"Concordia" wrote in message
...
On the other hand, eating more than the body will burn is almost
always an illogical, non life affirming action.

The problem is that most obese have no way of knowing how much their body
will burn. The mecanism that regulates that in normal people is just broken,
for psychological or physical reasons, in obese people. As a normal person,
you have don't even have to think about losing weight, maintaining a proper
weight is a natural function of your body. Just like inflating and deflating
your lungs is something you perform automatically without paying attention.
For various reasons, obese don't have this nice option. It's not like there
is any positive action on your part to remain slim.

And it is a choice.
Mind you, I'm personally not condemning the individual right to make
the choice to continue to overeat, though I think it's a sad one.

You don't get the point. A huge majority of obese people would rather be
slim. Except they can't. I mean, ask most obese people. Over the course of
their life, most have lost more weight than your total weight. It's not a
matter of willpower. Most obese can beat you on that. Just try to stop
eating and see how long you last and how you feel - well, most obese people
are able to function with that level of hunger for months at a time.
Actually, you do have an advantage. If you stop eating, hunger will
disappear as you start to starve. If you diet, it won't.

As a side note, to the extent that injuries result from known high
risk activities such as bungee jumping or skydiving for example,
participants generally and rightfully bear the burden of their
responsibility (financially) for those activities, as most insurance
will not cover treatment. Not sure about the skiing.

That's not the case here. You do get an insurance with some sport licenses,
but healthcare will cover it anyway. But we do have "socialized" health
care.

Good point. However, if one wants to lose and keep off excess weight,
one must and will assume current and ongoing responsibility for the
problem. Attempts to assign blame after the fact are rather useless
and frequently counterproductive.

Usually, if one wants to lose and keep off excess weight, one just fails and
gains even more weight as a bonus. That's the statistical truth. 85% of the
diets fail within 5 years. Not because 85% of the dieters lack willpower,
but because diets don't work as a long term cure for obesity. Do you blame
people with cancer for their cure not working? I mean, they had their one
chance at a cure, and now, they managed to get cancer *again*, and they want
yet *another* cure!

A school lunch is only one meal a day. Furthermore, even if the foods
aren't ideal, they are usually portion controlled. More importantly,
what are the kids doing, learning, and eating at home?

The role of the school is to educate the children. Despite the poor
education their parents are giving them if it needs to. Obviously, schools
are failing to educate the youth of your nation properly about their eating
habits. You might think it's not your problem, but how long do you think the
system can work this way? Do you think society will hold together with 50%
of obese? 80%? 99%? 99% of super-obese? When things take epidemic
proportions, it becomes the responsability of the nation to deal with
them...

Many people do not make themselves obese alone, they do so with the help
of
the government and their doctor.

Government and doctors don't shovel food into a person's mouth, people
do.

No, they told them "here is a cure for you", and people believed them. But
the cure happened to be worse than the disease. When this happens with a
drug, it's customary for people to try to sue the hell out of the
manufacturer.

The best way to become a super-obese is
through yo-yo dieting after all. Many people started their way towards
obesity by merely being healthy overweights and starting a diet.

Which is all the more reason to adopt a lifetime eating and exercise
plan, instead of yo-yo dieting. For example, weight training is an
excellent way to build and maintain lean muscle mass.

That's the "lifetime" eating plan that is causing the yo-yo dieting. You
were thinking I was talking about fad diets? There is no difference between
fad diets and the so-called balanced diet. Both work rather well at making
people lose weight. Both have a high failure rate at the 5 years mark. And
both trigger a rebound that can result in a net weight gain.
People do not chose to yo-yo diet. They just chose to diet. They pick a diet
that seems to work for people, that has good advertising (if something is a
fraud, shouldn't it get banned from the medias?), that is FDA approved or
that their doctor told them to follow. And then, like most diets, that diet
eventually fails, and they gain some more weight. Then, one of the few
options not to yoyo would be to discontinue any diet and live happily at
their current weight. But then, you would call them lazy people who should
pay for their self inflicted condition... So, many obese people go through
yet another diet, that will also fail, and will push them to even higher
extreme. And so on...

Or what about the FDA that has let every traditionnal
food be replaced with a look-alike junk version of it?

Don't eat it.

Even when everyone, including your doctor and the government, tells you to,
because it's healthier for you?

Certainly, having access to accurate nutritional information is
helpful, especially with all the food choices available today.
However, people have known for eons that eating more than is burned by
the body will cause weight gain. No one ever needed government or
nutritionists to point out this simple fact.

People have known for eons that being happy is better than being sad, but
this doesn't prevent depressions from happening. Do you suggest depressive
people should just be happier and stop depending on expensive drugs? People
have known for eons that stress is bad for their health, yet they keep going
to work daily. People have known for eons that air pollution is becoming our
#1 health risk, yet most still drive their car. The human being is not a
machine. Knowing something and rationnally reacting to it is not something
we do easily.
Besides, it might have helped if nutritionists and governemnt had *said*
that simple fact. But they didn't. They blamed obesity on pretty much
everything, except excess calories. It's because of the fats, or the carbs,
or the water, or the salt... Because blaming it on the calories alone would
mean blaming it on consumption. At the root of our economic systems is the
idea that consumming more is better. If all the obese and overweight in the
world stopped consumming so much and just ate what they need (instead of
tons of light food), the food processing industry would just collapse.

Lack of exercise due to increased modernization, more variety of and
access to convenience foods, unfortunate cultural shift away from
value systems that emphasize the value of personal responsibility and
hard work.

Lack of exercise doesn't make people obese. As you pointed out, it's eating
too much that does.
I don't see what hard work and personal responsability has to do with the
deal. Unless you have spent any significant amount of time fasting in your
life, you have no idea what dieting really means - and it means hard work.
Besides, the USA is still the country in the world where "personal
responsability and hard work" is at its highest. Yet, it's also the country
in the world with the highest ratio of obese. On the other hand, highly
socialized country, where we are not supposed to value these as much, still
have a much lower obesity ratio. That seems counter-intuitive.
Sure, we have access to more variety in food. But there again, facts do not
fit. The average American eats a very poorly diversified diet, with an
average of 5 different products a week. France reaches 15+ different
products a week. Yet, obesity in France is a new and limited epidemia while
it's explosive in the USA.