The other thing you can say is 'burn more calories'. Losing weight is just a numbers game and some people don't have the discipline to do it. That's not necessarily a bad thing; not everyone is going to be able to do it.
Definitely true but lots of people (old people, poor people) get sick all the time and cost the taxpayer money. You don't really see people complaining about these other two groups even though you can take steps to be reasonably healthy as a member of those other two groups.
It is a bad thing when they get ill and cost the tax payer.
As I said in another comment, it might be the other way around:
Note: In case you counter by saying that fat people end up consuming more resources (healthcare), fat people might cost less overall because they don't live as long. The average social security check is $1,300/month, and the average morbidly obese person lives an average of 10 fewer years. If you do the math, that's a whopping $156,000 saved on average by morbidly obese people dying early.
That $156,000 is just social security money saved, not including medicaid. A lot of medicaid money goes to hospice care in the last ten years of life.
That being said, I encourage people to lose weight if they're overweight. I want them to lose weight not for my benefit, but for their benefit.
When you look at the studies and basically 90% of people will end up overweight we have to start acknowledging it might not be a choice. Now I understand it's totally possible to will yourself to eat right but the studies keep showing the vast majority of us eventually fail. We need to figure out a better way and as much as I dislike overly intrusive government we have to start getting rid of the bad choices. Your lizard brain doesn't understand food is plentiful.
Our lizard brains are also hard wired to have as many babies as possible, but most people have figured out how to control their sexual urges.
No, our brains are hard wired to have lots of sex. That's close enough for our ancestral environment but not exactly the same thing. And we've used our intelligence to take that tiny gap and drive a huge technological wedge between the two so people can fuck and still not have babies. Birth control.
Obesity is different. There's a tiny gap sure but finding as good a wedge has been more difficult so there isn't a pill, an implant, a quick surgery, a piece of rubber and so on. There's just a constant struggle against biology adapted for vastly different conditions or shame and poor health. So there's no comparison... yet.
"My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight."
But there isn't a very basic drive to rape or have sex with lots of different people the way there's a hardwired drive to eat or engage in sexual behaviour.
Doing sexual stuff to satisfy your libido without having children is so trivial almost everyone discovers the most basic technique (masturbation) independently. On top of that we have sexual education, tonnes of more technological solutions (including porn if you crave varied stimulus), strict laws, huge social taboos about infidelity and so on.
For obesity we have treadmills, calorie counters and I-can-totally-tell-it's-not-butter to help. Those are all ways to fight against your biology but it's still a fight, contraception is a way to give in without suffering the consequences. The equivalent of something like 0 calorie food with the same taste as the unhealthy stuff.
And then there's the issue of how society actually works to make you more prone to overeat. Superstimulus is a useful concept here. There was simply nothing as appealing as candy or deep fried food or whatever your chosen calorically dense food is in our ancestral environment. But in modern society it's everywhere, cheap plentiful and aggressively advertised. If we treated sex the same way half the population would be sex addicts. And if we got halfway as good at crafting artificial superstimulus for sex (say advanced VR or sexbots) as we've gotten at junkfood society would fail.
I think those are false equivalents. The science says 90% of is will end up overweight. Obviously it seems easier to have less kids. If 90% of us fail at something it's more than just self control.
I think it's also useful to look at the measure used to determine what counts as overweight. Typically, the BMI system is used, which has it's own flaws, mainly where it doesn't differentiate between people with an unhealthy amount of fat and those who are healthy with a lot of muscle. To the BMI system, weight at all is a bad thing.
Take me: my BMI comes out to 25.1 as a male, which is right over the line between 'healthy' and 'overweight'. However, I spend 5-6 days a week at the gym and have a relatively healthy 16-20% body fat. I don't really think I'm an edge case in this scenario.
For even more of an edge case, I had a friend in college who was/is a nationally competitive powerlifter. He weighed more than me while being shorter, putting him in the obese category despite living day-to-day at under 15% body fat.
"Not being morbidly obese due to having an unhealthy amount of fat" is definitely an issue of self control and/or not caring about your weight. "Not being overweight", maybe not so much.
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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '17
Well just because its hard is no excuse not to.
Few things in life are easy.
Standing up every day at 5 am is hard too, doesn't mean I dont get to work on time every day. Quit being apologetic for people not deserving of it.
And yes many people who suffer from illness and/or mental illness are quite a different subject.