According to the Journal of the American Medical Association over 30% of Americans are obese. Not just “a little overweight”, but flat out OBESE.
The definition of Obese is “grossly fat or overweight.” That means one out of three people in American society are really, really big. This is (pardon the pun) a HUGE problem.
People wonder why healthcare in America is so expensive compared to the rest of the developed world, and immediately the blame is put on insurance providers, medical professionals, “big pharma”, and the government, but nobody seems to want to blame those who have preventable health problems.
“Some people have diseases that don’t let them lose weight,” people like to say, but is it really 1/3 people? Does one-third of our country suffer from said “diseases”? No. The majority of them suffer from “hand to mouth”, which is the inability to stop shoveling vast amounts of garbage into their stomach.
If you are the type of person to scream something like “you don’t know their story”, I’m going to implore you to put on your critical thinking cap. Even if HALF of the obese people in our country suffer from an illness, that’s still 50 million people. IF that was going on, don’t you think we would be aware of it? If 50 million people were suffering from a disease that prevented weight loss, wouldn’t that be on national news? Forget a cure for cancer, combating THIS would be the focus of every pharmaceutical company. There’d be too much money NOT to tackle this “epidemic”.
So what IS the problem? For the most part it’s laziness. We are a people of sitters. We sit at work. We sit at home. We sit while driving from place to place. We sit. From an early age we sit to play video games. We sit to learn. We spend a large portion of our day on our ass.
We also eat a lot. While many cultures eat to get nutrients, we eat for fun. We eat because we are bored. We eat past being “full” because we have to “finish our plate”.
BAD weight accumulates because we take in more calories than we burn. That’s it. That’s how it works.
This lack of calorie burning leads to people becoming overweight, and ultimately obese.
This isn’t a “shame fat people” thing, or anything of the sort. In fact, I find it hard-pressed to find how encouraging others to be healthy could be a negative, but then again there’s a lot about our society that I don’t get.
We live in a time where saying anything that could be misconstrued as a negative is “shaming”. What’s even worse is that people seem to want to praise others for being fat.
Why do those people want others to suffer from the consequences of being unhealthy? While that may not be their intent (it’s not, I’m just being an ass) the truth of the matter is that being obese isn’t good. It’s bad. It’s very, very, very bad.
I recently stumbled across an article from the garbage-website Huffington Post in which a woman was being praised for exposing “fat-shamers” by writing their nasty remarks on her body, and posting images of it on social media. Thankfully she had a lot of skin because there were an awful lot of comments, and a healthy person wouldn’t have been able to fit them all.
This woman was met with praise for being so “bold” and “brave” in the face of “haters,” but that’s not going to help her health.
Bullying others is wrong. Being unhealthy is dangerous. Only one of those two things present an actual threat to one’s life.
Many in our society want us to believe that “we are fine the way we are”. There are many people who would rather let someone suffer from their own demise (even going so far as to praising them for it) than say something helpful like “you might want to think about losing weight.”
Obesity isn’t attractive, no matter how many times someone says it. I could say “I’m a spaceship” a million times, but that doesn’t make it so. If I did think that way, I would hope someone would help me get back to reality. Not “my reality” but actual reality.
Encouraging others to maintain their unhealthy lifestyle is selfish. Many of us would rather be seen as “kind” than helpful. This is because we care so much more about how WE are perceived than we genuinely care about others.
That doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to hurt others. Saying “ha ha, you’re a fatass” isn’t kind. I get that. I’m not trying to convince anyone to “shame” or “bully” other people. However, we definitely need to encourage others to live healthier, for their own sake.
Want to save lives? Do you want to lower the cost of healthcare? Do you want people to be happier? Encourage others to be healthy. DON’T encourage them to be unhealthy. It really is that simple.
