Why don't people eat right and exercise?

D

desi

Valued Senior Member
Most people know what is healthy to eat and that exercise is good for them. Yet most people don't seem to do eat well or exercise. Why do you suppose this is so?
 
people do not exercise and do not eat good food because of Pinwheel. She does believe in people exercising and eating good so as a result they are reading in Pinwheel's sentence and shoveling tons of cheeseburgers and godiva chocolates because they feel sad not to be believed in and not be given faith in.
 
healthy food is as delicios, i think it is the comon knoledge that healthy means carrots and water. it all starts from parenting. eating healthy meanst eating more than 3 times a day and eating all food groups. and salads can be heavenly too: )
 
I exercise a lot. Two days of weights. Three days of mixed cardio. I've got a spinning class today that I'm getting ready for now.

As for the "eating right" part. Well, I do eat right, about 90% of the time. (by "right" I mean a vegetable and lean meat laden diet, with a smattering of complex carbs like legumes and whole brown rice; the other 10% is when I break down and have a PB&J sandwich or on Sundays when I allow myself to go to the Kiedrowski's Bakery and pig out on snoogles).

~String
 
superstring01 said:
I exercise a lot. Two days of weights. Three days of mixed cardio. I've got a spinning class today that I'm getting ready for now.

As for the "eating right" part. Well, I do eat right, about 90% of the time. (by "right" I mean a vegetable and lean meat laden diet, with a smattering of complex carbs like legumes and whole brown rice; the other 10% is when I break down and have a PB&J sandwich or on Sundays when I allow myself to go to the Kiedrowski's Bakery and pig out on snoogles).

~String
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But you're not most people.
 
cosmictraveler said:
Because people are lazy.

Because people make excuses for not wanting to.
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putting it in "chemical" words(maybe thermo dynamic?), all things in this universe tend to go from their current state of energy to a lower state, not higher.
 
Lazy. Lack of motivation. The majority of Americans are overweight now. They sit in front of the tv and computer much of the day. They eat what they like and don't care. Usually when they start getting health issues they try to straighten up. Still, many don't and just take medication.
 
Short term perspective. Not looking to the future, not learning from the experiences of others. Wanting to be left to decide what they want to do for themselves and being told what is healthy is a good enough reason not to do it :p.
 
If you want to eat a variety of healthy food, it can be expensive. It does get boring if you can't afford anything but beans and rice.

Many forms of exercise (someone motioned weights) are as mentally stimulating as watching ice cubes melt. Push ups, sit-ups and things like that are only enjoyable for a very small section of the population. It's much easier for some people to find a hobby that includes exercise while they can also challenge their mind. Sports are good for that but then what sport can you play by yourself.
And again the more elaborate the hobbies/sport, the more it costs in money and time.
In some relationships eating expensive health food and spending much time on your physique may even end up in an argument about selfishness.

I tend to also think of it as an inertia effect. Body at rest.. yada, yada.
 
desi said:
Most people know what is healthy to eat and that exercise is good for them. Yet most people don't seem to do eat well or exercise. Why do you suppose this is so?
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Evolution. Natural selection favored our ancestors that enjoyed high calorie foods and relaxing when they didn't have anything else to do.
 
desi said:
Most people know what is healthy to eat and that exercise is good for them. Yet most people don't seem to do eat well or exercise. Why do you suppose this is so?
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I have a friend who was extremely fat and appeared to be continually gaining weight. We didn't talk for about ten months or so. I'm talking two meters high and 140kgs. Then I meet him again and he's a normal, healthy weight. Skinny and muscular. I last talked to him at New Year's Eve. "Why? How did you lose weight so quickly?"--I mean, obviously if he's able to do that he's not lazy.

The reason, he answered, is that his doctor told him that if he continues with his current behavior--well--bad things will happen, soon.

My friend, Rob, not being stupid or lazy, suddenly started giving a shit. He became educated in nutrition. He went to the gym religiously and worked out hard. (In fact one time I was talking to him at our college gym and between sets I was talking some shit about computers and he passed out.). Yeah. Total reversal.

