I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese? This isn't something harmless like treating yourself to drinking diet soda or eating ice crime on the odd occasion.

It's not hard to fix for most people either. Switching off devices and lights at night, and getting sunlight in the morning, is often what's needed to fix what presented as mild DPSD or N24 sleep disorder.

>I don't agree with that. Would you say this to a smoker or someone morbidly obese?

Yes. This neurotic obsession with health that categorizes every deviation from the norm as something that needs fixing rather than a choice that people make needs to stop. Smoking is bad, drinking is bad, unhealthy food is bad, staying up at night is bad. For everything that even remotely makes live fun you now have some health fixated busybody lecture you on it.

> unhealthy food is bad ... everything that even remotely makes live fun

You've swept the dose of the poison under the rug in order to make your point that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity.

>that it's neuroticism and health fixation to suggest that people should avoid morbid obesity

that isn't what I said. I said that people should make their own decisions and listen to themselves. If they feel bad being obese, they should change it. If they don't, they shouldn't. What people ought to stop doing is being driven by others to make these decisions. And that is where the neuroticism from an entire self-help and lifestyle industry comes in.

the OP is apparently happy with his lifestyle and feels good and that's what they should care aobut, period. Smoking is a prime example of this. Other than in public places it's a purely private choice. If people enjoy smoking and they're aware of the risks other people should stop meddling with their decisions.

> If they don't [feel bad about being obese], they shouldn't.

Well let's agree to disagree on this. When these obese people age a further 20 years and get health complications caused by metabolic syndrome, they will wish they could go back in time and change things or they would wish that the people around them didn't placate their desire to destroy their own bodies. Someone's current feeling, which might just be because they're misinformed or addicted or on autopilot and not thinking about it, doesn't count for everything. It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.

> It's also not just a private decision when my insurance health premiums and taxation pay for the consequences of their self-destruction.

This is unsolvable and consequence of existing in a society. Unless you’ve disavowed all the “unhealthy sins” and actively avoid all risk factors, maybe then you can hold such a view. Doesn’t mean others should listen you though…

It is improveable. Metabolic syndrome is a late-20th and early-21st century phenomenon caused by the processed and junk foods industry. The worst of the effects can be improved with policy, whether that's public health messaging, taxes, bans or regulations. We saw this happen with smoking.

Members of a society have a responsibility to not impose unnecessarily burdensome costs on other members of society. If someone wants to develop metabolic syndrome on their own dime, that's none of my business. As it stands, it is my business, because the costs they're imposing on me are unacceptably high.

1. Most people, when regretting about decisions they could have made, are unlikely to even make those decisions at the time of that realization, if those decisions involve lifestyle changes, because change is hard and modern life is full of addictive superstimuli.

2. Trying to hard-sell people into making changes, whether by scare tactics, shaming, and so on, might cause them to actively avoid making those changes. Simply telling people what they're doing is unhealthy and they should stop it is often not enough. Public health education is an incredibly difficult and lacking area.

3. There's only so much that could be done to encourage or deter people. At some point these half-measures of nudge economics are useless, and if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones. That would be more helpful than being a nag.

> 3. if you really want to improve public health, you might as well start banning harmful products and practices, and mandating healthy ones.

I would like to see that. More regulations or taxes or even bans and mandates (within reason -- we don't want a prohibition like situation that does more bad than good) applied to supermarkets and food chains (not individuals) are needed, for two reasons. The first being that they're taking my money for their healthcare, which gives me moral buy in into questions surrounding any self destructive habits that will take more money from me than necessary. The second being that the concept of free individual choice doesn't cleanly apply to any product that hacks our dopamine system, as with unhealthy food being sold to people who are addicted to unhealthy food, i.e. the morbidly obese.

I agree. There is probably a case to be made that industrialized, mass-produced, hyper-processed food has led to terrible nutritional consequences in the U.S. that regulators should reevaluate heavily.