How much do weigh? If you’re American — or from an Industrialized nation — you can probably answer that question within a few ounces of dead on accuracy. Do you think you need to lose weight? And, if you said yes, how many pounds do you need to lose? You can probably answer that too.
We, especially Americans, are wholly obsessed with weight loss/diet/fitness. We spend more money on diets and weight loss products than the Gross National Product of the entire country of Morocco.
We’ve talked before about the weight/health connection and how the idea that overweight automatically equals poor health is dangerous.
There is such a laundry list of things you should know about weight, diet, and health, I couldn’t possibly include them all.
Here are the Big 17:
3: Percentage of people able to maintain weight loss long-term.
5: Percentage of women who have the body type portrayed in the media.
8: Age at which the average American girl starts dieting.
20: Percentage of people with anorexia who will die from a complication of their illness (Remember, anorexia is about more than weight. You can get info and help here.)
25: Percentage of college-age women who engage in binging and purging as a weight-management technique.
30: Number of minutes a day you should walk for more health benefits than any other form of fitness.
35: Percentage of “normal dieters” who progress to pathological dieting.
81: Percentage of 10-year-olds who are afraid of being fat.
97: Percentage of women who said that, at some point, they hated their body.
1,000: Number of calories I was eating per day in 2008.
1830(ish): Year the bullshit BMI was created.
2,000: Number of calories the average 30-year-old female needs per day.
1.65 million: Number of American households living on less than $2/day. Two dollars. (Does dieting seem silly now?)
850 million: Number of people in India living on less than $2/day (How about now?).
52.3 billion: Gross National Product of the entire country of Morocco ($7.7 billion less than what Americans spend on diets/weight loss).
60 billion: Number of dollars spent on the diet and weight loss industry — in America alone (you could go to the moon 800 times for that amount of money).
1: Body. Life. You.
You have one life, one body, one chance to breathe it all in.
You can do it without a diet.
