There is a weird Internet cult that celebrates obesity, but I think plenty who live in the "nothing you can do" camp internalized bad advice, got nowhere with it, and gave up.
Giving up is the only option after trying and failing diets and exercise programs your whole life. I started dieting when I was ~6 years old.
Desk jobs used to be uncommon back when most people worked on a farm. It is within my lifetime that this changed. When I was born, more than half of all people had physically hard jobs on farms, iirc.
This kind of "abstinence-only personal fitness" might work fine for cigarettes, but kinda breaks down when it's stuff you've been fed since you were 5 weeks old and has been injected into most pre-prepared foods in a "sweetness war" that's lasted decades.
Want to break a sugar addiction, stop eating, fast until you've broken all food addictions and shed much of the stored calories, and then build up a better diet when you start eating again.
Some people might find that a bit offensive, but its not really a moral argument but one of self determination. You chose to consume something and you choose to continue to consume that substance. The fact that it is a lot easier to start and to keep doing it then it is to stop, doesnt mean that you dont have a choice in the matter. The ods being stacked against you doesnt rob you of, or relieve you from, your freedom to choose.
If I understand the the concept correctly, Alcoholics Anonymous is partly to blame here for that mindset, with the focus on your powerlessness. But if you want it or not, it still is your choice, not an easy one and not one with a right or wrong answer, but ultimately your choice.
You are fundamentally not an object at the mercy of your circumstances, as easy as life would be that way.
A fantastic lesson in how to not understand addiction in the slightest.
I look forward to a more mature response when you get past whatever juvenile phase your comment is the product of.
I understand addiction just fine, addictions can be broken: that is a fact; you can break your body of any such dependency and that you can, means it's your responsibility to do so and thus your fault if you remain addicted. I understand addiction, you don't understand that we don't all then conclude from that that one has no culpability. Other people have different moral reasoning than you do, that they disagree with you about something does not mean it's because they don't understand it.
Nobody's saying it's all somebody else's fault.
The only valid position to hold about this topic is that it's complex and multi-faceted.
Sure, self-discipline and personal choices are a factor - but the issue of what influences people's ability to exert self-discipline and make healthy choices is a vast and little-understood topic in its own right.
Whatever the case, if a child is raised on a high-carb/low-fat diet from a young age because their parents and schools accept the official advice, the carb-dependent metabolism they end up with by the time they reach adulthood will most certainly complicate their ability to make healthy choices.
> you still got addicted to it, you allowed it to happen
Societies everywhere restrict access to alcohol and tobacco to minors because it's accepted that minors are not capable of making fully-informed choices.
Why do you hold a different position regarding sugar?
Yes they are.
> The only valid position to hold about this topic is that it's complex and multi-faceted.
Incorrect. That's a valid position, it's certainly not the only one.
> the carb-dependent metabolism they end up with by the time they reach adulthood will most certainly complicate their ability to make healthy choices.
Nonsense, your metabolism is not set in stone, they can simply change their diets and if they don't, no one is to blame but them for their continued unhealthiness.
> Why do you hold a different position regarding sugar?
Sugar isn't remotely comparable to those two; they're restricted to minors because they're lethal drugs, sugar is not.
Please link to their comments.
>Incorrect. That's a valid position, it's certainly not the only one.
It is when you're talking about an organic system like a human body or any evolved system in nature.
> they can simply change their diets and if they don't, no one is to blame but them
No they can't; this is the entire point. If they could, they would, and metabolic illness would simply cease to be a problem rather than being one of the most pernicious problems in all of medicine.
> they're restricted to minors because they're lethal drugs, sugar is not
The evidence suggests otherwise.
But what's it to you anyway? What's your motivation for being utterly dogmatic and uncompromising, rather than engaging in a good-faith examination of the evidence?
But if sugar/food addiction is relevant, there should be some data on its effects on non-obese, physically active individuals who maintain a lifestyle that allows them to burn enough calories to offset the caloric effects of sugar consumption. What you linked doesn't mention obesity, yet you're conflating addiction with obesity in your response.
That's a necessary condition, but it doesn't really represent a useful model of the system of interest. It's a bit like saying that a car moves forward because the engine is hotter than the surrounding environment.
> That's a necessary condition
And addiction isn't, it's merely a contributing factor. Like I wrote, how do you factor in non-obese sugar/food addicts, and, vice versa, obese people who don't suffer from food addiction?
Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices. Placing unsubstantiated importance on the role of addiction is just as baseless as disregarding all obese people as lazy. Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"? Because a doctor can't prescribe it in a pill?
The point of my analogy isn't that I was crying out for a slightly better car analogy. My point is this: if there's a problem with someone operating a system, it's usually unhelpful to model the system as a black box that happens to follow some universal physical law. It's not necessarily useless to do that, but it's unlikely to capture the aspects of the system that people directly experience and care about.
> Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices.
Nobody in this thread claimed (or even suggested, by my reading) that food addiction was necessary for obesity. The description of "poor lifestyle choices" elides any serious analysis of specifically which behavior patterns are involved and what factors drive them. This is especially true when obesity is increasing across large populations. I don't think it's remotely sufficient to suppose that the behavior of hundreds of millions of people changed in similar ways in the span of ~50 years simply because they all spontaneously made unrelated individual decisions to have different preferences. I doubt that you believe this either, so I don't understand why you've arrived at this description as though it's an alternative to addiction and not just a larger category or higher level of abstraction that includes it.
> Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"?
Of course such measures would be of interest; my objection to your previous post is, in some sense, that it failed to describe any.
Its mean-spirited and somewhat ignorant to blame your fat friends who, along with you, have been deliberately lied to about the ill effects of the massive amounts of sugar you consume on a daily basis for the last half century.
First, they can’t fight what they don’t know is killing them because they’ve been lied to that it’s lack of exercise, it’s the steak and fat. That it’s a problem with them. How can they win when the ‘health food’ shoved in their faces is packed with more sugar?
Second, once they realize how to get out of the mess, they find out how nearly impossible it is to eat anything of what they are used to eating. Sugar is so prevalent in everything in the supermarket, from the obvious ice cream, ketchup, sriracha sauce to mayo, crackers, smoked fish, practically all frozen or canned items, pizza, bread and on and on.
The system is rigged against them.
My son, if he has a single cookie, will develop raging athletes' foot and become a complete monster for days. When I say monster, I mean violent and completely uncontrollable. Maybe you don't have to deal with it, and for that you should be thankful, but for others, it's a no shit problem that they have to deal with day in and day out. Be thankful, but don't presume that your blessings are bestowed on the rest of humanity.
Maybe the next article will be some conspiracy theory combination of the two.