It's always someone else's fault

[Ray!]

FAT people are not to blame for being overweight, a top Melbourne academic claims.

Dr Samantha Thomas, who spoke at the annual Castan Centre for Human Rights Law Conference in Melbourne, said the war on obesity was failing because society put too much emphasis on personal responsibility.

http://www.news.com....1-1226431238369

You aren't responsible for your actions, someone else is!

Cheers

Ray

[BigGQWesty]

Thank god for that.. So I can blame maccas coz I'm to lazy to cook now...

[Ray!]

Yep! I can blame CUB for the beer that I keep drinking. I can blame Nissan for driving a car rather than walking or riding a bicycle.

Cheers

Ray

[gottheshits]

I just blame my wife for everything.........

[Ray!]

I just blame my wife for everything.........

I thought it was the other way around?

Cheers

Ray

[Glort]

Well as reluctant as I am to weigh in on yet another beat up news article, I tend to agree with this one.

I'll clarify by saying if your are 150Kg plus you are a greedy, lazy mongeral and there is NO excuse.

The BS about people having a problem is garbage as well. the stats prove less than 0,5% of bargearses actually have some metabolic disorder responsible for their size.

That's a whole different case however to those that are in the overweight classification or even obese.

The scales the medicos use to come to those conclusions are irresponsible IMHO. For one thing they are simply a height Vs weight measurement. They make no allowance for fat over muscle mass which makes it stupid right there. My mate who is a health nut and strong as an ox and thin as you would want is classed as slightly obese just because of his height and weight even though he's all muscle. I'd like to see a lot of the shiny arses that would lable him obese keep up with him on a jog, lift the amount of weight he does or see how tight they could torque up a bolt not to mention compare his BP and other stats.

There are the better scales but the ones most GP's use on their little Height Vs weight rotating dials are a crock.

I started a diet of my own creation this week. Most of what I have seen was useless because it relied on things I would never eat or portions I would never be satisfied with. I saw the film, Fat sick and nearly dead a while back on late night TV and downloaded it again to have another look. Fking brilliant. They show a truck driver amoungst some other people who was huge and lost half his bodyweight. No gimmicks, no programs to pay for, just eat fruit and veg basically and eat as much as you want and get off your backside and move. I found the film bloody inspirational.

That is about Juicing and Detoxing ( which I think is crap) but the results are outstanding and the ability to stuff myself with as much as vegetables as I want to fill me up is the upside. I'm not juicing on it's own, I'm eating but very carefully and replacing the urge to snack with a glass of Veggie juice instead of a couple of lamingtons, biscuits or some other crap.

Now I reckon I'm luckier than most in having a mate I talk to pretty much daily that is an expert on food, nutrition and dieting.

I can concoct a meal or juice ( Im doing a lot of blending for the fibre) run it by him and get the go ahead or the caution.

The thing is, when you are trying to loose weight the amount of foods you should avoid is fking over whelming.

My mate is of the opinion there is nothing you can't eat, you just have to have it in moderation. Of course moderation is starvation on the not so good foods. Sure you can eat Chocolate. depending on what else you have had for the day it might be one single square 1x1 Cm but he'd not say you couldn't have it.

To get your fill however, what you can have is bullchit in the smallness of variety and qty.

And basically you can forget about 99% of anything that comes from a can or packet.

If you look at soooo many foods, even fresh ones, the amount of sugar alone in things like fruit and even an amount of veggies is going to mean you are limited greatly in what you can have if you want to loose weight.

To me, It's no wonder people are fat, the Fking miracle is that everyone is not 10 times fatter than what they are!

Another thing I have learned is that Double cheeseburger / Big whopper etc isn't the epotiomy of a fat gain disaster it's always made out to be.

Have that burger and a bottle of water and you could still likely be on target for your daily calorie intake. The thing is they shove the chips, the coke, the Sundae and the apple pie at you as well which then provides enough calories for the entire day. That's where the problem really lies.

So when this is being promoted as good value and a bargain and something you are going to enjoy, it's BS in the extreme to then say it's people fault and responsibility for being fat without attributing some of the blame where it belongs.

To me that is shared between the gubbermint for allowing it to happen and the food companies.

Yeah sure, you can duck shove it back to the guy in the street for not having a gun held to his head and being forced to eat it but that's a fing cop out in the reality of human nature they bloody well understand and rely on in their advertising when they peddle the chit in the first place.

When you dangle a bag of money in front of a crim and collar him when he takes it, that's called entrapment and it and the prosecutors arse is kicked out of court. You can't have one standard in one thing and another on something else.

While the majority of experts go on about making healthy choices and all that crap, the fact is those choices are EXTREMELY limited in mainstream foods and difficult to work out and find palatable options for a lot of people. I don't like Broccoli, and brussel sprouts and cauliflower and all those other bland arse vegetables that either have no taste or taste like Chit. I don't like a lot of other things that are favourited by the diet freaks either.

the mentality is "You''ll get used to them". I'm sure I could get used to the taste of drinking muddy water as well but I have no inclination to suffer that either.

Even when you do go looking for healthy, non fattening foods, you could condense your entire supermarket into 1 single aisle or less. And for this reason I do agree it's not peoples fault entirely for being fat. Even the stuff that is pushed on you as being healthy frequently is some of the worst, most fattening garbage out there. You can't allow people to be mislead into thinking they are doing the right thing then put the blame on them because they are getting fat eating what they thought and was told was healthy.

