If it were that simple, people would eat the calories they needed and no more.
Staying in shape is a struggle for me. I need to work at it constantly. A few years ago when I had knee surgery…I gained 30lbs…took me almost a year to loose it. But it’s MY problem…no one else. To blame anyone but yourself is a cop-out. Yes…a lot of food is high on calories and low on nutrients…so what? Believe it or not there is a plethora of FREE information about good nutrition available to anyone who wants to look. Not saying it’s easy…because it’s NOT…but it’s still a CHOICE.
Tons of free material on how to live a healthy lifestyle is everywhere. Including on TV. Every time I turn the TV on it seems like Dr. Oz, “The Doctors”, or some other health practitioner or show is on. I cannot accept that there is actually any more than a tiny fraction of the population that doesn’t know how to live a healthy lifestyle of they choose to. And our average grocery store is filled to the brim with healthy foods, so availability is not a problem… even if you don’t have a health food store within 5 miles of home… and I’ll bet you do.
Genetically, it’s generally believed by the scientific community that we’re programmed to overeat. For most of man’s time on this Earth, keeping food on our bellies was work, and meat didn’t store, and even when agriculture was developed we never knew when a drought or a natural disaster would leave us hungry. The ability to store perishables is also a recent thing, so for most of our history we ate when we could and starved when we couldn’t.
Now we have enormous amounts of every food conceivable readily available to us and still the genetic predisposition to overeat. And we no longer have to do physical labor unless we choose to or do so for economic reasons. It’s the perfect formula for obesity.
We all know what we should do. And what we should eat. It’s just that most of us lack the desire or discipline to do it. We all want to look youthful, and we all want to be in shape, but man, those corn fritters are good. And as to exercise… there are far, far more exercise machines being used as coatracks than as exercise machines.
Anyone who’s obese has only one person to blame; themselves. And that includes me. Well, I do acknowledge that upbringing is a major factor too. People who grow up in unhealthy lifestyle families are less likely to have healthy lifestyles. But they can still choose to live healthy if they desire.
Sitting here exercising only my fingertips and writing all that made me hungry. Fortunately, I have some apple pie in the fridge and some ice cream bars in the freezer. And if I want to eat them, IT’S NONE OF THE GOVERNMENT’S DOGGONED BUSINESS!!!
Not everyone who is overweight is guilty of pigging out and/or an improper diet either. Some people are just genetically prone to being heavier and others have certain health issues which cause weight gain or may prevent them from exercising.
If lack of exercise and diet was the sole causes of obesity then by all rights I should be tipping the scales at over 500 pounds. The only weight gain I’ve ever had was about 10 pounds when laid up in the hospital for a week or so and that was lost within a week of dismissal with no exercise at all.
Point well made, OK4450. I was in much better shape before my heart attacks, my degenerative disc disease, and my arthritis. But I still consider it as being mainly my fault.
And there are those who truly have glandular problems and other medical conditions that make it truly impossible for them to not become obese. But, by and large (pardon the pun) it’s the fault of the person him/her self. That doesn’t make them less of a good person, but an obese good person.
Cigarette related diseases though still with us, has taken a generation to help curb by dealing with our youth and exposure to smoking when young. It has become a choice battle that is much easier to make because it is much less a part of our daily environment. Low nutrient foods are not and food addiction is exactly the same. Without more stringent guidelines, our youth as that get older will continue to suffer from obesity at alarming increased rates. Sorry to disagree; it’s not about choices alone. It’s about taking poisons out of foods that contribute to malnutrition caused obesity and a life of suffering and high healthcare costs that are totally preventable. Yes, the govt. Fed and local, like dealing with cigarette addiction, has a huge role to play. To say food additives is about making choices is only addressing half the problem. Many people are on a nutritional island for a variety of reasons…they suffer from obesity at alarming rates.
And no, obesity is not their problem. It’s all of our problem in the preventable healthcare costs we all WILL share whether we want to or not.
