XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame (U of T Centre for Public Management Series on Public Policy & Administration)

Obese individuals are twice as likely to experience heart failure as non-obese people. More than eighty-five per cent of type 2 diabetes sufferers are overweight. And in the United States, obese and overweight individuals make up more than two-thirds of the adult population. Public health organizations and governments have traditionally tried to combat obesity through shame-inducing policies, which assure people that they can easily lose weight by eating right and exercising. This generic approach has failed, as it does little to address the personal, genetic, and cultural challenges faced by obese individuals.
XXL directly confronts the global public health sector by proposing an innovative, alternative policy - the 'healthy living voucher' - for decreasing high calorie consumption and its related health problems. Neil Seeman and Patrick Luciani argue that many public health campaigns have made the problem of obesity worse by minimizing how difficult it is for individuals to lose weight. XXL challenges governments to abandon top-down planning solutions in favour of bottom-up innovations to confront the obesity crisis.

XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame (U of T Centre for Public Management Series)

Business & Money

Seeman, Neil

LUCIANI, Patrick

Economics

University of Toronto Press

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Psyche in the Lab: Celectrating Brain Science in Canada

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Seeman, Mary V.

Psychology & Counseling

Hogrefe & Huber Pub

XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame is a book that directly challenges the public health sector in North America and around the world for its failure to address the crisis of obesity meaningfully. The authors argue that the public health sector has made the problem worse by failing to emphasize how intensely difficult it is for individuals to lose weight and by proposing marginal and ineffective lifestyle changes. Around the globe, the traditional public health solution has been to throw extraordinary amounts of tax dollars at shame-inducing policies that encourage people to eat right and exercise. This generic approach has failed. A shaming mentality is metastasizing throughout the anti-obesity public health movement and across popular culture. The book begins with an account of a futuristic world in which we might live if shame-laden policies accelerate. The authors argue that shaming policies (singling out fat children in gym classes for &ldquo;re-education&rdquo;) and mass &ldquo;carpet-bombing messages&rdquo; (&ldquo;eat your fruits and veggies or else!&rdquo;) carry deep social costs. In some cases being threats to fundamental freedoms, and in other cases being expensive showpieces to justify government bureaucrats' existence, such shaming policies do little to confront the personal, genetic and cultural challenges of obesity. No one program works for everyone. But the one-size-fits-all public health approach dooms it to failure. This book is not about how to lose weight or how to eat less. XXL is a public policy document of how to implement policies that might more realistically work to decrease the health crisis caused by high calorie consumption. And the evidence of poor diet is everywhere from a dramatic increase in childhood diabetes, to doctors' offices and weight-loss centers that have furnished waiting rooms and diagnostic machines with extra-wide, heavily reinforced chairs known as &ldquo;bariatric chairs.&rdquo; Obesity is not only a public health problem, but an ethically fraught psychological and bio-social-cultural-genetic problem. This book realigns the debate on obesity: Governments must admit to the utter futility of their top-down planning solutions and enable bottom-up innovations to flourish.

XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Key Porter Books

Accelerated Minds: Unlocking the Fascinating, Inspiring, and Often Destructive Impulses that Drive the Entrepreneurial Brain

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Books by Seeman, Neil