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I'll point the finger of blame at the Western American Diet as the reason that people are overweight or obese. There's lots of theories out there, my belief is that we eat too much. We're encouraged to eat, eat, eat. Eat a big breakfast it's the most important meal of the day, eat snacks, eat lunch, eat dinner. Eat to celebrate holidays, birthdays, promotions, or we eat when we're stressed, unhappy, bored. We're constantly eating and snacking. Then our insulin levels spike and crash all day long and we get hangry, so we eat even more. Exercise cannot fix all the overeating we do. Eventually we become insulin resistant and the downward spiral continues.
We need to eat less period. That's where our trouble is.
Other cultures are about food. I will use Italy as an example. They spend hours on a meal there. They aren't fat. I think it's about the kind of food we eat. Lots of sugar. I saw an IHOP commercial the other day and OMG. I couldn't imagine going there.
Which has nothing to do with caring about one's looks.
We've embraced being overweight so much that skinny people are now shamed.
We truly have entered bizarro world.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/gwyn...153750161.html
“It’s a body. Just because its not your size body, stop judging it!” one person commented. “All your ‘too thin’ comments are a reflection of your own insecurities.”
WOW!!!
Fortunately, where I live, I got "shamed" for being overweight.
Seems to be a combination of factors. Crappy food/overeating, sedentary lifestyles that expend less calories than one takes in, more societal fat acceptance and descriptions such as "curvy" or "voluptuous" now include those who used to be considered fat or obese.
When I was a kid many moons ago, we were a lot more physically active and constantly playing outside, basically free-range. Nowadays, most parents don't seem to let their kids run around the neighborhood or do many unscheduled activities. We walked to and from school, now even parents who live within walking distance to schools seem to drive their kids and pick them up.
And many kids don't seem to be that interested in going out and when they do, they are sitting around, checking their iphones. So kids who are already chubby may continue to gain weight as they enter adulthood and become obese adults.
First, most women work full time. Used to be majority of wives stayed home so there was someone there who had the time to cook healthy foods.
Convenience foods did not exist as they do now. The most they had were tv dinners that could be put in the oven, otherwise besides some canned goods everything had to be prepared on your own. There were no microwaves or frozen meals or heat-n-eat meals like you get in the grocery store that have loads of additives and preservatives.
Fast food and fast casual restaurants didn't exist. There was no such thing as picking up Panera bread or Chick Fil A or Five Guys.
Snacking in between meals was not a thing. Three meals a day was the norm. It was unusual to have chips or cookies or candy or even soda everyday.
Caloric drinks were not a thing either. Now kids in my local high school can be seen walking with their giant Frappucinos on a daily basis. Drinking your calories is a sure fire way to gain weight.
Kids were on their own much more than today and walked everywhere. Kids also didn't have their free time so scheduled. Used to be kids would walk home from school than play outside until dinner. Now most kids I know are shuttled to sports or dance or some other activity. Or they stay locked up at home playing video games until mom or dad gets home after work.
The idea of "thin" being the only acceptable standard for beauty shifted with all of these changes. Now that more people are obese than ever there's the attitude of "why fight it" when everyone else is fat too. Now I see major retailers like Target or the popular teen store American Eagle putting very overweight models up front.
Ironically the obesity epidemic is not due to lack of education. People know what they should eat, they just choose not to because food tastes too good.
When I was a kid, moms were home and cooked meals for the family. We had three meals and no snacks. More of our foods had fat in them and no sugar. No processed foods. My mom even baked our bread from wheat that she ground. I can count on one hand the number of times we went to fast food as a family, not per year, but during the entire 18 years of my childhood.
We had a treat with our meal two nights a week. On Fridays my mom would make a cake for the weekend, on Mondays we had ice cream. The remainder of the week, fruit.
Schools did not serve breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and after school meal like they do now. Kids were slim at school. I remember two overweight kids from school. I still have the class pictures.
