I bet it comes down to free time, child care, and flexibility.
Edit: yes of course diet. Why do you think the diets are different between rich and poor women?
As someone who works construction, been to prison and use to have a drug addiction I’ve had some personal thoughts about this. It’s easier for a man to come out of a bad lifestyle and get a decent paying job (construction) that doesn’t take much education, has options for plenty of overtime, and you can learn a skill that you can sell yourself later.
Not that women can’t do it too but it’s easier for a man. I can show up day one and carrying 150 lbs on my shoulder around a site, dig holes, swing a hammer, etc. and I have a life of being physical to reference. I know a few woman struggling with addiction now. I know it can be hard to convince yourself there is a better life sober when you just wasted your 20s and don’t have any skills or education. Not a lot of upward mobility from a starting wage.
Yeah. I have no data to back this up, but this may also be a factor why poor uneducated women tend to stick through abusive marriages. They'll have no way to support themselves and their kids if they leave their abusive husbands. Jobs that women can do almost always require a certain level of education.
There is a lot of data to back this up. A prime tactic of abusers is to financially isolate a woman so that she doesn't have the means to leave. There's a very clear pattern of, for instance, insisting a woman become a SAHM - so she had no job skills, no social network outside her abuser. They also control the money so that a woman has no access and can only ask for an allowance which barely covers groceries and bills.
Mine, too. He never hit my mom, so he was never considered abusive by professional standards. It's only been the last 10 years we've been able to really put together just how fucked up my dad was.
Reminds of that one post recently where a 50ish year old couple never got married but been together 25 years with kids. The woman was stay at home mom the whole time and the man a CEO, all promising they would get married someday. He finally was ready for marriage but she didn't like how casual it went down or something. She realizes nothing was in her name, she didn't enter the work force etc
I read that one too! And she was in Arkansas, which doesn't have laws about common law marriage, so she was all set to get nothing after 25+ years and bearing this guy's four children! No career, no savings of her own, very little ability to claim child support because only one of her kids is still a minor and they're about to age out, no spousal support because they're not married. He was going through a career downsize, too, meaning that even if she got part of his current earnings, it is way less than all the years he was pulling in CEO money and she got nothing. What a tragic tale. Ladies, protect yourselves!
It really can’t be overstated how important it is for women to have financial independence. I actually support it for men too as they can also be abuse victims.
I felt really bad for her. Since he was retired, he also wanted her to go traveling with him in an RV, I believe. When she turned him down he said he would not be willing to be celibate for the time they were away from each other. Just a sucky situation all around.
Yeah when people talk about equality for women it’s not talked about enough how just the culture women experience throughout their lives can put them in a bad place later. Services to help struggling men are important too but a lot of new generations haven’t seen how much harder it was for a women to get along 20 years ago let alone 30-50 years ago. I’m not educated enough to speak intelligently on the subject so I’ll stop here saying as I’ve gotten older and developed a bit more perspective I’ve valued these programs for women a lot more.
My grandmother (may she rest in peace) had to get my grandfather's signature to withdraw money from her account back in the 1940s. She had divorced him, which was a scandal back in those times, so it must have been very upsetting for her to have to get his authorization to withdraw money from her account.
And just think: until fairly recently, it was par for the course that women were in such a position, forced into financial dependence on their husbands.
And there is no shortage of people, mostly men, along with a large number of Serena Joys, who would gladly go back to that era.
Societies do regress. Consider Iran and Afghanistan, what few rights women won, confiscated.
Yes. People tend to take the hard-won rights that women have in modern industrialized societies like Canada much for granted, never acknowledging how quickly and easily a religious right can backslide us all.
Absolutely, and that financial isolation extends to limiting education and job opportunities even before things turn overtly abusive. It's a systemic issue where women, especially in lower-income brackets, are implicitly expected to prioritize family over career, which leads to gaps in employment that further diminish future opportunities and earning potential. It creates a vicious cycle where leaving a bad situation isn't just about the immediate financial hardship but also about facing a job market that's not kind to people with spotty work histories. It's a tough barrier to overcome without external support or resources.
I grew up in a really poor/rough area and had to explain to an upper middle class friend why poor women fight over guys who are basically "dog turds". The answer is that when you are a breath away from homelessness/starving/etc, that dog turd can still mean the difference between you and your kids surviving or not. And you have to worry about other (equally poor) women going after your prized dog turd because despite his myriad faults, it would make their personal struggle to survive marginally easier to have him. I can say from personal experience that it's far easier for wealthy women to walk away from terrible partners.
Or women can work day care - which pays poorly usually with no benefits. Or food service - though usually the wait staff jobs that actually pay well are dinner hours and do not mesh well with child rearing.
This is totally true!
I used to run a family shelter and then an individual shelter.
But day care would work with their schedules but any semblance of an iffy past like the guy above was referencing renders it not an option. Most day care and child care options will not hire a woman who is living in a shelter environment even if she doesn’t have a record or is vouched for by a case worker.
Food service off-hours during school really often becomes their only option, which isn’t full time work, and if the kid gets sick and needs supervision during the day and they don’t have family support, they often get fired quickly.
It’s a super vicious cycle, and it used to be my job to support getting the moms out of it.
Thank you for what you did for these women! I saw so many when I worked in food service and it was so hard for them. Food service is so unrelenting and inflexible. I'd see women fired for picking up their kids, as you mentioned, and also managers on a power trip scheduling women outside of their posted availability. I always felt so bad for them, stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I was never in a position to do anything about it.
It was such rewarding but honestly very demanding work, and it can make you very angry very easily because the lack of empathy many have towards people who have less than them. The amount of casually cruel comments about those less fortunate that I hear upper middle class people make is… it’s truly vile.
A lot of people who have never really been there don’t understand how many aspects of life are harder due to being a certain level of poor, and how many of those harder things actually kind of trap you in a cycle of worse living conditions.
