicap cart wasn't thinking, "Well this is probably some of the worst "food" on the planet that I am buying to feed myself and my child." as she was rolling down the aisles of the grocery. She probably wasn't thinking at all. That cart full of Frosted Frosting Flakes, party sized corn chips, cookies, hotdogs and the like were what she was raised on. I'm sure if in another setting she was asked, she could probably come up with some of the right answers but in the store she was on autopilot repeating what she had learned growing up.
This is willful ignorance - ignorance that could easily be fixed but she chooses not to; therefore, I don't believe it deserves any pity. You're right that she's not thinking about her food choices at that time - she's just grabbing what she likes to eat and what tastes good. I could easily do the same, the difference is, there's a voice in my head that goes on when I shop - "yes, those chips sound good to you at the moment because you're hungry but you know it's crap, you don't want to have them in the house" - and I walk past them. I could've easily grabbed them - but I don't. I made that choice.
For another example, my husband was never really overweight but he had maybe an extra 10-15 lbs around his midsection. Complained about it, but didn't really change his diet, which wasn't bad but he pretty much ate whatever he wanted, when he wanted - not junk but red meat, sweets, etc. Well at 30 he went for a checkup and his cholesterol and blood pressure were too high. He had no idea - you could've said he was ignorant up till then. Well, from that moment, he started watching what he ate. He started working out regularly, he cut down on the rich foods and the steak and the beer and sweets. Slowly he started trying and eating things he would make a face at before - greens, broccoli, quinoa, plain yogurt, all things he hated and never ate before, he actually learned to not mind them. He lost weight and at his last checkup, his numbers were pretty much perfect.
He made those choices and those sacrifices - he could've ignored the doctor and kept eating all his favorite foods. He still enjoys them - but his health is more important to him. This is what's missing in the equation for the woman above - choosing to make her health a priority.
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Yes obese people are guilty of eating too much but the devil is in the details. Why do they eat so much? Are they aware for example that their less than stellar lunch of a bag of popcorn and a soda sets them up to be ravenously hungry a few hours later. Rinse and repeat. Are they aware that their shear BMI has most likely caused them to be insulin resistant creating problems with metabolism and hunger, a vicious circle that yes, they got themselves into by poor food choices and getting so large but getting out is another matter altogether? Is that woman aware that every moment of sitting in that cart is part of her problem and that simply moving around, not necessarily engaging in active exercise will help her? I don't think that she understands any of those things nor do most people that I know.
Again, willful ignorance. All this information is easily accessible at the click of a mouse nowadays. It's not hard to find - you just have to want to do it, and clearly these people don't care enough.
And in our parent's day and I'm probably one of them, there wasn't a fast food joint on every corner, nor the plethora of invented food constructs that we have today, nor was it consumed on a daily basis. I'm taking the industry to task and you apologists for junk just keep selling your snake oil.
Having it on every corner does NOT mean you have to eat it!!!
Exactly which part of the industry is it that comes to your house and holds you down while they force-feed you junk on a daily basis? Wasn't aware of that being a job description
Moreover, as far as I know they haven't yet eliminated regular food everywhere and replaced it with 'invented food constructs'. Somehow the fresh produce, dairy, meats, grains and legumes still manage to coexist with the junk in the same grocery stores in peaceful harmony. If anything, with all the renewed focus on healthy eating, there is a lot more healthy choices available now than back in the 70s when Campbell soup casseroles ruled. All you need to do is pull the right thing off the shelf.
FWIW, we recently moved to a suburb that's relatively new and doesn't yet have a good presence of restaurants and food places. Coming from a much more 'foodie' oriented place, I was surprised to find that out of only a handful of restaurants, majority are various fast food chains. In fact there are almost no places to grab a quick bite that's NOT fast food within a 20-minute drive.
I was kind of disappointed since we enjoy grabbing a bite to eat outside the home for variety - and where we used to live that could mean a variety of relatively healthy, tasty, multicultural options. But now that I can't pop out for sushi or falafel or a panini, does that mean I go grab a burger instead? Nope, I've simply accepted there aren't good food options here so I suck it up, go home and make my own, or we drive out further on occasion. I can buy some good bread, cheese, and veggies at the store, and that's a meal for me. The fact that there are 6 fast food places within a few blocks does absolutely nothing to make them seem more enticing.
