Personal Health
In the responsible citizen's world, I am intrigued about the subject of personal fitness and who should care about it.
My question is about individual responsibility again. Of course defining good health is the first challenge, then there is the matter of unavoidable ill-health. An obvious example of the unavoidable would appear to be poor mental health, not least feeling out of control and therefore feeling desperate.
The most obvious and overt sign of less than good health that I have witnessed in a lifetime is of obesity. I was first struck by the frequency of this in the 1990s in the USA. At that time in Europe, obesity was definitely unusual. More recently in the 20th Century it has become commonplace in the UK.
If obesity is bad for the human ape, why does it proliferate? Biological sex clearly plays a part. Females seem naturally prone to storing fat reserves more efficiently than males across their entire frames. The latter (men) appear mostly to collect any reserves around their belly followed by their faces and necks. Neither can be said to appear optimally healthy and, for starters, one foresees restrictions on fullest engagement with other humans at work and at play.
One presumes that those with reasonable mental health realise that obesity is not a good thing for optimising normal survival. Movement is restricted and internally there must be consequences, arterial and skeletal. One problem of course is that obesity creeps up on the individual and returning to an optimal BMI is evidently not able to be addressed easily with the multiplicity of personal pressures and other priorities in a busy modern lifestyle.
Speaking personally, I have been overweight, not able to fit certain clothes that I like to wear. My personal options were to buy new clothes or reduce my weight to fit those clothes again. I decided to lose the extra weight by eating and drinking slightly less and by taking slightly more exercise, definitely nothing dramatic involved for me.
Perhaps modern clothing options are one of the contributory factors that encourage tolerance of personal obesity? Wearing tracksuit-type clothing daily in public is commonplace now where suits were the norm in previous generations. The fact that modern clothes are more informal and able to stretch more clearly accommodates body size fluctuations. And another contributing factor seems that replacement clothing in different sizes is cheap compared with the days when clothes worn outside the home were more expensive, tailored and formal.
My conclusion in this short consideration is that the responsible citizen with good mental health can blame social changes but ultimately he or she remains the only person who can decide what goes down their throat. Both in quality and quantity, too much eating leads to obesity if there is insufficient exercise to burn that food fuel. And the doctors say that obesity is not a good thing for living one's single life optimally on the planet. The most important matter therefore is that the normal individual (the majority of people) needs to know that tackling obesity is for them alone to decide and to address.
