Denial is North America, and I won't even go to politics, 'culture wars', voting against your class interests... If you've too short an attention span for a full education:
Here's the thing: if you eat shit, drink shit, mortgage your ass to buy a shitty house in a shithole and drive miles in your shitbox from there to your shitty job, this is what you become.
I do feel bad for the family in the first picture, but if the parents are shamed and change their weights, they might just save the boy's life, and lengthen their own. Shame is good! You should feel shame for things that are your fault, and you can change. The kid: little shame for eating what his parents give him. The parents: criminal shame. Someone born with a congenital condition: none. That kid's parents: none, nearly always. This meme of 'accepting your weight' is bullshit. It kills people, and it deadens them.
Oh yeah... haven't you heard that there is more to HFCS than diabetes? High-fructose corn syrup: it makes you stupid, before it makes you foul, and then it makes you dead.
But we can solve everything by putting in a couple of bike paths and play areas, no? No. I know that train station. It's nowhere. Tract housing on the edge of a bedroom town on the edge of Toronto, itself inaccessible outside of a car anywhere further than five minutes from its mere twin subway lines (Sheppard and the Scarberia RT do not count). Nobody uses bike paths that do not take them to work or to school. That is a plain fact. Sure, a few people will toddle around on them on weekends, and a few teenagers will get impregnated and stoned in the bushes, but it is not going to make any dent on bellies or traffic congestion. If you don't believe me, or the studies you can find yourself, go sit on a suburban bike path and count the traffic. Take a good book.
So let's see:
- HFCS makes you stupid
- and fat
- is addictive
- so you'll vote like an idiot
- buy a house with a huge yard
- you are now too lazy to use or maintain
- and too lazy to get anywhere out of a car
- so you have a loan for the car
- and a mortgage for your house
- so you'll support phantom tax-breaks in hope you don't go under
- that help another class altogether, who were doing fine already
- since they've moved half the work offshore
- and rigged the game in many more ways
- and your subconscious suspects all this
- so you need to take psychoactive drugs, legal or not
- which are made by the same corporations who make HFCS
- sold you a car
- the house
- your insurance policies
- and your investment portfolio, if you have any money left for it
- make more money keeping America at war that at peace
- lose none if your kid's killed abroad
- or from petrochemical pollution
- and are owned by the people who'll benefit from you being a sucker.
HMM...
Oh forget it. Just watch the video again.
I'm on the fence about this. On the one hand, I don't think shaming is a good thing. It doesn't make people change their behaviour and often has the reverse effect.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I get incredibly pissed off with people who say it's too expensive to eat healthy food. WTF... maybe in Japan but not Australia. I can buy a week's fruit and veg for what one meal would cost at Maccas so that's plain freaken bullshit. Also the supermarkets here sell Coke as a loss leader to get ppl into the shop.
You see ppl with their trolley just stacked with crates of coke. At one point, during the drought here, Cola-cola were getting water subsidies and coke was cheaper by the litre than tap water! That is so ridiculous.
Every time the government suggest a "fat tax" on maccas, ppl go nuts. I say tax the fuck out them. There is a 1000% tax on cigarettes because supposedly, they are compensating for the increased health costs so why can't they do the same with fast foods?
Shaming the individual will do little good, I agree, but if the society considers eating yourself to obesity shaming, it might do some good. This is why few men commit statutory rape, I am afraid to say: shame, not guilt.
DeleteI'm ok with shaming the parents. It should be considered a felony to get your kids addicted to junk food at an early age and provide them with as much as they want of it as they get older...
ReplyDeleteIt's true that America is still overpopulated with people who've never been to college, think of college-educated people as being tricky and conniving, and believe God will bail them out before their excessive resource-depleting, environment-destroying habits take us all into a shitty future...
I feel the same way about these bike paths and nature trails that keep going up. Or how where I live so many people have gym memberships or see eating coaches and are still FAT. I use my sister as my own motivator.... she has a gym membership, goes to Weight Watchers and still can't seem to get her weight down and doesn't know why. She gobbles up beef jerky our mom uses for her long road trips and hikes.... she gobbles up a pound of bacon at a time. Yells at my mom for having cake in the house but doesn't take responsibility for putting in her own mouth... She isn't even a plump teen that doesn't know any better. She is 30!
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as fat shaming goes... I am all for it. I can see my nephew getting fatter and fatter because of how lazy he is and how he is coddled. So I have no qualms pointing out that his dietary choices have given him layers of lucky neck meats.
My hubs and I are always asked if we are okay because of our weight... because we are not HUGE. My hubs is spot on with his BMI, I have a bit of a pots (I like beer, so what) but am also in the healthy BMI range for my age and height. I have been made to feel anxious when people ask how we are so thin...insinuating we are on drugs or barfing after meals. I just ask them how they gain so much weight.... makes for awkward silences.
Exactly. The new 'normal' isn't normal. I also read somewhere that using pictures of various body types, researchers have shown that the upper limit of weight found attractive in the opposite sex, or same sex, has increased in recent years. It would be nice to believe this means we are more tolerant of others, but it really means we are more tolerant of ourselves, and that the fattening population will reproduce with the fattening population. What could go wrong?
DeleteAs for your 'pot', I don't exactly have a 'six-pack'. However, I am over forty, and you are a woman, by which I only mean that adults should have a little meat on their bones. Let me clarify: ADULTS should have a LITTLE meat on their bones; kids and teens almost none extra.
The little meat is used to pad our older bones I think. Falling hurts so much more now as a thin adult than as a thin child.
DeleteI used to feel sad that the boys didn't like me because I was not curvy... but years later... the girls that were "attractive" and curvy have become quite the heffers. I feel good about me now.
"The boys didn't like me because I was not curvy... but years later... the girls that were "attractive" and curvy have become quite the heffers."
DeleteExactly the line I plan to use on my, now in utero, daughter - for how little I expect her to listen.
But curves are nature not nurture, aren't they. I've seen few fat Japanese girls with natural curves. You get what nature gives you in this life and you can only work with that.
Deletekathrynoh, they are both, aren't they? As an example, I have two brothers, and we grew up similarly thin. Now two of us exercise and do well for our ages; the other is a compulsive drinker and pig, and looks it. Oh, and I have seen J-girls with curves. When my friends in Toronto, who I'd met in Tokyo, talked about the J-girls we knew in town, we determined they looked scrawny when they landed, outstanding after six months of our diet, and as bad as they rest of us after a year.
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