The fat nation
 

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

I was at my grandson's hockey game Saturday and while in line for a hot chocolate I saw so many people that at least looked morbidly obese that I was honestly saddened.

Here I was surrounded by fit, active girls and boys all geared up to play hockey and there were so many very fat people that it was probably 30% of the crowd!

I know that my grandchildren are being raised by health-conscious parents and yes, I do take some credit for that because my kids were raised that way. I try to help by watching what the gkids eat when in my care and we do active things like hiking in the woods or swimming in the pond.

But man oh man it really is an epidemic of obesity.

How do you guys keep your kids or help keep your grandkids fit?

Everyone has their own problems. Best to work on those and leave others work on theirs.

Conscious decision to not eat ready made, packaged, highly processed, and at chain restaurant. Also meal size is very important.

I think the issue is consumerism. We are fed advertising on delicious looking food with a mindset to eat 3 meals a day.
More consumption = higher profits.

Some people abuse drugs and alcohol.... Others eat a dozen cookies at a time.

Have them play hockey instead of video games.

Yeah! Mind your own business.

Morbid obesity is now healthy, should be embraced (somehow) and has no impact on our DEI healthcare industry, Medicare or Medicaid.

20 years ago, I went to San Antonio for business and was shocked because it seems like 85% of the folks there were heavy. Houston is bad, but not as bad, It feels like Houston is more like 50%.

When we have the grandkids, we enforce better eating. One of the grandkids is super picky, but the missus makes sure that he eats a little bit of everything (he doesn't like most fruits and veggies). They get meals at regular times, and they get snacks but the snacks are minimal. At home they get more snacks instead of regular meals.

Flat, if you look back on what people looked like, 15, 20, 30, 40 and earlier, Americans were much leaner. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We live in a supersize, high fat/high carb, fast food, large portion world. And there are industries that feed on that enabling that culture. There is no universal solution.

It is sad. I see it daily, at work, in public and in my personal life.

My youngest is an Army captain, his wife an army nurse. They both grew up active and have no issues with weight. Their sons are skinny, muscled and very active. My daughter is naturally skinny, a Tae Kwan Do black belt, and smart about her food. No issues there.

The plethora of fast food, pre packaged food, overly busy lives, 400 calorie "coffee" drinks, energy drinks, and more sedentary lives than previous generations are all a problem. My wife's dad was a carpenter/contractor. He didn't exercise a day in his life, but his work was physical every day.

It’s very frustrating, Steve.

Gram and Gramps also become the bad guys for not having bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and boxes of Lucky Charms stashed in the kitchen cupboards nor slime from the video oozing across the living room floor.

My wife and I just attended the Banff film festival.
A bunch of shorts featuring outdoor adventures.

During intermission, I remarked to my wife, not many fatties in this crowd.
These are the people that go outside and do things.
Large crowd, and I only found two that I would consider obese.

I don't think there's any issue with 3 meals a day. I think that was the norm for decades if not centuries. The problem is that now instead of 3 meals a day, there's 3 meals a day, and multiple snacks, and when there's not snacks, there's drinks that are full of sugar, and, and, and...

If it was just 3 meals per day, and those meals were not ready to eat, packaged, process crap, we'd all be better off.

Trust me we still have large folks here, me being one just around my belly 😂
But I am conscious about it and am working on it, I think there is too much acceptance now a days, the woke crap ain’t helping.

People are lazy is what it boils down to...fast food, soda, sugar, processed foods - all are quick and easy but very bad for you. Plus portion sizes in most US restaurants are insane and WAY more than needed for one meal.

Agree with you 100%

We are exposed by media to eat like we are farmers .

Modern society it's so sedentary.

I eat a meal a day. Maybe a snack in between. Around 2000 calories a day. I don't count calories by the way.

One meal with a side and a beverage at any restaurant starts at around 2000 calories. You do this 3 times a day. You wonder why people are obese???

I agree, except it's more than 3 meals a day, it's eating crap at every opportunity.

Our friends have 4 kids, 12, 10, 8, and 6 (see a pattern there?). They very deliberately planned their family, but I think they left something out of the plan.
Both parents work and the kids are in all kinds of school activities. There is no time to plan meals or eat well, everything they get is prepacked and nuked in the microwave or picked up on the run from a fast food place.
It's the way they planned their family life and none of them is over weight now, but I'm afraid they are setting the kids up for unhealthy lifestyles.

It's not just Americans that are obese and getting fatter.

I watched the documentary Blue Zones on Netflix, (living to 100 by healthy eating) and it broke my heart how the little kids in Costa Rica were jonesing for the greasy salty snack food. I'm not saying I eat Corn Beans and Squash every day, but I am saying that the genie is out of the bottle.

This thread seems incredibly insensitive.
I feel certain that most of those "fat" kids are just identifying as "perfect, I was born that way." That's what mommy and daddy say.