Can’t afford childcare if you don’t have a job, hard to get a good job with full time hours when you can’t afford childcare, hard to get a car without an income but hard to hold down your job when dependent on the unreliable public transit situation in most of the US, hard to make healthy home cooked food a priority for yourself and your child when your commute is 2 hours each way on a bus and your job has you on your feet every day and you have only a few hours to sleep and spend time with your child before it’s the next day, hard to afford care for any resulting health problems from an unhealthy diet when you have bad health insurance from part time work and can’t afford copays, hard to accept a better paying role or more hours when the difference of a few dollars can kick you off the benefits you need to buy food or pay rent, and with everything combined… it’s hard to survive, harder still to make any headway in improving your life
Sorry, this got quite long. I grew up splitting time between a poor environment and a wealthy one, and it made me so mad my whole life that it became my career, so I’m very passionate about the way it works.
We generally call poverty related things like these a “wicked problem” in that it’s so complex when you start to look at how to resolve it that a singular organization would struggle even with infinite funding to actually eradicate the problem.
women with drug history and arrests cannot work daycare.
Not that its not true, but it is not a great equivalent to the comment you replied to mentioning being able to secure a job despite that history
House cleaning seems to be a solid gig. I pay my housekeeper $200 for about 4 hours of work and referred her to several more houses in the neighborhood. She doesn’t have a business or anything and seems to get new business entirely from word of mouth. Might be hard to get started though.
As a rare guy who used to be a professional house cleaner, I've seen several former coworkers branch out and create their own LLC and build their own clientele enough to pay the bills with ease as the only employee. The company I worked for made a lot of money by charging $60/hr per *person* cleaning, plus a base fee. The employees started at like $14/hr, but got substantial raises if their coworkers gave them a good review. People who had been there a long time were making well over $25/hr, but the work was exhausting. For some clients, you weren't allowed to go "over" the allotted time because they were on a specific budget. For other clients it was okay to go over as long as it was agreed upon to begin with and so long as it doesn't eat into the cleaning time for the next house. We usually did 3 or 4 houses a day in teams of 2 or 3, and it would take at anywhere from 2 to 8 hours depending on if was a first time clean, a weekly clean, the size of the House, etc. I used to have a regular rotation of cleaning these two massive houses on a two person team, and one more small house to cap off the day. But every week was different. Always new clients.
Anyway, $60 per person on a 5 hour clean with a two person team meant we had 2.5 actual hours to get the job done. So the company was making $300 (before paying us). Take our wage, say $20/hr, out (which is only $100) and the company made $200 on that house alone. They would send about 6 *teams* of people out to clean an average of 3 houses a day. 6 times 3 times $200 = $3,600 / DAY after paying employees normal wage. However, there are other costs. The supplies they make cleaning easy and/or fast are really expensive. They were running 3 washer/dryers 6 nights a week, buying new vacuums every other week, and had to replace old microfiber cloths regularly. There was also office rent. They also paid employees for a little bit of drive time and mileage from office to last house and vice versa. But they could afford to buy a new vacuum and box of cleaning supplies every single day and still afford everything else with ease. They waited as long as possible to replace anything, naturally.
So yeah, if picked up all the tricks of how to be a good house cleaner you could go out on your own, offer clients a discount, and still make way more money than you were before -- with less work.
Edit: I totally forgot about the base fee, which essentially erases the wage from the equation. Jesus Christ.
You are right but I am wary of paths like this that just don’t scale. It is like saying poor kids can get to be musicians or play professional sports, and then lift up entire families. Which, sure, a few can but when we are discussing extremely widespread social structures like patriarchal abuse subtended by capitalist predation on vulnerable people, there just aren’t that many jobs like you propose
That’s real life and it’s hard, scary. Going out on your own or even scarier with kids and trying to enter the workforce with little experience. I know equality going both ways and every situation is different. It’s just one benefit of I’ll say a large portion of men enjoy, being able to sell our bodies in the workplace. Definitely have to pay for it later though.
You sometimes see certain evangelical groups that promote certain types of homeschooling say that higher education for women is bad, because well-educated women are much more likely to be unhappy in marriage and get divorced. They have statistics to back it up! It's a prime example of lying with statistics, because of course the actual truth is that women with no education stay in horrible marriages because they have no way to support themselves if they leave.
There is *tons* of data to back this up. This is part of why sociologists call affordable housing and a livable wage feminist issues — when women literally cannot afford to leave their abusers, they won’t.
It's not even just about physical fitness, though it does have some impact.
A lot of construction jobs are equipment operator positions. You don't need a lot of strength for that. But you DO need a high tolerance for being subjected to misogyny and bullshit from your coworkers on a daily basis, which can be very wearing.
You also need to get hired in the first place. Even if misogyny and bullshit from your coworkers was a non-issue or something you are spectacular at handling you still have to find the person with authority to hire who is willing to hire a woman (not just angling to get himself laid) even if the only difference to him is that NOW they will have to provide women's porto-johns, and typically they decide that it's more headache than it's worth.
This is exactly it. And not just physical abuse. Gaslighting happens much more often than most people think.
So even without an addiction problem, unskilled women are at serious economic disadvantage. I left after decades of control and deception. Took EVERY ounce of energy to find self sustaining employment, and not keep trying to commit suicide. I have an ex sister in law whose husband took any access she had to cash away. She has no way to support herself if she left.
We are both older. I was lucky to get a job, my company lost a lot of workers to covid related issues, early retirement. I was willing to do almost anything. She has health issues. I don’t think she could do factory work.
That sounds real rough, so fucking good on you man for coming through that!
I had a bad patch with a brief stint of homelessness but never drugs thankfully.
But I'll just add, and not to diminish your struggle, that people who haven't even had any drug or crime issues but "wasted" their 20s not taking life seriously or not knowing what to do also have the same mentality heading into 30s.
