The problem with letting a woman know you care about looks

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Tan and thin is the ideal because it is the least common/most resource draining. I don't think it's about doing good at all, it's about making money. That's why there does need to be some government intervention in the US because capitalism is in a way, making people fat. The way we subsidize corn here is absolutely bonkers.
Fat signals poor, and whatever looks poor, looks unattractive in mainstream culture.
And as far as heath goes, that concern trolling doesn't do anyone any good.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XhTA4xOxCc[/youtube]

Obesity makes a woman less fertile and poses numerous risks to the fetus if she were to get pregnant. In men, obesity stalls testosterone. This is why it's considered less attractive in any culture where people eat enough food everyday.

Furthermore, people who are obese are less active and eat more than other people. Our instincts tell us that this isn't good.

Capitalism isn't making people fat. If anything, you can thank the free market and supply and demand for the low prices of eggs, milk and chicken in the US. There are many countries that are more capitalistic than the US, with much lower rates of obesity. The country with the highest rates of overweight people here in Europe, also happens to be the country with the most left-wing government (Belarus).

Food is more expensive in relative terms than it was 10 years ago, and yet the weight is greater. This argument fails - especially when it isn't the eggs, milk, and chicken that is causing the weight gain, it is processed food and what is added to it.

Before one can even begin to talk about solutions, causes must be understood - without the influence of ideological hopes and fantasies.

It depends on what food you're talking about. I didn't say that milk, eggs, lean beef, chicken, tuna or anything healthy yet cheap caused the weight gain. What's causing the weight gain is that portion sizes when it comes to processed food has increased, that people become lazier (20 years ago, you didn't see fat people riding Rascal scooters) and so on. In general, the food prices fluctuate all the time, it seems.



Furthermore, the US is less capitalistic now compared to the rest of the world than it was during Reagan, Bush sr. or for that matter Clinton. There are many countries that are more capitalistic than the US (Ireland, Singapore and Switzerland, to mention a few) where obesity is less rampant.

Globally, corporations have far more power than they have ever had before. Even in the US this is true. For 30 years, deregulation has been a political fetish and the economy is far more ruthlessly capitalist than it was 50 years ago, when the market was more heavily regulated.

Globally and nationally, food prices are higher. There are in fact shortages in the overall supply, relative to decades previous. Obesity is on the increase and much of the food supply is contaminated with unnecessary adulterants such as salt and sugar, for market reasons.

Obesity is on the increase even in places like Ireland and Singapore. People, however, have not changed - they never do. They are no more or less lazy than they ever were, they simply exist under different circumstances and influences.

Actually, countries with food shortages (Somalia, Zimbabwe, Bolivia and so on) are ruled by left-wing politicians. Had it not been for the socialist wish for biofuel during the mid-to-late 2000's, much of the food shortages in Latin America could have been avoided (after everyone else started seeing how hypocritical and cynical the biofuel industry was, the socialists finally jumped on the bandwagon as well.

International corporations are what propelled the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) from developing countries into countries that rivaled Westen Europe in living conditions. Actually, these countries have even grown during the current economic recession that a lot of western countries face.

In fact, lack of international corporation is why no communist countries has ever reached a standard of living on par with Western-Europe or North America.



I never claimed otherwise, but Singapore has a much more liberated economy than the United States and still has a much lower rate of obesity. Some increase in obesity rate is expected though, as people get lazier due to the fact that Singapore has gone from being a third world country to a country with a higher standard of living than the US in a matter of 40 years.

The food market is global and there are literally dozens of countries ruled by right wing generalissimo's, which have food shortages. Left wing ones too, but it doesn't break down along left-right lines at all.

We are getting way off topic. Things are regulated all the time and often with great success, even in the context of market economies. Do you read the nutritional labels on food products? You wouldn't be able to without regulation, that was fought tooth and claw by the food corporations. They said the ink was too expensive (I am not joking). Corporations deploy libertarian dupes as a way of avoiding regulation, but this has huge social and economic costs at the national level when regulation would be wiser.

Last edited by edgewaters on 06 Jun 2012, 8:17 am, edited 5 times in total.

I'll agree with this one and I'll say why - we should appreciate everyone for who they are, big or small, short or tall, fat or thin, able or disabled. Considering we are a mental health community that has to deal with ignorance and intolerance daily, that principle of tolerance should be applied somewhere.

HOWEVER, we shouldn't be asking people to become less healthy, less able, less appealing to certain groups of people just to make those that feel insecure about their own worth or being less insecure. It's like asking athletes to slow down, those that want to live healthier or gain attention from peers (whether we like it or not) to become unhealthy, as to not offend others. Next we will be asking brown people to be more black or more white to show they aren't sitting on the fence.

If you have problems with your own weight, health, abilities, cognitive thinking fine most of us here won't judge you on that and we will respect you for how you are. You should offer the same respect and understanding to others though that make health, lifestyle or personal moral choices that don't match your own or make you feel better about yourself. Making people feel bad for trying to be like the models on TV, is just as bad as putting down those that aren't inch by inch perfect as those same models and pressurising media representations of how we "should" be.

The only capitalist dictatorships that are left are located in the middle-east, but even countries like Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have high standards of living. Generally speaking, a highly capitalist economy combined with ruthless supression of the people (similar to Batista or Pinochet) isn't possible in 2012.



South Korea gradually became more market oriented already in early the 1960's, Taiwan eased it's restrictions on the import and export at the same time and by the early 1970's the nation was a mixed economy with capitalist tendencies. Allthough the People's Action Party of Singapore historically was a left-wing party, the laws became more capitalist oriented during the late 70's. Singapore experienced it's most significant growth after 1980, though, after the production of computer hardware became widespread.

State enterprise plays a huge role in the US as well, not to mention the fact that a lot of private industries are heavily subsidized. Just thought I'd mention it.

