frostbiker
Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite
A distinction without a difference: if you don’t eat some more, you will suffer. In the long run, people eat until they are satisfied. Call it hunger, call it appetite, call it cravings, call it whatever you want. Stop eating too early -> suffer.
But how many overweight people are just eating too much
How do you determine what is “too much”? If you measure it by weigh gain, then all of them are eating too much. But if you measure it by “they eat until they are satisfied and no more than that”, probably most of them aren’t eating too much.
and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
That I suspect is very common. Then again, many modern jobs involve sitting all day and the day has a finite number of hours, and at least in North America cities are car-dependent so many people don’t even get to commute by foot. It’s an environment that produces very sedentary people.
There is also lack of sleep, which I personally suffer from. How many of us are getting a good eight hours of good quality sleep every night?
There is more to it than “personal responsibility”.
I suspect the whole “fat acceptance” movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It’s the same process behind gay pride: it’s not pride as in “I’m better than you”, it is pride as in “I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me”.
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can’t fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
I used to judge overweight people. Now I understand that I was an asshole.
I have gained 25Kg in the past three years for no apparent reason. I eat the same kind of food, I exercise regularly… yet something is slightly off and my weight continues to slowly creep up.
People talk about calories in, calories out. What is missing from that argument is something as obvious as hunger: in the real world, over the long term, people eat until they are satisfied and no sooner than that. “Count your calories” means “Go hungry every meal”. You can soldier on for a few months or a year, but eventually you will simply eat until you are no longer hungry.
If your hormones are slightly off and you feel a little too hungry for how much energy you actually need, you will slowly gain weight. Healthy people don’t feel hungry every meal, that’s simply not how they maintain a healthy weight.
That is why drugs like Wegovy are so important. They slightly adjust your sense of hunger so that it matches the amount of energy you actually need. Being overweight is in itself a chronic disease with all sorts of complications, from hypertension and diabetes to heart disease and joint problems. We need to stop judging people who suffer from it and start treating them now that we finally can.
…which is fine. We can’t encourage antisocial behavior, and leaving private stuff for free in the middle of the street is antisocial behavior. Free on-street parking for cars is just as bad for everyone, but people have grown accustomed to it and get bothered by e-scooters even though they take a small fraction of the space of a parked car.
A carbon tax does a better job at incentivizing low-carbon alternatives at all scales, from trains and more efficient airplanes down to e-bikes.
We should disincentivize antisocial behavior rather than ban specific technologies. If rental e-scooters left in the middle of the sidewalk are a problem, require rental companies to provide parking where the e-scooter must be docked at the end of the journey, for example.
As long as e-scooters are primarily replacing car trips, they are a net benefit to society. Let’s iron out the wrinkles instead of an outright ban.
There is plenty of precedent of non-religious informal rules around clothing. E.g. men wearing skirts, dresses, or soft “feminine” colors. Do those informal rules bother you as well? Should we change the law accordingly, or are we okay with informal norms of conduct in that case?