W.H.O.: Average Global Adult Weight: 137 lb.s (Page 2)

This is coming from the perspective of a high school student.

It seems to me that kids quite simply don't want to eat healthy. In my school health class is required and healthy eating is brought up again and again, and I feel like they do a good job on educating us on things. However, only if you pay attention during the class. Most kids seem like they are more interested in talking to their friends or messing around than learning.

Also, school lunches are not the best example setters. I think that they are trying, but are doing a poor job. For example, at my high school, they have a soda machine, ice cream, cakes, cookies, chips, french fries, etc. everyday. I couldn't tell you how many kids get a cookie, soda, fries, and some chips for lunch EVERY DAY. 

The school acts like they are trying to make improvements by taking away the salt, adding "healthy hot lunches", etc. But they just aren't doing enough, and the things they are doing, the kids don't appreciate it and they are not taking advantage of the healthy options.

Being one of those weird triathletes, I always eat healthy and oftentimes bring lunch from home. In a highschool setting, this is definately considered as weird and a waste of time to other kids. I don't care. I think a big problem for other people is their need to "fit in". 

My parents never really encouraged me to be super healthy and active, they let me be me. I chose this lifestyle and I don't regret it. Many kids prefer to fit in and be unhealthy, or they just lack the drive to want to change their lives in a positive way when they way they had been living before was much easier, albeit unhealthy.

^^YES.  Mixed signals is right.  It's like one extreme or the other.  Kids see celebrities, model and actors who look "perfect" and strive to be like them; it's unrealistic so it sets them up for failiure.  Then they feel badly about themselves and who's motivated to take care of their body or be healthy in that state of mind?

I always find this an interesting concept because I truly believe that a person and people are two distinctly different things. 

A person can follow a healthy diet and exercise and maintain a healthy weight because a person has free will and will make a decision and do what they feel best.  A person is also very poorly modeled with BMI and likely will not fit any of the stereo types well.

People on the other hand, when taken as a whole society, are a completely different entity.  They act as a group to environmental stimuli that has little to no bearing on free will.  Social, economic and environmental stimuli will form and shape the evolution of a people despite what each individual person in the group may choose to do.  For a people, BMI will very accurately model the group.

The goal of the war on obesity is not to get individual people to learn about healthy eating and fitness and make a life change but to change the environment stimuli that moved the entire society of people in the direction of ever increasing BMI.

Ill end with one of my favorite quotes.

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. - MIB

I agree that corn based diets are not the healthiest but I disagree that this is the root cause of our obesity epidemic.  I think one can be of a healthy body weight even without extensive knowledge about nutrition.

I believe the real problem and key to fixing it is portion control.  It doesn't matter if you're eating a 100% organic, local diet--if you're consuming mass calories, you will become overweight.  I know so many people struggling to lose weight who get trapped into thinking that just because they shop at Whole Foods, buy organic and read labels that they'll lose weight.  And they don't.  And it's because they're still overeating, just overating good foods instead of McD's.

People are just in the habit of eating WAY too much.  We've lost touch with what it is to be satiated and satisfied or to eat to sustain our bodies instead of just eating for pleasure or as a hobby.  Restaurants are partially to blame but people still overeat at home.  And the extensive nutrition labels meant to cause changes have caused little.  It seems a large percentae of individuals still eat without abandon regardless of how many serving sizes they're consuming.  It's impulse control, and as a society we lack it. 

We want it, we want it now, we can have it now, and more of it.  No wonder we're a fat nation.

The high school kid gets the "cookie"!

Dude, I think you're perspective is spot on here. In general, nowadays, we triathletes (or any healthy/active group) are considered weird for our healthy, active lifestyle and generally healthy eating habits. It's just not the norm anymore.

At my office, my employees know not to bother asking me to eat with them when they order their pizza, mexican, fast-food hamburgers, almost daily. They pick at me..."Mr. healthy eater" or "Mr. Triathlete diet", whatever. It's funny and I let them laugh, but I'm the one "winning"; quite ironic, I think. But they think I'm weird, because I don't eat the same nasty, horribly-fattening crap they do. I do occasionally indulge in some greasy pizza or a great big 'ol juicy homemade hamburger but its not often, and I try to be extra good and set the example at work, hoping I might just teach someone something one day.

Point is...healthy eating is not the norm and we are "weirdos" for bucking the "system". It's gonna take a huge culture change to get away from it. I kinda like being different than most, anyway, though.

The point about kids being in too much structured activity...well that's a whole other issue but we, too, have a traveling soccer kid. He's very lean, active, and healthy as a horse. It's because we sit down to a home-cooked meal either before or after soccer practice, instead of opting for the sonic drive-in down the street from the fields, like some of the parents do. When we do travel, we bring healthy foods with us. We aren't alone, there are several parents who do that but then there are several who do not. As for me, I would rather have to rush around and worry about how we are gonna get that healthy meal in before or after soccer practice/games than have a sedentary kid sitting in front of the tv or xbox all night long.