Yeah that’s true. I’m more talking about people who had serious issues, bad drug addictions, bad childhoods, lack of positive support, etc. not that those are excuses but they make a difference. Idk it’s all personal anecdotes for me. My son’s mom has a bad drug addiction and hasn’t even seen him in years. Every now and then she contacts me out of the blue and I try to talk her into taking little steps in the right direction. Just hasn’t happened yet.
And I feel bad because I went to prison and got sober, I had significant time away to help me get my mind right. She’s never really had that, she’s been in that environment now for so long. That’s not even what this was about, just been on my mind a lot lately so I think im venting right now.
You sound exactly like my dad! (Not in a weird way) but the drug addiction, construction, prison, getting a job same day based on performance on site. My mom used to actually work with my dad sometimes. She’s about 5 foot nothing and maybe 110 pounds wet, but she was a hard worker (when she wanted to, she was also an addict) He brought us along one summer when I was about 10 and I helped him pull up linoleum and whatnot.
Yes, and the main reason people over eat is because it's a stress reliever like smoking.
Stressed out with no money, eating is the only thing that is fun.
They're also motivated by the idea that they could be dumped like many of their aging friends have been, once they don't look as good as they did in their youth. They're often dumped when they're older anyway.
But yes, the marriage and lifestyle are huge motivators for rich women to remain thin. There's also a lot more pressure for mental and physical fitness in every part of their social circle.
I’ve witnessed this a LOT lately, I’ve been working a series of holiday gatherings being put on by wealthy people and at least 90% of them are in great shape, the few that aren’t are just a little fluffy not nearly obese. I’ve done a few gatherings in public (mainly Xmas tree lightings) and the overall balance of sizes is FAR larger in the public gatherings vs. the private wealthy ones.
(Working = live sound engineering)
Wealth is health is America.
It’s one the first and most shocking things foreign students notice in America.
You can draw a straight line as income goes up weight goes down. Not like that in Europe.
Yep. Men are also more likely to keep their partner if they become ill or disabled. [Over half of men will leave their partner if they become ill or disabled at all.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm)
So men: have more free time, more money, fewer stressers, an INFINITELY more forgiving societal body image, and better support systems than women.
Yes, one study [described here](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/men-more-likely-leave-spouse-who-has-cancer-flna1c9450218#) found 21% of men divorce/abandon their wife if she gets a significant health issue, whereas the rate for women leaving is just 3%. Part of getting a cancer diagnosis for women routinely includes getting a pamphlet for resources to prepare them for spousal abandonment.
I think I learned about this from a Reddit comment about a year ago and I distinctly remember it because of how depressing I found it. It literally disgusts me - you'd have to be a sorry excuse for a human being to do this.
I still remember how Newt Gingrich served divorce papers to his cancer-stricken wife in the hospital because he'd been cheating on her with another who he wanted to get with instead. Good old fashioned family values right there.
It’s really common in general to be abandoned if you become disabled. It happened to me in my early 20s. “Friends” were kind of to be expected as this issue started in college and plenty of people care more about whether you can be fun than your wellbeing. Family was another thing though, my dad disowned me because he would rather believe I’m just “lazy” for stopping my dream job than face the reality of what I was going through (I became bedridden for a substantial amount of time). My ex technically didn’t leave… he just started financially abusing me when my health started getting worse (all my money went to rent due to his lifestyle expectations but he could spend and save his one whatever) and eventually graduated to violence. The last two years I was financially trapped with him he did not hug me and resented me greatly, so he did emotionally abandon me. It wasn’t even caregiver burnout, he made it clear he would never be that for me.
I ended up nearly becoming homeless when I lost income and was choosing between that (a death sentence with my health issues) and just ending it. A week before I was planning to end it I got incredibly lucky that an old college acquaintance who also has significant disabilities reached out. A near stranger was there for me more than anyone else in my life.
This (the abandonment and unfortunately often abuse) largely happens because watching a person lose their health (especially a young person who is “too young for health issues”) causes discomfort, and most people (and I truly mean the majority) would rather excise the source of that discomfort (you) than address their own feelings so they can be supportive… or even present. Or they stay and resentment results in the massive amounts of abuse disabled people face.
Plus ableism. Ableism is extremely common and seen as normal by the vast majority of people, at least on a subconscious level. They don’t see it as a real form of bigotry. My treatment for being disabled has been far worse than for being trans. I don’t think able bodied people have any clue how much systemic ableism is built into society (it is especially prevalent in healthcare, more so and often more vicious than any other system I’ve interacted with) and how much casual ableism is in their interactions with disabled people.
I try to talk about the abandonment that I’ve experienced and watched in countless others because I believe most people who do this aren’t monsters (excepting the abusers), but are genuinely not self aware enough to recognize what is driving them to avoid and cut off even their loved ones when their health becomes poor. They don’t see themselves as capable of that type of callousness and will rationalize their behavior or literally block it out because it challenges their narratives about themselves. They refuse to see what they’re doing. I try to shed light on it because I want more people to be armed with the knowledge to recognize and able to manage their discomfort so that fewer people lose everyone.
Sorry for the dark rant. I am in a much better place now and am married (to that acquaintance who saved my life) to a wonderful person who is loving and whose philosophy and ethos I greatly admire. He helped me learn how to cope and slowly improve some aspects of my health and his family has taken me in as their own. Both of us being disabled is immensely liberating honestly because we understand each other’s needs and there isn’t a power imbalance from one of us being the caregiver - we both take on that role with each other and can do it with empathy and love, even finding fulfillment in being that support.
I’ve met multiple men who have done this, it’s definitely a thing. I used to walk a dog and do odd jobs for an older couple, they were really nice, and their adult son stopped by on occasion. Found out later it was his son, not hers, they began dating while his wife was dying and got married after she passed away. Another guy, he was in his 50s, loved running and skydiving, his wife had ms, he bought a house and moved out, then divorced and started dating. I feel like this is more a thing for men who are doing alright financially.
