I was fat when I was a kid. In elementary and middle school my belly was like a basketball and sometimes poked out from beneath my shirt. I would lay on the couch watching TV and go through boxes (yes, plural) of microwaved Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies. I really didn’t care about my weight because, well, I was a kid.
My mom finally made me take up a sport when I entered high school, so I started running cross-country because that’s what my brother did. I remember my very first day: I barely made it a quarter of a mile before I was heaving and felt like I would die. The rest of the team disappeared over the horizon.
I really don’t know why I didn’t just quit right then and there, but I kept on going and over the weeks and months I got in very good shape. In fact, I ended up playing basketball, soccer, and running track and field as well. My best mile time was 5:35.
Even in college, although I didn’t play any sports officially, I kept running and lifting weights and playing frisbee for fun. Plus, being in good shape for the ladies is never a bad thing, either. Those eight years of my life, high school and college, were easily my healthiest. I stayed right around 160 pounds with a 33 inch waist (and I’m 5’11″ tall).
During those years I also developed a philosophy: I was convinced that only idiots would ever allow themselves to become fat. I hated hearing women complain about being fat and ugly. “Get off your lazy asses and exercise!” I would think to myself. How hard was it to exercise one hour every day? I really believed that fat people deserved to be fat because they were lazy, and that they deserved all the scorn and disrespect afforded to them by skinny people.
But then something happened to me. I graduated, got a job, and suddenly started living in the real world. The real world where I no longer had time to exercise every day, where I no longer had time to cook for myself healthy meals three times a day. You know that old joke about college, “Studying, friends, sleep. Pick two.” That’s much more applicable if you replace “studying” with “working” once you enter the real world. There just isn’t time for exercise or “being healthy”.
It’s also much easier and cheaper to eat unhealthy. McDonald’s has a dollar menu, for crying out loud. Am I really going to spend lots of money on healthy foods and lots of time preparing them?
As icing on the cake, I also bruised the meniscus in my knee and couldn’t run even if I wanted to. I finally felt my body getting old. I wasn’t an invincible teenager anymore. My back was sore, my arms were sore, my legs were sore. Every time I worked out something ended up hurting. When I exercised (if I exercised) I felt like an old man.
It took about a year, but I gained 20 pounds and went up to a size 36. I didn’t realize it was happening at the time; summer came and went and suddenly I didn’t fit into my pants anymore. For the first time in my life, I had to buy new clothes not because they were old and worn out but because they didn’t fit anymore.
I couldn’t believe it. How could this happen to me? Me! The super-fit young man who could eat anything and everything and never gain a pound!
It was life, that’s what happened. All good things must end. I might have lost my old figure, but I also gained an entirely new philosophy: it wasn’t fat people’s fault.
Think about it. Getting fat is a slow and steady process that takes a lifetime. Nobody wakes up one day suddenly fat. I’m 180 pounds right now and 26 years old, and if I eat just 50 extra calories a day, that’s 2050 calories instead of 2000, just an extra half a banana, or half a cup of coffee, or half a slice of bread, or one bite of a cheeseburger, I’ll be a 336 pound walrus by the time I’m 56 years old. Don’t believe me? 50 cals x 365 days x 30 years = 547,500 calories of fat, and its 3500 calories per pound, which comes out to a gain of 156 pounds.
Being healthy is a full-time job, and not everyone has time for it. A lot of fat people are also poor people, who have to work multiple jobs and eat at McDonald’s not because it tastes good but because it’s cheap and all they can afford. Some people suggest that we should force fat people to pay extra health-care premiums to make up for the fact that they’ve made unhealthy choices. Really? Do we really want to hit those poor people when they are down?
(I don’t believe even smokers should have to pay extra premiums. My former roommate was a smoker, but that was because her mom bought her cigarettes when she was 12 and kept buying them for her for the next 10 years. Should we punish the young lady because she had an irresponsible mother?)
I’m not actually fat, right now, I’m at a pretty healthy weight. However, I can see my fat self on the horizon. I’ve tried many diets in the past, but currently I’m trying out the “2000 calorie diet,” which simply means making sure not to eat more than 2000 calories per day. We’ll see how that goes.
In the meantime, try to show a little more respect for fat people, please. You never know what their circumstances are; it might not be something as simple as shoving boxes of donuts down their throats like many people seem to think. Getting fat can happen to anyone, and I can almost guarantee that it will happen to you one day.
Tags: calories, diet, exercise, fast food, fat people, Health
Yes, the smoker and other people who make unhealthy lifestyle choices should pay more for her health insurance (given a certain minimum income).
