Most Americans are fat for reasons that really aren't the result, exclusively, of their individual choices. As this article says, although not, imo, clearly enough, a person's economic reality greatly impact their health.
I am obese. I eat with a careful rigidity. I exercise a lot: I swim one hour almost every single day and I walk about five miles a day (I don't own a car). I lost a lot of weight a few years ago and am keeping it off .. but I have been frozen at 240 pounds (I am female, five feet six inches tall) for about two years.
Before I lost 90 pounds (I had ballooned up to 330), I went through months of near starvation and I couldn't scape off a single pound.
It is a myth that people can lose weight if they follow the rules. Sometimes a person's metabolism is not working.
My metabolism? I took a boatload of psychotropic medications for about twelve years. All those meds cause weight gain. There are class action suits for some of the meds I took because the meds cause . . . diabetes. Also, because lots of those meds cause weight gain. And liver damage. And guess what happens when you have liver damage? Your metabolism goes out of whack. Is it them entirely your fault that you don't lose weight even when you eat 1,200 calories daily, exercise a lot?
My body is damaged.
Additionall, diabetes runs in my family. My grandparents, on both sides, had diabetes. None of them were fat. My dad had it: he wasn't fat.
Did the meds give me diabetes? Was I genetically pre-disposed?
In the years before I actually became diabetic, I watched myself balloon up even though I have never eaten the way people who aren't fat imagine fat people eat. I never pigged out ... sure, in the course of my life, I have eaten to many slices of pizzas or a pint of ice cream . . but for the most part, I have always eaten a very typical amount of food. And I have never really been into sweets.
Now, I eat protein and low carb vegetables (to control my diabetes). .
I have gone on protein fasts, medically supervised: I stil don't lose weight.
It is true that swimming is not a great weight loss exercise, which is why I walk a lot. I love to swim and I know it is good for my health. . .
I know my story is anecdotal . . but I can't help believing that most people who are fat n this country are fat because they eat a typical American diet. As the article points out, poor folks can't afford good produce. So then we penalize people for being poor and fat?
Being fat is a highly complex problem. It is not solely a health issue. The real issue behind the obesity epidemic is economic. Our government subsidizes the production of cheap agricultural products (cheap fructose corn syrup, cheap potatoes, etc), our capitalist economic is ruthlessly designed to entice people to buy crappy manufactured food, then we only pay people barely enough to buy the crappy sucky nonnutritous food . . we don't pay people enough to join gyms and public parks cost more and more money . . and now we are going to penalize capitalisms fat victims by charging them more money for health care?
That is like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
And why is it okay to discriminate against fat? Singling out fat people is no different than singling out people with diabetes or cancer and saying 'since you have cancer, we are going to charge you more because you could have avoided getting cancer if you had only eaten organic food and avoided pesticide consumption. ..let's also penalize people with high blood pressure because if they exercised more and ate better. .. and we could penalize people who catch colds because if they wore masks or lived in a bubble they wouldnt catch colds.
And let's charge paraplegics more if they became paraplegic in a car accident because if they had been a better driver . . . .
