// Fat? Just start running! Never mind that you can’t afford a gym subscription and live in a car-centric hellscape that’s not even bikeable, let alone walkable
So here's something that's true: you can only move forward from where you are and with what you have. So while it's surely easier to lose weight if you can hire a coach and a nutritionist - if you can't do those things you nevertheless have to find a way!
So if you are "poor and fat" as in this scenario, the idea that you need a gym membership and perfect running streets is a trap. You don't have those things and therefore you are going to be fat forever.
The reality is that plenty of poor people lost weight when they decided to. They found a way - whether by walking around the block or taking the bus to a highschool running track or whatever. It's not easy but it was the only way to do it.
So how to avoid this mental trap? Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
This reminds me of a conclusion I have come to in life. You have been dealt the cards you have been dealt. Sometimes, usually, it isn’t fair. Now how best can you play your hand? You still might lose, but you can only do the best you can. Being upset, feeling sorry for yourself, whining, complaining, flipping the table over, really doesn’t change anything and is wasting time and energy that could be put towards improving your hand.
This is the harmful mantra that shifts all responsibility down at the individual level, overlooking any structural deficiencies at large. Multiply this behaviour over a large population of individuals, and you have atomised wheel-spinning hamsters without any abstract sense of the world they inhabit. Everyone tries to spin the wheel a bit faster, exacerbating the systemic issue even further.
It really depends on the exact circumstances imo, and so generic advice like "if you're poor and fat just go for runs" is supremely unhelpful because generic advice is often times simultaneously not actionable and it blames the person for not being able to action on it! For example, if you're fat, poor, and wheelchair-bound, "just run" is a slap in the face and, potentially, advocating for a less car dependent society is actually the best thing they can do so that they can safely take accessible public transport to the one nutritionist their insurance covers!
I agree that it depends on the circumstances. I would argue that generic advice is generally applicable. It can't cover every single corner case specifically designed to evade it.
By that same metric, advocating a person wait for a less car dependent society with accessible public transport is terrible advice for the average fat and poor person.
No hypothetical advice can pass a "No True Scotsman" test.
I'm not suggesting any solutions for all poor fat people. In fact what I'm advocating against is the idea that generic advice for all people of a very broad category is not as generally applicable and, in fact, runs into the rhetoric I said earlier that it both provides inapplicable and blaming advice. There are a great many, many problems with generic advice for a very broad set of society of millions of people.
If no hypothetical advice can pass a "No True Sctosman" test, stop giving hypothetical advice to the simplest example of a complex problem.
Im not suggesting blanket advice for all people either.
I think we might agree, but just be coming at it from different ends.
>stop giving hypothetical advice to the simplest example of a complex problem.
Surely we agree that a lot of fat people could benefit from eating less and exercising, correct? We could debate what proportion of people fall into the simplest example, but that is less interesting. What is interesting more interesting to me is when you think advice can be given and what kind:
Are you suggesting that nobody should ever give this advice to eat less and exercise more?
Are you suggesting that any advice that ascribes individual agency and control is inappropriate?
Are you suggesting that only discussing the complex socio-systemic causes is appropriate?
I'm suggesting that you should give advice to specific people and specific circumstances over giving advice to hypothetically generic people and then casting blame on the many, many individuals for which the hypothetical doesn't apply.
Can you say "fat people who are physically and mentally capable would benefit from eating less than exercising"?
What, specifically, are the harms this is trying to avoid? Does it avoid people incapable of exercises accidentally injuring themselves? People blaming themselves when they have no ability to exercise and no control over their diet?
I literally already said what the harm of generic advice is: generic advice to a too-broad situation is often both inapplicable and blaming the individual.
What I'm trying to get at is why you think those things are so bad that it warrants never issuing general advice, and why the downsides outweigh any potential benefit.
All I can do is guess at the reasons why.
For example, inapplicable advice might lead to collateral damage like someone blaming themselves for not exercising when they are wheelchair bound. This all assumes that anyone who hears the advice can't decide if it is applicable to them or not.
Less charitably, I wonder if you are reacting negatively to the idea that people should feel responsible for their own behavior, and this is the Crux of our difference.
I think it's always bad to give advice that large subsets of people the advice is applying to can't use. It's just calling the advice bad advice.
You're reading too much into this. I just want advice to be useful. I consider advice useful when it's able to be used by the people it applies to. Generic advice fails to be able to be used by a large subset of people it applies to, and therefore generic advice isn't useful, and therefore I think it's bad advice.
Think of it like this:
Person A: "If you're new to programming, just start with javascript."
Person B: "But what if they want to start in game development, finance programming, or data science instead? Javascript isn't that helpful to them. I think you should be more specific. 'New To Programming' is too broad of a field."
Person A: "Oh, so you don't think people should feel responsible for your own behavior?"
Person A is clearly projecting nonsense at person B, who is just pointing out the advice is too broad. That's it.
It is not meant to be a government or societal philosophy. It is a personal philosophy. It is exerting control over your life where you can and trying not to let what you can’t control bother you or beat you down.
No, this is about acceptance of the 'hand' you have and having an understanding of what you can control and influence. Which is pretty damn empowering, compared to blaming structural or systemic problems for your situation.
Individual agency is important either way, but people should be aware of its limitations when approaching wide societal problems. Collective consensus has the ability to change the rules of the game once they have become an impediment to the net "well-being" of society. And this can only be assessed when people try to jump out of their subjective experience, reasoning about the world as an outside observer.
Most of us don't have any meaningful avenues to do so (although there's plenty of simulacrums if one just wants to feel like they're "doing something").
But, more importantly, it's generally not something that can be done on a timeframe that would actually benefit you and solve your immediate problem. Yes, we should be fixing systemic problems at proper scale, but meanwhile we still have to function within the current messy state of affairs.