He was an extreme case. He had very bad behaviors. Most people don't behave that badly for practical reasons. The reason most people don't take very good care of themselves is because they're uneducated. And stupid and lazy and all that shit. But they're uneducated because they're stupid and lazy and all that shit. The reasons sort of meld into this one pot of awfulness in which there's no clear discernible cause.
 
Denial, primarily. They know that bad stuff can happen to them if they don't live healthy, but they figure that it will happen to then next person, not them. We all know the person who got scared and then got healthy. They were just lucky, as most end up dead or disabled from their 'event'.

Further, the commercial economy pushes trash to make money, not to keep us around - remember cigarettes?

Children will eat what their parents eat and what is put before them. If the parents make responsible choices and show by example, their kids will follow suit. This is precisely what my wife and I have done, and our teenage son is one of the healthiest and strongest young men in his high school. He is also the only one who raises his hand when the class is asked who eats broccoli....

He runs with my dog and I on his days off - as far as 18 miles and as short as 7 miles. Plays with our weights as well, just like his ma and pa. ;)

A few sports that you can do on your own: running, biking, yoga, weight training, martial arts, swimming, hiking, kayaking, canoeing, playing hard and physical with the dog.
 
Dont worry Charlie Brooker has a plan to save Mankind.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/15/charlie-brooker-time

Because time is invisible, it's hard to work out which bit to focus on at any given moment. It's even hard to work out just how long "any given moment" is. Right now, as you're reading this article, are you absorbing it by the paragraph, by the sentence, or on a word-by-word basis? When I type the word "word", does time temporarily slow down while you hear the word "word" spoken aloud in your mind, or have you already leapt ahead to discover the end of the sentence doesn't sense quite make? How big a "timeslice" can your awareness eat in one go?

The more time you swallow in one sitting, the wiser you become. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, we're introduced to the Tralfamadorians, an alien race who can see in four dimensions. They experience life not as a linear sequence of unexpected events, but a timeline of inexorable peaks and troughs, occurring simultaneously. Tralfamadorians aren't upset by tragic events or overjoyed at happy events, because the concept of "events" has no meaning; to them, sunrise, sunset, birth, death, peace, war are all just notches on the same stick. When confronted with tragedy, they merely shrug and say, "So it goes." That's why there's never been a Tralfamadorian on EastEnders.

Anyway, while most people don't perceive life with the worrisome scope of a Tralfamadorian, they're capable of projecting at least a little. Take joggers. They weren't born with a pre-programmed desire to jog. No. One day they decided they'd like to get fit, and chose to sacrifice their immediate comfort in favour of delayed gratification: they got off the sofa and jogged themselves slim. Every jogger is essentially a clairvoyant. They've transcended the shackles of contemporary subsistence and risen above the likes of you and me, to witness a vision of the future so captivating it blocks out the pain of the present, so enticing, they're literally compelled to run towards it. Not only that, they've been organised enough to buy proper trainers and shorts and everything, the smug bastards. No wonder everyone else wants to hit them. Here's a tip: visualise a future in which you've toned yourself to athletic perfection by fighting random joggers in the park. Here's another tip: wear some sort of mask. And maybe a cape. We'll come up with a logo for your chest plate later.

Joggers are a minority, but then exercisers generally are a minority. Even though we're repeatedly told that regular exercise combats heart disease and cancer and blah blah nag nag nag, more than 60% of the population couldn't be arsed trying, because it makes their legs ache. They're not necessarily lazy, but suffering from an inability to perceive the future as a solid and tangible thing, unlike those far-sighted seers in running shoes and sweat pants. Perhaps joggers have a few additional Tralfamadorian synapses; only by experimenting on their brains can we be sure. Meanwhile, the rest of us remain stubbornly wedged into narrow individual pockets of time, moaning that we need to lose a few pounds while sobbing into our chips.
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I love lifting weights and martial arts. Also do free running (Just crap stuff in a beginner's class...) I hate any sort of endurance training, though. It usually ends in my almost fainting. I'm always the one in free running class struggling so hard to breathe after the (mild) warm up that my inhales sound like metal scraping on metal. Yup...literally...
 
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