Even if we want to assume it’s her mom’s fault, someone *has to* get “punished” for this. She’s going to (probalistically speaking) require more healthcare and someone has to pay for it. Should I be punished for it? Or, should she?
Fact is, thinking it as punishment is the wrong way. It’s not punishment at all. It’s fair. Insurance is about paying out your expected value and in return the costs associated with the volatility of random luck is smoothed out. Her personal choices are not random because they are a conscious choice, and they directly lead to a higher expected value of healthcare costs for her. Therefore, she should pay more.
It’s also about incentives. “Fault” is a slippery concept since we are a product of 1) genetics and 2) environment (I know one will argue that everyone has the ability to change but even your propensity to effect positive change will be a factor of 1) genetics and 2) environment). But, what you can do is set up society such that “good” behavior is rewarded and “bad” behavior is punished and create the incentives for a better functioning society.
But, to respond to the heart of your entry: the same thing happened to me after college. I had spent age 12-22 in organized sports with year-round conditioning (and a diet centered around gaining muscle mass). After college I was sitting in a cubicle working crazy hours, not running or lifting but eating the same calorie-heavy diet, and drinking the free dr. peppers at work. I ballooned from a fairly fit 6’2″ 245 lbs to a grotesque 270+ lbs within 1.5 years of working.
Good news is, I hit a tipping point one day, started having salads for lunch, cut out sodas, kept a regular lifting/running schedule, and dropped 30-35 pounds of fat in two months. Three years of fairly constant vigilance later, and I’m 235 and in some aspects, the fittest I’ve ever been.
The problem, Justin, is that everybody has unhealthy tendencies, so who makes the final call?
Do you drive to work? Driving is incredibly dangerous, maybe your health premiums should be tripled. Do you have sex? You can catch all sorts of diseases. Maybe your health premiums should be increased. Do you have unprotected sex? Let’s increase them even more.
What about your parents? Are they fat? Did they smoke? Do they have any genetic diseases? Let’s increase your premiums.
What about all the things you DON’T do? Do you eat five servings of fruits and vegetables every day? No? Let’s increase your premiums. Do you drink a glass of wine every day? No? Let’s increase your premiums. Do you play any sports? No? Let’s increase your premiums. Do you play dangerous sports? Yes? Let’s increase your premiums.
What about things you don’t have control over? Are you a man? You won’t live as long, let’s increase your premiums. Are you black? You are more likely to get sickle cell anemia, let’s increase your premiums. Do you have any pre-existing conditions? Let’s increase your premiums. Do you live in a dangerous neighborhood? You’re more likely to get shot, let’s increase your premiums.
What about people who work dangerous jobs? Maybe construction workers should pay more for their health insurance, or police officers.
This sort of thing is exactly what insurance companies do now. The problem is, it gets ridiculous! Show me any person in the world, even the world’s healthiest person, and I will find something that they do or don’t do which is unhealthy and cause them to have an increase in their insurance premiums.
The thing is, it’s not JUST smokers or JUST fat people who are the problem. Anybody who does anything other than just sit in a chair all day is increasing their risk. Maybe we shouldn’t allow people to go sailing because they are more likely to drown, maybe we shouldn’t allow kids to go to school because they could get beat up, shot, catch some disease, or whatever else that they wouldn’t have gotten had they just stayed at home.
Some of my examples might sound ridiculous, but the question remains: where do you draw the line? Do we SOLELY target smokers and fat people? That doesn’t seem fair.
The only fair thing, in my opinion, is to treat everybody equally.
When you say “increase the premium”, what’s your starting point?
You should be starting from The AVERAGE premium (this being the premium that you’d pay if there were no distinctions) and therefore everything should be compared to the health choices of the average person.
So, no, all the things you listed won’t “increase your premium”. That would only be true if your initial premium was for the perfect person. But, it’s not. So for everything you listed, it would be a question of whether or not you are above or below average as to whether it increases or decreases your premium.
So, yes, if you make life choices that make your expected healthcare costs to be higher than the average person, then damn straight you should pay for it. If you don’t like it, make better choices. I have a hard time understanding why *I* should pay for *your* choices. Someone HAS to pay for them. It should be you and not me. You have control over them. I do not.
The problem with your suggestion of “treat everybody equally” is that it is the exact opposite. Nothing could be more unfair to those that make healthy life choices. They have to subsidize the healthcare costs for those that choose unhealthy habits. You want to punish those that make the right choices.
And, you should be careful to note that I have consistently referred to active choices and not gender, race, etc.
And, I’m all for mandatory healthcare and gov’t helping those that can’t afford it. If there was universal healthcare, there’d be no such thing as a “pre-existing condition”.
