Memes

It is now year-round bulking season, and I'm loving every minute of it, jerry.

Biggest difference between your conventional fat dude and a sumo wrestler is the nature of their fat deposits. Regular fat dudes, no exercise, have what is called "visceral fat", where the fat is beneath the skin, and exists in between the organs. Sumo wrestlers have subcutaneous fat deposits, just right beneath the skin, as a sort of layer between the organs and the skin. It truly matters less whether or not you're fat, and more whether or not you're active, and have a good dietary composition regardless of potential caloric excess.

The only major limitation on this that I might qualify is that overweight people will probably have to put more effort into flexibility and strength exercises, especially in their lower body, their ankles, their knees, for the same reason that extremely tall people tend to have similar injuries. There's also the problem that it tends to be harder to cut back later in life, and so you can kind of see a huge onset of lots of visceral fat if you keep up the same lifestyle choices while cutting back on the activity, or even keeping the same level of activity as your metabolism slows down, so that's something to also consider.

People also have made points about how the excess of simply carbohydrates, like high fructose corn syrup, and palm oil as a preservative in highly processed american foods, and food deserts, are contributing factors to why americans tend to be super fat. This is true. The other side of this coin also tends to be that american civic infrastructure doesn't tend to keep you as active as perhaps other countries might, so there are less opportunities to burn calories without making a kind of committed lifestyle choice centered around that.

In any case, I do find it really, sad, and funny also, that people tend to treat obesity as a kind of personal moral failing, rather than treating it like any other kind of public health problem, or epidemic. Reminds me of how they treated HIV.