I spend some my time at a forum devoted to long distance running. I enjoy talking about politics with the people there, though there is one topic that always sparks endless debates, and that is weight. A large number, though not all, of the people on the forum see weight in the following ways:
- For overweight and obese people diet and exercise are "successful" when they lead to weight loss.
- It is possible for adults to lose weight and keep the weight off using diet and exercise.
- Failure to lose weight, indicates a lack of will power, or a failure to take personal responsibility for ones health.
There is some truth to all of these statements and it isn't surprising that a lot of people in a group of long distance runners thinks these things are true. But it is still worthwhile to reexamine each of these ideas.
For overweight and obese people diet and exercise are "successful" when they lead to weight loss.
Improvements in diet and exercise have positive effects even if they don't lead to any weight-loss. This is a fact that seems to get lost in the shuffle. But it is important becuase, very few people are successful when lose weight and keep it off to do this. It would make more sense to say that it is possible for adults, regardless if they are overweight or obese or not, to improve their quality of live and increase their longevity through diet and exercise.
It is possible for adults to lose weight and keep the weight off using diet and exercise.
The jury is still out, but there may be powerful biological forces that keep people from drastically changing their weight once they reach adulthood. Yo-yo dieting has its own negative impacts. The take away message here is that making success all about pounds lost rather than modifying behavior can make people who have made significant improvements in their life feel like they have not made any progress because the number on the scale remains the same.
Failure to lose weight, indicates a lack of will power, or a failure to take personal responsibility for ones health.
This can be the case some of the time. But, the the focus on "personal responsibility" becomes disturbing when the runners talk about obesity trends in populations. For example in response to an article on food insecurity and obesity in The New York Times:
A recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.
The Obesity-Hunger Paradox, The New York Times
A number of the runners choose to focus on things that read something like "My dad lost his job for a few months when I was a kid and I had to eat for less, we had whole wheat bread and carrots the whole time. Why can't these people do the same?" The general feeling from the few who did not understand the article was that connecting obesity to poverty was "making an excuse" for those who were overweight.
We like to think we are masters of our own destiny. If you are a health nut, and you run 5 miles (or more) a day and eat wholesome foods, this is who you have made yourself in to. It is an accomplishment. But it is also a function of luck-- the wealth of our parents, race gender, where we live, the opportunities we had growing up: things beyond our control. Of course, most of us can see that it is a mix of both-- but, there is something about the weight issue when it comes to the poor that really brings out some peoples' desire to tell others how to live.
Maybe it's because if you are on a diet and trying to lose weight excuses get in the way so easily. People who are successful at losing weight are very good at shooting down the excuses we make up for ourselves in our mind when we want and extra pieces of cake. Maybe these people imagine that they are helping by shooting down the excuses for people with weight problems who also face food insecurity.
But a little refection shows that "shooting down excuses" is not the kind of help that's needed! Access to fresh, high quality food... or "food security" that's what's really needed. I guess maybe some people don't get how bad it really is... This is nothing new...
George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, which was published in early 1937:
The first question is whether it is even theoretically possible for three persons to be properly nourished on sixteen shillings a week. When the dispute over the Means Test [to determine whether one was "worthy" of welfare] was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive. So far as I remember, one school of dietitians worked it out at five and ninepence, while another school, more generous, put it at five and ninepence halfpenny. After this there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claimed to be feeding themselves on four shillings a week.
. . .
The miner's family [miner, wife, toddler, baby] spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman [eating on 4 s/wk.], saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.
So, you see, this has been going on for more than 70 years. The rich, "well educated," and middle-class try to tell poor people how they should eat and live while knowing very little about what unrelenting poverty is like.