Ask Lemmy

• Cheap access to fresh fruit and veg

• Education for healthy eating starting in childhood

• Public outdoor spaces that are enjoyable to exercise in

• Cheap, frequent public transit to allow everyone to access food and public spaces

If those don’t take care of most of it we can keep going from there.

Eating the rich has been shown to have a positive impact on weight loss and health in general.

Seriously though, this is the answer. Obesity is a systemic problem.

People don't realize* that processed food is engineered to make you eat more of it. You'll also feel like shit for at least 3 days if you start eating fresh foods and you will crave the junk (cuz it's made to be that way), but it's worth it. The price is about the same to eat if you make it from scratch, but it's so much easier than you think. Your body will thank you. Also, if you're craving something sweet, drink water.

Examples:

Soup

• boil a bunch of veggies and you get veggie stock.
• Boil the bones of your rotisserie chicken and you get chicken stock.
• Microwave a potato and put it in a pan with your sauteed veggies, then add milk. You now have cream of type soups

Grill

• veggies
• meat
• seafood

Baking

• cut up your veggies and put a whole chicken in there. Cook for awhile, then you have 3 or 4 meals of different varieties. Here's an example recipe, but you can do any herb or veggies you like. https://simply-delicious-food.com/oven-roasted-whole-chicken/

These are just few.

There's not a single, one-size-fits-all solution, there's a lot of factors going into this

In no particular order, off the top of my head, a couple things that would need to change

1. Better nutrition/health education- a lot of people have almost no idea what eating healthy means
2. Better labeling requirements, there's a few weird loopholes in how food and such can be labeled, and companies get away with using some pretty misleading labeling, and we need to be tightening that down so that people can actually make better informed decisions about what they're eating.
3. Better pay and work/life balance- Planning and preparing a healthy diet takes time and money. Same with going to the gym. We need to free people up to be able to make those better, healthier choices for themselves
4. Addressing food deserts- In some places people just may not have easier access to healthy food. If you don't drive and public transit is spotty around you, and the only stores within walking distance of your home are gas stations and convenience stores, it's going to be hard to eat a healthy diet.
5. Pedestrian and bike friendly infrastructure- In a lot of cases, people don't walk or bike places because it's just not safe for them to do so. If you provide that opportunity for them, a lot of people will actually use it, they'll get more exercise, and save money on gas that can in turn be used for other healthier choices.
6. Healthcare- In some cases it may mean getting things like glp-1 drugs or surgeries to aid in weight loss, in other cases it might just be checking in with a doctor or nutritionist to come up with a weight loss plan to make sure you're going about it safely and effectively. Maybe you need blood work or other tests to identify other underlying health problems, maybe you have depression or anxiety that are making it difficult for you to be motivated to go to the gym or some sort of trauma you need to work through to address an eating disorder. Whatever the person's specific needs are, they need to be able to access them.

I can tell you what I did. I went from 92 kilos to 69 kilos in a year.

1. Nearly removed all carbs from my diet
2. Increased diet to include vegetables and chicken and eggs
3. Removed artificial sugar
4. Removed all apps which allowed food delivery
5. Went to gym 5 days a week
6. Told myself everyday "trust the process"

I started noticing changes after 3 months.

Now how do you convert this into government policy? That is a huge problem altogether. Long term thinking + strong regulations. Even if you try something like this, you will be ridiculed for suggesting government overreach. At the end of the day, a diet is a personal choice.

Treating it like the multifaceted issue it is instead of a moral failing would be a start.

In the US that would mean labor laws which favor the human instead of the business. With hours that allow more daily personal time and pay that allows prosperity even at minimum wages. These things would take care of most people.

It would also mean medical treatment being available without burdensome cost, and with consideration to it being a mental hurdle like addiction and destigmatizing seeking aid for it in that manner. Universal healthcare removing the need/demand for private and employment tied insurance would help this as well.

There are many more facets, and facets within facets to all of this, but from a mile high view I think this would help a lot.

Kill corn subsidies.

We've invented the cure to obesity. We should be dancing in the streets and throwing parades for scientists. Again. We invented the cure to obesity. It's just a distribution problem at this point. We just need to work on getting the drugs out to everyone that wants them at a price anyone can afford. Do that, and the obesity crisis is solved.

It turns out that when you give humans calorie abundance, it just breaks a lot of our "full meters." And we can fix that with a simple shot or pill. Generations fretting and brow-beating people over morality and gluttony. Generations of forcing people to painfully starve themselves to achieve a healthy weight. Generations of shame, guilt, and cruelty. But all along, the real issue wasn't moral. It was medical. Or perhaps, historical.

