I got fat af when I was piss broke. When I could start to afford things other than carbs, the lbs starting going away.
I get there are people even more broke who can’t even afford rice, but don’t assume that being fat and being poor run contrary to each other. Shit food is cheap.
Not really. The cheapest food is often loaded with fat and sugar
Poverty is strongly correlated with obesity.
It’s easy to get. Healthy and nutritious food can be more costly, and being poor you have very limited amount of funds. It can take more effort to make and being poor, you might have much less time for yourself and have a physically or mentally pretty crushing job so less energy to prepare food. It might not be as satisfying for the brain as unhealthy food, and being poor thing might suck balls so you might not want to give that up and just want something good in your life that makes you a bit happier, even if it is not great for your body.
Last part is true for beer related weight gain too. And lot of it goes for having active and healthy lifestyle.
Yeah, no.
First: eating strictly healthy is more expensive than eating trash.
Second: Time. Poor people tend to have less of it available, which means that it’s harder to cook meals at home (which, in theory, should be cheaper to eat healthy). That same lake of time also makes exercise challenging.
Until you get to the point of poverty where you’re risking starvation, poor people are more likely to be overweight than people that are in better circumstances.
I feel like way too much emphasis is put on cost. It’s really easy to find cheap stuff to eat that is healthy. It’s almost all of the second point: it just takes time and effort.
If you want to eat quick with little effort, it’s cheaper to eat unhealthy. Which is ultimately the problem. But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t. It’s almost more expensive to eat unhealthy if you spend time to prepare and cook.
And I think too many people use this as an excuse to eat unhealthy. “Well, it’s too expensive, so I might as well not even try. Let me go get McDonald’s.”
But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t
I already addressed that, and you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time. Time is a commodity that poor people often don’t have nearly enough of. If you’re poor, you’re going to tend to have a longer commute to get to work, and you’re more likely to have more than one job that you have to juggle a schedule around. You’re more likely to live in a neighborhood where you don’t have ready access to grocery stores at all.
When I lived in Chicago, the last neighborhood I lived in was poor/working class. The closest real grocery store—not a corner store that had a couple of bananas and some slightly soft apples–was about two miles away. If I didn’t have a car, that would have been a pretty long walk, or a 30 minute bus ride with one transfer. Public transit from where I lived to where i worked? About an hour and a half one way, by bus, train, and then a 2nd bus. With an 8.5 hour day, that means that I’m away from home a minimum of 11.5 hours. If I can get up, grab coffee, get a shower, and be out the door in one hour, that’s 12.5 hours for my day so far. When I get home, I still have daily cleaning, laundry, etc. Best case scenario, if I don’t want to get anything else done in a day, that’s 3.5 hours at the end of the day before I have to be asleep. If I’d had a second job instead of coming straight home, well, there goes sleep and any time to do general daily housework. I’m certainly not going to have time to go to the gym, or take an hour run in the morning.
I made gyudon for myself tonight; it took about an hour and a half between prep time, cooking, and clean up, give or take. I used top round (it was cheap at Costco, and is very lean). Between all the ingredients I used–the top round roast, onions, rice, sake, soy sauce, hondashi, togarashi, ginger, and eggs–I probably spent about as much as a super-sized meal at McDonals, but it took me 85 minutes more time. And that’s a pretty simple meal.
you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time.
You read only the first 2 sentences of my post, and accused me of ignoring something that I explicitly addressed and agreed with in the third. You could have saved yourself all of that time writing if you had just not, hypocritically, ignored most of my post.
I think that you’re talking around the problem.
There simply isn’t time for most poor people to spend much, if any, time cooking, because they often have so many other demands on their time. It’s not an excuse to eat unhealthy food, they just don’t have the realistic option to do otherwise.
I think that you’re talking around the problem.
You led with “it’s too expensive.” This was your primary point. Now, in multiple points, you focused on time. A point I’ve explicitly agreed with now twice (and now, twice, you’ve attempted to argue that I’m not making this point. I’m quite dumbfounded by this, actually).
It’s you who originally talking around the problem by focusing on price. I challenged your primary point because I believe (as I’ve seen it myself) people use it to justify their laziness. And I’m not talking about not having time or being exhausted, but simply throwing their hands up claiming it’s too expensive to eat healthy, and using that as an excuse to eat like absolute shit.
“Expense” isn’t just money. Everything has a price. Everything. Some things cost more than a person can afford.
Except from the context we both realize that this is not what you meant, because you clearly separated out expense and time into two separate categories. If you meant expense to cover both time and what most people mean when they colloquially use the term expense, why did you repeat it?
We both know what you meant. Why are you trying to pretend otherwise?
It’s often cheaper to buy fastfood than healthy food
I don’t know about that. A combo meal at McDonald’s is inching closer to 15$ in a lot of places. You can go down to the grocery store and get a good amount of food for that much. Healthy doesn’t necessarily mean only the expensive organic, free range, non GMO whatever foods are worth eating.
It’s more than just the monetary investment though. It’s time and energy spent creating healthy meals, that if you’re working 12-14 hr days just becomes too much to handle.
It takes roughly 5 min and 1$ to scramble up a few eggs. It doesn’t need to take an hour to prepare a decent affordable meal at home.
It takes much more effort to make a healthy well-rounded meal than just scrambling up “a few eggs”. I’m happy you have enough time, energy, and physical ability to spend an hour making dinner, but a lot of people don’t.
Some have multiple jobs, kids, disabilities, ect. Others live in food deserts where it’s impossible—or at least very difficult—to find cheap, healthy food. Not to mention the people who were never taught how to cook, and would have to spend even more time, energy, (and very possibly wasted food) on learning how.
This is coming from someone who can and does cook cheap, healthy meals all of the time.
I’m diabetic and cannot get the ozempic I am prescribed with because there isn’t enough because of people that want to lose a few kg
