The issue of obesity in Western society is not a new issue, but it has steadily gone from something on the fringe of society to a full-fledged pandemic. So lets step through some of the contributing factors and try to understand how they impact our health and how they might be contributing to the deterioration in our general health.
I’m really more interested in looking at some of the social factors initially, then taking a look at diet and nutrition.
In terms of our social behavior, we lead our lives very differently now than we did just two or three decades ago. If you think about this in basic terms it seems that our recreational habits have become focused on pursuits which have us sitting at a TV screen or computer monitor for many hours each day without having to leave the house to socialize with others.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Game Consoles etc have each replaced something important from past generations. We used to ‘work out’ as a side effect of conducting recreational and social activities. Nowadays the recreational activities that we partake in, involve little or no physical activity, so we must now proactively seek to exercise as an addition to our social/recreational agenda, which for many people creates a motivational issue and also a time constraint. Kids suffer most from this change. They’re being conditioned from an early age and it’s more difficult to undo those habits when they’re ingrained into you as a child.
So we need to shut down, or at least limit the time we spend using these ‘artificial’ forms of recreation, and get away from our computer monitors and out of the house for our leisure and recreational activity. In most cases, doing so will provide all of the exercise one needs to stay fit and healthy without having to resort to going to a gym. When you have an online community of friends, you’re sitting in a chair and using software tools to create your leisure and recreation. When you have physical contact with your social group you introduce activity to enhance your interaction – you play sports, you go swimming together, you golf….all activities involving a degree of exercise.The next issue is again a social one, and that is stress. Stress can have a debilitating effect on our lives, leaving us with a frame of mind where our own physical and mental well being are overlooked in preference to an unhealthy preoccupation with identifying and trying to deal with the cause of the stress. If it’s workplace stress, we try to counter it by working harder, working more hours etc. If it’s marital or relationship stress we might seek avoidance, to shut down and hide. Whatever the source of the stress we often respond in ways which only perpetuate the problem and can often take us down a path which can be very hard to recover from.
They key to this situation is identifying it early enough before it becomes a real issue in our lives. Once we realize that things are going pear-shaped for us we need to take corrective action quickly. Seek help initially from friends and family, seek professional counseling and stop the rot before it’s too late. Of course one of the key ways we can help ourselves deal with stress is through exercise. This is ironic in a sense since the first thing to suffer as a consequence of dealing with stress is our physical health. We stop or cut back on recreational activities that promote exercise, we turn to unhealthy eating habits to try and make us feel good, then we gain unwanted weight which just makes us feel more stressed.

So basically, if you’re having family or work issues or some other extraneous factor is causing you stress, get out and exercise. You’ll feel better, your brains will be more energized and you’ll have a better capacity for clear and rational thought.

So we’ve looked at ways in which modern society and culture contributes to a ‘not so healthy’ lifestyle in many of us, but what about food and our eating habits.