I’m 5’10", was 240 by hi school graduation. Went up to 260 by the end of college. All you can eat, oily cafeteria food didn’t help. By the time I got laid off at the beginning of the recession, I considered all sorts of options, including joining the navy as an officer. Before the navy decided to select younger candidates instead of giving me an age waiver, my recruiter assigned his subordinates to get me in shape. When it was all said and done, I got down to195. As a consolation, my recruiter told me he never thought he would talk to me more than once. I got a great body out of that experience, can lift more weights and bike faster than people younger than me. As much as I love a rich creamy cheese cake, I rather stay skinny for a long time and do things that I couldn’t when I was younger
Btw, if you are in a habit of eating foods which are high in nutrition FIRST, it is much easier to control your caloric intake and your so called choices are much easier.
I’m not trying to be mean but I’m not going to allow an overweight person to tear up something I worked hard for. When they have to slide down the back of my seat just to get in. I’m not accommodating that.
There’s no need for the back of my seats to be wrinkled when my son and I total 300 pounds together. Also they will bear down on your car door to get out. I shouldn’t and I’m not going to tolerate it.
I knew a mechanic who was very large but not very tall. He mainly worked on Corvettes. He could move them in and out of the shop by turning the very top of the steering wheel. His daily driver was a bread van with a fold up drivers seat and a sliding door. He could step in and drive standing up.
He moved his shop to building next to an adult video store because it was hard to rent and the rent was cheap. Perhaps it was for dietary reasons, as the old shop was across the street from a pizza shop. It was so close the pizza shop delivered his lunch every day on foot…
I’d rather a 450 pound person not ride with me, even once, however the car will probably handle it better than I will.
A 300 pound person may cause premature seat failure if they ride in the car on a daily basis. But not once or twice. I’ve seen seats collapsing on vehicles owned by people this size.
That does not speak to personal preferences. IMHO people that heavy need to understand that they should not be hitching rides from friends, unless their friends drive vehicles that can tolerate extreme weight. Commercial vans and Jeeps would be examples.
You should also be aware that federal crash standards require that all car seats be able to tolerate a very high load without failing. If you want to look it up, it’ll be somewhere in the Department of Transportation (D.O.T.) website where the rules for over-the-road vehicles reside. Good information may be able to be accessed at the NHTSA website too.
My first reaction was to make a similar comment, however I noticed that the new post was by the same person that posted two years ago. I don’t understand why he/she reopened it, but that makes a difference.
I had a similar thought, and I was tempted to tag @cdaquila because this conversation has devolved into fat shaming and the original topic has been exhausted. However, the conversation is still related to automotive matters, so I don’t think it violates any rules.
I’m not sure if I should even join in on this necrothread from a few years ago, but mountainbike’s comment below resonated with me:
Quite a few years ago, I knew a guy who was probably ~6’2" tall and who weighed in excess of 300 lbs. He drove a VW Golf, and after ~3 years, the driver’s seat had essentially been destroyed.
I was shocked to see that the upholstery had more or less shredded, and the seat springs that you could see poking through the gaps in the upholstery were visibly sagging. The other seats looked almost brand-new, but his constant in and out (he was a newspaper reporter on the city beat), combined with his weight, just laid waste to that seat.
Hi. At the time this conversation died a few years ago, I see it was unrelated to cars. This iteration is car-related, but it’s true that I’m picking up on some comments that are pretty judgmental of the overweight. I have aimed to be very consistent and content-neutral about not closing conversations that 1) stay car-related and 2) aren’t flame wars, so I won’t take any administrative steps at this time. If it veers off again, and stays off, I’ll close it. Thanks for the tag, @whitey.
Gave a big buddy a ride in my '65 Rambler - he shifted in the seat a little too hard and broke the reclining seat gear (neat trivia on the Rambler; if you pulled the bench seat all the way up, the backs would recline all the way down and meet the rear seat and make a bed).
I’d guess a really overweight passenger could make the car’s suspension and steering more unstable, more likely to mis-behave should an emergency situation occur that required quick stopping/swerving. If I had this problem, I’d try to tactfully distribute the other passengers around to balance the weight more evenly.
Years ago I heard a guy reminisce about working as a dispatcher for a cab company in San Francisco. One of the drivers ate pastries all day; they called him ‘Doughnut’. He got so fat they removed the driver’s seat so he could fit. Then he got too fat to fit even without a seat, so they had to fire him.
