Over the last 70 years, the modern world went from slim to fat.
Look at photos people at the beach in the 1960’s and you’ll see hoards of slim bodies. Look at people at the beach in 2023 and it’s a very different story.
Obesity is one of those tragedies that’s so commonplace and so ubiquitous that nobody even views it as a tragedy.
Obesity is responsible for more deaths than: COVID19, drugs, mass shootings, the Ukraine war and the Israel-Palestine war combined. Yes. Combined.
All of this controversy, all of this media attention on the above issues, and yet right under our noses is a tragedy far bigger and more dangerous that, honestly, people rarely think about.
Fatness and obesity has simply been accepted as a fact of life. As though there’s nothing that we, or you, can do about it. Your neighbour is fat, your mother is fat, the receptionist is fat, your colleague is fat, the doctor is fat. As for you, reading this now, if you live in the USA, there’s a roughly 73% chance that you’re either overweight or obese. (This statistic can’t be accurate, surely!).
It may seem like a fact of life, yet for almost all of human history, it wasn’t like this.
If you yourself are overweight or obese, you may feel somewhat defensive or offended when reading this article. Especially as it’s written by a 30 year old guy who is genetically predisposed to being skinny and has never had so much as a pinch of fat on him (don’t be too jealous, being overly skinny comes with it’s own problems, trust me).
Despite my lack of personal experience, I’m going to present to you here a radical mindset shift that is miles away from the ordinary weight loss advice you’re likely sick of hearing.
Why am I doing this? Because I’m sick to death of seeing people simply not understanding this issue properly. I’m sick of watching people lie to each other, and lie to themselves about being fat.
I want to provide a raw perspective from somebody who isn’t trying to make you feel good about yourself.
1. If you’re overweight, you’re being played for a fool
Now, I am most certainly not calling you a fool if you’re overweight. There are plenty of overweight or obese individuals out there who are far more intelligent than I am.
I’m not calling you a fool, I’m telling you you’re being played for a fool. By who? The food industry.
The food industry does not exist for the purpose of providing nutrition to the public. It exists to take as much money out of the bank accounts of the public and place it into their own bank accounts.
The modern food industry has 2 goals: 1. To make a food product that sells as much as possible. 2. To reduce the costs of making that food product as much as possible.
Notice how “providing a food product that is healthy and nutritious for the public” is not on their list of priorities.
They need to follow the rules of the food regulatory body (In the USA, that would be the FDA), but aside from that they are laser-focused on those 2 goals. And they spend millions of dollars researching exactly how to achieve them.
The food industry creates artificial food products out of thin air; there was previously no need for this product. After all, the public already have enough natural, nutritious food to last them a lifetime.
They fill these artificial food products with a balance of sugar, salt and fat.
The sugar, a highly addictive white powder (shown in rat experiments to be somewhat similar to cocaine), increases the number of customers who continue to buy the product.
At the same time, sugar is cheap, allowing the food manufacturer to cut the costs of production. Highly addictive and cheap at the same time — an absolute dream for the food industry!
The food industry sees you as a number, as a walking $ sign, as a rat being tested in an experiment.
Think about it like this. You’re in the rat maze (modern society) and the experimenters are watching you from above (the food industry). They watch you to see which precise combination of ingredients, what colour and design of packing and what kind of marketing will get you to keep buying their food products.
As you (the rat) walk into the supermarket, they (the experimenters) watch and record your behaviour to see what you buy. You buy their artificial food product (created in a laboratory), take it home and nibble on it.
Take Oreos as an example. Oreos are an entirely artificial food product that was created, not in a kitchen, but in a lab. Studies have not only shown that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine, but also that rats often eat the creamy filling of the Oreo before the rest of the biscuit — just like humans do.
The food industry experts at Oreo discovered that the experiments they conducted with Oreos on rats translated very closely to human-beings.
Mondelez International, the corporation that owns the Oreo brand, loves to see you handing over your money to them to buy yet another pack of Oreos.
And what do you get in return? You ingest an artificial food product that travels through your body, damaging it at the cellular level, before being excreted out.
You age your skin, damage your internal organs, build excessive amounts of fat and make your body less attractive, all for the sake of a second of “mouth pleasure”.
Every time you eat a Mcdonalds Big Mac, a chocolate bar, candy, cookies or cakes, you’re eating a scientific experiment made inside a lab. They did study after study, testing to see how to make a food product that sold as much as possible with the cheapest ingredients possible. And you keep going in there and buying it.
They’re playing you for a fool.
Not everyone who’s overweight gets there through eating junk food products, but a lot of people do. And if you’re overweight AND you buy and eat junk food products, you ARE being played for a fool.
2. Junk Food is not a “luxury experience”
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For decades now, Galaxy have been marketing their chocolate bars as some kind of “luxury experience”.
