In my opinion, the obesity health problem in the US is mostly from people living in car-centric cities.
If everyone got out of their mother lovin' cars and onto a bike or walked we would drop a lot of weight.
That opinion is worth exactly the amount that I paid to read it.
Madgeylou, I realize from your comments every time that it cones up that obesity is an issue very close to your heart. In some cases this leads to strangely aggressive posts directed towards others, like this one. If you want, I can dig up multiple studies that show weight loss, stress reduction, and improved heart health of people who commute by bike rather than automobile. On average, people do in fact drop weight when they become less sedentary.
The question isn't whether some people lose weight when they commute by bike (I never did!) but why is weight loss always assumed to be a worthwhile and achievable goal for fat people.
As you state above, health outcomes can be improved by doing things like riding bikes and walking and getting other forms of exercise. This is true for the vast majority of people regardless of their weight. Most people of all sizes in the US especially would benefit from doing more exercise.
At the same time, we know that although exercise does correlate to healthier outcomes, it does not often correlate to long-term weight loss. Sometimes it even correlates to weight gain.
We also know that, quite often, when fat people do get out to exercise, we are subjected to abuse, ridicule, concern-trolling, people being like "keep going, you can do it!" and all kinds of condescending and hurtful shit.
So ... there's a health protocol called exercise, that
everyone would benefit from, but only one category of people is shamed for NOT doing it, and that same category of people is also shamed when they DO do it. Who doesn't see how fucked up this is?
And none of it leads to weight loss for the
vast majority of people. It may make them healthier, but by and large, it doesn't make them slimmer.
So if what we really care about is
people being healthy and not just
people not being fat, we should be encouraging everyone to have healthier habits, take a walk, keep trying to quit smoking, introduce more nutritious foods into their diets when they can ... but no, instead we just shit on fat people and talk about how lazy they are and how all the bad things that happen to them are their own damn fault. Sure. Because no one skinny has ever gotten sick and died.
THIS is the point I keep trying to make. You can't tell how healthy anyone is by simply looking at the size of their body. And to keep harping on fat people to sacrifice endlessly to change their body size when it's clear that this is not possible for the majority of us is simply cruel.
And yes, this is a topic close to my heart because I and most of the people I know have been discriminated against for my entire life. It's not "strangely aggressive" to stand up for myself and others when folks express ill-informed opinions that actually, materially hurt us.
When y'all stop saying uninformed, incorrect, and harmful shit, I will stop with my "strange aggression" that is actually rooted in just trying to survive in a world that has conditioned almost everyone to exclude me based on the size of my body.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled armchair epidemiology-ing.