I’m 370 lbs and today I had a doctor tell me that people who are skinnier than me are all like that because they work out and eat right. Can I get a roll call for the people who are less than 370 lbs and eat like shit or don’t work out? Because I’m pretty sure you exist.
Also, one time I had a doctor ask me “are you sure?” 4 times after I said I didn’t have any breathing problems. Like nah I’m just big.
I am now roughly 80kgs, so I’ve lost around 5kg since moving from Australia back to China without actively doing anything.
I think the west (but especially the USA) has created an environment that facilitates obesity and shames people to pay their way out of it.
I don’t actively exercise, but living in a walkable city vs living in a suburb (without a car) has probably doubled the amount of exercise I get. Like in Australia, I’d walk to work, walk around for several hours (line cook), walk home, and usually at night on weekends walk from home to pub to pub to pub to home. But on my days off from work/drinking, nothing was close enough to my suburban ass house so I’d just stay at home unless I was particularly motivated. Also I had a diet of white people food since that’s what my work serves and it’s therefore obviously what I steal from work.
Back home now in the People’s Republic, I’ve been walking 9-20km per day. Night or day. It’s safe to walk around alone. There’s people out and about in common spaces so you don’t look/feel like a weirdo. Pedestrian friendly, bicycle friendly, parks, plazas and monuments everywhere. Seen everything in your immediate surroundings? Drop 4 RBM round trip on the metro to another part of the city with another dozen vistas and attractions and parks and running tracks. And most of the things you can do on a stroll are free. I find myself enjoying going for a light jog/stroll in sub zero temperatures in China more than a lovely spring afternoon in the Australian suburbs.
My advice is to leave the USA as soon as possible (I assume you’re American because you used lb). Wash your hands of the evil empire. I can’t imagine the motivation for exercise is as great if your options are to walk past cookie cutter houses in a suburb that might not even have a footpath, a stroad with no barriers where American motorists drive an arms length past your body at 100km/h, a cookie cutter gym playing terrible music and costing money.
If you’re very lucky a nearby hiking trail or public park… that requires you to drive there and back and probably pay for parking.
God forbid if you’re a POC and some right wing chud with a gun doesn’t like the notion of a coloured person strolling through their neighbourhood.
Not even to mention all the “healthy” food in the US apparently sucks ass, costs double and might not even be available due to food deserts.
It’s good advice generally and I enjoyed reading your comment bragging about how nice PRC is and how shit Australia is. But I think you may have misunderstood the post, OP was complaining about always advice to get more physical activity etc in relation to their weight. And here you are just doing that.
Just about the only situation in which an adult person can lose weight long term is if there is a specific, identifiable cause for them to have gained weight as an adult and that cause is modifiable. Your example of a person who moves to US/UK/Canada/Australia and gains weight is a known phenomena, for the reasons including which you described. And they may be able to lose some of it if they are able to make their life (not lifestyle) more like it was previously. Another example would be like if someone is taking a medication that causes them to gain weight; stopping the medication will likely result in some weight loss. Especially if the weight gain has been recent/brief. Often these causes are extrinsic to the person, like your example of living in a shit country.
However, most people do not have something like this in their life. If they do, they have one thing. You lost 5 kg by moving back to PRC. You might continue to gradually lose for a little while (don’t know your timeline) but eventually it’ll plateau when you back to your baseline balance for your body. Once that happens, it would be very difficult to lose another 5kg permanently.
People who are fat as adults and were fat as children have very little chance of becoming permanently skinny (or even much less fat) other than by illness, surgery or ozempic for the rest of their lives. It’s just how they are. And people who have been fat for a long time, regardless of their age, will probably be fat forever too. So offering advice about losing weight is a strange and unkind thing that everyone always wants to do, which was the gist of the post.
This is very much true. I would love to be able to ditch my shitty car for a bike, and I would be in much better shape if I did. However doing so is extremely dangerous, because I have to drive 15 minutes down a 55mph stroad just to go get groceries, and I don’t even really live in the suburbs. I live in a shitty apartment block that is 5 minutes (again by stroad) away from my manufacturing job.
If this were a sane society everything would be built to scale with the travel abilities of the human body in mind, but it’s not, it’s built exclusively with the private automobile in mind; and everything else flows out from that.