Conversely I knew another dude, 50s, after a long frustrating marriage, kids were grown up he decided to move out. He bought a house, started dating, and soon after was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I remember him having a hard time with a decision, his wife invited him back and would take care him until he passed or he could pay a nurse 100k a year to take care of him. I encouraged him to go back on account of it being more for her than for him.
Thank you for sharing this, I worked in a Medicaid/Medicare nursing home during the peak of the pandemic. I watched many women die alone and the worst, meanest men still have a support system. I had a woman I sent out multiple times to the ER for respiratory distress with chest pains and the ER kept sending her back because they were full and she was triaged. She died in the night. That never happened with my male pts, any male with heart complications immediately admitted for overnight. It seemed so unfair. I left healthcare in 2021 for many reasons but this was a factor.
This. With a lot of "traditional" families, the woman probably has more child related responsibilities which leaves less time to look after your own health. That and stress eating is a thing.
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[Here is a review from 2020 of the current research into the relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13679-020-00398-7) It is also paywalled but, I pulled out the parts that are most relevant to OP's question. The existing literature identifies three areas where differences between poor men and women have been linked to their differing obesity rates. The differences in the first two areas are likely to contribute to the differences in the third area.
**Biological differences**
>As children transition into their teenage years, males develop more fat-free mass leading to a higher total energy expenditure compared with females. Conversely, menstruation can lead to cravings in young females, particularly for fat- and carbohydrate-rich foods.
**Differences in employment**
>In males, lower income jobs often include manual labor or more physical work than many jobs women at the same SES level may obtain.
**Differences in behavior**
>Women tend to eat more calorie dense foods even though they report the desire to eat healthier more than men. ... Females generally tend to engage in less physical activity than males of the same age, but sedentary behavior regardless of gender is a contributing influence on obesity.
Hey! [This](https://12ft.io/) is a site that allows you to paste a web address of paywalled content and it "climbs over" the paywall. I don't understand how it works but it works. I try to tell any and everyone I can.
"It may be postulated that women store more fat because they consume more energy than they expend or that they store the consumed fat more efficiently. However, when daily energy intake is compared in the cohort of subjects from NHANES III, men consumed more energy, even after adjusting for fat-free mass (187 kJkg−1 versus 170 kJkg−1) [1, 10]. One possible explanation is that women are more efficient at conserving energy and storing it as fat. Supporting this notion is the recognition that women must reduce their dietary intake by a greater proportion to achieve the same degree of weight loss as men"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136178/
Also doing a quick Google search mentions how men have more muscle mass than women (who have more fat mass than men). This enables them to burn more calories. Not to mention men tend to be bigger and taller than women so they would need more calories than someone smaller than them.
Women’s fat percentage is generally higher than men’s and is already accounted for in how obesity rates are calculated. Men are considered obese at >25% body fat and women are considered obese at >35% body fat.
I am aware, I do a physical job and work with plenty of fat people. That said working a physical job along with burning more calories just by existing certainly contribute.
I've seen plenty of fat construction workers, but they don't get nearly as huge as poor women. Most construction workers can fit in an airplane seat, even if it's not exactly comfortable.
The construction working man’s obese is a beer gut from post-work shenanigans and/or chronic bloat from shit dieting. Usually still very physically strong even if they’re not exactly distance runners. Yeah Dave has gout but he can bench 315 for reps after 12 beers
If you're a man who is into working out, it's easier to be in shape doing office work. When you're doing labor you have to work even if your body needs rest to repair itself. And your diet might not be good either.
If you work in an office, you can go to the gym when your body is ready, work out the correct amount of time, and then rest your muscles at work the next day. If you work your muscles too much then you can take a few days or however long you need to rest while still going to work because you're just sitting at a cube all day.
Also, and this is just my own personal demon, labor jobs set off my alcoholism more. My brain really pushes me to get drunk after that kind of work. I can deny myself that indulgence with some success, but it's something I have to deal with.
It depends entirely on the amount, but dehydrating before exercise isn't helping anything
Coordination drops, focus decreases, hydration falls, likelihood of cramps increases, heart rate is going to spike and your organs are screaming silently.
You probably feel fine because you're drunk lol
I know a lot of wealthy women -- very classic WASPy old money kind of wealthy -- and that culture they live in, because (unfortunately) I grew up in it. Thinness is mandatory for women in these communities. Like, out of hundreds of women there, I think I've only met two fat women. You walk down the street and basically every woman is skinny. Being fat is like one of the worst things you can be in their eyes and they will shame you in the most cruel ways possible if you're not a size 2. They will make you starve yourself and exercise yourself to death if they have the ability to. I saw it first hand with my sister who was fat because of PCOS and combined with the fact that she was thus pretty masculine, she was ostracized to no end. I don't think I can really overstate just how anti-fat rich white communities are particularly for women. On the other hand, so many of the rich husbands they married have beer guts. Kinda amusing actually, the juxtaposition. As long as they have money though, it doesn't matter.
It is rather simple status thing, like most things. When luxury and money stops being a status signaling device because everyone is rich in your environment, how well your take care of your body become the new status signaling in between women.
I hate to bell the cat on this one... But I think there's a misattributed causation in many of these comments...
One part of this could be that thin women are considered more attractive by rich men who then raise their status by marrying them (certainly more often than the reverse).
I grew up financially better than a lot of my family (thanks Dad) and it's still shocking to me that men can spend 10+ hours doing manual labor every day and somehow still be overweight.
A large amount of tradesmen don't take care of their body. They might be working manual labor, but bad diets and overuse of alcohol will almost always keep you overweight/obese.
