It's both simple and extremely complicated. Obviously simple because we know that eating a balanced diet of whole foods is key to keeping weight off, more effective than exercise from a weight loss standpoint, and that movement gets us the rest of the way there & provides overall strength.
Complicated in the fact that our shift from mostly locally sourced whole foods has shifted to a lot of packaged food and whole food ingredients that look nothing like it used to -- tomatoes from 2000 miles away that have only a hint of the nutrition they used to, lean meat from chickens that go from egg to butcher in ~35 days and are pumped full of growth-enhancing drugs to facilitate that, meat from animals whose diets changes the genetic structure of the meat we eat, preservatives, chemicals, gigantic portion sizes, people who don't know how to cook even if they have the time to. And then there's the fact that more families are now in a position where both parents work or a single parent home, so time isn't prioritized to cook in the way that it once was. We're more sedentary overall, which changes how we're metabolizing food. Individuals metabolize food differently, so the ballpark 2000 calorie recommendation may be far too much for many people right from the start, yet access to resting metabolic rate tests for individuals isn't exactly easy or affordable.
Despite all of that, it's still very possible to make changes for the vast majority of people...if they actually want to. God knows that I've yo-yo'd over the years, from stupidly underweight, to overweight, to crash dieting my way back to underweight, back to overweight when I hit my skinny goal, and finally adopting a healthy lifestyle, getting fit and thin, then semi-fat again when a lengthy period of stress hit, and now at a weight a few pounds heavier than when I raced, but with a more trim waste (28" in vanity-sized pants like Levis, 30" in true-sized pants), wearing smaller shirts, more muscular, more fit overall. And I still struggle to not overly indulge myself in my addiction to sweets, but have pretty damn good balance now to do varied strength & endurance workouts very regularly, plan out meals, still eat some food I really enjoy so I don't fall off the rails, and make health a high priority. But it took me a long while to really find and embrace the right balance, a discipline most people don't have or refuse to adopt. While a good chunk of this would be resolved with societal changes to our food structure and encouragement of more movement, the individual can always take ownership of their individuality...if they want to, and most don't.
sphere wrote:
Quote:
Parents create the culture for the house.
Absolutely. And even among well educated health conscious people, it takes an ongoing, deliberate effort to reinforce the food-as-fuel message. Mrs sphere was a scholarship athlete in track and field, marathon runner, triathlete, and holds an advance degree in a scientific field. She's not your average American, in most ways, and yet I have to police the house with regard to nutrition and activity, because junk food really is the new normal.
I see our neighbor's seven year old walking around with a blow-pop on the daily, despite having to be sedated for fillings on over half a dozen cavities. On average, I think most parents just don't get it, or don't think it's worth the struggle to feed kids things they should be eating.
That said, in our neighborhood, there's only one family with an obese child (Hispanic, it's epidemic in that group), out of at least fifteen I can think of, and maybe two that are overweight. Middle class suburban Virginia. I'm sure inner city DC would look a whole lot differently.
