Obesity — The Elephant in the Room
When you help someone whose hurt — it feels like a good thing to do. However, in our world if you even attempt to help someone that is obese you are seen as an asshole or rude because they didn’t ask for any help. People that are obese should be seen no different than people that have depression issues or people that break a leg and require immediate attention. We need to help people stay healthy, not avoid the elephant in the room and pretend that they like being obese. No one wakes up and says ‘I want to be obese’, just like no one wakes up and says ‘I want to break my leg’ — but should either one of these things happen we need our society to take both events just as seriously as obesity will kill you and cause perhaps more damage to your life than breaking a leg or temporarily hurting yourself.
How can we change the stigma around helping people who may or may not be wanting to be helped? I believe, for the most part, obese people would rather not be addicted to food and would rather feel good about their bodies instead of being ashamed at what they look like in the mirror. We are the only species on the planet that gets obese — horses, elephants, tigers, dolphins and monkeys never get obese in the wild. Yet, us “very intelligent” humans have made obesity an easy feat to reach. Why? It’s simple — our diets suck! Our food has been made chemically addictive (thanks to greedy corporate food companies) which has made it easy for many of us westerners to be addicted to food and as a result explode into human Humpty Dumpties. Actually, Humpty Dumpties would be an understatement for a lot of us westerners these days. Our society has become so addicted to eating that that we’ve even made eating a sport. And if your not into stuffing as many hot dogs down your throat at record speeds than your more than likely one who looks at food for happiness instead of fuel to keep you looking and feeling at your best. And when you seek to derive maximum happiness from your food, you’ll soon find most of the food that you eat to be delicious meats, cheeses and dairy-derived-products like croissants, ice creams and creamy cakes. All which are not healthy for humans in any shape or form.
Are you obese? Almost obese? Know someone whose obese? Well, here’s the quick and easy solution to fix that mentioned in my book Greedlicious — “Become a Healthy Vegan for Good”! (Well, at least 6 days a week to start) That means no meat, no dairy, no fatty oils and 70% of your calories from starches (rice, potatoes, pastas, brown bread, ect.), 20% of your calories from vegetables and 10% of your calories from fruit.
What’s better is fighting obesity by means of becoming a healthy vegan will reduce your carbon footprint by about 50% as well as help save our oceans and rainforests from turning into extinct wastelands within fifty years. As the UN says by as early as 2050, unless we change our diets, there will be no more fish left in the ocean and NASA satellite images show that we won’t have any rainforests left within 100 years at our current destruction pace. And despite the tropical rainforest covering only 7% of the Earths surface it provides us humans with about 30% of our oxygen. Do we really want to live in a world with 30% less oxygen just so that you can eat cheap burgers and steaks? Yet, perhaps the better question is can we survive without our rainforests? A lot of scientists say that we can’t — yet we are slowly destroying our planets lungs like a chain smoker with a death wish.
If we #EndGreedlicious by getting everyone to adopt a healthy vegan diet for at least 6 days a week we’ll have a chance to help millions of people whose number one health problem is currently largely ignored by our society, which you can bet our millionaire food executives wants to keep it that way and not to mention millionaire pharmaceutical executives.
What do you think? How do you think we can get society to make a big leap forward and change our culture to one that views obesity as an illness deserving complete support instead of an illness we quickly turn a blind eye to? How can we get doctors to prescribe a healthy vegan diet as the only cure worth prescribing for those who are currently obese? Let me know know what you think in the comments below. With your help we’ll #EndGreedlicious soon enough — our planet and our species needs us to. Let’s get started.
Click here to the Book Greedlicious at Amazon today.
Sources
Eating Meat Is Linked to Obesity
Maintaining a Healthy Weight by Dr. Deborah Wilson
Cheese and Obesity
The Physicians Committee
http://www.pcrm.org/media/blog/jan2012/cheese-and-obesity
The notion that milk is healthy for you is “udder” nonsense.
Dairy Products by Dr Gina Shaw, MA
The leading causes of rainforest destruction are livestock and feedcrops.
“Livestock impacts on the environment.” Food and agriculture organization of the United Nations (fao). 2006.
Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
Goodland, R Anhang, J. “Livestock and Climate Change: What if the key actors in climate change were pigs, chickens and cows?”
WorldWatch, November/December 2009. Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, USA. Pp. 10–19.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294
Emissions for agriculture projected to increase 80% by 2050.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v515/n7528/full/nature13959.html
We could see fishless oceans by 2048.
Science, “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services”.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/787
As many as 2.7 trillion animals are pulled from the ocean each year.
A Mood and P Brooke, July 2010, “Estimating the Number of Fish Caught in Global Fishing Each Year”.
http://www.fishcount.org.uk/published/std/fishcountstudy.pdf
Montaigne, fen. “Still waters: The global fish crisis.” National Geographic.
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.cocean/global-fish-crisis-article/