I don't think anyone is 'apologizing' for the junk. I think they're saying 'you don't have to eat it just because it's there'. If that's snake oil - oh well.
Last edited by EvilCookie; 02-04-2015 at 07:20 PM..
I knew a woman who ended up in the hospital, and the hospital fed her drinks and foods with high fructose corn syrup all day. Some of the reason people are fat is due to medical incompetence. Failing to treat people for thyroid disease and other serious illnesses, failing to give patients hormone replacement at midlife, failing--or even refusing--to treat chronic illness is behind some of it.
There can be a lot of truth to this too.
Take me, for example. I am obese. I know it. We all know it. I have struggled with weight since high school, even though I was a very active kid. I ALWAYS played at least one sport a season, plus martial arts and/or dance the rest of the year. I ran through the woods. I played outside. I helped my parents garden and we ate a lot of food that we grew. No soda was allowed in my house and because my dad is diabetic and my mom has high blood pressure, we also had no sugar or salt. I was still fat. When I look at pictures of my great grandparents and great great aunts straight off the boat from Ukraine fleeing the Cossaks, they were overweight as well. There's a healthy bit of genetics there - in particular a rather unfortunate predisposition of gaining weight on my arms and legs first - thin in the middle but huge wrists and ankles.
But I crossed the overweight to obese threshhold when I went to college. Despite being more active than ever climbing up and down hundreds of stairs a day on a very hilly campus and walking 2 miles each way to internships in town, I gained weight. I had a litany of symptoms that were blamed on weight gain, which was often blamed on depression.
Fatigue? It's because you're fat.
Back pain that wakes you up in the middle of the night crying? It's because you're fat.
Itchy skin? It's probably something you ate. You probably eat too many dairy products, but here's some prednisone which will make you gain a ton of weight.
Out of breath? It's because you're fat.
When I was 23 after 5 years of symptoms and many doctors, I woke up with my underarm convex instead of concave. Stage IV lymphoma - I had it all along and because doctors blamed my weight, they NEVER investigated further. A simple chest xray when I first started having symptoms at 18 would have shown the mass in my chest that eventually would be the size of a grapefruit. Further investigation would have shown that my back pain was due to lesions on my spine. Itchy skin is also a hallmark of my cancer. Had I been diagnosed years earlier, I might have avoided years of needless weight gain as well as my stage IV diagnosis.
Then there was 6 months of chemo. I gained a further 60 pounds on chemo because I lost the ability to be active, was on a ton of steroids, and had to work full time through treatment - I ate whatever was able to be microwaved or a kind friend or coworker prepared for me. I wasn't eating abnormal amounts - under 2000 calories a day which *should* have been under my basal calorie burn. But it wasn't.
And ever since then, losing weight has been monumentally difficult. At 27, I've already gone through menopause (and come back out of it), gained close to 100 pounds in 4 years, have PCOS/insulin resistance and basically had to retrain myself to lift even something as heavy at 10 pounds once I was out of treatment. Lung damage makes it very difficult to work out, and impossible to do so in cold or hot weather.
Based on my weight, it should take more than 2500 calories for me to maintain my weight. But if I actually ate anywhere near that much, I would gain like crazy.
Right now, I have been doing a month of 1200-1400 calories eating less than 50 grams of carbs a day eating extremely cleanly. It's the only thing that works, but is also very difficult to keep up mentally and it takes BOTH the low calories and carb vs. fat vs. protein distribution to get results. And I absolutely have to be on top of my food choices every step of the way. There's no "calories in and calories out" for me - it's all about eating high quality calories in a low enough amount that I lose weight but not so low that my body thinks I'm starving. I'm lucky to have a fantastic doctor who does not fat shame me in the least and an onco-nutritionist who has helped me retrain how I think about nutrition.
