Reply #144: You can go to the moon too, [View All]

[wickerwoman]

as long as you don't need to breathe oxygen.

It really irks me when people who work like dogs are accused of being "lazy" because they're overweight. I only knew one person when I was working minimum wage jobs who didn't have a weight problem and that's because he took speed to get through his second shift. And he was still fired for falling asleep on the job. So let's go over it one more time:

I used to work two full time jobs and I didn't have a car. The buses only ran once every hour so if I was working two shifts the same day, I wasn't home for 22 hours at a stretch. I slept in 3 or 4 hour installments then got up and went back to work. This went on for months and months. My night shift job got off at 5:00 am but the buses didn't start running until 6:30 so I had to sit around for an hour and a half trying like hell to stay awake so I didn't miss the bus and end up late to my next job. Tea doesn't make a dent in that kind of exhaustion. I needed Jolt or Mountain Dew just so I didn't fall asleep on the bus and miss my stop and probably have my bag stolen. And working night shifts totally screws up your system. I would have no appetite one second and be starving an hour later.

The nearest grocery store was a forty minute walk each way and the food was absolutely disgusting and I didn't have a car so I needed to carry it back and even with a little cart, I still couldn't bring back more than three or four days food at a time. So each trip to the grocery store is 4 hours and I need two trips a week- where are those 8 hours supposed to come from? And that doesn't even include meal planning and cooking and washing dishes (I didn't have a dishwasher).

And I didn't even have kids and I had a real kitchen. What is someone living out of their car supposed to do with a bag of beans?

It's an empirical fact that the poorer you are in America, the more likely you are to be obese. How would you explain it if you see no connection between poverty and obesity? Do you really want to go with "laziness" when you're talking about people who work more than 60 hours a week?