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Last edited by smudge on 08 Jun 2012, 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, it's lack of discipline. People no longer cook anymore. Cooking takes discipline to learn and time to do. I'd say it's damned near impossible to get anywhere fitness-wise without cooking for yourself. Now there's lots of reasons why our country is seemingly incapable of cooking for ourselves, some of it is laziness, some is overworking in other areas of life (ie, jobs) but until we figure out how to cook again, we're screwed.

It's easy to blame the food companies, and much harder to blame ourselves. It's paralleled with the banking crisis. Banks allowed people to buy houses they couldnt afford, people bought them, whose fault, then? Food companies market food that's bad, because people buy it. So, everyone wants external control of the food companies, but nobody takes it upon themselves to just not buy bad stuff.

For all the bad stuff, there's a ton of good stuff on the market for VERY cheap, I can buy a pound of sprouts for 69c where I live. Dried beans are like a buck a pound, brown rice, buck a pound, chicken, like a buck a pound, Frozen fruit to make smoothies, like $2 a pound. If you want good food, it's fairly cheap if you know where to look. In some locales things are more or less expensive, as I've seen in Vermont and the South. But the solution is quite simple, you just cook food as best from scratch as you can, and yeah. There's a problem of time, but this applies to everything in life, I'm not excused from taking showers for example, if I don't have time in the morning, you're just expected to make time.

So the solution, cook your food from scratch.

Its one of those societal things that clearly show that humans are social animals within confines and for social behavior to work there needs to be an external "enemy" so to speak. Overweight people, smokers and so on, need to be picked on in order to make people who are not smokers or overweight feel better. Look at how beauty ideals have evolved in the Western world in the last 50 years, and in many cases we've gone from "healthy" to "unhealthy". For instance the female ideal of beauty has become underweight and in many cases the ideals for men are not the John Wayne, Sean Connery types but the Zach Braff and Robert Pattinson types which are more androgynous than they are male in many cases.

The obesity issues we have do need to be handled, but social alienation, bullying, teasing and so on are not good methods to get this done. Easier access and lower prices for healthy food and snacks would greatly help for instance. I'm eating "low-carb" a majority of the time, and I find it difficult to find snack foods that are protein/fat with little to no carbohydrates. There are things like the Atkins line of products, but the price of those products are roughly twice as high as a snickers bar and contain a ton of artificial sweeteners.

Fast food is a huge part of the problem since it tends to be high in sodium and sugars, because humans have evolved to love those tastes, to a point where "normal", "healthy" food does not elicit the same rush of reward chemicals when consumed. There needs to be a wholesale approach to the issue, which includes both psychological and physiological tactics to review whether or not our society is healthy in both respects. When you hear about 9 year olds going on diets and such, we need to review if our society is insane. Personally, in going from about 300 lbs to 200lbs using a low carb approach, I found that simple carbohydrates are the problem, since they cause the body to store fat. If you look at bears when they put on their winter weight, they eat lots and lots of sweet berries to put their bodies in "food storage" mode, and it works much the same for humans.
Its all about insulin control, in the case of the too many calories and too many carbs diet.

In short I just feel people should know the difference between defending tolerance towards a category of people and bullying the other category of people for simply wanting to fit in with society or actually already fitting society's ideals. There are people that make larger, less active, less vain people feel inferior but people wanting to be more active, over actively pursuing society's ideas of what healthy is shouldn't be lumped in with those jerks unless they are exerting that sort of behavior. Bullying and agendas to make other groups feel inferior because of personal insecurities exist in ALL circles of people. Let's not pretend otherwise.

HAHA - All Hail, The Something or Other!

It's obvious that you care. It pisses you off seeing people let themselves go and getting taken in by a broken system. I get that. Personally, I blame the system, not the people that are taken in by it. I think this is a growing pain time in history where science and common sense are battling it out and everyone's emotions run really high depending on what side of the line they are on. It's hard to see that everyone seems to actually be on the same side but coming at it from different perspectives.


Fighting off what most of society says is a pretty daunting task for most people. It may not be that difficult for you, but you have to consider everything that makes you YOU. You are able to butt heads with the system. You're not afraid to speak your mind. You're not afraid of facing the tougher thoughts. It could be because of how you were raised, where you were raised, or how you simply are as a person. It sounds like it frustrates you that you can't understand why, if it's so easy for you, other people can't do the same. Why can't other people see the truth that is so plainly easy for you to see? It may not be that difficult, but it's also not that simple.

People are the same as they've always been. It's just easier not to cook now. The market caters to convenience.



Blame isn't the issue. On a personal level it's fine to look at one's habits, but here's the cold hard fact in terms of society as a whole: people in general aren't going to change. They haven't changed; and they won't change. You're not going to change them. They respond to their environment in predictable ways.

It isn't the food companies fault. They're in business to make money, that's what they are supposed to do. They exploit weakness sometimes to do this, but it's not about moral judgements, because moral judgements aren't solutions. Solutions are things that provide working results.



Right, and that's not going to change by just trying to convince them. It's not a solution. We can moan and whine about the ethics of it all forever, but that's just mental masturbation, doesn't get us any closer and might well get us farther from working solutions.

Food regulation works. People wouldn't even be able to eat healthy if it weren't for food regulation, because there would be no nutritional labels or ingredient lists. The food companies fought tooth and nail to prevent it. They spent millions in lobbying against it. They lost, and now people know what's in their food and you have the ability to make an informed choice. Because of regulation. I'm not saying let's move to a command economy or anything. A tax break for companies that meet certain targets, or a tax on additives (same difference). Whatever. There are solutions. Figuring out who's to blame isn't anything at all.

Last edited by edgewaters on 06 Jun 2012, 10:29 am, edited 2 times in total.

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