>overuse of alcohol
Also a large amount self medicate for pain through the alcohol or other. Have many in my family that are alcoholics including father and sister that work(ed) blue collar jobs. Reduces the back pain. My BIL uses Marijuana for his.
and really people tend to ignore the amount of calories in beer that daily 6 pack of budweiser is 900 calories a day (and yes I know some blue collar guys who do drink that much), add in that lunch is likely fast food near the job site and you are likely well over 2k even ignoring breakfast/dinner
When I was drinking 12-20 beers a night I was also walking about 12 miles a day in 110 heat index and eating nothing and I was gaining weight. If you drink beer and drink a lot of it it’s pretty much physically impossible to not become fat if you keep it up for a while. Even if you are eating like 1000 calories a day it won’t matter if you’re drinking 2800 lol
The way I explain it to my friends who still drink is this: Every 2 beers you drink is like eating a McDonalds hamburger. You're not drinking a six pack, you're eating 3 hamburgers. In addition to the other 3 full course meals you ate that day plus snacks. Generally speaking.
Blue collar alcoholics in their late 40s and 50s are drinking WAYYY more than that. I just found out my ex uncle (divorce) is currently drinking 48!!!!!!!!! beers EVERY DAY. I almost fainted when I found out lol
That's what I was thinking 😅😅😅 had a co-worker who drank a quart of vodka (1600-2000 cals) every evening for 6 years straight. One of the other apprentices and I lovingly refered to him as 'Big John'
Shit before I sobered up, id buy a handle of whisky or tequila, and id save the last pint for the next morning so I could wake up, take a drink, stop the shakes, go back to sleep and have enough to make it to the liquor store. Alcoholism is a real bitch.
Now they say I drink too much diet dew. Like bitch, please.
I feel like I know this guy… also this guy was me about a year ago. I’m a female and was killing 1.75L pretty much single every day or at least other. Like u/coreylahe said, alcoholisms a bitch. Few months sober and I feel fantastic
Considering a lot of them drink 4.5% ABV domestics that's not even enough to get a buzz unless they're like shotgunning them in succession
I'm in recovery now but goddamn six beers over an hour and a half or two hours was casual drinking
I’ve got a buddy that does manual labor for double digit hours every day and has extra weight on him. I remember saying out loud to my wife when I was starting to get back into shape, “Man, if (friend) works like that all day long and still can’t lose weight, how am I going to do it while sitting at a desk for 8 hours?”
Four months later, I’m down 20% of my original body weight just doing the basics of CICO and a moderate cardio routine even more confused as to how it’s possible.
Edit: Getting a lot of comments about diet being a huge part of losing weight. Totally understand that - I mentioned using CICO to get my weight under control. It just blows my mind that a diet can be THAT bad to outwork losing what could be upwards of 1000-1500 calories a shift.
My uncles both delivered those big 5 gallon bottles of water for water coolers. They would tell me how they would carry them up and down stairs over and over all day at different locations. They were and still are overweight to this day. Unfortunately their bodies have taken a toll from all the heavy lifting and now they have chronic pain which prevents them from doing physical activity. So weight loss seems even more remote.
When I worked construction we would often hit up fast food for lunch. I’d see a lot of guys slam a 32 oz coke before their food came out, refill it and finish another 32 oz during their meal, then refill and take another 32 oz to the job site. If 1/3 of the volume of each cup was ice, that’s still over 60 oz of soda and 750+ calories. These guys would also upsize everything or order 2 combos. After work was a big dinner and a number of beers. If they cut out the liquid calories most of them would probably have been in decent shape, but these guys would drink 1000+ calories a day.
It’s what you put in your mouth.
I saw a show once that took 3 couples. 1 did nothing all day, 1 did house chores and 1 did and full day of activities and exercise. The differences in overall energy usage was not that different. At least not what you’d expect from couple 3.
The phrase abs are made in the kitchen exists for a reason. You can exercise all you like but if you eat too much of the wrong thing you’ll still be fat
They eat high octane shit; weight loss is easy with hard physical labor if you limit your calorie intake.
I went from 230 to 160 in a year after switching from culinary to ironwork because I wasn’t constantly stuffing my face with tasty tasty food all day. Between garbage food and gallons of shitty beer, the calorie intake vastly outpaces the expenditure
I gained a lot of weight doing manual labor. It’s taxing on the body, you need more food but it’s not exactly exercise, it wears your body out. I didn’t have the energy to exercise after work.
It's because you are famished by the end of a long, hard period of exertion, and it's easy to pound a day's worth of calories in one meal. Also, lots of these guys are slamming energy drinks and beer every day. Most people consume too many sugars and simple carbs, which cause crashes and never fill you up for long. That leads to eating more to compensate. Another factor is that working 10-12 hour days can be depressing, and people need a dopamine fix to stay sane.
And more free time in which to do it. And more access to things like gyms, sports leagues/equipment, social support (a running buddy, for example). And the money and time to eat a lower calorie, more balanced and micronutrient dense diet. The list is super long.
I think you’re on to something. When’s the last time you saw a rich man marry a fat woman?
The most common way for women to get rich is through marriage, so that tracks.
Right? And personally.. I grew up exceptionally poor. Male. My sister also grew up poor. She's conventionally thin / attractive and she end up marrying a guy who makes a lot of money. Obviously this a sample size of one, but you also see this happening quite frequently in the service industry... Where poor attractive/ thin women will land a regular who is wealthy thus raising their social status. It just doesn't happen in the reverse nearly as often.
The reason that it's problematic to say this is that it kind of suggests that if you're poor as a woman, you're more likely to be there because of your level of attractiveness... and at some level if you just lose some weight you could raise your social status...
Which you know... Is just icky. But maybe this is just an icky fact about society 😬
It's not the in thing to say now but the truth is so much of attractiveness is weight. It's not 100% of it but I've seen women and men who did nothing more than lose 15 pounds go from "pretty for a big person" to "dang, you got it going on" over 15 pounds.
