Most of the people who this advert is aimed at would probably rather get a cold than be obese… So it’s probably a more powerful message to them anyway. And the fact that it is liked might even lead to more discussion!

Plus the ‘sick earth’ has been slightly overused, I feel.

To be honest, I wasn’t aware that there was any evidence suggesting that obesity isn’t linked to health or to over consumption! So I admit I’m not very well read on the subject and I’m probably influenced by the 12938192083 images a day I probably see inferring that they are linked. Perhaps I would be a little more adverse to this otherwise.

But also, I feel I should say, that the earth in the cartoon doesn’t look like he’s starving himself, he looks like he might have been putting on muscles if anything since he’s flexing them! And he’s not weighing himself, which was how I thought obesity was defined anyway (could be wrong there!).

It’s not being inferred that the earth should go on a diet, really, more like he needs a detox and he’s hitting the gym! If obesity’s not connected to over consumption or lack of health, then surely there’s no reason they can’t hit the gym too?

I never made the argument that being fat is unhealthy. I, in fact made the claim that there is “less solid” evidence for that than for a link between over-eating and fatness. So we aren’t arguing about that, I do think that it is completely rational for pretty much any other nation on the planet to accuse America of being an by-and-large (so to speak) an overweight culture drowning in food. Fat-activism aside.

“Thus, the underreporting of energy intake increased with the amount of adiposity in women.”

Women’s underreporting varied with increased fat body fat levels.

This difference doesn’t seem to stop men from being fat.

The assumption that accuracy in calorie estimation =thinness or the opposite of that, is unsupported by the first study.

In the second study;

‘the belief that the researcher could verify their report improved the accuracy of patients’ self-report. However, all subjects continued to underreport their dietary intake.’

This strikes me as just one of the many psychological effects of calorie mainpulation.

So pressure of being ‘found out’ doesn’t erase underreporting. Why seems to me to be the most interesting part of all this.

This morning, I read an old article that adroitly handled the argument that “diets don’t work.” It stated, in part,

We don’t say that teeth brushing fails because 95% of people regain tooth plaque once they stop brushing. The point is that fitness and nutrition are good habits that have to be repeated, over and over and over.

And that is basically my argument. Among most people, as you write, “behaviors are more alike than different.” A person who is presently overweight needs to act different – indeed, different from most presently (what you’d call “naturally”) thin people – to get fit and/or lose weight, “over and over and over”. This is something which “diets”, as we commonly understand them, are usually neither designed nor suited to accomplish.

* See this comment, if you are interested, for my take on the health-weight paradox. In a nutshell, if FA arguments are true, then overweight causes poor health, acting through social stigma and the resulting stress.

I’d really pretty much put being fat despite diet and exercise into this, because when people are regaining weight despite things like stomach surgery and being in a hospital to have their diet monitored, and there are constant reports of fat people who eat healthily and don’t lose weight, or people dieting for years on the same amount of calories or fewer calories and hitting plateaus or regaining, or fat people who exercise a lot, eat normally, and don’t lose weight, that tells me that there’s almost certainly something more to it than a simple calories in, calories out equation.

How much people eat might be interesting to a lot of people, but it’s irrelevant to altering metabolic function, permanently.

Not that this has anything to do with the point of the post, which is fatness representing overconsumption.

I’d say someone dripping in jewels, huge empty homes, private jets, the bankers rescued by the public to save a system that environmentalists consider to be the problem in the first place etc., are better examples. Of wasteful overconsumption.

You’re right, though, in that your phrasing would be more thematically consistent with what I was trying to say.