{"id":290,"date":"2012-12-05T08:49:15","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T14:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/?p=290"},"modified":"2013-12-18T17:27:13","modified_gmt":"2013-12-18T23:27:13","slug":"obesogenicity-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/obesogenicity-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Obesogenicity &#038; Broken Things: Why America Won&#8217;t Solve the Obesity Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I learned new words yesterday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Obesogenicity<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>An\u00a0\u201cobesogenic\u00a0environment\u201d\u00a0supports gaining weight by promoting indulgent overeating. It&#8217;s the opposite of a &#8220;leptogenic&#8221; environment which would promote leanness or weight loss. An environment&#8217;s obesogencity can be measured by the use of <strong>ANGELO<\/strong>, the\u00a0ANalysis Grid for Environments Linked to Obesity.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever ANGELO&#8217;s rating system is, I think the entire United States would be off the scale.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re in your forties or younger in the United States, you&#8217;ve lived your entire life in the world&#8217;s most obesogenic environment. You were likely given soda while you were still drinking from baby bottles. Ketchup was a vegetable in your school lunch. Pizza and fast-food were staples of your teen-age diet. You grew up to consume a large percentage of your daily calories as sugar-laced coffees and ostensibly &#8220;healthy&#8221; smoothies. The USDA Economic Research Service reports that the average American diet is 62% processed, food for profit that is increasingly engineered to hit the brain with addictive properties.<\/p>\n<p>American culture is so obsessed with eating that even weight loss methods are marketed with a focus on food gratification and an entitlement to indulgence.<\/p>\n<p>If your brain and your genetics and your physiology make you one of those people with a predisposition to gain weight and be heavier, living in the American Food Theme Park makes it practically a self-fulfilling prophecy that you will be fat and you will spend much of your life at the far end of the weight bell curve.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s time that we face what really drives obesity. Bias assumes it&#8217;s a weak character. Demons. Excessive self-medication. Emotional wounds. Psychological trauma.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You&#8217;re not broken. The American Food Culture is.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you want to reclaim your health and take control of your body and your weight, reject the bias. Spit out the Kool-Aid. \u00a0Look hard at your daily life, your habits, your routines. You&#8217;re consuming addictive substances and you&#8217;re hyper-sensitive to their effects. You&#8217;ve believed you&#8217;re weak but you&#8217;re very, very strong. You&#8217;ve been fighting a long time but you can&#8217;t face off against a tough adversary until you have the right weapons in your hands. If you&#8217;ve been thinking it&#8217;s all in your head, you&#8217;re looking in the wrong place. It&#8217;s in our grocery stores. It&#8217;s in our restaurants. It&#8217;s in our media. It&#8217;s deeply entrenched in the most obesogenic culture on earth.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve spent years believing you became fat because of emotional weakness, it&#8217;s time you take a look around you. We live in a culture that glorifies both thinness AND indulgent eating. A culture that vilifies weight and assumes it&#8217;s all your own failure while you&#8217;ve struggled to lose weight eating addictive processed foods that are marketed with &#8220;health halos.&#8221; Release yourself from shame and blame. I&#8217;m tweeting with the hashtag #bodytruth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I learned new words yesterday. Obesogenicity An\u00a0\u201cobesogenic\u00a0environment\u201d\u00a0supports gaining weight by promoting indulgent overeating. It&#8217;s the opposite of a &#8220;leptogenic&#8221; environment which would promote leanness or weight loss. An environment&#8217;s obesogencity can be measured by the use of ANGELO, the\u00a0ANalysis Grid for Environments Linked to Obesity. Whatever ANGELO&#8217;s rating system is, I think the entire United &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/obesogenicity-environment\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,14,6,16,15],"tags":[12,21,7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powerfulhunger.com\/powerful_hunger_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}