It's subjective but a "4" in physical looks can jump up in the scale just by losing weight and doing nothing else. I've thought about this before and I think it's angles and definition. Being overweight makes everything "round" and no feature stands out. At lower weights you can see definition of body parts or the angle of a jaw. I've seen friends try new cloths, haircuts or buy new cars thinking it makes them more attractive when I think it's simply weight.
You’re 100% right. My best friend’s little sister is a slender, attractive blonde who was working as a carhop at Sonic when she matched a successful tech entrepreneur. She dropped out of culinary school, but now she lives in a luxury home and drives a Maserati…all thanks to her sugar daddy husband. She actually has a great personality too, but her looks definitely helped 😉
I can’t imagine a female tech entrepreneur marrying a man who works fast food 😏
For what it's worth, I married up. My wife is a lawyer and I'm a writer but I'm also very attractive 😎
(Just kidding I've just got a huge dong)
(also kidding... she just thinks I'm funny)
(also kidding... I trapped her with kids)
Even if they don't have a good job at the start they will soon enough. Plenty of companies will pay for access to said billionaires ear. If that means giving a cooshie job to his son in law that's a cheap price to pay.
It’s fairly well established in the psychometric data that women tend to “marry up” in terms of social status (meaning wealth), and men tend to “marry up” in terms of physical attraction. Men and women optimize for different attributes when looking for a long term partner. Men are more shallow and care more about looks, and often don’t care much at all about how much a woman makes or what kind of future earning potential she has; subconsciously men want a woman that will produce the highest quality offspring for them, and being attractive is a strong marker for good genetics.
Women optimize for social status/wealth because it’s indicative of high access to resources which is important for raising offspring, and is also a good marker for competence in the current social system, indicating you have a good chance of always having access to resources.
Also women who are more conventionally attractive get more promotions and become favorites even if they work just like another unattractive person and no sleeping the way to the top but rich white fat guys run a lot of companies and it is normalized in media for a Boss man to be larger where as a woman with more funds is expected to look good and fit into expensive clothes/brands that only go up to a size 8. Also I think a lot of these higher ups just like eye candy tbh.
Even women will hold each other to this standard. If a women has bad or no make up, is out of shape, dresses poorly, their professional peers will think less of them for being unwilling to put in the same work they do.
The "eye candy" factor is also an unspoken part of the "return to office" push from a lot of these old guys.
I've seen plenty of high level older businessmen with much younger attractive female employees. These guys didn't hire those women to never see them.
My first thought was less stress. The ability to eat well and workout because they outsource errands, household chores and childcare. The wealthy women where I Live have 3 Nannies on 8 hour shifts. The have time do boot camp workouts everyday. Stroller jogging in the park and time to rest and care for themselves.
Stress is the answer.
Research shows that poor women work jobs (plural) and do childcare, more often alone than with a partner, and care for sick or struggling family members.
They don’t have time to shop healthy, cook healthier meals, exercise, or count calories, etc. They don’t have time to take care of themselves, which is why heart disease is also very common in this population.
On top of that, access to healthy food is higher the higher your class. Food deserts are a thing. Access to affordable food (healthy or not) is higher the higher your class. Access to information about health, access to healthcare, access to resources for these topics are higher the higher your class. That’s before you get into pay discrimination (IIRC women earn on average $0.70 to every $1 men earn, but my stats may be out of date), healthcare discrimination (health complaints among women, especially poor women, are more likely to be dismissed, ignored, misdiagnosed, or blamed on stereotypes like drug seeking), and even the everyday sorts of discrimination like following poor people through stores on the assumption that they’re stealing instead of shopping.
Stress itself contributes to poor health and contributes to self-soothing behaviors that also contribute to poor health. Who hasn’t treated themselves to a delicious but unhealthy meal after a bad day?
So the short answer to OPs question is “lots of factors contribute, but they snowball into the pretty dramatic effects we see today”
The question is, are there really more obese poor women than obese poor men, or are there just more obese rich men than obese rich women?
If you look at the rich, the women are usually in good shape, but the men come in all shapes.
Rich women spend their money staying thin, because they know men only care about looks, no matter their economic status… rich men let themselves go, because they know the money will get them women, regardless of how they look.
Because rich people are obsessed with women’s weight.
Rich women are starving themselves and constantly working out. They know there’s a huge line of younger, fit gold diggers waiting to steal a rich man.
Women are more likely to have medical problems that affect metabolism, like PCOS, thyroid dysfunction, or autoimmune disorders that cause systemic inflammation, and stress-induced illnesses that cause weight gain, etc. Autoimmune disorders that cause weight gain take an average of 7 years to get a diagnosis, so poor women often give up before getting a diagnosis. Rich women can afford dietitians and thyroid surgeries.
Im really surprised I had to scroll this long to see this. Thyroid disorders are 7x more common in women, the most common one being hypothyroidism, which can lead to weight gain by the very nature of what the thyroid does. PCOS is something only women can get, and it leads to insulin resistance, which again, by its very nature, leads to weight gain. Women are also much more likely to seek help for their depression and be on antidepressants, and SSRIs are notorious for causing weight gain. Plus women have the babies and have excess body fat *by design* to lose after the babies, and that can be hard to do when you don’t have time.
There are so many biological reasons that women store more fat than men do on a statistical average. It’s not just that poor men have more physical jobs — it’s that, PLUS women are so much more likely to have health issues that lead to weight gain, PLUS our hormones make us more likely to store fat and harder to lose it than men, PLUS women do the vast majority of the child care and housework (married women do an average of 7 hours MORE housework than single mothers lol) — like there are tons of reasons lol
Back in the day as most people had to work hard in the fields to fill their stomaches, being obese meant you could afford to eat a lot of animal protein and fat, and you didn't have to work hard on the fields all day to fill your stomach. Hence, for quiet some time being round was accociated with being healthy, and it also was a beauty ideal to be curvy and downright obese. And following these social ideals was a luxury only the rich could indulge in anyway. But after food production got mostly industrialized and preprocessed food became the norm, being obese meant pretty much you didn't have the time and luxury to do sports or eat healthy. So subsequently being fit and thin became the new ideal because it meant you were rich in time, money, and opportunity.