The reality is that many of us just have a part of our biology that isn't calibrated for the modern world. We have satiation systems that are designed for ages of famine. It's only in the last few centuries that food has become cheap and abundant, and it's still not that way everywhere. You take a satiation system that is evolved for an age of famine, but require it to live in an age of abundance? Obesity is the inevitable result. Sure, you can always starve yourself into a healthy weight. But the point is human beings aren't evolved to have to maintain their weight through painful conscious self-denial. We're supposed to simply eat when we're hungry and stop when we're full. That's how human beings have lived for most of history and pre-history. And until the era of modern cheap calories? Our ancestors never really had to worry about eating themselves to obesity. There was only so much honey you could get a hold of, and it required taking quite a few bee stings to get it. Maybe the Lord in his castle had to worry about obesity, but this is a burden our ancestors never had at scale. We guilt ourselves for failure to maintain healthy weights, when that's just not something humans should have to consciously do.

But we need not accept endless calorie counting and weight maintenance through intentional starvation. We also don't need to return to an age of deprivation. We CAN have our cake and eat it to. We don't need to accept obesity or starvation. We can build a world where calories are cheap and abundant, but people can simply modify their satiation systems to achieve whatever body weight they want without conscious effort. Find a way to get these drugs to everyone. That is how you solve the obesity crisis. Some may not want to take them or have medical reasons they can't. But it doesn't matter. Imagine lamenting if we only cut the obesity rate by 80%. Simply giving these drugs out free to as many people as want them will inevitably be the most effective form of obesity intervention a government could ever do. Forget public health campaigns and presidential fitness tests. Just get people the damn medicine they need.

We invented a miracle. Let's share the wonder.

There’s no one single approach.

1. Stop overincentivizing HFCS; as a sugar replacement, its main feature is suppressing natural hormones that tell you “I’m full, let’s stop eating”. It’s a corn product, which often makes it a very “American” thing to support.
2. Design walkable communities. Many people can’t schedule out time to get exercise, but should get it regularly through their job or community.
3. Make programs designed to promote home cooking, ensuring people have time in their day to do it, adequate kitchen space, and buy-in from their family or lifemates. Many people live off take-out or ready meals, which means they don’t know what goes into it, and also don’t socialize with family.

Theres a whole host of issues, many of which are already mentioned, but two other big ones are treating it more as a health issue rather than a moral one, and improving healthcare - especially mental health care.

People don't realize, but a lot of obesity cases are tied into other health issues - especially mental health. This is doubly true for more extreme cases. For a very simple example, those who are neurodivergent often struggle with specific stimulations including food textures (limiting food options), especially in combination with food deserts or areas with little selection. On the other hand, this can often be improved or worked around with medication and/or therapy. Medication such as antidepressants or antipsychotics causing weight gain is another very common example, and while it isn't as easy to avoid, better medical support can make it easier to manage, especially if you need to change diet as a result. For a more extreme example, trauma is very closely tied to weight gain and eating disorders. Watch any episode of My Six-Hundred Pound Life (or better yet, don't), and you'll notice that almost all of them have significant trauma. For example, childhood abuse can lead to difficulty self-regulating, or sexual abuse can cause someone to feel that being """ugly""" will help prevent future assaults. These examples just scratch the surface too, and things only gen messier when you have comorbid conditions. Just imagine, for example, someone with OCD affecting how they eat, depression treated with a weight-gain causing medication, and PMOS (a hormonal issue common in women, which often makes it extremely difficult to lose weight). Doctors often ignore or struggle to treat any of these individually, nonetheless all three together, and thats before we open the conversation around affordability.

Given this, and just how sensitive and defensive humans are in general, that makes it all-the-more important that we treat people respectfully and kindly. Even ignoring basic decentcy, demonizing or mocking people for their weight delegitimises efforts to change systematic barriers, makes accessing care more difficult or unfriendly, often wastes time or confuses with "advice" that is unhelpful or outright destructive given the context of someone's medical background (I.E. telling someone with an eating disorder to control their eating more), and increases stress, which in turn, makes medical issues worse and harder to cope with. Instead, if we treat it as a medical issue, we avoid all of this and stop moralising or hurting people already struggling.

What worked for me was living somewhere I could do a lot of outdoor labor. So I say replace all excavators with manual labor.

Switch to Scientific Socialism where people aren't overworked and in deep debt over shitty capitalism.

