Shock and Awe said:
If you ask me obesity is nothing more then a disease and should be treated as such. The only difference that it has when compared to others is that the best treatment is not drugs, or surgery; its effort to make good nutritional choices and to exercise. This is the problem. There are people who think that society should have to accept and accommodate a problem that could be solved if they had any self discipline or will to help themselves. The fat acceptance movement is nothing more then people trying to justify their sloth and find excuses not to cure themselves.
This is all coming from a person who used to be borderline obese in highschool(I was a weight lifter, but it was still excessive) to being in excellent physical shape in the span of two years. What did it? Discipline to eat right and exercise more. These people just don't want to do that and like saying that they cant. Are there really people who have some medical problem preventing weight loss? Yes, but that is a small minority.
In short, we shouldn't make people hate themselves for being overweight, but we need to push them toward health like any other patient. If someone is trying to fix themselves then its fantastic. If someone is making excuses they're wrong. If they are spreading lies they are disgusting.
The obesity epidemic is simply something that came with modernization and civilization. The entire first world suffers from the problem, it's just that the US is the only country that loves to air it's dirty laundry, where other countries downplay their problems and keep as much as possible in-house.
The big cause of obesity is largely that people are increasingly sedimentary as a lifestyle, we use machines, we drive, and of course jobs tend to involve a lot of sitting or standing in one place. What's more this is just as exhausting, especially when you add stress into the equasion. Your typical person typically comes home stressed and exhausted physically and mentally, and has a lot of responsibilities other than work.
A lot of solutions that exist in other countries that are less developed don't work for the US. It's easy to intellectually sit back and say "well, jog to work, or ride a bike, leave a bit earlier" but the way first world nations are organized this isn't particularly practical even before you consider safety concerns (permissive first world societies tend to be very dangerous as a result, which is why in a lot of areas people wont' let their kids outside and have adopted paranoia as a way of life... in cities where such a bike, or foot based commute might be most practical, your in the most danger for trying it).
Then there is the whole issue of medication, with lifestyle dissatisfaction, paranoia, and stress at all time highs in the first world, people tend to take a lot of legal drugs for purposes of mood stabilization (there have been articles about this) a lot of these drugs might not directly cause obesity, but some do, and of course side effects can vary from person to person, almost all of these drugs cause things like fatigue, dizziness, and other problems that are seen as better than the alternative which also contribute to people literally not being able to exercise, even if they were to find the time.
The point here is that it's a more complicated issue than just "get up off your arse and exercise fatso" or "put down the fork and do sit ups" a lot of fat people don't even eat that much, it's more about how much they wind up burning. Some people are just lazy, or have eating problems, but that has always existed as a problem and it hasn't been this kind of an epidemic.
The solutions that would probably help a lot of these issues, are things that would require society wide change, trillions of dollars, and would meet with mass resistance for a lot of reasons. Say for example if a lot of places had their zoning laws changed and business and industrial districts were moved a lot closer to, or intergrated with, residential districts. Right now we've separated them because nobody wants a factory next door, or a tons of crowds tromping past their house to go shopping (along with parking issues and everything else), but it also means someone
can easily have 20-30 miles to commute every day, not to mention that bikes and foot traffic aren't allowed on certain roads like a lot of highways that represent the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B (understand that 20-30 miles can amount to a lot more when you can't travel in a straight line). Of course this leads to a lot of problems in of itself, and one has to wonder if those problems are going to be better than a lot of fat people.
Another solution that would probably help a lot would of course be massive workplace reforms, happier and more content workers of course means less people popping mood stabilizers and narcing themselves out to get through the day, which means more energy, and of course people employing that energy to do things which will cause them to lose weight. Of course for a lot of reasons, namely the desires of big business, we're not going to see happier workplaces any time soon. The school system with it's "everyone is special" attitude doesn't help either because a lot of that depression comes from people hitting the real world, realizing they aren't special, and that they get to be another cog in the machine of society rather than someone at the top or doing all kinds of incredible and fun things. Add to that the sheer amount of competition for other jobs and it's a huge mess.
One thing that has also worked when it's been tried is to have companies integrate a work-out schedule into their time tables. Say providing exercise facilities and then scheduling all employees to work out for 15-30 minutes a day, sort of like a gym class. The problem with this of course is that companies do not want to play people for even 15-30 minutes a day that they aren't working, and employees don't want to give up the pay if they are forced to take an unpaid "break" in the middle of their schedule. In most cases where things like this exist, it's largely at an executive level, because a company actually considers those people real assets, and to be frank they probably aren't doing a whole lot anyway.
That said I have some weight issues and a complex about it myself, and am pretty heavily medicated due to brain damage, so I know what the results can be from that first hand. Some dude popping robust doses of drugs like Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, and similar drugs to get through the day can gradually mess themselves up if they get some of the side effects, and if they wind up getting a generic because of their insurance... heh, well...
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