All joking aside, our nation is in the middle of a health crisis. Healthcare delivery, mental health normalizing, ignorance based dietary concerns and medical fascism.
At some point "fat shaming" needs a resurgence.

But hey, no worries, we're all in on restricting home appliances.

There are a lot of causes. Take a look at the size of those plates you inherited from your parents. A dinner plate used to be 9 inches in diameter. They are now 11" and even 12".

Portions have grown. I owned a franchised restaurant and the portions we were forced to serve people were huge. I would hire Mexicans who began their employment thin and healthy who would wind up fat in a year or two eating the great American fat full, sugar full diet.

Not to mention the government subsidizing corn syrup, which resulted in inexpensive, ready to eat unhealthy foods that lower income people are almost forced to consume through convenience and price. It takes time, effort and money to eat healthy. Given the choice, they choose the easy and cheap way out.

This then teaches their children how to eat improperly. It's a vicious circle.

All true, and you are right, it costs $$ to eat healthy, and in many low income areas you can't even find real food available, not to mention that most folks couldn't afford it. It definitely is a vicious cycle..

Forget what people today are putting in their mouths, what they are putting in their brains is far worse.

That would be funny, if not true.
Unfortunately, you can't fix stupid. People believe what they see, hear and read.

Personally, I blame the media. Rupert Murdoch poisoned it decades ago. Today, they flood the masses with inflammatory, devisive, angry topics that are designed to get and keep people watching or listening. Ratings and advertising drive everything.

It's a pandemic of misinformation that feeds upon itself.

I’m sitting on a lounge chair in Jamaica as I type this. Traveled here with my friend that just retired as a Cardiologist. He is mildly obese. He loves wine and drinks nightly. He also loves food. I’m thinking, everything in moderation. Oh… there are some hideous bodies here. I’d post pictures but that wouldn’t be right.

And everything is sweetened to excess with hfcs. That's why I like home made bread or higher end breads that are made like grandma made.

Unless it is something like cinnamon raisin bread. That can be sweeter.

I eat more than 3 meals, but they are all small. 200 to 250 calories for breakfast, salad with protein for lunch, and so on.

I have one major meal a day that is usually lunch. Breakfast is never more than 250 calories. Dinner is often chicken/fish, veggie and a carb. Lunch is most often a platter of olives, tomatoes, crackers and cheese.

I do snack but never a big honkin' serving.

Dropped 20 pounds going more often but less per serving.

Its also laziness. We shop from home sitting our butts in a chair our couch. We no longer have to move to turn on a light. We ask Alexa to so everything for us.

Instead of going out, to shop or eat. Food gets delivered to us while we wallow away in our easy chairs.

Need I continue?....

.

It's called Beer Gut for a reason.

Although eating and drinking for pleasure is not seen as sinful, eating or drinking to excess beyond reason is a sin.

So I'm hearing the consensus seems to be that people are fat because of the unhealthy food they eat.

How come the consensus isn't that people are fat because they eat too much, unhealthy food or not?

IMO, what people eat isn't the problem. The problem is how much they eat.

Shouldn't it be 'weight challenged' instead of fat people? :D

Thinness challenged. They don’t seem to find weight to be much of a challenge at all - they are rather good at it.

I lived abroad. When I moved here I couldn’t fathom how cheap processed food and meat was vs vegetables. Even now I can buy pork by the lb for less than onions. And I picked onions because they are one of the cheapest vegetables. Steak is close in price to broccoli.

A Ghirardelli’s brownie mix was $3 last week - cheaper than a pound of broccoli. I can’t imagine why people are fat…

It's both, but I think the main reason for the differentiation is as follows.

If you eat healthy food, the amount of healthy food required to become grossly, morbidly obese is A LOT OF FOOD. I think the average person would have a really hard time getting morbidly obese eating healthy food.

The problem is that most folks eat crap food, and most crap food has tons of sugar which greatly increases calories, which leads to obesity.

I guess you could say "sure, go ahead and eat ding dongs and ho-hos and wash them all down with syrup from Starbucks" as long as you don't eat too much of that. But if you eat a normal volume of that food, it's probably got 3-10x the calories of a healthy meal.

So yes, eating in moderation is also key, but the (IMO) bigger factor is the quality of food that you eat.

Agreed, quality of food AND quantity of food should both be considered.

If you fill yourself with high calorie food (and drinks), and do not burn off those calories, you're going to gain weight.

There is no single problem, but the number of calories you consume to feel full matter.

I think that is excellent advice. But it seems less than easy to play sports now. Too many pay to play leagues.

While true, completely off topic

Like so many things, it is a failure in parenting. Fat kids with poor eating habits, people without money management skills and so on, parents taught them wrong

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iVJM_0XEiBI?si=nmb8UnothPuFJZM6" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>