Bottome line, most people in the US are just plain lazy with waaaay too much access to horrible foods and have been "programmed" not to give a chit, or just grew up with it and are too ignorant to know better! My parents grew up in a time when everyone had a garden full of vegetables, harvested wild game/fish, and they would go to the butcher/grocery for some of their meats and that's pretty much what they ate. There was no Kraft mac n cheese in a box!

I think we have put ourselves in a position to fail...

Healthy food is more expensive.  I do the whole foods thing once in a while, but it's not even that.  Even getting lean ground beef, whole wheat buns, the fixings, for a healthier homade burger will cost 4x times more than just dropping into McDonalds.  That's why the poorer areas tend to be more obese, go figure.  Back in the day, the fat cats where the rich...

Can't blame the industry, but you want to.  They are entitiled to make a buck.  If they can produce a cheaper, "better" product that sells?  Why blame them for that?  It's the people that have to decide to buy it or not.  So all the advertising is to get us to buy this stuff.

Everyone is on a budget, especially schools.  In many areas, the best meals kids get are at school.  But they need to cut budgets, so they start serving the mass produced and cheap items.  They may offer some healthier choices, but do you expect kids to select that salad over a slice of pizza on their own?  No way.  At home, we ate what was put in front of us and it was healthy.  On my own?  I wasn't so good.  Thankfully, stayed thin.

Social stigma says to critisize an obese person is wrong, but you can jump all over a smoker.  (there is the second hand smoke arguement).

What I find amazing, is the obese person will say they want to lose weight, to be active, to start dating (if they don't), etc.  Some interviewed on "Weight of a Nation" just broke my heart.  They were so sad...  But then just didn't do it.  I felt bad for their frustration.  They have good intentions, but just don't know how to do it.  Like my golf swing...  I have great intentions, try this, try that and no luck.  It kills me - and that's just a golf swing - not my health.

I also got mad at parents saying they can't get their obese kids out of the door or off the Xbox.  Or make them eat healthy.  Then you look at THEM...  And you know why - they lead by example.

It goes on and on.  I get mad at everyone, can't blame anyone, want to blame everyone, can't take comfort that as long as I take care of myself and my family it's good enough.  This is going to overwhelm the system in 15 years.  Medical costs, lost efficiency in the work place, etc.  It will pay, even if I'm healthy.

ALSO, back to the drinks...  The body doesn't register AT ALL the colories taken in as beverages.  You can take in thousands of calories and the body doesn't get the signal that it's enough.  Soda and other sugary beverages - even juice is HUGE in calores and why we are obese.

I also saw in a documentary, that we are hard wired to not feel the "full" signal when eating excessively fatty foods.  BAck in the day, high calorie meals were few and far between (hunting and gathering days).  If you got a kill, you needed to get as much into you as possible to last to the next time, and before it goes bad.  So your body would turn off the "full" sensation a bit.  However, the body never addapted to the fact that food is around the corner and only 5 minutes away at any given time.

It's interesting that several posters refer to "back in the day" and how much better our it was in relation to diet.  Assuming we are talking 50's, 60's and 70's, we are also talking about the birth of fast food, of TV dinners, of convenience foods.  Back in the day, we probably had LESS healthy options and good information on nutrition than we do now.

What was different back in the day before the obesity epidemic wasn't the food, it was the attitudes toward food.  To me, this is the key to solving it.  People don't have to be able to afford a nutritionist or shopping at Whole Foods to be of a healthy body weight.  They know about fruits and veggies.  They know what a portion size roughly is.  They just don't have the will to eat a healthy amount of daily calories.

One other point to add to this discussion is the recent articles in our local paper about how much more money it costs to eat “healthy” foods.  The argument then took a turn towards socio-economic/class warfare/left/right, basically, if you are poor or lower middle class, you cannot afford to eat healthy.  It included an opinion page cartoon showing obese children wandering a desert in search of healthy food, which was depicted as being on a mountain, glowing with dollar signs.

I found this to be very disturbing.  On a personal level, my wife and I decided to start eating healthier about 2 years ago.  This included converting to being vegetarians but still eat fish and an occasional burger/steak.  We also cut out basically all processed foods such as lunch meat, potato chips, soup from a can, etc., plus no more fast food except in rare circumstances.

A funny thing happened.  My wife, who is meticulous in her tracking of our budgets, found we spent around 10-15% less money on food than the previous year.

Now, walk into Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck as we call it) and yes, eating “healthy” is expensive.  But, you can find good food and fresh vegetables everywhere these days.

As others have said, there are a lot of factors here.  Just stating my thoughts.

Full disclosure, I just came out of a meeting and grabbed a slice of cheese pizza!

Are you calling me fat?

Chapeau.

A few years ago there was a book published with a title something like "French Women Don't Get Fat"  If you go to France you will notice that the majority of people are at a healthy weight.  The author examined the differences between the way women in the US ate, and the way women in France ate.  Some of the observations she made were that the French take their time when eating their food, and savor every bite.  Also, the portions they eat are about a third of the size that American women eat.  They also walk on a daily basis, and aren't obsessed with counting calories or grams of fat. 

