Maher/Corden and obesity

[LadyForCamus]

Go work at the VA for the day. Tell the homeless vet who lost one leg overseas and the other to diabetes after he came home; who is hospitalized because he was making suicide threats after his wife left him due to alcohol abuse; tell him he should eat a salad instead of that pizza because it’s “bad for him”.  Tell him you’re there to teach him about counting carbs.



Then come back and tell us what he threw at your head.

Point taken. Although, you're not telling me anything I haven't already thought about.

Now, let's think about this.

If we assume there's about 247 million adults in the US, that means there's about 96 million obese adults in the US. That's a lot of people. Out of those 96 million, how many do you think are as severely mentally ill as the example you give above? Maybe 10%?

Probably much larger than 10% considering the heaviest people in this country tend to also be the sickest, the poorest, and the least educated. 

But the vast majority of those 96 million have enough control over their personal decisions to decide to lose weight. They're simply choosing not to. And that sucks.

If they’re sick, uneducated, and impoverished, I suspect they’re at quite a disadvantage when it comes to the knowledge, means, and opportunity necessary to achieve a total and permanent lifestyle change. Notice I didn’t say “impossible”; I said “disadvantage”. For a single, teen mom of three who lives in squalor, and works two jobs while simultaneously trying to get her GED, weight loss might not even be 10th on her immediate priority list. Someone has to give her a reason she should care at all, and a reason to think she can, before we can even talk about the logistics of how, and what types of expectations are reasonable for her at this stage in her life. It’s far more complicated than just, “she chooses not to, and that sucks”.

I think it speaks to a larger issue we have with education about health & nutrition and an array of problems we have with mental health in the US. But to suggest that obese people are so severely mentally ill that they can't choose to eat a salad or go for a run is silly, and very condescending. It comes off like, "Oh, those poor fatties, they're too crazy to even help themselves." See? I can make silly, overly simplistic representations of your words too.

Those people in my example were real people, not a reductio ad absurdism. And sadly, there are a very many of them. It’s not that they can’t choose. It’s that they may not see a practical reason to give a shit right now. That’s why they need support rather than blame.

I think the uncomfortable fact is, tens of millions of people every single day choose to eat unhealthy foods and sit on the couch instead of exercise. It sucks. I wish it wasn't that way.

And, that mind set is the reason those people get blamed (which never helps), rather than actually helped. Are you ready to revoke my reputation point yet? 😛

A friend I helped get healthy described the same realization that I had somewhere along the way in my weight loss journey... He describes realizing that he had the choice all along. That it was never the physical abuse he discovered as a a kid that held him back. Or the bullying. Or the time a girl dumped him for a guy who was 100 pounds lighter. All of those were just excuses. And it doesn't mean those problems don't suck. They're terrible. But they are excuses, at the end of the day.

Succeeding in losing weight does not make one an expert on the reasons why others have so far failed. I don’t consider any of those things excuses either. I consider them road blocks that take a tremendous amount of work, resources, opportunity, and support to get around.  If society keeps telling these people that they’re “just making excuses”; ie. blaming them; don’t you think that hurts their chances at getting what they need to be successful?