Archived There's hope if you catch them young. (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
submitted ago by Phillyshitlord
Posted by: Phillyshitlord
Posting time: 5.3 years ago on
Last edit time: never edited.
Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
Views: 122
SCP: 15
15 upvotes, 0 downvotes (100% upvoted it)
~31 user(s) here now
NSFW: No
Authorized: No
Anon: No
Private: No
Type: Default
Archived There's hope if you catch them young. (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
submitted ago by Phillyshitlord
view the rest of the comments →
[–] Untended_Distention 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
I had those classes, too, as a kid (here in 'murica), but they were vague and incomplete. We learned about the "Food Pyramid" which, among other things, advocated for almost as many servings of grains & starches as everything else together. The food pyramid has since been replaced with better information, but still not good information. I was never taught about calories in/calories out, and kids today still don't get that from established curricula. I was taught in general that eating healthy foods is what makes you thin/healthy. Growing up, my concept of weight loss was "You have to eat nothing but vegetables and exercise constantly." When I finally learned how weight-loss works (after I was 30!), I can't tell you how happy I was to be able to control my weight loss with something as simple as calories. But, culturally, there is almost zero awareness of calories in/calories out. No one in TV or movies ever mentions calorie counting unless it's related to Anorexia. There is almost no popular music that even mentions losing weight as a positive thing, and none at all that ever even reference how it actually works.
There are occasionally news articles from actual news sites that talk about weight loss and calories correctly, but not many.
In all, popular culture doesn't know how weight-loss works. There's no ubiquity, no innate sense of food, no common understanding about overeating, no real knowledge about cause & effect.
Sure, there are plenty of Americans who do know all of this, but it's usually because someone in their family (usually the parents) are already shitlords and have explained it properly. Others might eventually get it form friends or acquaintances (like I did), and fewer still learn about it when they study medicine/nutrution, but mostly people are just clueless.
And to top it all off, the people who do get it often don't realize that fat people don't get it. Doctors will tell their patients "You should eat healthier and be more active" without going into specifics. I had the same doctor for at least a decade starting when I was in my teens, and as he watched me gain weight, he would warn me that getting fat is unhealthy. But I didn't know what that really meant, and I railed against the idea of switching from my horribly sugary diet to vegetables and strenuous workout. "Not worth it," I thought more than once.
But if he had told me how to eat right and lose weight and that it was even simpler than veggies and exercise, I probably never would have been obese, maybe never even overweight. If I'd known when I was a kid how it all works, I definitely never would have been fat.
Ignorance is a terrible thing.