Poor folks clearly want to be fat, say wealthier idiots

I am utterly fuming over some of the responses to yesterday's post at the Skinny Daily. Apparently, many people find it obvious that poor people just don't think that eating healthy and exercising should be a priority, and that rich folk do.

Excuse me while my class rage spirals out of control. Christ on a pogo stick, what exactly are people thinking here? In case they missed it, obesity in the United States is in part an economic issue. Anyone who has spent time in the lower half of the economic spectrum knows this. What's cheaper per serving: a gallon of ice cream or a pint of berries? A bag of chips or a bag of apples? What keeps longer, fresh vegetables or a can of soup? Oh, and when you're working two jobs to put that crappy food on the table, you better believe that prep time is a major concern. Crap food doesn't take prep time. Fresh food does. Crap food doesn't spoil. Fresh food does. And crap food is cheaper than fresh food, particularly in the winter.

Yes, there are ways to do this. Of course there are. But we know better than anybody else that it takes a lot of concentration, work, and committed time to learn how to cook healthy, period; healthy, fast, and on a budget is triple the challenge. When you're eating crap food and not getting exercise, you have less energy-- add in long, discouraging work hours and you're lucky to have enough oomph to feed your family at all.

Yes, we all know that it can be done. But pointing fingers and saying "Clearly, these people don't want to be healthy" is just plain mean and hypocritical. Don't any of us remember the steep learning curve at the beginning of our weight loss journeys? The frustration of having to learn how to cook all over again, of fighting with grocery lists and struggling to learn how to properly stock the cabinet, of having to come home night after night and having this extra burden of health on top of the cooking? I don't know about y'all, but I found this to be a giant pain in the ass. Worth it, yes, but if I hadn't had my Hub doing the lion's share of the cooking I would have spent so, so many nights just curled in a ball saying "It's too much, it's just too damn much."

I have relatives who work two jobs and live the life that these folks replying to the SDP are describing. They do like beer. They do like nice TVs. They drive pick-up trucks or SUVs. I know them well and love them to death. They get home in the evening looking for a quick fix, some kind of release from the drudgery and from the underlying constant panic of the fact that there's a limit to how much a person can work in a day and there's just not enough money. Some of their purchases are not smart. When your income is limited, you tend to go for quick fixes there, too; things that you know will make you feel better. Hell, I do this, and I'm living extremely well by their standards. When you're in a cage of any kind, there's a caveman rage and panic that builds up until you batter yourself unconscious against the bars-- not so much in an attempt to get out as a desperate need to move.

Yes, they could probably feed themselves better, and find the time for exercise. The sad fact of starting any diet and exercise program, though, is that money makes it easier. The more leisure time you have available, the more time you have to read up on nutrition and lifestyle tips, to experiment with cooking, to exercise, to prepare for the next day. The more money you have available, the more of a safety net you have-- money to pay for the fresh fruits and vegetables, money to restock after those fruits and vegetables go bad before you thought they would, money to stock up on Lean Cuisines for as long as it takes to get the lunch-packing thing figured out, money to pay for a gym membership that's convenient for you, money to pay for proper running shoes, money to buy a sports bra and a pair of dumbbells. Like it or not, money and leisure time make this journey a lot easier. That's not to say that it's easy for anyone, rich or poor or middle class-- but damn, the rich folks got a bad-ass safety net. In my opinion, it's a lot harder to get started on this hard journey if you just can't get the time to take a running start at it or buy the crutches to hold you up for those first few desperately hard months.

Oh, and let's not forget the wonder of peer pressure. Aside from all the studies done on this sort of thing by people who know what they're doing, my own experiments in these matters indicate that even when people in your life mean no harm by unconsciously supporting unhealthy habits with the group dynamic, it's still deeply weird to try to go against the social norms within your group. There's a certain sense that trying to eat healthy and exercise is a rich person's game, it's "fancy" and a waste of time and effort. My family is much more likely to roll out the barbeque and chips and chocolate cake and cola and beer than to ever dream of serving a fresh fruit platter. There's a sense that it's just not our style, particularly from the older generations.

Again, that's not to say that it can't be overcome, and I'm not saying that there aren't families out there who either have a natural high level of activity and tendency toward healthy eating or are badass enough to make the transition. I'm just saying, this is another problem. I don't know about anybody else, but a strong sense of tradition is sometimes all that holds my extended family together and food is one of the highest-held traditions. Leave home and what do you do when you're homesick? You make family recipes and eat them. (I do, anyway, which is hysterical because my immediate family utterly sucks at cooking.) Changing those sorts of deeply held traditions can throw a whole family for a loop and get you looked at funny when you bring different food to the church potluck.

There's a certain pride in being on the just-scraping-by end of the economic spectrum-- pride in doing the best you can with what you've got, pride in not living above your means, pride in community and teamwork and family. There's scorn of the upper classes that goes along with that (oh, there always is), and part of the things that are the most scorn-worthy are the personal trainers, the gym memberships, and above all the picky little healthy eating habits. There's a strong feeling that these are silly things that rich people can afford to worry about and that po' folks don't need to bother with.

This is just another one of those cases of people not respecting the difficulty of this endeavor-- and it stings more because it's coming from people who should know better, people who've been through or are currently going through the transition into healthy living. This shit is hard. It's harder still if you're trying to do it without a safety net. Possible, yes. Easy, no. Pointing at po' folks and saying "They just don't want it enough, they don't put a priority on their own health" is no good for anybody. Don't forget, the vast majority of people that attempt to lose weight-- regardless of class-- fail at it. I respect that it's going to be hard for anyone, but I can't help but assume that there are certain parts of it that get a lot easier when you have more money. Working fifteen hours a day out of dire, desperate necessity is a lot different than choosing to do so out of ambition-- in both cases, you'd make less money, but in one case making less money would cause you to lose your home and starve. Different circumstances.

Now, personally, I make a respectable wage. It's not great, but it's livable. Same goes for my Hub. Thing is, we're also saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off, and because we don't like having to depend on our credit cards during emergencies, we also tuck as much money as possible into our savings accounts. (Which is, I admit, a downright pitiful amount when compared to the amount sent to the debtmongers every month.) Between debt and savings and normal living expenses, we each get a small allowance on every paycheck to spend as we like.

Once upon a time, when we first moved in together and were living as unhealthily as you please, we spent $100 every two weeks on groceries, and the only food expense out of our allowance money was money spent on take-out and restaurants. These days, I'm spending half of my allowance every damn time on grocery shopping, because the amount that the pre-planned $100 buys has just plummeted. I've beaten my brains out trying to bring this amount under control. I try. I try very hard. And I'm still spending an absurd amount of money. And spending money on food means that I'm trapped in a situation where I don't spend a lot of money on clothes, or activities, or entertainment-- a situation which makes me fairly stressed out and which, if I didn't have the constant balanced fuelling going on, would have me binging on chocolate again. I can't even imagine having this tight a budget WITHOUT the money going to debt payment and savings, and to have to choose between debt, savings, food, and entertainment. I would lose my mind.

Okay. Rant over. I need to go get some water and do some work. Sigh.