Plate size increased from the 60's until today. My wife inherited some items from her grandmother. The large plates were smaller back in the day.
I think in the late 70's or early 80's eating fat became a bad thing. So fatty foods were bad. What the food companies did was cut the fat and add sugar to flavor just about everything. All those low fat foods are loaded with sugar. What we need to do is cut the sugar and go back to eating real food. I have since changed my diet to a no sugar, no sweetener diet. No processed foods of any kind. Water is my only drink.
Other cultures are about food. I will use Italy as an example. They spend hours on a meal there. They aren't fat. I think it's about the kind of food we eat. Lots of sugar. I saw an IHOP commercial the other day and OMG. I couldn't imagine going there.
Yes, the U.S. has a high carbohydrate-centered diet. rice, bread, white flour and sugar in everything. even the fruits people crave here are high in sugar. It's best to have low glycemic fruits.
OP put this thread in the exercise and fitness forum. But when you look at the slim young people in the Woodstock movie, those were not people who went to a gym; they didn't work out on purpose. The exercise culture was not a thing yet, so for whatever reason those people weren't overweight as a group, it's not necessarily because they were healthier and more mindful of fitness.
Then that makes a point that the obesity epidemic isn't so much about a change in exercise habits as it is in something else.
But that is still a valid point to make.
My daughter (who is a black woman) took a considerable amount of time to Google images of young black women from the 60s and 70s and discovered the same thing. "Junk in the trunk" became evident only from the 80s. Prior to the 80s, young black women were normally slim.
Probably not a matter of exercise, or not exercise alone.
But there is a difference, and the difference is stark.
When I was a kid, moms were home and cooked meals for the family. We had three meals and no snacks. More of our foods had fat in them and no sugar. No processed foods. My mom even baked our bread from wheat that she ground. I can count on one hand the number of times we went to fast food as a family, not per year, but during the entire 18 years of my childhood.
We had a treat with our meal two nights a week. On Fridays my mom would make a cake for the weekend, on Mondays we had ice cream. The remainder of the week, fruit.
Schools did not serve breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and after school meal like they do now. Kids were slim at school. I remember two overweight kids from school. I still have the class pictures.
Plate size increased from the 60's until today. My wife inherited some items from her grandmother. The large plates were smaller back in the day.
I think in the late 70's or early 80's eating fat became a bad thing. So fatty foods were bad. What the food companies did was cut the fat and add sugar to flavor just about everything. All those low fat foods are loaded with sugar. What we need to do is cut the sugar and go back to eating real food. I have since changed my diet to a no sugar, no sweetener diet. No processed foods of any kind. Water is my only drink.
I remember "after school snack" being explicitly invented by food companies during the 60s. I also remember vending machines being introduced into schools in the 70s.
Obese people were extremely rare in the past because ultra-processed food wasn't available back then. But these days America leads the rest of the world in the availability of ultra-processed food, and in fact some parts of America are "food deserts" for healthy food, therefore we lead the world in obesity rates.
From an article in Scientific American:
His studies suggest that a dramatic shift in how we make the food we eat—pulling ingredients apart and then reconstituting them into things like frosted snack cakes and ready-to-eat meals from the supermarket freezer—bears the brunt of the blame. This “ultraprocessed” food, he and a growing number of other scientists think, disrupts gut-brain signals that normally tell us that we have had enough, and this failed signaling leads to overeating. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...=pocket-newtab
People care just as much now about their looks today as they did in the past but our food has changed. If ultra-processed food had been as readily available 250-300 years ago as it is these days it's very likely some of our Founding Fathers would have looked like tubby blimps in their portraits.
I've thought about my looks and weight almost daily since I was probably 10. And I am saying that as someone who has never been chubby or overweight. I know people battling eating disorders and terrible relationships with food.
Many people do still care, some too much. It just doesn't always look how you think it should.
Are there people who don't at all? Sure, but we all have our vices and it's their choice to make.
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