Yeah, you can read the labels but not everyone has 4 hours to do the food shopping. The responsible thing to do for gubbermints etc to put some health standards or at least some easy to understand labeling on these foods so people can easily see what their getting without having to be chemist to understand it all. And if that is all too much, they should have minimum standards on the current nutrition information so you can bloody read what they have put without the aid of a high powered Magnifying glass.

If it's good enough to mandate minimum size health warning on Cigarrettes that some of the population consume, why not on food that Everyone eats?

Just yesterday I met my first challenge. The food court at the shopping centre where I had gone to see some potential clients.

Not wanting to blow my good and painful efforts away, instead of just lobbing up for a burger etc. I walked around looking for the right stuff.

Yep, there were salad type things but difficult to have without being completely bland or with a dressing, wrap or something else that would make the burger and chips no worse than the " healthy" looking if totally deceiving option.

A trap I noticed straight off was subway. Look at all that salad and stuff. that has to be good and not fattening right?

Wrong!

The bread is laced with all sorts of fattening nasties and a lot of the dressings have enough calories to put the piddly little 6inch snack rather than meal on par with a meat pie.

But Joe average bombarded with the advertising and deliberate misrepresentation of the product is supposed to do all his homework and know the nutritional content of everything on offer out there right?

With anything else they would call that a con and it would be illegal.

They restrict the availability of guns because their position is people will shoot one another if there are too many around.

How the Fk then do they allow so much chit to be put into foods and not think people aren't going to get fat and then blame them when they do?

[Ray!]

I'm not sure exactly what you agree with; the part that individuals aren't responsible for their own weight, aka health?

I also don't think this is a media beat-up. It's another wedge being pushed into society, where do-gooders feel that people need to be looked after, because they believe they can't look after themselves. And of course to do this, government needs to fund the do-gooders that will be required to do all of this looking after.

Cheers

Ray

[Rumcajs]

I tend to agree with both views, but also add my 2 cents worth. We seem to also forget that food is being considered an entertainment as well which is another hurdle some overweight people have to face. Problem with that kind of thought is that our bodies are programmed for time of plenty and starvation cycles. So now we still eat like we going to starve except we've got "plenty" cycle going only with added social pressures

Combined all that fuel(food) with more sedate lifestyle we now have and fatties are easily made.

The constant barrage of cooking shows, food commercials and what not is making sure that no one forgets that food is available. Food manufacturing (what an oddity) is a big business and creates masses of fat people. It is hard, inconvenient and expensive to eat healthy.

Cheers

[Glort]

It is hard, inconvenient and expensive to eat healthy.

EXACTLY!

While doing the opposite is convinent, fast, cheap and promoted far more.

[Foo]

Not all can be linked into the fat and lazy label! My wife played net ball four nights a week and two games a night and couldn't lose weight! She was diagnoised as having a low metabolism and no matter what she did and how little she ate, she couldn't drop the weight.

She has now had 85% of here stomach removed and a sheath put in, to try and get the weight off because the future was not good for any longevity, so don't lump all people into the same basket, as there are many that can't help it!

Foo

[Ray!]

That wasn't what I was implying. There are genuine medical reasons why some simply can't overcome weight issues, high cholestorol, heart issues, etc; but they are not the people being discussed in these conferences, media reports etc. What my concern is that this is becoming another excuse to control the lifestyle choices that people choose to take. It's increasingly becoming a world where so called 'experts' know what's better for the dumb masses.

If this is genuine concern, ban it all; cigarettes, alcohol, fast foods, cars, anything that's deemed bad for us. Will they? No! All it will be is an excuse to impose more sin taxes. The mayor of New York is addressing these issues by direct action, in a half-hearted sort of way, for example: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-31/nyc-mayor-bloomberg-seeks-ban-on-super-size-soft-drinks.html. But why stop there, ban sinful products entirely.

I believe that we should ban mobile phones for kids, facebook, computer games etc; that way today's obese youth would actually get off their fat arses and do what kids did before technology made them immobile.

Cheers

Ray

[Ray!]

And on que: http://www.theage.com.au/national/car-pollution-puts-child-health-at-risk-20120721-22gyt.html.

The study found children inhaled and retained more air pollution per unit of body weight than adults, partly because they played outdoors, and that pollution had a greater impact on children because their lungs were still developing. While the impacts measured were small, long-term exposure to NO2 could affect them into adult life, the report warned.

The report called for major reductions in particulate matter (airborne fine particles of soot), carbon dioxide, NO2 and ozone, saying there were many pollutants without a safe ''threshold''. The report suggested this be done by limiting motor vehicle emissions, investing in more public transport and through better urban design.

Lucas Dew, 10, of Newport, had his first ambulance trip with an asthma attack four years ago and has had three since. His father, Simon Dew, said there was only one mild asthma case in the family before Lucas, and he believes nearby factories, including the Newport power station and Mobil at Altona, which both emit NO2, may be a factor in his son's condition.

I read a report somewhere that suggested kids were becoming more prone to all sorts of problems because they live in virtual clean rooms for most of their important developing life and fail to get immunity like kids of yesteryear did.

Cheers

Ray