This guy is full of shit. Walking around your block at home is healthier. Having lunch at home with your dog is healthier. Not being stuck in a train with hundreds or a car with pollution is healthier. Almost like he was paid to write this.
This last category waddle around and breathe heavily like they walk once or twice a year. Their walk is so strange, from behind they wave their arms like a paddle in water.
We often talk about obesity as some sort of thing that happens to people. I really wish willpower and individual will could come back as a value in American society. We don't have to go back to the 80s. But we need to start holding individuals accountable, it will make them feel more like they have control.
I commute multiple times a week and I also didn't commute at all for a while. I stayed fit because I do a variety of exercises, I do it like a quota of What Must Be Done, and I've married obligation with fun (which means picking and choosing). Sometimes I eat too much so I'll eat less the next day. Most days I skip breakfast because I know my body doesn't need 2500 calories a day.
It's an individual choice, not A Thing That Happens To people.
At the same time I agree that for the individual they need a mindset that they can change their circumstances. The US won't be made walkable over night if ever. There is unlikely to be a ban on producing or advertising high sugary processed food. But even in such an environment you still have tons of agency over your choices.
One can not be hyper vigilant at all times and exercise willpower. We simply aren’t capable of that.
You're telling me how it's not possible and I've just told you why it is. The majority of people struggling with inactivity are suffering from a motivational problem or an educational problem.
Dark patterns work because we aren’t always vigilant. For instance, Google knows we don’t always read the instructions perfectly and we are easily duped, statistically speaking, to do things that we didn’t mean to do. There are dark patterns so to speak in the way our society is constructed.
As long as the walk isn't along super polluted roads, or litter-filled streets.
It's not like commuting is hard-coded into our DNA. Over the past 60ish years commuting slowly changed a lot of things about modern life, and taking it away suddenly revealed a lot of those. But that doesn't mean that commuting is, itself, the answer to our social or motivational desires.
I then got a web dev job, which turned out to be full-time in-office. I adjusted, but I resented, and still resent, being in the office. It's not for me. I don't have my kitchen, I don't have my expensive office chair, I don't have my good keyboard and mouse, I don't have my comfortable living room for when I'm on my lunch breaks, I find I get significantly worse sleep, and the commute stresses me out a ton (as well as costing an absolute fortune).
It's definitely a problem that divides people, with some firmly on the in-office side and others wanting to be at home. Businesses really should be catering for both.