Originally Posted By: Drew99GT
Originally Posted By: gathermewool
Originally Posted By: double vanos
Here in Houston most restaurants offer meals so big, they're enough for 2. As Alice Cooper said in one of his songs "please clean your plate dear, the Lord above can see you, don't you know people are starving in Korea....."
This mentality was brought on by parents that remember the depression as kids. Back then you DID clean your plate mostly because there wasn't that much on it.
Nowadays, value is based on quantity or size of the meal, not it's nutritional attributes. I grew up in an Italian household so you can imagine what the meals were like there (huge, mostly pasta).
As Walt Disney once said in a Goofy cartoon about obesity, "to loose weight, simply put your hands on the dinner table and push"; that's part of it but also America needs to demand foods sweetened with natural sugar, cut the salt content WAY back, and whack the amount of saturated fat in the diet. Get some exercise of some sort.
That, and 'ol Walts' advice and America could get back on track.
Like me, you probably grew up in a household that kicked your butt out of the house between meals in the summer to go run around the neighborhood. My parents weren't health-conscious; they just wanted us out of the house for a few hours, and we were all too happy to oblige!
The biggest part, to me at least, is exercise. I'm eating less than I usually do, but since I had surgery last year I haven't been nearly as active as I was previously and it shows. I'd have to cut out all of the tasty things I snack on during the weak and nights out with the gf on the weekends to get back into the shape I was before. OR, I could get off my lazy bum and work out a few days a week and keep enjoying what I enjoy. All it takes is a few months of doing something active before it becomes habit. After a while it'll slowly evolve into a harder to break routine. The hardest part is getting through the first few months, especially after so much time just going through the motions.
Totally agree. IMO, childrens diets are probably better today then they were when I grew up - my mom cooked good healthy dinners usually, but I ate so much corn infused cereals, pizza rolls, ice cream etc. when I was young, I should have been a lard [censored] like todays youth. I was skin and bones. The difference? Pretty much every kid in school along with me was bouncing around the neighborhood riding bikes, playing football, building tree forts, exploring, running around, playing ultimate frisbee etc. etc. etc.! I hardly ever see kids playing today. The park by my house is empty, kids hardly ride their bikes etc. They sit at home on their computers and playstations.
Same with many adults. Time previously used for basic exercise is now occupied in front of electronic gadgets.
+1
Originally Posted By: Benzadmiral
My brother, four years younger, and I ate junk and puffed up like blowfish every summer when we were young, but lost the weight when we went back to school in the fall. Reason: There weren't any vending machines dispensing junk food in our schools!
(Well, okay, my high school did have them, but they were very limited, and I didn't have much money to spend.)
Of course our mother could have, y'know, not bought the stuff every summer, but she liked a little nosh on chips herself. One summer she actually bought and installed a padlock on the cabinet in the kitchen and locked the food up. So I figured out how to unscrew the padlock's hasp from the door; we'd have ourselves a feast while she was at work; and then I'd reinstall the hasp before I went to bed. She couldn't figure out how we were spiriting the food out of the locked cabinet. At last she threw up her hands and said, "Go ahead, get fat, you'll burn it off when you get back to school."
That's hilarious.
