Obesity
How would you feel if I told you that there isn’t one state in the US with an obesity rate lower than 20%? Now take this information and compare it to twenty years ago when every state had an obesity rate lower than 15%.
There are many causes of obesity: overeating, genetics, hormones, the environment, and lack of physical activity, but in almost every circumstance, obesity is a self diagnosable, self treatable condition, but obesity is also terrifyingly common, the most common cause or preventable death, (or second depending hon you calculate it). What’s more, obesity can be prevented with two simple steps, eating healthy and staying active. So why the dang is it so prevalent!? To be honest, I have some theories but I’ll leave most of them out of this, the one I will tell you about however is one that I am sure about and here it is.
I have discovered a couple things over the years of my life, one is that fast food is cheap, readily available, and it tastes really good. Another is that working out and hard exercise sucks. it really does, when you run, for a long time it is absolute agony and all you want to do is to stop. Most people don’t have the motivation to keep going. For most of humanity, staying in shape just isn’t enough incentive. So it is quite easy to slip back into old habits of bad nutrition and inadequate exercise. In my case, about 75% of the food I eat is crap for my health, (I am eating a big bag of jelly beans as I type this) but I’m not even overweight.
My trick is that I get myself into, and get myself friends who are into activities that keep me in shape. A couple of examples of this from my life are, instead of driving or walking places, I often rollerblade or run. I also have a friend that is into long distance running, and even though I hate running more than a mile or maybe two, I let her convince me to join the Cross Country team next fall because it would be a fun way for us to spend time together. And that’s the key, fun. Did you know that, during a game, a professional soccer player runs an average of 7–9.5 miles? The difference between running 7 miles during a workout, and running that same distance during a game though, is that a soccer player enjoys it. If you take pleasure in an activity, you are not going to need motivation in order to do it and you go out of your way in order to spend more of your time doing it. I asked my mom and my sarcastic friend Calvin what they thought about obesity or something.
Why should we care though? I mean if you aren’t fat then the obesity epidemic doesn’t affect you right? Haha I wish that were true but sadly it isn’t. Increases in the size of the US’s citizens affect us all. Here’s why. As we get heavier as a country, we have to pay more money on jet fuel and gas, also obese people cause discomfort on subways due to cramped conditions and they have even caused boats to sink because people are heavier than they were in the past. No, that was a joke. Here are some real reasons. Obesity can have terrible effects on the body such as increased susceptibility to other major health problems and depression this can happen to relatives, close friends, or even you. But If you still don’t really care, researchers are finding trends in groups of close friends where when one person gains weight their close friends also gain weight. One study showed that friends are a huge influence when it comes to weight gain and if a friend became overweight you had a 57 percent higher chance of becoming obese. And the same thing with parents, A child with one obese parent has a 50 percent chance of being obese, and when both parents are obese, the likelihood that the children will be obese goes up to 80% . And if the child is overweight, the cycle will continue. Obesity has even been deemed a threat to national security because nearly 30% of military recruits are turned away due to obesity(I’d say that affects you).
My paternal grandparents have both eaten horridly most of their adult lives and have been fat the entire time I’ve known them, now that they have gotten old , the repercussions of that are showing. I love my grandparents and seeing them in such terrible shape is a big motivator for why I don’t want to be fat and hate obesity so much. the same thing could happen to anyone but it is much more likely to happen to obese people. My point is, that the obesity epidemic affects this whole county including you, so you’d damn better care about it.
This story is part of a new Storytelling for Changemakers program for Changemaker Schools activated in partnership with Ashoka’s Youth Venture and Start Empathy.
Individual views expressed in this blog are from individual students at YIHS and not representative of Ashoka, Start Empathy, or Youth Venture.