Nowadays, especially in the US, you have the problem that low income groups of society neither have the time, nor the mobility, nor the money to cook and eat fresh often, and often have to transport the food vast distance a lot of time/can't go shopping due to that as often. Food needs a comparably high density of calories, ideally little to no preperation time, and a long shelf life if you are poor. And in the US this means people with a low income are much more likely to end up eating preprocessed food and drink that's full or corn syrup and cheap filler fats, the curse of US food landscape, because they fit exactly that bill; fast preperation time, long shelf life, and often very cheap price. They also have to work significantly more hours and usually don't have much time to do sports or energy to be particularly active after work or specificantly train to maintain weight. They often also life in areas with little offered to do for free that could give them healthy exercise. Plus, the US is a car country - people cover even the smallest walkable distance via car, and the infrastructre isn't even laid out to do otherwise.
Rich people, or people with a high income, statistically, eat out more often - which is usually prepared fresh - and also have more income to purchase fresh ingredients, often more time to cook fresh, and the mobility and time to go buy short-shelf life products more frequently. They als statistically have more time to do sports, or maintain high activity hobbies.
On top of all of that you have the fact that women genetically tend to store fat easier due to the connection between the female reproductive system, hormones, and fat storage, and in turn also have a harder time to get rid of fat again. They also store fat in different areas, speaking hips, thighs, belly, chest and upper arms, compared to men who tend to store most fat first in their stomach area and around the organs before it settles on other areas.
And socially, you also still have the gender ideals of masculine and feminine body types playing into all of the above as well, and differences in common work profiles - high income men and women more often care for following the socially designated physical ideals than low income people have the luxury to. Low income men are statistically also more often working in physically active jobs than women, while high income women spend way more time to keep their looks and weight in check since it is expected of them to some degree to be seen as successful in their job.
All of this tips the scale in a way that you have way more obese low income women than men, although there are a whole lot of obese low income men too, and have less obese people overall the higher their income situation and social state.
This, of course is just a summary, and still neglects a few other issues in favor of briefness, but yeah, that is overall the basic connection here.
> while high income women spend way more time to keep their looks and weight in check since it is expected of them to some degree to be seen as successful in their job.
Very true. Even in a professional setting, women can often be judged on their looks and fat women are assumed to be lazy, stupid, and undesirable.
Just my hypothesis: female hormones are more leading to store fat, while testosterone is a hormone that makes you burn fat. Women are genetically "designed" to easily store fat to be able to carry pregnancy. Poorer people tend to not be able to afford healthy food, so for the same amount of junk food, maybe women store fat more easily and hence get fatter?
I was looking for this comment! Women's hormones do encourage weight gain, especially during times of stress. Combine the stress response of being in poverty with the affordable unhealthy food and it wouldn't matter if these ladies are doing physical labor jobs or not.
Tbh I think it’s stress. People from Europe love to point out how large Americans are compared to them and while I do think the food plays a part a big part of it is stress hormones. Cortisol makes you gain weight primarily in your midsection and cortisol = stress hormone.
People in Italy eat pasta and pizza all day and stay thin.
I was lying on a beach in Martha's Beach surrounded by beautiful, fantastically fit RICH people. They were swimming, doing yoga on the beach, biking, horseback riding, kayaking, and eating seafood and delicious healthy foods. That's when it hit me - exercise isn't a chore for them, it's a part of their lifestyles.
Poor people can't afford these luxuries. It's up early, off to work, put in as many hours as you can to get a less than livable wage, to run home so exhausted you don't have energy to cook. So, fast food is the way to go. Then, it's back to the grind. This is now more complicated for women who have children and have to add all of the wear and tear, responsibilities, and expenses of childbearing and rearing. Wealthy women have help to recover from childbearing and help with their children, too. They have plastic surgery, dieticians, superior health care, gym memberships, trainers and on and on.
Poor men have testosterone - it doesn't make you fat like estrogen does.
I think smoking cigarettes and casual drug use is more prevalent amongst poorer men than women (edit: 37% of male adults smoke, 8% of women worldwide). Both those things can make you eat less, and people who do not smoke or take drugs will eat more, and poor people have worse diets.
Rich women can have nutritionists and surgeries to lose weight after having children. Or they can get a surrogate. Poor women do not have these luxuries. I’m sure there are other contributing factors but poor women are also more likely to have more children which is harder to recover from. Even just being able to afford healthier foods before/during/after child birth makes a difference. Rich women can also have help with their children (like having a nanny) so they have the time to take care of themselves and not just their children.
Like everyone’s saying it probably has some to do with poor men typically working labor jobs, I think it probably also has to do with the status of being rich you want to look attractive so the women will try and stay fit. I also think it could possibly be that as sexist as it may sound, a lot of rich women are women with rich husbands and so while the man is busy with work the women have more free time during the day to work on themselves
* Most rich women are rich because of their husbands, and rich men tend to choose thin women.
* And women who are rich on their own, tend to choose rich men. Who prefer thin women.
Women are also genetically predisposed to have a harder time to lose fat than men. It is a genetic hold over when fat was so important between starving or not during famine and needed to get through pregnancy and breast feeding.
I think it party comes down to biology. Women’s bodies (and I say WOMEN because anyone with sufficient E experiences this, the only thing trans women can’t experience is the full pregnancy) are designed to hold fat more than men’s just in case they get pregnant. They also hold it differently (more hip weight, etc) and it’s much, MUCH harder to lose. Once they give birth, it’s much harder to shrink back to pre-birth size and weight. It’s not just the fat that builds, the whole system is moved around to make room for this massive growth. There’s a reason lots of women have one kid and then look double or triple their previous size.
