Why are Americans obese? Is it the food or is it the psychology?
08.06.2025 00:39
Far be it for me to complain about how a grown man with a job spends his free time. But the simple fact is that someone who spends their free time playing video games is likely to be less fit than someone who goes to the gym, rides a bike, or takes a karate class for fun.
I didn’t have a dad to reign in my behavior. I also had a learning disability (dyslexia) and astigmatism, but didn’t see an eye doctor until I was 15 and got glasses. You’ve got a high energy kid who can’t read and can’t sit still so the right thing to do was put him on Ritalin.
Ritalin and other “ADHD medicines” are basically speed, low dose meth to help kids focus. In my teens I came off the Ritalin and my weight ballooned up to 320 lbs on 6′2″ frame. I would end up struggling with obesity for my entire adult life. But this condition didn’t start until I was put on, and taken off, a form of amphetamine.
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One: Diet
Mine wasn’t actually as cool as these bikes, but some of my happiest memories were riding my bicycle around the neighborhood when I lived in town, and all over the dirt roads when I lived on my grandparent’s farm.
Two: Not enough activity.
Everyone was expected to do it, or at least try. And if you could do the exercise, you’d likely hear about it from your classmates. It wasn’t fun for the unfit, but it was HEALTHY peer pressure. Go to some PR classes now, and you’ll see something unimaginable to the PE teachers of the 70s, 2/3 of the PE class slowly walking the track instead of running.
Recently I spoke to someone who runs a bicycle rental business in a resort town. He told me that he’s being forced to add E-bikes. The adults still want to ride bicycles, but they can’t get their children to ride with them if the bicycle doesn’t do some of the work.
We don’t eat enough food that is prepared in a kitchen from fresh ingredients.
I was Dennis the Menace.
Four: Drugs
When I was a kid, my bicycle was the most important thing in my life.
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There are literally millions of kids in America who are taking speed.
We eat too much food that is manufactured in a factory.
And the stuff they’re eating during biology class is the same junk food I mentioned earlier.
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Physical effort is not a regular experience for a lot of kids. When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for the PE teacher to direct us to run one or two labs around the field.
Five: Electronic Based Childhood.
This one is purely my opinion. I was a normal sized kid, maybe a little thin even when I was 6 or 7. I was also a super high energy kid, with a propensity to run everyplace, climb every tree, make buildings out of blocks then knock them over with a Tonka truck. Leave me alone in the back yard and I might try to dig a hole to China for to see if I could (I never made it past the asthenosphere).
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Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that kids who get away with not exercising in PE are going to grow up to be adults who take up Yoga or Tai Chi or Racquetball when they get out of school.
The best-case-scenario for processed food is that our body doesn’t recognize them as food. We consume them, taking in calories, but our bodies don’t think they’ve actually taken in food. The worst-case-scenario is far darker. Anyone who remembers the 1990s has to know that “big tobacco” tweaked the nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive. There’s evidence that makes of processed foods engineer their products to be addicting. There is also evidence that the makers of the foods making us fat are financially backing the body positivity and fat positivity movements.
Three: Snacking Culture
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When I was a kid, it want pretty much from breakfast to lunch without eating. After lunch I might not get something to eat until dinner. Now, kids feel pretty entitled to snack whenever they feel like it.
So a couple labs that should take 5 minutes out of the class, now takes 15 or more minutes. Many students simply refuse to exercise or even dress out. Teacher’s don’t have the same authority to make students do as they are told. The only recourse PE teacher has to someone who won’t dress out or participate is give them an F. And the kids know that teachers are the ones who get in trouble if too many students get Fs.
The constant stream of electronic input is making people more and more lazy. And it’s not just children. My wife’s nephew is a 300 lb 29-year old who spends all his free time playing video games.
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While my bicycle was the most important thing in my childhood, this is the most important thing in the lives of most children.
To make matters worse, many schools, America has spent nearly 4 decades and hundreds of billions of dollars on methods of reading instruction that don’t work and cannot be made to work. The dominant mode of instruction is simply too flawed. So to compensate for the fact that the majority of kids can’t read or write at grade level, PE teachers are being forced to use their class time to have students read about physical fitness or write essays about sports heroes. We are literally taking cohorts of overweight kids and having them write about fitness instead of actually exercising.
The PE teachers would then run you through calisthenics. Then they might make you climb a rope or swing across monkey bars.
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