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i read in some article once that the french and italians don't understand the american obsession with exercise. they seem by and large culturally not to believe in it.
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Being an Italian-American, I would have to agree with this. In my life, I have never once heard an Italian tell someone not to eat because they were too fat. On the contrary, I was saying in another thread, food is a huge part of the culture...more than that, it's a joy, an experience. Italians will urge you to eat and tell you you're too skinny...and to turn down food at someone's table is almost like an insult, like you don't want their cooking.
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Trekkiegirl--ITA! Technology somehow went from a being a wonderful thing to being a burden on humanity.
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I wish I had more faith in humanity. Too often it seems like the human tendency is to go after whatever it wants regardless of the damage it leaves in its wake or the harm it will cause in the future. I don't observe too much hindsight or learning from past mistakes and apparently not even the foresight to not repeat the mistakes. That's what I meant by believing the human race has learned very little about itself. I think technology is a double-edged sword...wonderful in a lot of ways but obscuring some problems and creating others...and allowing those problems to occur on a mass scale because it makes things easier for people. With the good, comes the bad. Inanimate objects...guns, money, television, computers, etc...aren't bad or evil, they have no morality in themselves. They get defined by how people use them. I remember people discovering how wonderful the internet and all that accessibility was as it started to burgeon, followed by all the complaints and worries over spam, porn, the luring of children, viruses, infractions on privacy, etc.
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I think that it would be interesting to see what people in the past would think about our exercising habits today. Imagine if they saw people running on treadmills, or bikes that didn't go anywhere for an hour at a time! Some might think we were crazy.
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This brings to my mind Jack La Lanne. He's gotta be like the world's first fitness guru. My mother told me that, back in the day, there were some people who thought he was a joke, even that what he was doing was "dirty." Those people are probably dead now and he's going strong at 92 and looks pretty darn good. I've gotta give the man his props. Now, I grew up in the 70s (sorry if I crossed the age barrier here since I'm not 20-something, although I feel like it mentally, lol) and the main thing I remember in the media relating to weight was the stuff I used to see in comics about Charles Atlas and bodybuilding...the scrawny guy at the beach getting sand kicked in his face and deciding to bulk himself up to a muscleman, lol.
And I remember people like Bill Bixby (whom I loved but couldn't understand why this skinny dude who never had a weight problem was hocking diet pills) pushing Dietac and other weight loss pills...and, of course, the whole fitness craze of the 80s when even people like Jane Fonda got into the act and got rich.
Anyway, I know we're going off on all kinds of tangents but I just find this thread so interesting.