I find myself to agree with both of you, depending on scope.
When it comes to me and my personal life, I do my best to find what I could be doing differently. I try to find the blame for my problems in myself, because it's the place I can actually make changes.
When thinking about policy or culture, it's the opposite; I seek systemic solutions and look to where there are systemic inefficiencies.
The reason for this fairly bipolar thinking is inertia; I'm only going to be around for so long and I don't have time to wait for the cruise liner of human society to change heading - so I get my run in on the deck. Then I go yell at the captain for getting us lost at sea.
And this is the problem with "generic" advice from self-help books. They are usually written by someone with privilege from a middle or an upper-middle socio-economic background. What works and is applicable in their situation might be irrelevant in another. For the author of the book, doing exercise means devoting one hour of their leisurely daily routine while not missing anything else. For an impoverished person, doing exercise means leaving their kids screaming and unfed after a long day at work.
The real purpose of the media is to expose and raise the awareness about systemic issues affecting large portions of the population. Then society should attempt to address those issues through the political institutions, with the participation of both the affected and the unaffected group.
I think the mistake is viewing the task as a dragon that must be slayed rather than 10,000 hamsters which need be stomped on in 10,000 days. If we can reframe our large problems into a sequence of small (and potentially even gratifying!) tasks, life becomes easier.
Fat people should not be running anyway. First, it's ineffective for weight loss, second, your extra body mass puts stress on your joints, resulting in injuries. To lose weight you need a diet, not exercise. And if you want to exercise anyway you should ride a bike, not run.
I am using the concept from the article to provide a counterexample. This isn't a conversation about how to lose weight, but about when to be "optimistic" ie apply yourself to the problem rather than giving up.
Being fat is a problem with caloric intake, not caloric usage.
I've found every time that I wanted to lose weight I needed to get my eating in order. That gave me more energy to work out, which of course helped even more.
But it starts with eating less.
Whenever I focused on just working out, I found I would just eat more and still have a caloric surplus. It never worked as a way to lose weight as I wasn't addressing the root of the problem, overeating.
I agree with you that the exercise example is a little soft, but my sense is it was meant to be one of many, and you might inadvertently be supporting their argument a bit.
There's probably some term for this phenomenon in formal logic or argument, and if there isn't, there probably should be, but...
It seems to me often with these kinds of things you can always say "if you want X enough, you can find a way," and that's logically true, but in practice the effort involved or the threading of the needle is exactly the problem. People have lives, and maybe taking the bus isn't feasible because you're working two jobs, have kids, and literally don't have the time without jeopardizing those things. It's some kind of logical trap, where you can provide all these examples of things to do, in some imaginary context where nothing else in life matters, or where success comes by making exactly the correct sequence of N steps of complicated decisions that is extremely implausible once uncertainty and normal levels of human error are taken into account.
The authors also basically provided an example of the neighborhood not being walkable and then you offer walking around the neighborhood as a solution. I bring this up not to be antagonistic or hostile to you, but I think this is part of what they're talking about: someone has X obstacles, and then in the course of getting advice, those obstacles are ignored in part or in whole. Even if it's unintended, it creates a loss of credibility on the part of the person giving advice (whether or not that credibility loss is warranted or not): "if you're ignoring my problem X, do you really understand my situation? And if not, can I trust that what you're saying will work out?" Then they might even ignore good advice, which then makes the problem worse.
I agree that you can still lose weight if by no other means than not eating as much, and I'm deeply skeptical of someone's inability to lose weight in the absence of some kind of internal physiological limitation. But as someone who's sympathetic to where you're coming from, I kind of read your comment and felt like you were just kind of illustrating the author's points. At what point at a population level do we start recognizing that these systemic factors are in fact causing problems for individuals, and that individuals cannot just bootstrap their way out of it completely? In the same way that you can come up with a complicated series of excuses for a person, you can also do the opposite, whatever that is termed -- you can come up with a complicated series of explanations of how they are culpable by not doing exactly the right series of things that would never be even discussed about a whole other subgroup of society.
I guess it seems to me that dismissing "obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else," and asking them instead to obsess about their own situation, is basically the thing the authors are talking about.
> Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
AKA: "why don't you just have 10x more willpower?"
Depends on why the friend is fat and poor. Could be they're disabled, in which case they're basically SOL. Wheelchairs are incredibly expensive, it's hard to cook in one unless one pays $$$ for home modifications, removes a wide range of exercise options...
The friend is fat and poor because they eat unhealthy, spend most of their time sitting down watching YouTube or playing games, and work a low skill job because they do not have a skill that will pay them more.
That "eventually" covers a lot of ground, and is literally the opposite of "just" in "just do it". Therapists help you get to the point where you can actually do something.
Your mileage may vary, but my experience is that they tell you to just do it, explaining the reasons why it comes down to just doing it each time. They listen to your BS reasons for not doing it in between to let you vent, then tell you again that if you want to do it just do it.
I readily admit that there are differences between a therapist and a random internet stranger. An internet stranger is not paid to listen to your excuses and work them around to the question of why don't you just do it. Some people seriously need the coaxing and empathetic here. At the end of the day however, the message is the same. You want to do it, just do it.
So here's something that's true: you can only move forward from where you are and with what you have. So while it's surely easier to lose weight if you can hire a coach and a nutritionist - if you can't do those things you nevertheless have to find a way!
So if you are "poor and fat" as in this scenario, the idea that you need a gym membership and perfect running streets is a trap. You don't have those things and therefore you are going to be fat forever.
The reality is that plenty of poor people lost weight when they decided to. They found a way - whether by walking around the block or taking the bus to a highschool running track or whatever. It's not easy but it was the only way to do it.
So how to avoid this mental trap? Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.