Obesity

You can easily go over your maintenance calories with extremely cheap food, especially children that don't do much in the way of physical activities these days. Rice is 200 calories per cup. Most cooking oils are 120 calories per tablespoon. Fat is 9 calories per gram (the locals tend to not trim the fat off their pork). Sugar, 4 calories per gram, gets loaded into most meals that locals prepare (and most soft drinks have over 30 grams of it per serving). You can get very fat very quickly on a very small budget here. Eating a healthy and balanced diet is a much more expensive endeavor in most of the world, including here.

 

I went from 105kg @ 25% body fat (from when decided to lose weight and I got on a scale for the first time in probably a decade, my heaviest was likely around 110-115kg) to around 70kg @ ~7% body fat in less than a year while in Afghanistan. (Although, I will admit I was competition lean without much muscle mass. The average person from any country may be taken back when they can see every muscle fiber on a person.)

When I came back here the comments I got were downright offensive and disrespectful. They thought I was dying from some deadly disease or had been horribly addicted to meth, it did not change any opinions when I told them that I was extremely strict with my diet, in the gym 7 days a week and walking 15-20km/day (and had extensive knowledge, notes, data and an article about me on the men's health website to prove it). Some even commented that they thought I used to look "buff" when I was extremely obese and suggested I go back to that. I never took it personal though, their opinions were coming from a place of ignorance.

I think this idea that obesity=healthy stems from the country reducing the number of people living in poverty and the introduction of cheap calories in the past several decades. They just don't know any better...though many will be learning through huge medical bills and early deaths in the very near future. I believe many Western civilizations have went through this exact thing before (glorification of obesity...which is not the same as the dereistic thinking of today). The government will likely step in and push nutritional/exercise classes in schools and PSAs, I could even see them adding junk foods under the "sin tax" (gluttony is a sin, right?), once it gets completely out of hand and hospitals start complaining to politicians about not getting paid.