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Their fast food/junk consumption is clearly a lot more moderate than you think. They are also a lot more consistent in their food consumption.
Maybe, and I don't have time to look up statistics right now, but it's easy to make population level pronouncements about health that don't hold up on an individual level. We all know of athletes who drop dead while jogging and beanpoles who smoke and eat Taco Bell everyday. On the flip side, there are overweight people who regularly exercise and eat well and whose medical tests show no adverse health metrics, other than they're 20/30/50 pounds heavier than what they're "supposed" to be. Health is different than weight.
Maybe, and I don't have time to look up statistics right now, but it's easy to make population level pronouncements about health that don't hold up on an individual level. We all know of athletes who drop dead while jogging and beanpoles who smoke and eat Taco Bell everyday. On the flip side, there are overweight people who regularly exercise and eat well and whose medical tests show no adverse health metrics, other than they're 20/30/50 pounds heavier than what they're "supposed" to be. Health is different than weight.
The overweight people who exercise greatly overestimate how much calories they are burning (They also greatly overestimate how much exercise they are actually doing). If you run for a mile its the equivalent of like half a cheeseburger. The people who legitimately properly exercise are not overweight, they just can't use traditional BMI calculators because muscle weights more than fat.
It is true that your normal caloric consumption varies between each individual person, but consider the fact that just a few decades ago nobody was fat, even in the US. Fat people were just rare. That means everyone is just overeating. Perhaps it is 2000 calories for the average person, but maybe you should be eating 1900 instead, or 1800. The issue is everyone instead is eating close to 2500, and think they do not eat a lot, because their friend is eating 3000 cal. Everyone is leading these sedentary lifestyles thinking that they should be eating 3 full meals a day plus snacks in between to boot. When in reality you should be only eating 3 full meals a day (with no snacks) if you do hard physical manual labor. I am assuming none of these obese people are loggers, oil platform workers, or fishermen in Alaska, but they sure eat like one.
It certainly IS a mental game. One needs to have the mind set that are willing to sacrifices in order to be successful. ALL diets and ways of eating fail if one does not want to make the sacrifices to follow it, and that means mental fortitude. There is NOTHING easy about losing weight and without a mind in the game there is no way to succeed.
I am fit and I eat healthy and I exercise, but I do gain weight at times - quarantine 15 is a real thing, and when I need to lose it I have to make sure my mind is in the game or else I will fail.
People who are obese and live off of crappy food are not going to all of a sudden just follow instructions and lose the weight. If it were that easy there would be no fat people.
There would still be obese people because of the terrible, fat inflicting additives and ingredients that have been added to food regardless if it’s food from a restaurant or grocery store/supermarket. This is a national crisis that is primarily created by the US food industry.
Another problem is super large portions being served regardless of the location: home, restaurants, cookouts. Over the holidays, it was ridiculous to see or experience personally.
Most people, using a large open face spoon, put two servings worth of each food item on the plate. The average meal consist of a meat, two or three sides, a roll, biscuit, or sliced bread. Two servings of each, sometimes including the bread, are placed on a plate. If there are 6 drink options, at least 5 are sugar-laden drinks. One meal is around 2,000 calories. That’s just one meal. People are eating 2-3 meals a day (6k calories a day not including snacks and another serving of soda/sweet tea / fruit juice. Society has all mechanisms in place to ensure the population is obese. People are not intentionally setting out to become obese. This thing is bigger than individual willpower.
Another problem is super large portions being served regardless of the location: home, restaurants, cookouts. Over the holidays, it was ridiculous to see or experience personally.
Most people, using a large open face spoon, put two servings worth of each food item on the plate. The average meal consist of a meat, two or three sides, a roll, biscuit, or sliced bread. Two servings of each, sometimes including the bread, are placed on a plate. If there are 6 drink options, at least 5 are sugar-laden drinks. One meal is around 2,000 calories. That’s just one meal. People are eating 2-3 meals a day (6k calories a day not including snacks and another serving of soda/sweet tea / fruit juice. Society has all mechanisms in place to ensure the population is obese. People are not intentionally setting out to become obese. This thing is bigger than individual willpower.
The market responds to people's tastes. If all of a sudden people started eating a lot of soup for example, there would be "soupery" type places all over, and restaurants would adjust their menu and expand their soup options. The reason why the food in the US is so unhealthy is because that is where the demand is from the average person. The reason why 5 out of 6 drinks put out are sugar laden is because everyone picks them, and even the one unsweetened version is not usually that popular anyway! The food and restaurant industry in general is very competitive, and it would respond quickly to people's changing tastes. Just like there are new food fads every few years or so. You can even find these trends within the US among different ethnic cuisines. For example, Chinese Americans are less fat on average, and guess what? Chinese restaurants do not serve sweet tea, their tea only comes unsweetened. Why? Because it is the most common drink ordered. If you stop serving sweet tea in some diner in the South, people would be outraged or at the very least stop going to the place. It is the people's choices that dictate the menu, not the food industry.
