Just by-the-by, but not one is 'blaming' people for being fat. But really, if you're fat then the only person who can change that is yourself. As both individuals and a society we have to accept that. Sure, there are many culprits and reasons, but if we hide behind excuses, create an environment where everything else is to blame, then there's no reason for anyone to shoulder that responsibility for their own health. Things will only get worse. And yes, we need a proper public health initiative that brings everything to the table. I'm not optimistic that any current flavour of government will step up to that, not when it involves everything from urban planning to diet. But that's not an excuse, if you're not happy with the way you are, then you're the only person who can change that. It has to start with the individual.
Wow, my comment about fat people triggered a bit of a wave of posts.
Truth be told in many ways the only people to blame for being fat are the fat people. And, to be clear, I write as a fat person myself. As someone (I think ian) said earlier there are fat people in the UK but they take it to a whole new level in the USA.
In the UK when my weight went somewhere over 20 stone (once the scale read more than 280 I stopped weighing myself because I didn't like the news the scale gave me) I started to find it harder to find clothes that fit me. I needed formal trousers for work and as soon as I reached a point where a 42" waist was too tight I struggled to find anything suitable with a 44" waist. That was something of a wake-up call that it was time to shed a bit of weight. Whose fault was it that I was fat? Mine, and mine alone. Nobody forced me to eat chocolate and cake, nobody prevented me from going out and exercising. I chose both courses of action.
When I was the wrong side of 20 stone I could still visit the US and feel positively slim by comparison to some of the folks here. On another cycling forum I used a while back there were people who had lost 200+ pounds and were still overweight. Seriously, think what someone who weighs 18 stone looks like, and then picture somebody literally twice that weight. Some people get heavier than that. Of course here there isn't the wake-up call of not being able to find clothes that fit - it doesn't seem to be an issue if you want jeans with a 58" waist.
Up to a point it's true to say that in food terms the junk is the cheapest. But the example I used was at a fair, where somebody who was practically spherical was eating a jumbo size bag of popcorn and the biggest ice cream I'd seen in a long time. This is fair food we're talking about, and if money is tight you don't eat fair food. You know, you can buy two jumbo family size packs of double-stuf Oreos for $6, or you can buy five deep-fried Oreos for $5. So while that argument may hold some water in general it doesn't work to say that poor people lack the choices, when the clearly do have the choice to not pay through the nose for junk at the fair.
Even then in many ways it's too easy to make excuses and blame Someone Else for the choices I made. When I was at my fattest (and I'm not exactly a featherweight now) I could come up with all sorts of reasons why I didn't eat more healthily and why I didn't exercise. But the fact is that I made choices, and those choices had consequences. Ruthie mentioned the question of whether fat people like being fat, and in my case the answer was definitely no. But the flipside to the answer is that I didn't dislike being fat enough to do anything about it. Did I want to be thinner than I was? Oh yes. Did I want to make the lifestyle changes to make it happen? Obviously not at the time, or I would have made them. And there's the kicker, in more ways than one I wanted to have my cake and eat it. It's no good whinging saying "I don't want to be fat any more" unless you're going to take steps to change things.
Naturally people with mobility issues don't have the same choices the rest of us do when it comes to how much exercise to take. I can choose to go for a long hike in the way a wheelchair user just can't, and it's not as if most wheelchair users can suddenly decide that they're sick of being unable to walk any distance and changing their predicament. But even though that represents a lack of choice, the choice of what goes in their mouth is still the same.
I know very well how gaining weight makes exercise appear less and less desirable. When you're sufficiently fat and unfit that going up the stairs seems like an effort it does take a degree of willpower to break the cycle. But instead of blaming anyone and everyone else for their predicament the only solution is to do something about it. Nobody else can eat less for you, nobody else can exercise for you, so the obvious thing to do is make small changes that add up. Someone doesn't get to be 500+ pounds in a week so they won't go back to being 180 pounds in a week but every time they get to Saturday weighing less than they did the previous Sunday they make progress.
