Hacker News Reader

Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

My point was that making it a personal choice seems to be failing us. We’ve been telling people to do that for decades, and they’re not — make it a societal choice so that it’s individuals are automatically enrolled in a system that promotes their health rather than forcing them to sit in a car seat for hours per week

View on HN

I find it fascinating, from an social science perspective, that in other critical areas of society social shaming is encouraged, but when it comes to human fitness we will invent PhD theses worth of reasons for why that's not allowed.

I 100% agree with you though, the physical structure of (most) US cities makes this difficult if you yourself don't prioritize it, or you can't afford to.

Fat shaming just doesnt work, the only provable outcomes are mental illness and weight gain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/

It's also a huge glaring actor/observer asymmetry issue, you think between the 50's and now human beings innately changed to be lazier, more prone to overconsumption? Why opt for blaming the individual multiplied by 70 million rather than looking at the conditions of their shared environment?

>you think between the 50's and now human beings innately changed to be lazier, more prone to overconsumption? Why opt for blaming the individual multiplied by 70 million rather than looking at the conditions of their shared environment?

Subdivisions basically didn't exist in the US in the 1950s; they were only just being invented then. People lived in smaller towns and cities and walked around a lot more. Even in the 80s, kids were walking around outside a lot, without adult supervision. Now that's basically illegal in most places, so kids stay in their suburban homes all day playing video games.

And, as usual, you can compare to other countries. In other places, there's less of a car culture, people walk around a lot more, and there aren't many obese people.

I'm not certain but I think we're in perfect agreement here. The environment in which people live has changed and I think that should be the obvious first target to change.

I think this urge to blame people for the effects of their environment seen in the one of the parent post is an example of a very dark part of our attitude toward change. It is very easy and tempting to short circuit into ridiculing positive changes in favor of instead attempting to fix it by punishment/shaming ("People will literally rezone entire cities rather than saying we need to eat less food and workout more")

The "you are beautiful no matter how you look" social campaign probably doesn't help here. There are literally visual cues that you 're doing something in excess and your doctor tells you to lose weight but Instagram says it's ok to be obese. I wonder if there's a limit to it, is it still ok to be twice your normal weight overweight?

Do you live in the US? Fat people are routinely discriminated against in employment and healthcare. A few Instagram influencers and ad campaigns don't negate that.

I have never met a fat person who wasn't aware they are fat. I do know two people who have failed to lose significant weight even after bariatric surgery physically restricted how much they could eat.

After even the most extreme medical intervention fails and you are still obese, what can you do? Stay inside your home forever so that thin people are not forced to look at you? Never eat a piece of cake in public? Never go shopping, never date, never dance?

Of course not. In the end the only choice is to live your life anyway, in spite of your reduced opportunities and the judgment you receive from others.

If you're brave, you might even dare to post photos of yourself on Instagram.

> I have never met a fat person who wasn't aware they are fat.

"Today, 7 in 10 Americans are obese or overweight, but only 36 percent think they have a weight problem. In other words, close to half the people who are overweight or obese don't think they're overweight or obese."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...

I live in Europe. For employment that demands physical stamina it makes sense that fat people would not be favoured at the extreme level of obesity. My healthcare provider differentiates between overweight and obese and you can't treat triage as discrimination. There's a whole lot of middle ground between staying in your home not eating cake and promoting yourself on Instagram. Date and dance as you see fit.

The kind of discrimination I am talking about is refusing to hire fat people for desk jobs (or not promoting them, or paying them less) because of stereotypes that they are lazy or lack self-discipline or simple distaste for the way they look. [1]

Categorizing a patient as overweight or obese is not discrimination. Dismissing their health concerns or providing lower-quality care because they are fat is. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853419/

[2] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/weight-bias-hea...

When you say "we've been telling people to do that for decades" I'm assuming you're referring to the accumulated scientific wisdom that says eating healthily and getting exercise is good for your health, and not the trillions of dollars spent advertising addictive sugar water, alchohol, cigarettes, sugar coated cereals for kids, subsidized beef and corn syrup and attacking every health recommendation as lies if it threatened someones profits?

It might actually be worth telling people to eat healthily and excercise as a consistent message before we abandon the idea.

Exactly this. Not sure how much of the scientific messaging reaches the lower socioeconomic subsets of society either, I don't think kids' obesity is because they 've tried everything to lose weight and can't help themselves or rather their parents don't really understand the intricacies of how processed food works. There's something that defies intuition about a 50g mars bar having the same calories as a 300g potato even if most people vaguely understand that 'sugar is bad for you' but can't really put it in perspective, what does that mean in practice? The dosage makes the poison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com