• Cheap access to fresh fruit and veg

• Education for healthy eating starting in childhood

• Public outdoor spaces that are enjoyable to exercise in

• Cheap, frequent public transit to allow everyone to access food and public spaces

If those don’t take care of most of it we can keep going from there.

People don't realize* that processed food is engineered to make you eat more of it. You'll also feel like shit for at least 3 days if you start eating fresh foods and you will crave the junk (cuz it's made to be that way), but it's worth it. The price is about the same to eat if you make it from scratch, but it's so much easier than you think. Your body will thank you. Also, if you're craving something sweet, drink water.

Examples:

Soup

• boil a bunch of veggies and you get veggie stock.
• Boil the bones of your rotisserie chicken and you get chicken stock.
• Microwave a potato and put it in a pan with your sauteed veggies, then add milk. You now have cream of type soups

Grill

• veggies
• meat
• seafood

Baking

• cut up your veggies and put a whole chicken in there. Cook for awhile, then you have 3 or 4 meals of different varieties. Here's an example recipe, but you can do any herb or veggies you like. https://simply-delicious-food.com/oven-roasted-whole-chicken/

These are just few.

There's not a single, one-size-fits-all solution, there's a lot of factors going into this

In no particular order, off the top of my head, a couple things that would need to change

1. Better nutrition/health education- a lot of people have almost no idea what eating healthy means
2. Better labeling requirements, there's a few weird loopholes in how food and such can be labeled, and companies get away with using some pretty misleading labeling, and we need to be tightening that down so that people can actually make better informed decisions about what they're eating.
3. Better pay and work/life balance- Planning and preparing a healthy diet takes time and money. Same with going to the gym. We need to free people up to be able to make those better, healthier choices for themselves
4. Addressing food deserts- In some places people just may not have easier access to healthy food. If you don't drive and public transit is spotty around you, and the only stores within walking distance of your home are gas stations and convenience stores, it's going to be hard to eat a healthy diet.
5. Pedestrian and bike friendly infrastructure- In a lot of cases, people don't walk or bike places because it's just not safe for them to do so. If you provide that opportunity for them, a lot of people will actually use it, they'll get more exercise, and save money on gas that can in turn be used for other healthier choices.
6. Healthcare- In some cases it may mean getting things like glp-1 drugs or surgeries to aid in weight loss, in other cases it might just be checking in with a doctor or nutritionist to come up with a weight loss plan to make sure you're going about it safely and effectively. Maybe you need blood work or other tests to identify other underlying health problems, maybe you have depression or anxiety that are making it difficult for you to be motivated to go to the gym or some sort of trauma you need to work through to address an eating disorder. Whatever the person's specific needs are, they need to be able to access them.

I can tell you what I did. I went from 92 kilos to 69 kilos in a year.

1. Nearly removed all carbs from my diet
2. Increased diet to include vegetables and chicken and eggs
3. Removed artificial sugar
4. Removed all apps which allowed food delivery
5. Went to gym 5 days a week
6. Told myself everyday "trust the process"

I started noticing changes after 3 months.

Now how do you convert this into government policy? That is a huge problem altogether. Long term thinking + strong regulations. Even if you try something like this, you will be ridiculed for suggesting government overreach. At the end of the day, a diet is a personal choice.

Treating it like the multifaceted issue it is instead of a moral failing would be a start.

In the US that would mean labor laws which favor the human instead of the business. With hours that allow more daily personal time and pay that allows prosperity even at minimum wages. These things would take care of most people.

It would also mean medical treatment being available without burdensome cost, and with consideration to it being a mental hurdle like addiction and destigmatizing seeking aid for it in that manner. Universal healthcare removing the need/demand for private and employment tied insurance would help this as well.

There are many more facets, and facets within facets to all of this, but from a mile high view I think this would help a lot.

Kill corn subsidies.

There’s no one single approach.

1. Stop overincentivizing HFCS; as a sugar replacement, its main feature is suppressing natural hormones that tell you “I’m full, let’s stop eating”. It’s a corn product, which often makes it a very “American” thing to support.
2. Design walkable communities. Many people can’t schedule out time to get exercise, but should get it regularly through their job or community.
3. Make programs designed to promote home cooking, ensuring people have time in their day to do it, adequate kitchen space, and buy-in from their family or lifemates. Many people live off take-out or ready meals, which means they don’t know what goes into it, and also don’t socialize with family.

What worked for me was living somewhere I could do a lot of outdoor labor. So I say replace all excavators with manual labor.

We can start by not eating highly processed, industrially made food-like substances.

Make people even poorer, so that they can transform from too poor to buy healthy food to too poor to buy food

Ban every food and drink invented in the last hundred years

This is gonna be an unpopular take, but I vote for federally subsidized meth rations. I bet I'd be super productive and who needs sleep?

Theres a whole host of issues, many of which are already mentioned, but two other big ones are treating it more as a health issue rather than a moral one, and improving healthcare - especially mental health care.