Another example: I like motorcycles. I will probably own one some day. They seem like a lot of fun but they’re also ridiculously dangerous. If I get a motorcycle, my health care premium should go up.
Why should everyone else’s premium go up to pay for the added healthcare cost of me driving a motorcycle? They’re not the ones having fun on the motorcycle. I am. And, the added cost of healthcare that might happen should be reflected in my premium.
Maybe I can’t afford or are unwilling to pay the extra healthcare cost of a motorcycle and therefore I will have to forego this purchase. If everyone else paid for my motorcycle healthcare cost, I would be able to increase the cost of all insurance premiums even though I myself wouldn’t be able/willing to pay for it.
How is this fair?
The calorie delusion: Why food labels are wrong
http://www.newscientist.com/ar.....wrong.html
You’re not a mindless automaton. When I started noticing a bit more fat on my belly, I didn’t continue to eat that “extra 50 calories”, I stopped eating them.
You don’t need cooked food to eat healthy.
Think apples, tomatoes, milk, oatmeal, cheese, salami, sausages.
Get up your fat ass and go workout ! Eating healthy and doing exercise is not expensive, it’s cheap. I’m the same age you are, I went trough the same you did, you are just lazy and trying to get excuses.
I think is true. well, good to be fit like u said. Eating healthy as well. so workout.
First of all, it is absolutely, 100% impossible to create a “fair” healthcare system where people pay based on what their risk is. Again, we are not talking only about smoking or only about being fat, but about everything. Should you have to submit a report to your insurance company every time you go outside, because sunlight increases your chance of skin cancer? Should you have to submit monthly weighings to your insurance company so they can keep track of how obese you are? Can I go get myself evaluated by a psychologist and submit to my insurance company that I am “psychologically cautious” and therefore less risky to get my premiums reduced? Where do we draw the line? It’s absolutely ridiculous to even attempt this sort of thing. Plus, what’s to keep someone from lying and just SAYING that they go running every day? There’s no way to test if that’s true or not. It would be unbelievably simple to game the system.
Second of all, this is a MORAL issue about KINDNESS. We seem to have forgotten that. I checked, and in England they don’t charge people more or less based on their weight or how much they smoke. And their healthcare system is more efficient than ours.
Everybody acts as though we don’t have the money. We certainly DO have the money, we are just spending it on things like wars. If we spent money in the right place, and spent it efficiently, there would be no problem whatsoever in insuring everybody. Haven’t you seen those graphs of what we could do with the money we spent in Iraq? We could provide healthcare for the entire WORLD, let alone fat people. Not to mention that all universities could be free, every school could be rebuilt, every hungry person could be fed, etc.
What we have here is a classic case of a superiority complex. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are so arrogant and self-centered that they think they are better than everybody else.
- Skinny people think they are superior to fat people, and that fat people are lazy asses who deserve to be fat.
- Rich people think they are superior to poor people, and that poor people are lazy asses who deserve to be poor.
- Christians think they are superior to everyone else, and that everyone else is going to hell.
- Straight people think they are superior to gay people, and that gays aren’t worthy of marriage.
- White people think they are superior to black people, and that blacks don’t deserve freedom.
- Men think they are superior to women, and that women should just stay at home.
- The US thinks that it’s THE BEST, and that all other countries can suck it.
I mean, geez, doesn’t anybody get tired of this smug superiority? Can’t we all just sit down and agree that you cannot put a price on a human life?
I fully understand that in times of necessity it makes sense to give the extra liver to the responsible man rather than to the alcoholic. That’s fine. However, if we found a way to clone human organs and we had an unlimited supply, then definitely give a liver to the alcoholic.
I find “money” to be drastically different from “organs”. To deny someone healthcare simply because they are fat seems evil. Some rich people are billionaires a dozen times over, Goldman Sachs makes more profit than the GDP of small countries, and the US government is spending TRILLIONS of dollars on bailouts and fighting wars for no reason. You simply CANNOT tell me that “we don’t have the money” to treat fat people.
If we spent money wisely, insuring fat people and smokers should be no problem.
You obviously can think deep thoughts and can analyze things. You also have picked up a lot of the misinformation that has been accumulating and floating around for the last 60 years. See what an impartial, no-nonsense science writer found out after 5 years of research. Read Gary Taubes’s “Good Calories, Bad Calories”. 2,000 calories is a bad idea, but it seems good compared to 3,000 calories. 1400 is probably more like it for you for optimum extended healthy life. And damned few of those calories can be sugars and starches, especially in refined form.