Some have proposed that the French are skinny because a lot of them smoke.  This was discounted by the author of the book. 

I so agree with this!  I think there are circumstances where sometimes this is the need b/c of allergy or other issues with texture (ie there are some illnesses or disability where this matters) but in general I think many parents do this b/c they don't want the argument with their children or spend time making a meal "they won't eat".  I have always been of the mindset you eat what we put in front of you, I do not prepare two meals, one for adults and one for children (and my kids are only 3 and 5!)  A lot of times people ask me how I get my kids to eat so many different things (they don't even like chicken fingers/nuggets and processed mac n cheese) and I really think it comes down to the fact that I worked hard early on to expose them to tastes and textures outside the realm of generic baby foods by making my own pureed baby foods so I could control the texture and offer more of a variety in taste/spices/flavors and combinations of flavors and by breastfeeding b/c then they get 'taste' of what I'd eaten through the milk other than the same taste every.single.meal in formula - I'm not a BFing Nazi, please nobody take this comment to be judgmental if you are a formula feeding family, I just honestly believe it to be part of why my kids developed a wide range of tastes they enjoy.  We also stick to natural and organic foods so they don't even like the taste of most processed, artificially flavored, or fast food, etc.  There are so many layers to this topic for certain, I just believe as parents we have to take the steering wheel on this one, we can't just go on automatic pilot and think obesity and poor food habits etc will not happen to our kids.  Beyond that we need to be the example for them and clearly kids these days are not getting much of that anymore, sadly. 

My middle daughter who is 4 has this very issue.  The problem is getting her to eat anything that isn't bland or crunchy in texture.  It has taken us 2 years to get her to eat peanut butter and 3 years to eat meat.   On top of that, my husband is a type 2 diabetic.  

We have become very aware of the aspects of food through this process, and I can see where people would get discouraged with preparing meals, gosh knows I have my days.  

I feel that society has taken on such a fast pace and as a whole people want things now without a lot of work.  No one thinks of the consequences till later in life when they become discouraged to do anything about their situation.  We need more education in society about food and health.  

I have a friend whose husband had a heart attack at the age of 37.  She has 3 small children and her husband to take care of.  She has to rely on the government to help her with food stamps, etc.  She uses the help of a nutritionist to make sure she is buying the right food and making the right choices with her kids and husband.  She tells me that when she goes in monthly to be reviewed for the amount of assistance she receives, it is just a matter of paperwork.  We have had many discussions about the fact that perhaps there should be an educational class on nutrition before you receive the food stamps.  

This is a really good point- criticism doesn't equal insults.

One of the tough things about making good eating and exercise a habit is that the reward is not immediate and not entirely tangible- it takes, what, a few weeks until you see any difference in your body, and probably a little longer than that before you actually feel better.  At some point you crave the healthy feeling you get from eating good stuff and exercising but it takes a LONG time to get there.  But the reward of a slice of pizza is immediate.

I think another factor at work is that many people don't even see regular exercise and healthy eating as an option- they just don't see anyone doing it.  I live in a neighborhood that is in general on the lower end of middle-class, about 50/50 black/ white, and it is very rare that I see anyone out exercising, even taking a walk (aside from young men and kids playing basketball).  My neighbor drives 20 minutes one way to drive to a gym to run on the treadmill and just cannot conceive that I run here (and I've never had any problems or been hasseled.) We don't have a grocery store here but there's one about 2 miles away so it's hardly a food desert- but when I see what the people from my neighborhood buy, a lot of the time it's chips, soda, packaged food.

It's almost like you need someone in your peer group to show you- you know what, you can run.  You can eat a meal that's half vegetables and doesn't have any meat and it can taste good.  I don't think it's necessarily a class thing but a lot of social groups perpetuate a cycle of inactivity and bad eating.  And I'm not sure how to change that. 

I'm not convinced that being overweight is all that bad for a person, that BMI is a correct indicator over a large and diverse population, or that this problem wasn't in part caused by women joining the workforce.

I agree. My children are much more adventurous in what they will eat, and I also attribute that to breastfeeding and people food (not baby food). My kids, for the most part, eat what we eat.

I also will brag on my kids a little and say that all three of them would pick a salad (or individual raw veggies) over junk food. They like their sweets, certainly, but even my 5 year old knows that his plate needs to have a balance of protein, fruit, veggie, and "bread." And he understands that corn is not a veggie. (But he probably wants to count ketchup.)

When my oldest was almost 4, we visited his paternal grandparents, and my then mil made a sandwich for him with Wonder Bread. He sat for a moment looking at it, then poked the bread with his finger, "What is this stuff???" He had never had white bread before.

Sadly, that same child is very overweight now, at 16. He makes basically good food choices (with the exception of sugared soda; in contrast, my 5 year old hates soda), but his proportions are insanely large. My two younger kids are thin, so I often wonder what went wrong with the older one . . .

It's hard to take, honestly, and even though I don't know what I did wrong, I know I am responsible. He doesn't take to preaching/nagging, so I try to provide a good example for him to follow, but as some of you have mentioned, he just thinks I'm weird.