People don't realize, but a lot of obesity cases are tied into other health issues - especially mental health. This is doubly true for more extreme cases. For a very simple example, those who are neurodivergent often struggle with specific stimulations including food textures (limiting food options), especially in combination with food deserts or areas with little selection. On the other hand, this can often be improved or worked around with medication and/or therapy. Medication such as antidepressants or antipsychotics causing weight gain is another very common example, and while it isn't as easy to avoid, better medical support can make it easier to manage, especially if you need to change diet as a result. For a more extreme example, trauma is very closely tied to weight gain and eating disorders. Watch any episode of My Six-Hundred Pound Life (or better yet, don't), and you'll notice that almost all of them have significant trauma. For example, childhood abuse can lead to difficulty self-regulating, or sexual abuse can cause someone to feel that being """ugly""" will help prevent future assaults. These examples just scratch the surface too, and things only gen messier when you have comorbid conditions. Just imagine, for example, someone with OCD affecting how they eat, depression treated with a weight-gain causing medication, and PMOS (a hormonal issue common in women, which often makes it extremely difficult to lose weight). Doctors often ignore or struggle to treat any of these individually, nonetheless all three together, and thats before we open the conversation around affordability.

Given this, and just how sensitive and defensive humans are in general, that makes it all-the-more important that we treat people respectfully and kindly. Even ignoring basic decentcy, demonizing or mocking people for their weight delegitimises efforts to change systematic barriers, makes accessing care more difficult or unfriendly, often wastes time or confuses with "advice" that is unhelpful or outright destructive given the context of someone's medical background (I.E. telling someone with an eating disorder to control their eating more), and increases stress, which in turn, makes medical issues worse and harder to cope with. Instead, if we treat it as a medical issue, we avoid all of this and stop moralising or hurting people already struggling.

One of the best available interventions is mandatory cooking classes in high school. Cut the necessary time out of other classes and do it.

Teach children how to eat. In school. Countries that do this have much lower obesity rates.

I've been proposing that we tax HFCS out of existence for years now. Tax the hell out of all calorie dense sweeteners. When Dr Pepper Zero costs half as much as the sugary stuff, you'll see a lot more people making the switch

I think most problems with obesity will be solved like this:

Eating the rich has been shown to have a positive impact on weight loss and health in general.

Seriously though, this is the answer. Obesity is a systemic problem.

The collapse of industrialized society will solve it very quickly.

I don’t think there is a solid answer but the current political chaos points to one step

• make junk and fast food more expensive - vice taxes

Looking at myself, I see portion size is the number one issue. Mental state also contribute, although I can’t claim anything treatable. So I eat too much and it’s a comfort thing but I don’t see a way for government to help me do the right thing there

Exercise. While exercise isn’t the main contributor to being overweight, it does go to state of mind. I’m much less likely to overeat when I’ve been active. This is where we ought to be able to do something to keep people moving

You absolutely can get addicted to food, others turn to food for comfort, some eat as a response to trauma as well (ever see my 600lb life, almost every person there has had some sort of trauma or mental health struggle.), therapy and other mental health care never seems to make it into these plans and that, in my opinion, is where they fail.

Most governments never seem to treat obesity as a chronic illness, just some sort of personal failing.

Edit.

Obesity risk factors are also genetic, no one chooses to be obese and the constant shaming and hatred people who exist in fat bodies get is unreal. I know fat people who are terrified of being seen even going for a walk outside because of internalised fat shaming, it fucks with your head something fierce.

I grew up fat which did not set me up for good habits later in life, I have struggled with binge eating and stress eating all throughout my life, getting an ADHD diagnosis and medicated for it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me, others in my situation may not have the ability to get that help or be in a place they are ready to even seek it.

What needs to be done and what will be done are unfortunately never going to align as long as someone stands to get rich on it.

What needs to be done:

• Healthier food options
• Healthier work/life balance
• Education on what is healthy and unhealthy
• Encouragement to daily physical

Why this will never be done:

• Too much money to be made on "tasty" premade meals, which "tasty" and "profitable" require lots of flavor enhancers and preservatives, both very calorically imbalanced / dense and also toxic in large quantities (toxicity is how preservatives work). If you don't flavor enhance, your competitor will for cheaper and people won't buy your option. Also each growing industry insisting their food in solo is the healthiest when it is not. I'm pointing at you corn and grain industries.
• 40 hr 9-5 8/5 work week is only office workers. Servicemen and retail sales often work 10-12+ hours per day or have all hours on call.
• points at every part of the American education system and its exported policies other countries sometimes take up
• Point 2 is the reason a lot of people don't exercise. There is no time to do so.
• Healthcare is expensive. When there is money to be made, it is always in healthcare. If you can't afford a consumer product, you don't buy it. If you can't afford a surgery or medicine to save your life, you die. This simple fact makes it nearly impossible to have any say in how much a treatment costs.

This is not just an American problem. Other western countries have this issue as well, and I hope people in other nations see the danger and keep themselves healthy.

I wonder if part of it is because food is less nutritious than it used to be. So we eat more to unconsciously fulfill our nutrition needs, inadvertently also eating enough to help increase weight. I'm not saying this is the answer, but it may be a contributing cause.

I stopped eating animal products and lost 50 lbs, so that's a start