As a note off of several other comments: While going through chemo, I was often the fat woman in a handicapped spot driving an electric cart around the grocery store. People made comments, especially when my face was swollen like the moon thanks to steroids. I was called lazy, an embarassement, and worse. Because I never lost all of my hair, people had no idea that the reason I was out of breath was because chemo had damaged my lungs - I just looked like I was young and fat. They didn't know I was in the cart because chemo had caused neuropathy in my feet and that I had already fallen 3 times that day and needed to save my energy to climb up 3 flights of stairs to my apartment. Did I make poor food choices? Sure. We all do. But you don't know the battles others are fighting. Some might just be fat, but obesity is so often an ignored side effect of serious illness thanks to lack of mobility or fatigue. And it would be much too kind for that weight to fall off when (if) you go back to "normal."
While I'm certainly not blaming my health conditions entirely for my current weight, there are LOTS of medical reasons for weight gain. We exist!
There are all kinds of reasons for people to be fat. During the 1620's it was considered fashionable. It was a symbol of wealth; they could afford the food, and they showed it off. The term Rubenesque referring to "plus sized" women refers back to Peter Paul Rubens, the painter known for gorgeous depictions of rotund women. A round blubbery belly was considered sexy in the early 17th century.
Then there was also the crinoline from the Victorian era, which added not merely inches, but a full pillow's worth of padding to a woman's curves beneath her gowns. A woman with naturally wide, fat-covered hips was thought of as beautiful and sexy - because it symbolized her ability to bear children.
Your story is very sad....(your observation in the check out line.)
This is terrible.
Sometimes I get a drop of pride as I lay my food on the checkout line...
I want the Twinkie's person to SEE what a parsnip looks like....and grass fed meat ...
org milk....apples....limes...red veggies....
I am a child of the 60's and I can recall quite a few apple shaped girls and women.
In a school of 350, in the early 70s we had maybe 6 apple shaped girls and that's being generous. One was fat, one was a Type I diabetic, one had massive breasts so it was kind of hard to tell really. The other "fat" girl in our school was a pear. One apple that was thin (a shape I'm seeing as common now) was just odd looking. Thin legs, almost no hips with everything above. I'm not talking ethnicity here which does display differences in body type. This was a "white" school and my customers are also predominantly white.
I stand by my observations and a tour through the old year books back me up. The predominant body types displayed in those old photos are getting to be rare today even among the really young and fit. What's going on? I can't help but bring back the differences in our food quality and eating patterns in the past 40 years or so. If it was merely a matter of sitting too much the youngsters would be fat pears. That's not what is happening.
We are setting up even thin children with heart disease and pre-diabetic profiles far earlier in life than ever. What is happening to these young girls happened to me as a pre-Type II diabetic in my mid 30s. Science backs this up. Add the explosion of obesity and where there is smoke, there is almost always fire. Calories in/calories burned is an outmoded or in my case an almost useless model. My particular body is highly efficient at extracting calories out of carbohydrates. Holding a moderate/low caloric line on a primarily carb based (even healthy carbs) diet (which I did with the diabetic exchange diet) left me getting fatter, constantly hungry and unhealthy as my blood panels testified.
Almost to the day I started working with the glycemic index and jettisoned, simple sugars (duh) including honey, grain and starch based carbs (or severely limited in the case of "good" but high glycemic carbs like carrots and most fruit) I was able to eat 50% more calories, was no longer ravenous and I lost weight which finally stabilized for the first time in my adult life. My blood profiles are excellent now. Apparently my body is more inept at burning high protein foods, low carb fiber and fat. Calories in that in my case are not efficiently burned become calories out without factoring into the simple 1=1 equation. In my case my low glycemic diet roughly equalled 2=1. Once I got on board with a brilliant diabetes and lipid physician, things that had me stumped were straightened out because I had information that went beyond the 1=1 calories in must be equal to calories burned, completely ignoring the function of the alimentary canal and amped metabolic rates with increased digestion required.
I think there are more of us out there than is presently known. It's just not a simple problem. I am sincerely mystified by people that would rather hold individuals solely responsible rather than that of poor choices being one part of a larger whole with many factors that are both systemic and individual in nature. For every fat person there are factors that will be unique to them, cultural, familial, genetic, psychological, habits, misinformation, resource issues.