Another problem is super large portions being served regardless of the location: home, restaurants, cookouts. Over the holidays, it was ridiculous to see or experience personally.
Most people, using a large open face spoon, put two servings worth of each food item on the plate. The average meal consist of a meat, two or three sides, a roll, biscuit, or sliced bread. Two servings of each, sometimes including the bread, are placed on a plate. If there are 6 drink options, at least 5 are sugar-laden drinks. One meal is around 2,000 calories. That’s just one meal. People are eating 2-3 meals a day (6k calories a day not including snacks and another serving of soda/sweet tea / fruit juice. Society has all mechanisms in place to ensure the population is obese. People are not intentionally setting out to become obese. This thing is bigger than individual willpower.
See, this is the problem right here. People consume absurd amounts of calories and then act surprised when they get fat. Unless you are a professional athlete there is no reason in the world to eat three 2,000 calorie meals a day. That's insane. If I ate like that I would be fat in no time at all. I'm willing to be those meals are loaded with saturated fats and sugars. For comparison, I eat about 2,500-3,000 calories a DAY and I'm very a physically active male that weighs almost 200 pounds.
No one is being forced to eat like a pig. That's a personal choice.
The only way i can keep off weight it to be on a diet the rest of my life... 1400 calories a day plus at least 60 minutes of exercise each day. When I broke my arm and was in terrible pain before surgery (and after surgery) and I couldn't exercise without unbearable pain and I had a hard time cooking because my arm was in a cast... I gained 20 pounds in three months that took me well over a year to lose.
I have to measure and restrict everything for the rest of my life. And even with that, I will still always be 10-15 pounds "overweight" according to the BMI charts. The only way I've been able to get down to my "normal weight" is to eat less than 1000 calories a day and feel weak and exhausted and that's just not sustainable.
And yes, I've tried keto, low carb, intermittent fasting, everything under the sun. Counting calories seems to work best for me. If I stop doing that, I gain weight.
And I've recently gained weight again that I need to lose because I got sick of counting calories for a while. It's an annoying way to live, always counting and measuring ever bit of food. Ugh. I slipped up for a few months and now it will take a year or so to lose it. It's so easy to put the weight on. It's so hard to take it off and keep it off.
On the bright side, I am the only one of my friends in my age group who isn't on any medicine for blood sugar, heart disease, whatever. Seems like everyone is on something, even the ones who look thin. My blood pressure, blood work, everything is very good. I am no no medication at all.
Grain also wasnt subsidized back then. It was still relatively cheap and easy to store, has been since humans took up agriculture and congregated in villiages and cities. The cheaper the ingredients, the more room for profit.
"...Lot raw produce. Produce is not subsidized though its most healthy thing most people could eat, not high calorie or high carb, but healthy. Pop Tart diet or pancakes or any high carb diet mentioned above as the most bang for the buck "for the poor" would be death sentence or at least one for losing eye sight and few appendages for a T2. Hey I get it, GRAIN IS SUBSIDIZED, so we get plethora of options that are grain based. If you eliminated EVERYTHING with even modicum of HFCS or other grain derived ingredient at grocery store, it would make shelves look pretty bare.
Even meat is subsidized cause livestock is fattened on SUBSIDIZED GRAIN. Even things like canned beans arent just beans, read the label! Even things like cottage cheese or yogurt, with exception of some high end ones like Daisy that are really just milk and bit salt, most have a label that takes up most of rear of carton and lot starchy fillers and other wonders of the modern world to maximize profit. Again cheapen anything and everything with grain or grain derived components because its SUBSIDIZED and thus CHEAP AND PROFITABLE. Sugar sells...
Yes, yes, yes to all of this. The point I've been making throughout this thread is that so much JUNK is added to practically ALL foods that we consume in this country. We are a country with a high % of fat and obese people. The easy button is to say like some posters on this thread are saying "well, if they'd just put away the Twinkies blah blah blah...". In the 1970s or 80s, that might have been the case because the foods at that time weren't filled with as much junk. People eating normal meals didn't get fat or obese eating nor were they working out in the gym 24/7.
In this day and age, even eating normal foods result in the same physical outcome for most people that eating tons of Twinkies did to people decades ago.
The Atkins diet was the first low-carb diet that got started in the early 1970s. Then, over the years, many other copycat low-carb diets followed. Diet books like Keto, Paleo, wheat-belly, Grain-brain etc..
So the low-carb diets have been around for about 50 years now, using different names. And what do we have to show for it?
Nothing! Over those many years, the numbers of overweight and obese people has steadily increased.
The numbers of overweight and obese people have increased because of the US food industry practices.
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