As an aging former military member it seems like personal responsibility is becoming more and more a foreign concept. I'm saying this not to kvetch but to get peer perception on the thought.
Day to day, people I know, people I overhear. people I talk to , show lots of personal responsibility. Sure they might skip the gym, or eat some cake. But they take responsibility for that, and themselves at large.
Frankly its easier to sell newspapers or get views by talking about someone we can look at and say "Wow, I know I skipped the gym today, but I'm not that bad", than to hear an altogether more boring story of the 99% that are basically the same as ourselves.
I understand it's not that simple (e.g., gut bacteria has been tied to weight control). None the less i know people who had what I would consider serious med issues (e.g., cancer) and made no change in lifestyle.
Yes, I'm generalizing. I apologize. But the obesity rate doesn't match well with self responsibility.
95% of the messages are: eat what you want, what matters is you still love yourself." Too few add that the extra weight is unhealthy.
The health behaviour of young children is largely influenced by parents. While promoting healthy eating and activity at school is probably helpful, it’s not enough.
A conclusion of "probably helpful" is not strong enough to spend public education dollars on, at the expense of other academic instruction (there are a fixed number of minutes in a school day, and if you're not teaching healthy eating you can be teaching something else).
Not to mention that what was taught for the past few decades (lots of grains and cereals and no fat) was flat-out wrong and probably contributed a lot to the obesity problems we have today.
Thanks.
Not to mention across my friends and acquaintances weight doesn't seem to correlate very well with any other since of personal responsibility. I have plenty of incredibly hard working heavy friends, and lazy as hell skinny ones.
What are your reasons for blaming an entire generation's(cross nationality, cross species) obesity problem on personal responsibility?
BTW what do you mean by personal responsibility? Is that a shift in culture, or is it a shift in willpower via dysgynic evolution?
Humams look around (subconsciously) and think "what's the norm?" Excess weight has become the norm. What's +40 lbs when 100 is so common? On top of that it's not PC to say anything on the subject.
Put another way, look at smoking. As it decreased, it decreased more. And so on. Individuals shifted the broader norm.
What made smoking different is it was so closely tied to causing cancer. But mention the ills of obesity and you're accused of fat shaming. We have cultural leaders (e.g., Oprah) saying "Love and accept yourself no matter what" but forgetting to add "even it leads to premature death."
Long to short, we've normalized the abnormal, the unhealthy. I personally don't see an end to this trend any time soon. I hope I'm wrong.
For example, type 2 diabetes is nearly always preventable. It is also the gateway if you will to other ills. But the T2D rate is increasing.
I realize this is a very non-HN comment but...I'm tired of people pissing and moaning about the cost of healthcare while they're inhaling another donut and washing it down with a 32oz soda.
There are plenty of med issues that are not preventable. I understand that. But any resources devoted to the preventable drives up demand for med resources, and thus costs overall. This is economics 101.
As we've grown more enlightened, as a society, to the reality that pretty much everything comes down to dumb luck in one way or another, we've started using this to excuse ourselves of our negative characteristics in order to relieve societal pressure to change, because either we don't really want to change or just because it is easier.
It's made even worse by the application of labels to the excuses. Once you assign a label to yourself it becomes part of your identity, your memetic self, and now needs to be defended and possibly even reinforced.
Which isn't to say that our old mindset is entirely correct either. "None of the blame" and "all of the blame" are just two extreme perspectives no the same reality.
I guess what I'm saying is that some things are significantly more difficult for some people than others due to factors beyond their control, and we should be more understanding of that than we are, but at the same time that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't work towards change, if change is what they desire, or that there shouldn't be consequences to being unwilling to invest that effort.
For context, I was somewhere north of 320lbs when I graduated college and have lost, and kept off, about half of that. It was by far the hardest I've ever done in my entire life. I wage constant war with my own body, every day, to maintain my current weight and I'm willing to do it because I took up a hobby where weighing less is significantly beneficial. As such, I have a very low opinion of people who think that because they have to exert little to no effort to maintain their weight then for others it must be just as easy. However, I also have a pretty low opinion of people making excuses for their weight, and believing that they shouldn't have to deal with at least some of the consequences of it. If you don't mind being fat so much, because you like eating more than what you think you'd get out of being thinner, that's fine, I can respect that, but you don't get to make that decision and not accept the consequences. You are entitled to be treated like a person regardless, but you don't get to complain about having to pay extra to fly because you need two seats.
And some recognition that context, inertia, and available choices matter too.
Ultimately kids might have some control over what they eat at school (depending on school dinners etc), but you're absolutely right that they have little control over what they eat at home. (or rather they'll be given the option to eat what the family eats or cook their own dinners - which no normal teenager is ever going to do week in and week out if there is already an easier option going)
I do also completely agree with you about leading by example with regards to exercise etc.
A kid can’t decide to move and in many cases it’s really hard to use alternatives: either neglect or deliberate attempts to discourage pedestrians mean that there’s very little in walking distance and often not even sidewalks or road crossings which don’t require substantial detours. It may or may not be safe / conducive to cycling but the safety culture is such that a lot of habits are set by the time they’re old enough to do that independently in their late teens.
Child Protective Services agencies need to get involved. In extreme cases it might be necessary to temporarily take away custody and put the child in foster care. But for most parents with obese children I think some mandatory classes on childhood nutrition and fitness could be a good start.
Diet, exercise and personal responsibility still do matter. This program was not able to get the target to embrace such things.
That said, there must have been some successes. Who were those? And why? Why was it effective? How can that be replicated and scaled to effect more?
Moi? I suspect too much was targeted at the kids and not enough at the parents. The parents do the shopping. They do the cooking. The kids, by definition, follow the lead of the parents. The kids adapt and conform to the nurture provided to them. Not to sound harsh but how often do to see a (pardon me) chubby kid and then see the parents are similar or worse?
Put another way, I'm willing to bet there was no change for the parents' weight / habits either; in turn no change for the "culture." And so it persists. This is what humans do. We conform to the norms around us.