They tend to include a beautiful women, sitting alone after a hard day, and gracefully slipping piece of Galaxy chocolate into their mouths.
Imagine thinking that eating a mass-produced chocolate bar was a luxurious, self-indulgent experience. Seriously.
Galaxy chocolate bars are, like all over chocolate bars, a precise balance of sugar and salt, along with a small amount of cocoa and various other unnameable chemicals.
Women in particular can be found all over social media claiming that eating a slide of cake is “self-love”, “Self-care” or “me time”.
I’ll put this bluntly: Eating junk food is not “self-love”. Eating sugar-filled food products created in a lab by giant food corporations is not self-love. The excessive amounts of sugar inside the food makes you less healthy and give your face a kind of pale “dead look”.
Want to relax? Want to practise self-love or self-care? Get a massage. Read a book. Watch a guilty-pleasure movie. Call a close friend. Eat freshly picked fruit: raspberries, strawberries, oranges. These are delicious. And they’re especially more delicious if you don’t constantly desensitise your taste-buds with artificially sweet foods created by junk food corporations.
3. The body is supposed to move
Perhaps you look at all those men and women sweating and panting in the gym and shake your head. What’s the point, you might think to yourself.
Or perhaps you think to yourself: only a simpleton could derive pleasure from such a pointless, repetitive activity.
Or perhaps you think to yourself: Look at them. Trying to meet capitalism’s impossible beauty standards. Like rats on a rat wheel.
Perhaps you see yourself as somehow “above” exercise.
Let me replace all that mind-chatter with one simple phrase: The body is supposed to move.
You’ve been blessed with an incredible machine. A complex system of bones connected together with joints, with muscles connected to those bones by thousands of tendons.
Your body is the result of millions of years of evolution. It was designed to run, jump and crawl, and to throw spears at great distances with great accuracy.
When you don’t move your body, when you sit still in your computer chair, when your sit in your car, when you sit in front of the sofa, your body begins to break down.
Your muscles become weak and your cardio-vascular system requires you to breathe heavily for simple tasks like climbing a set of stairs.
Human-beings aren’t supposed to live this way. You’re not supposed to be out of shape. You’re not supposed to be overweight. And you’re not supposed to live your entire life in an overweight, out of shape body.
Perhaps you’re somebody who prioritises intellectual pursuits over physical ones. Guess what, moving your body helps you think more clearly. Exercise improves your memory and thinking skills.
Exercise eases symptoms of depression and anxiety and makes you less prone to mental illness.
Your tribal ancestors, who lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles likely felt far, far better than you do on a daily basis. They probably enjoyed their life far more than you are. Why? Because they were constantly moving their bodies.
They exercised all day in the sunshine, and by the time the day ended, their body was ready for sleep.
The body is supposed to move. And any story that you tell yourself in your head as to why exercise isn’t important is a lie.
Forget the unrealistic Instagram models. Forget the toxic fitness industry. Forget advertising constantly showing perfect bodies. Forget the fat-shamers. All of that is nothing more than noise.
Forget all that and simply remember: The body is supposed to move.
4. Being Overweight will make your life unnecessarily difficult
Anybody who doesn’t exercise, anybody who doesn’t treat their body as their temple, anybody who lives their life carrying tons of excess fat with them everywhere they go is trying to move through life with the breaks on.
When you carry loads of excess fat on your body, everything is going to be harder. Dating will be harder. Work will be harder. Intellectual pursuits will be harder. Writing will be harder. Going to parties will be harder. And doing your household chores will be harder.
Things are likely going to be more frustrating and more difficult because human-beings aren’t supposed to carry tons of excess fat on them. Life isn’t supposed to be like that. Your ancestors certainly didn’t live life like that.
Carrying some excess fat is of course perfectly natural; it’s a survival technique useful during long periods without food.
Some body types do naturally hold more fat than others. Some bodies are naturally bigger than others. We call this an endomorph body type. This body type perfectly natural and can even be dead sexy if taken care of properly (on both men and women).
But there’s a difference between a healthy, endomorph body type, and carrying an unnatural amount of excess fat.
You don’t need to look like a supermodel. You don’t need a flat stomach. You don’t need a perfect ass. Carrying some fat is perfectly fine. This isn’t about impressing others.
But if you’re carrying an unnatural amount of excess fat around with you everywhere you go, you’re playing life on hard mode.
Why make your life unnecessarily hard?
Being overweight doesn’t devalue you as a person. Being overweight doesn’t mean you’re “less than” anybody else. And being overweight is nothing to be ashamed of.
But at the same time, these 4 things are true:
- If you’re overweight, you’re being played for a fool
2. Junk Food is not a “luxury experience”
3. The body is supposed to move
4. Being Overweight will make your life unnecessarily difficult
