The Exercise of Personal Responsibility
It's amazing, looking around, to see the number of people entering and exiting restaurants, fast-food outlets and supermarkets who are overweight. Fact is, we don't really register mere overweight. Overweight can be construed as having ten pounds too much on your frame, that you could, if you really tried, shed. To make yourself feel better, to feel you look better, to appreciate yourself more. So it's not the merely overweight that draws attention; it's the obese. Time was someone who was so mired in fat as to be labeled obese was a rarity. Now there are great numbers of people who qualify for the obese category, and a growing number who are morbidly obese.
Which is to say their great uptake of food has resulted in a condition where their body fat, their actual girth is so great as to render them susceptible to all manner of organ failures. So their futures are compromised by their greater susceptibility to diabetes and heart disease and stroke and high blood pressure and kidney disease, hip and knee problems. Carrying around all that weight is a burden to one's working organs. Not to mention the physical incapacitation of people so burdened by weight that their mobility is compromised, they've rendered themselves incapable of exercising even to the extent of taking prolonged walks to ensure they can at least work off some of the calories they consume.
The state of their health is a certain indication that they're not going to achieve a ripe old age. And the extent of their seniority will also be gauged by the quality of the lifestyle their failing health assures them. They've compromised the quality of their lives, they've ensured that ill health will complicate their futures, they've guaranteed themselves an early demise. All of which impacts on their families in one way or another. How about familial inheritance where children observe and behave as their parents do? Children are increasingly joining the overweight and obese categories, some even showing up with impaired internal organs as a result. All of which certainly makes an impression on our health care institutions. So the big question has got to be: why do people do this to themselves?
Yes, the easy availability of food, anywhere, at any time. And, of course, nutrient-deficient, calorie-rich fast foods loaded with chemicals and fats and sugars and salt. By eating this readily available junk we've distorted our appreciation of wholesome food and encouraged our predilection for salty-sweet-fat-laden foods. Our taste buds 'forget' how good wholesome, nutritional food tastes and we don't reach for the fresh fruits and vegetables, the whole grains and dairy and fish that can enhance our diets, not threaten our early demise.
If adults are so unconcerned about their own health, don't they ever consider how they're practises impact on their children?
It takes discipline to teach ourselves all over again to identify nutrient-rich foods over calorie-dense prepared foods, because it's just too much of an effort. We live in a quick and easy age when it comes to food and no one really enjoys reading labels to try to understand just what it is we're consuming. Food manufacturers are acquiescing to human tastes when they overload their food products with salt, sugar and fat since that's what tastes best to people, and masks the tastelessness of most pre-prepared foods.
Just because we live in an era where everyone feels themselves to be too busy, to overloaded with concerns about lifestyles and too burdened with demanding jobs doesn't equate with abusing our bodies. It makes sense, good sense, to devote some time to serving yourself well. To do that everyone has to become more conscious of what they're doing to themselves. A resolve to become better informed, to eat more purposefully and appreciatively, to become recreationally engaged just makes good sense.
People must learn to recognize the disproportionality of the foods they consume, to that which their bodies require. To control the appetite toward moderation will also control health and quality of life, let alone longevity. Not too much to expect from rational, intelligent beings. Or perhaps not, given peoples' demonstrated self-indulgence, visceral laziness and the resulting avalanche of modern society's succumbing en mass to an epidemic of ill-health situations exemplified by mass obesity.
Eat mountains of junk, make a junkyard of your body: you're complicit in your own life's dispensability; you've made your future disposable.
Which is to say their great uptake of food has resulted in a condition where their body fat, their actual girth is so great as to render them susceptible to all manner of organ failures. So their futures are compromised by their greater susceptibility to diabetes and heart disease and stroke and high blood pressure and kidney disease, hip and knee problems. Carrying around all that weight is a burden to one's working organs. Not to mention the physical incapacitation of people so burdened by weight that their mobility is compromised, they've rendered themselves incapable of exercising even to the extent of taking prolonged walks to ensure they can at least work off some of the calories they consume.
The state of their health is a certain indication that they're not going to achieve a ripe old age. And the extent of their seniority will also be gauged by the quality of the lifestyle their failing health assures them. They've compromised the quality of their lives, they've ensured that ill health will complicate their futures, they've guaranteed themselves an early demise. All of which impacts on their families in one way or another. How about familial inheritance where children observe and behave as their parents do? Children are increasingly joining the overweight and obese categories, some even showing up with impaired internal organs as a result. All of which certainly makes an impression on our health care institutions. So the big question has got to be: why do people do this to themselves?
Yes, the easy availability of food, anywhere, at any time. And, of course, nutrient-deficient, calorie-rich fast foods loaded with chemicals and fats and sugars and salt. By eating this readily available junk we've distorted our appreciation of wholesome food and encouraged our predilection for salty-sweet-fat-laden foods. Our taste buds 'forget' how good wholesome, nutritional food tastes and we don't reach for the fresh fruits and vegetables, the whole grains and dairy and fish that can enhance our diets, not threaten our early demise.
If adults are so unconcerned about their own health, don't they ever consider how they're practises impact on their children?
It takes discipline to teach ourselves all over again to identify nutrient-rich foods over calorie-dense prepared foods, because it's just too much of an effort. We live in a quick and easy age when it comes to food and no one really enjoys reading labels to try to understand just what it is we're consuming. Food manufacturers are acquiescing to human tastes when they overload their food products with salt, sugar and fat since that's what tastes best to people, and masks the tastelessness of most pre-prepared foods.
Just because we live in an era where everyone feels themselves to be too busy, to overloaded with concerns about lifestyles and too burdened with demanding jobs doesn't equate with abusing our bodies. It makes sense, good sense, to devote some time to serving yourself well. To do that everyone has to become more conscious of what they're doing to themselves. A resolve to become better informed, to eat more purposefully and appreciatively, to become recreationally engaged just makes good sense.
People must learn to recognize the disproportionality of the foods they consume, to that which their bodies require. To control the appetite toward moderation will also control health and quality of life, let alone longevity. Not too much to expect from rational, intelligent beings. Or perhaps not, given peoples' demonstrated self-indulgence, visceral laziness and the resulting avalanche of modern society's succumbing en mass to an epidemic of ill-health situations exemplified by mass obesity.
Eat mountains of junk, make a junkyard of your body: you're complicit in your own life's dispensability; you've made your future disposable.
Labels: Realities
posted by Pieface @ 6:05 PM
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