Tera Daisy Spawn / Beth McMillan ([info]teraspawn) wrote,
@ 2008-02-24 22:23:00
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Entry tags:politics

Ugh
Just came across this deeply unpleasant article on the usually reasonable Lifehack. A snippet:

"I’m amused by those who suggest that obesity is primarily an education problem, when in reality, it is (for the majority) a self-control problem. Self control: yes, that crazy, outdated notion I’ve spoken of many times before. We are inundated with education but we choose not to learn. Real ‘learning’ would have resulted in a large-scale positive change in behavior, and of course, decline in obesity levels."

So naturally I replied:

"You seem to be ignoring the fact that the highest levels of obesity occur within the working class, i.e. the area of society with probably the lowest level of education, the highest (and cheapest) availability of junk food and the least time for the middle-class pursuit of self-improvement. If there has been an upswing in obesity, it is because there has been a change in conditions, not because people have suddenly become incredibly lazy. The massive, multi-million-dollar fast food companies advertise to children from the word go - people are innoculated with the idea that there are foods you should eat because they are healthy (but boring) and there are foods you shouldn't eat but should want to eat because they are unhealthy but delicious. The power of advertising must not be underestimated in people's relationship with food. There may be a million reasons why someone might overeat, and refusing to examine them in favour of assigning blame just sidesteps the root of the issue. This narrow view of obesity as an individual problem, rather than a society-wide change allows overweight people to be further stigmatised and the problem to be sidelined into not being the responsibility of anyone but the person in question, allowing wider society, the food giants and the government to turn a blind eye and create a new group of social pariahs."

Anyone else's thoughts?


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[info]smithy161
2008-02-24 11:29 pm UTC (link)
Well said. For families living on a tight weekly budget, it's far easier to spend a couple of quid on chips for the children, and almost impossible to faff about with calorie controlled, low fat diets. Low-fat food is generally more work to manufacture, and therefore more expensive. There's also the fact that, with women now under pressure to have careers and lives outside the family home, take-away food is a frequent substitute for a full cooked meal, which does take planning and time that people don't seem to think they should spend on food.

I refuse to believe that all of a sudden, in the past few decades people have decided to throw abandon to the wind and eat whatever they like for the sake of it. And I'm not making excuses for myself (I did, in fact, eat whatever I wanted and that was my problem), but the increasing levels of obesity need to be objectively investigated, and the real causes identified and addressed.

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[info]teraspawn
2008-02-25 05:13 pm UTC (link)
I read some statistic a while ago that said people now spend a lower percentage of their paychecks on food than they did ten years ago (you can tell I was really paying attention since I can't actually remember the numbers...). Coming into contact with so many students recently has made me realise just how little time people are willing to spend on cooking ("Pasta? Ten minutes? I'll have a sandwich*"). If you can get quick, cheap food and you're pressed for time, that's obviously going to be the option to take.

It's interesting (and cool) that you agree with me on this - often it seems like people who've lost a lot of weight themselves are the least sympathetic to people who haven't.

*I feel I should add that this is a direct quote from a source who will remain unnamed for his own privacy.

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[info]smithy161
2008-02-25 07:57 pm UTC (link)
Well, coming from a background where you eat what you can afford, and what you can afford is often a bag of something processed and deep-fryable costing £1 from Iceland, the attitude in that article pisses me off. If cheap food was forced to meet certain standards, then the people who can't afford low-fat, high quality food would be less susceptible to obesity. If this country is going to have so many families who struggle to feed themselves, and low-quality cheep food, then it is going to have an obesity epidemic. Perhaps if the government stopped giving hand-outs to people who don't bother to work, and started giving that money to families who try to help themselves (i.e. my mum, who works because she has integrity, and gets bugger all in family support despite desperately needing it), then maybe those people would be able to eat better, and therefore be healthier, and put less of a strain on the NHS.

*Exhales*

I think the lack of sympathy from people who have lost weight might come from the fact that it is, actually, easy. What is difficult is realising that it's easy, and perhaps people forget the difficult part, and how hard it was for them. 'Just eat less' is easy enough to say; the difficulty is in finding a place in your head where losing the weight in the long run is more desirable than eating that food in the short run. Not really surprising, since self-hate is the main motivation, and no one wants to remember when they felt like that.

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[info]teraspawn
2008-02-25 10:59 pm UTC (link)
I think it's less of a problem of unemployment pay (you really don't get people getting rich of that kind of thing - and nowadays it's called a jobseekers allowance and gets witheld if you refuse any of the - frequently rubbish - jobs that are offered at job centres, since they're often run in tandem with private companies who need people for temporary work, who are basically getting cheap labour from the people in society who are the most desperate), and more an issue of the immense amounts of tax that rich people aren't paying. Tax cuts for the rich in the past few years have been increasing and increasing, and it's generally assumed that they'll have clever accountants, dodgy tax evasions and offshore accounts and so forth to get around the minimal amount of tax they are supposed to pay - so basically, people who are exploiting their workers, paying low wages and stripping them of their rights, are allowed to give nothing back to the support system, because apparently the rich are better than the rest of us for some reason.

In summary: the other people in need who are eating your slice aren't the problem - it's the fuckers who've eaten the rest of the damn pie that we should be worrying about.

But anyway (I'm turning into an angry young leftist apparently), you're totally right about the food thing - if food companies hadn't been allowed to get away with such untrammelled marketing and production of cheap, unhealthy, crappy food, people wouldn't be eating it. There are so many stigmas about food in our society (especially for women) that it's almost impossible to have a sensible, objective view of what one's weight or figure or health status is actually like because somehow it's become inextricably linked to self-esteem, so you feel fat if you're upset and skinny when you're confident. You go into a film feeling attractive then come out after a couple of hours of staring at Keira Knightley's collarbones, feeling like a house. It seems like the only reason anyone ever gets into a position in which they want to lose weight is when they have the opinion that the weight they are now makes them somehow unworthy, and that if they were a couple of sizes thinner they would be better people - and who wants to feel like that? There must be a way to want to lose weight without having to hate yourself first, but all the thin people who come up with ways to make fat people less fat seem not to have thought of this.

Whoa, long comment.

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