Long article, but so worth it! I loved loved loved it
A ban on advertising, graphic counter-campaigns, plain packaging and high taxes have all played a part in making Australia a country with one of the lowest percentages of smokers in the world. How might this approach translate to food? New York City funded an anti–soft drink commercial that showed a man guzzling a glass of blood-streaked liquefied fat. The tagline was “Don’t drink yourself fat”. Why not plaster packets of chips and chocolate with full-colour photographs of the rot that grows under an apron of fat, or a gangrenous foot caused by diabetes?
These kind of campaigns should exist. NOW.
We tell him that surgery may not be appropriate for him, given his situation. The patient is perturbed. “Well, what are you going to do for me if you won’t do the operation? Don’t you have some kind of ethical responsibility to help me lose weight?”
This is where the obesity-as-disease concept leads us – to a situation in which people demand that medicine shoulder the responsibility. What about the responsibility of the individual? And of society? My patient cries because the highlight of his day is returning from the supermarket with a plastic bag full of junk that he will eat and drink in his empty lounge room. What can I do for him? I can threaten him with his early demise, intensify his shame. I can offer him some evidence-based motivational lifestyle interventions – swap Coke for Diet Coke! Prescribe exercise? Walk for an hour at an average pace and you’ll only burn off the equivalent of one slice of bread. .
Lovely patient to have, typical fat person that decides that society owns him for being overweight. I seriously would not have the patience to not tell him to shut up and get a grip.
The state’s bariatric ambulance must be mobilised. (A standard ambulance can only take a person weighing up to 220 kg.) The patients require special beds, special scanners – sometimes in the zoo – and a small army of medical staff to treat their failing organs. The worst problems involve the skin – it rots and becomes infected when it folds on itself – and the lungs, which are slowly squashed under the mass of flesh so that the patient’s intercostal muscles can no longer move to let in the air.
To get that fat takes dedication and persistence.
I can only imagine what it would be like to get to the point of needing zoo resources to analyze my body because I'm THAT fat. If that is not motivation enough to lose weight, then nothing will ever be for these people.
We could say, “You are free agents, totally free, so pay for your own consequences.” We could make people pay at the point of choice, via a food tax, or we could limit choice. The other option, always unspoken, is: let us have our cake. Let’s just eat and eat, get fatter and fatter, and work out how best to live with it. This is where we are heading now: fatness, outside of morality, as an accepted consequence of the world as we have made it.
I actually had to read this twice, because as absurd as it seems to have a "food tax" , I think it
could work, of course not in this world, in this reality right now and the imposed - consumption world we live in, but it could serve as an incentive, but then again, you would have to be very aware that the money these people save by not paying taxes, by not overeating, needs to be destined to other part of consumption, and that would end up inventing a whole new market to spend money in. Still, as crazy as that proposal sounds, it made me understand why the author brought it to the table.
When she states that the amount of government revenue spent into this disease is so high, she tries to imply that "if you want to be fat and cost the government a big amount of money, pay for it" It is hard and out there but since it's a choice then it could make sense.
The choice is in your hands. Are you going to eat it?
Great way to end this article, such an interesting read and of course, every bit is true. Societies , some more than others, should read this sort of articles, in order to understand that YES, the big food-chains will make campaigns that will lead you to over eating or just eating very bad food, but the consequences for them will be that they will only get richer and on the other hand, you will only get fatter, unhealthier and unhappy. And that the choice is always your, your responsibility, your life.
Also loved the sentence she quoted from Kant :
" Kant famously formulated that no man would sleep with the woman of his dreams if the consequence for him were death immediately afterwards. "
Motivational for us too, since its pretty much literal when it comes to food, we already know that it WILL make us fat
) That's not the point! You're damaging your body! 