Whats the link? Stress, obviously.

We can start by not eating highly processed, industrially made food-like substances.

This is gonna be an unpopular take, but I vote for federally subsidized meth rations. I bet I'd be super productive and who needs sleep?

Make people even poorer, so that they can transform from too poor to buy healthy food to too poor to buy food

Ban every food and drink invented in the last hundred years

I wonder if part of it is because food is less nutritious than it used to be. So we eat more to unconsciously fulfill our nutrition needs, inadvertently also eating enough to help increase weight. I'm not saying this is the answer, but it may be a contributing cause.

I stopped eating animal products and lost 50 lbs, so that's a start

I think most problems with obesity will be solved like this:

Teach children how to eat. In school. Countries that do this have much lower obesity rates.

One of the best available interventions is mandatory cooking classes in high school. Cut the necessary time out of other classes and do it.

The education system needs to be redeveloped from the ground up. It's a 19th century system in the 21st century.

Physical Education needs to be prioritized as does social engagement.

This will be unpopular, but: just stop caring. Let people be whatever size, treat them equally, and don't sweat it. You may not like that but one way to solve an issue is to realize there is no issue.

Would people be healthier if they weren't obese? Possibly. The evidence is a little mixed. I'm in the middle where I think not being obese is healthier but the effect is overblown by related factors. People would be healthier if no one drank alcohol but I don't think banning alcohol is worth it.

(Revealing my biases: I've been extremely fit, I've also been technically obese, and I'm on a GLP-1 inhibitor because I want to lose weight. But I'm not interested in telling other people how heavy they should be)

https://www.the-independent.com/news/health/obesity-no-crisis-regular-exercise-more-important-than-weight-fat-but-fit-professor-traci-mann-a7833306.html

Bring on the downvotes, my body is ready.

give them all ozempic or GLP-1. almost every method, they want quick fixes, or dont want do dieting or exercising or they dont want to do it. glp-1 has a side benefit in helping with other addictions.

The collapse of industrialized society will solve it very quickly.

I've been proposing that we tax HFCS out of existence for years now. Tax the hell out of all calorie dense sweeteners. When Dr Pepper Zero costs half as much as the sugary stuff, you'll see a lot more people making the switch

You absolutely can get addicted to food, others turn to food for comfort, some eat as a response to trauma as well (ever see my 600lb life, almost every person there has had some sort of trauma or mental health struggle.), therapy and other mental health care never seems to make it into these plans and that, in my opinion, is where they fail.

Most governments never seem to treat obesity as a chronic illness, just some sort of personal failing.

Edit.

Obesity risk factors are also genetic, no one chooses to be obese and the constant shaming and hatred people who exist in fat bodies get is unreal. I know fat people who are terrified of being seen even going for a walk outside because of internalised fat shaming, it fucks with your head something fierce.

I grew up fat which did not set me up for good habits later in life, I have struggled with binge eating and stress eating all throughout my life, getting an ADHD diagnosis and medicated for it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me, others in my situation may not have the ability to get that help or be in a place they are ready to even seek it.

Firstly, BMI only really works for people of otherwise average height and musculature. A bodybuilder could be seen as obese for example. So just fixing for that would help.

But more importantly, and perhaps unpopularly, I think people have gotten too used to feeling full all the time, and that the slightest feeling of hunger signals red alert. I see people constantly grazing throughout the day the moment they get even slightly hungry, sometimes without evening noticing it themselves, then they'll still eat big meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Unless you're regularly getting a good amount of exercise from work or your personal lifestyle, then of course you're gonna put on weight cause those calories have got nowhere to go. Now while there are other factors that can tip the scales into or out of your favour, ultimately:

Daily Energy Input < Energy Output = Weight Loss

Now some will say they can't not eat, because they can't concentrate otherwise, it gives them the shakes, or something else. But for 99% of people, that "need" is all psychological, and can be shaken off with time and patience.

I would know, cause I experienced this when I was younger changing my diet to help lose weight. Being purposefully intermittent about eating will suck at first as your body and mind adjust to the new status quo, but stick with it and your body and mind will be healthier for it.

((Just to be clear, I'm not promoting any kind of eating disorder or crash dieting. Losing weight sustainably is about small changes that you take with you into the future, not making huge changes that make you sick/depressed, or throwing your body around like a metabolic ragdoll. But I do mean it when I say putting more planning and restraint into when and what you eat will do you a world of wonder))

Pay people to lose weight and then pay an even better rate for maintaining a healthy weight