sorry but the first time one of the boys tell me they cant do the job that customers are paying them to do then it's bye,bye. and i promise you i dont give a monkeys what anybody looks like.
I know it's purely anecdotal, but when I was a kid, I was given an apple every day to take to school. That's because we lived in a house that had a garden with a lot of apple trees in it. I was also given 2p a day for the tuckshop. That would buy you 8 jelly beans or 4 gobstoppers. It wouldn't run to a Mars Bar. Even now, I almost never buy a Mars Bar or any sweets at all. I just never developed the habit. Our mealtimes were fixed and there were no snacks and sweets given out in between (apart from tea and biscuits at tea-time). And of course, like all kids in the 70s, we'd spend breaks playing football or something. Or table tennis. We weren't doing Facebook and computer games. Mind you, if they'd existed then, we would have been, I am sure. Kids were thin because they exercised more (there were few alternatives) and snacking hadn't really been invented. Can you put the genie back in the bottle? I don't know, but if you let kids do whatever they want, they will do a lot of unhealthy things. Same goes for most adults.
Years ago I worked in a huge barn of an open office seating some 600 people in different departments, each side of the building had vending machines at approx 20 metre intervals (about 5 each side). There were a couple of people that would go from one end of the building to the other in a zig-zag, from coin operated food locker to food locker taking on a Mars bar at each one as fuel for the next leg of their journey across the office to the next vending machine. inaudible were their little thrusters firing them across the void to gratefully dock at the next food port, perform the ceremony of coin insertion, collect prize, take on fuel and another silent launch to the next chocolate chapel. They were very fat. They weren't poor. Yes, why is it that the fizzy drink-grippers don't tend to be slim? There are plenty of very well-to-do huge fat kids, plenty of mum and dad's disposable to spend on bastard burgers and large guzzle-buckets of bubbled sugar water. "Do you want that large?" "Course I do, do I look like I'm on a diet?" they cry in unison at the counter Its less about rich and poor, its about lifestyle - there are many more slim poor people than there are bloaters. Glidd points out that exercise is something that has gone for a Burton in schools, true, and everyone goes everywhere by motorised vehicle rather than walk distances we would all have walked years ago, the disappearance, by and large, of hard manual work, replaced by sitting at desks all day long, the increase of 'leisure'time = idleness = no calorie burn. The average family now has eight cars and each family member weighs three times what they weighed in the 70's because we all want to eat beautifully presented M&S prepared food from dawn till dusk - there's a point, is it true that for many years now, M&S makes more money from food than it does from clothes? Is there a creeping national obsession with food - it wasn't long ago Britain was an international joke for its cooking; soggy sprouts, transparent carrots with sawdust dry slices of roast beef kept company by watery, anaemic mash - as a nation we used to eat because we had to to live and in relatively few years we've become foody voyeurs with TV channels pouring cookery programmes over us any time we switch on. We hear, and may take part in, conversations about haute cuisine and chi-chi restaurants, there are food critics in the papers and we like to sample these delights whenever we can and how much of this food that we aspire to eating is actually reduced calorie? Not much, rather, most of it seems to be artery lining, vein clogging fare that we crave. In the meantime, how many times do we impulsively add items to our shopping baskets because we are seduced by their appeal - not our need? Foooooooooood, mmmmmm, eat, sleep, wake, sit, eat, sit, eat, sit, eat again, sleep... and repeat tomorrow plus a trip to the shops, 'Larger leathers, please!' I seem to have become an industrial unit when I wasn't looking. Even if part of the argument is that old chestnut that 'calories are cheap' and the poor can't afford to eat healthy food, eggs, dry pasta, rice, vegetables are not expensive, there are inexpensive cuts of meat, tinned fish is also affordable, potatoes are also cheap - but if people do not know how to cook and don't want to learn because they don't believe their survival depends on it, they can do no more than consume the devil's food. All the above applies to everyone else, except me. I'm slim, rich and gorgeous.
Not as far as you may think I suspect. Education and social media, along with a govt encouraging consumerism and living for today. Add into the mix the insistance of mothers going to work, advent of feminism making mothers somehow villified by parts of society for wanting to stay and home and bring up their family and a whole society living their entire life on benefits. The collapse of society genrally, of which the family and the dining table is part, added to modern gnerations who dont go anywhere because of tech pitting them in the 'room' with their mates while actually miles apart. Food, well actually eating, is an addiction driven by genetics imho and the conclusion of many studies. Thats why the fat have become super-fat, whereas the lack of movement and sedentary easy-food lifesytle had made regular peolpe fat. Its lifelong, it has to be concentrated on every day, a lot of the day, and is incredibly hard work. No wonder so many are depressed.
If obesity is a disability so is stupidity and misfortune. And what about laziness? I can't help it M'lud, its congenital. My Dad was an idle fucker as well. They've lost the plot. We've lost the plot if we think obesity is a symptom of poverty. I'm morbidly fat with type 2 diabetes and a rotten liver but I can't help it because I'm poor. I have to eat 5000 calories a day because I'm so skint. Ridiculous.
Too true. And successive governments, for many years, have done everything they can to encourage both parents to go out to work, and to punish families economically where one parent works and the other brings up the children. And that has been combined with a benefits/housing system which has been tuned to normalise "lone parent" families and to create a situation where many of those families are better of with parents living apart than if they were together. I don't see any attempt by any current political party to propose radical change in this area, rather than to dish out more of the same. The coalition have come up with especially stupid ideas such as the taxation/withdrawal of child benefit from families where one parent works and brings in more than £50K p.a., while families where the two parents both work, and bring in £100K combined, if evenly split, get full child benefit. The fact that the UK now has amongst the most generous (in Europe at least) single person's tax free personal allowance, combined with a very low starting rate for income tax (20%) which shoots up to 40% in one step, with no transfer of allowances or tax bands between spouses also makes it far more attractive for both parents to go out to work. None of this encourages the idea of one parent spending time to shop carefully for healthy basic ingredients, and then to prepare most meals from scratch.
For someone who takes care to put reasoned and factuall arguments forward, this lets you down. A lot.
Cheap public transport is to blame. Make people walk, giving them exercise and burning calories. Also ban those damn davros chariots for people with two legs.
Ever so slightly off topic but I think your avatar is great, a bunny with a chainsaw, brilliant ! Did you find it somewhere or draw it yourself ? Back on topic, generally speaking being fat is self inflicted, don't encourage the phuquers by making life even easier for them. Also, if the obesity level is set at say 30% of your body mass/weight as fat = obesity, will this ruling encourage those close to the limit have another donut or two in an attempt to wibble & wobble over the line and get a parking space nearer the door or excused from certain duties ?
18st body builder under 6st will be obese and probably morbidly obese. Most of the world cup winning England rugby team are classed as obese using BMI Yep go with that
Not that I would call the England rugby team fat bastards, all of them would be bigger than me, and much younger.
In the UK as it happens most food is zero-rated for VAT purposes, but with certain exceptions. Sweets, chocolates, choc biscuits, sweetened foods, crisps, sweet drinks, and fast food sold hot are standard rated VAT (currently 20%). This contrasts with zero-rated items like fruit, vegetables, bread, meat, fish, and most ingredients. What do you expect the government to do? Go into the next election promising to bump up the price of sweets? There might be just a teeny problem with that policy ...