I'm done. Most of the posters that spout the cleaned up version of "You eat too much you fat pig" are showing their true colors. I'd rather have empathy and offer hope than a lifetime of starvation eating today's modern packaged non-food food "in moderation' which is in many cases impossible.
We are setting up even thin children with heart disease and pre-diabetic profiles far earlier in life than ever. What is happening to these young girls happened to me as a pre-Type II diabetic in my mid 30s. Science backs this up. Add the explosion of obesity and where there is smoke, there is almost always fire. Calories in/calories burned is an outmoded or in my case an almost useless model. My particular body is highly efficient at extracting calories out of carbohydrates. Holding a moderate/low caloric line on a primarily carb based (even healthy carbs) diet (which I did with the diabetic exchange diet) left me getting fatter, constantly hungry and unhealthy as my blood panels testified.
Almost to the day I started working with the glycemic index and jettisoned grain and starch based carbs (or severely limited in the case of "good" but high glycemic carbs like carrots and most fruit) I was able to eat 50% more calories, was no longer ravenous and I lost weight which finally stabilized for the first time in my adult life. My blood profiles are excellent now. Apparently my body is more inept at burning high protein foods, low carb fiber and fat. Calories in that in my case are not efficiently burned become calories out without factoring into the simple 1=1 equation. In my case my low glycemic diet roughly equalled 2=1. Once I got on board with a brilliant diabetes and lipid physician, things that had me stumped were straightened out because I had information that went beyond the 1=1 calories in must be equal to calories burned, completely ignoring the function of the alimentary canal.
I think there are more of us out there than is presently known. It's just not a simple problem. I am sincerely mystified by people that would rather hold individuals solely responsible rather than that of poor choices being one part of a larger whole with many factors that are both systemic and individual in nature. For every fat person there are factors that will be unique to them, cultural, psychological, habits, information or misinformation, resources.
I agree with this. We're told over and over that there's no genetic predisposition to obesity and that we've just learned poor eating habits and a lack of self control from our obese parents. Type 2 diabetes is supposed to be a disease that people get from being too fat. But most of the diabetics I talk to have a family history of diabetes. I think there's something that goes wrong in our bodies because of that predisposition to diabetes, which causes us to be more sensitive to carbs, leads to obesity, which leads to diabetes. Obviously, not every obese person is diabetic, but I think understanding the link between diabetes and obesity and figuring out how to treat people sooner (maybe prescribing metformin and a low carb diet if someone is overweight with a family history of diabetes) would help a lot.
As the above post says so well, there is no cookie-cutter "just right" diet for every body. Some of us do great on Paleo, others thrive with complex carbs while others are perfectly healthy with a balanced diet of complex carbs and protein.
What no one seems to thrive on ---healthwise---is a diet laden with HFCS, additives, hormones, and highly processed so the nutrients are absent..
As the above poster pointed out, the new way of thinking is that all calories ARE NOT the same and we should be headed to a diet and way of eating that emphasizes "nutrient-dense" foods. Google "nutrient-dense" for more info.
Eating nutrient-dense foods keep us satisfied with a reasonable caloric intake that satisfies in a way that soda and a fast food burger and fries will never do--no matter how much of them we eat.
Our bodies are screaming out for nutrients and we can be starving them even if we eat a caloric amount that should keep our weight normal--but doesn't.
Why?
Because our bodies are demanding real food filled with nutrients. So we keep eating crap and never meeting the body's desire for REAL food. Nutrient-dense food.
How long will a car run when fed junky fuel? What happens when you put sugar in a gas tank?
Our body's are running out of gas and sputtering to a halt. We need better fuel. Nutrient-dense fuel.
Charolastra00, thank you for sharing your story. What a strong woman you are, I would have crumbled going through what you have. Sending you prayers and good wishes for good health.
Charolastra00, thank you for sharing your story. What a strong woman you are, I would have crumbled going through what you have. Sending you prayers and good wishes for good health.
Yes. Makes my little problem seem tiny which of course it is in comparison to what a lot of other people have to bear. Best wishes.
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