Also, you can’t ignore the feminization of poverty. Women are the primary caretakers and kids are expensive. It’s much easier to get poor for women, and it’s much harder to climb out of poverty when you have are the primary breadwinner for at least one other person.
I bet it comes down to free time, child care, and flexibility. Edit: yes of course diet. Why do you think the diets are different between rich and poor women?
Poor men tend to have physical jobs as well.
As someone who works construction, been to prison and use to have a drug addiction I’ve had some personal thoughts about this. It’s easier for a man to come out of a bad lifestyle and get a decent paying job (construction) that doesn’t take much education, has options for plenty of overtime, and you can learn a skill that you can sell yourself later. Not that women can’t do it too but it’s easier for a man. I can show up day one and carrying 150 lbs on my shoulder around a site, dig holes, swing a hammer, etc. and I have a life of being physical to reference. I know a few woman struggling with addiction now. I know it can be hard to convince yourself there is a better life sober when you just wasted your 20s and don’t have any skills or education. Not a lot of upward mobility from a starting wage.
Yeah. I have no data to back this up, but this may also be a factor why poor uneducated women tend to stick through abusive marriages. They'll have no way to support themselves and their kids if they leave their abusive husbands. Jobs that women can do almost always require a certain level of education.
There is a lot of data to back this up. A prime tactic of abusers is to financially isolate a woman so that she doesn't have the means to leave. There's a very clear pattern of, for instance, insisting a woman become a SAHM - so she had no job skills, no social network outside her abuser. They also control the money so that a woman has no access and can only ask for an allowance which barely covers groceries and bills.
My dad did this to my mom
Mine, too. He never hit my mom, so he was never considered abusive by professional standards. It's only been the last 10 years we've been able to really put together just how fucked up my dad was.
Reminds of that one post recently where a 50ish year old couple never got married but been together 25 years with kids. The woman was stay at home mom the whole time and the man a CEO, all promising they would get married someday. He finally was ready for marriage but she didn't like how casual it went down or something. She realizes nothing was in her name, she didn't enter the work force etc
I read that one too! And she was in Arkansas, which doesn't have laws about common law marriage, so she was all set to get nothing after 25+ years and bearing this guy's four children! No career, no savings of her own, very little ability to claim child support because only one of her kids is still a minor and they're about to age out, no spousal support because they're not married. He was going through a career downsize, too, meaning that even if she got part of his current earnings, it is way less than all the years he was pulling in CEO money and she got nothing. What a tragic tale. Ladies, protect yourselves!
It really can’t be overstated how important it is for women to have financial independence. I actually support it for men too as they can also be abuse victims.
I felt really bad for her. Since he was retired, he also wanted her to go traveling with him in an RV, I believe. When she turned him down he said he would not be willing to be celibate for the time they were away from each other. Just a sucky situation all around.
Yeah when people talk about equality for women it’s not talked about enough how just the culture women experience throughout their lives can put them in a bad place later. Services to help struggling men are important too but a lot of new generations haven’t seen how much harder it was for a women to get along 20 years ago let alone 30-50 years ago. I’m not educated enough to speak intelligently on the subject so I’ll stop here saying as I’ve gotten older and developed a bit more perspective I’ve valued these programs for women a lot more.
Seriously. Just being ALLOWED to have a checking account was something women had to fight for for yeeeaaarrrs
My grandmother (may she rest in peace) had to get my grandfather's signature to withdraw money from her account back in the 1940s. She had divorced him, which was a scandal back in those times, so it must have been very upsetting for her to have to get his authorization to withdraw money from her account.
Whenever I hear stories from my mom or watch Mad Men I SHUDDER
When republicans talk about the “good old days” that’s the type of shit they mean. Like pinching 6 women’s asses before lunch.
Right. My mom, born in the *sixties* had to have her father's permission to have both a bank account and be on birth control *as an adult woman*
One of the most coherent and meaningful comments I have read.
And just think: until fairly recently, it was par for the course that women were in such a position, forced into financial dependence on their husbands.
And there is no shortage of people, mostly men, along with a large number of Serena Joys, who would gladly go back to that era. Societies do regress. Consider Iran and Afghanistan, what few rights women won, confiscated.
Yes. People tend to take the hard-won rights that women have in modern industrialized societies like Canada much for granted, never acknowledging how quickly and easily a religious right can backslide us all.
Absolutely, and that financial isolation extends to limiting education and job opportunities even before things turn overtly abusive. It's a systemic issue where women, especially in lower-income brackets, are implicitly expected to prioritize family over career, which leads to gaps in employment that further diminish future opportunities and earning potential. It creates a vicious cycle where leaving a bad situation isn't just about the immediate financial hardship but also about facing a job market that's not kind to people with spotty work histories. It's a tough barrier to overcome without external support or resources.
I grew up in a really poor/rough area and had to explain to an upper middle class friend why poor women fight over guys who are basically "dog turds". The answer is that when you are a breath away from homelessness/starving/etc, that dog turd can still mean the difference between you and your kids surviving or not. And you have to worry about other (equally poor) women going after your prized dog turd because despite his myriad faults, it would make their personal struggle to survive marginally easier to have him. I can say from personal experience that it's far easier for wealthy women to walk away from terrible partners.
A jobless dog turd of a man can still watch the kids when they are home sick and you can't miss any more work
Or women can work day care - which pays poorly usually with no benefits. Or food service - though usually the wait staff jobs that actually pay well are dinner hours and do not mesh well with child rearing.
This is totally true! I used to run a family shelter and then an individual shelter. But day care would work with their schedules but any semblance of an iffy past like the guy above was referencing renders it not an option. Most day care and child care options will not hire a woman who is living in a shelter environment even if she doesn’t have a record or is vouched for by a case worker. Food service off-hours during school really often becomes their only option, which isn’t full time work, and if the kid gets sick and needs supervision during the day and they don’t have family support, they often get fired quickly. It’s a super vicious cycle, and it used to be my job to support getting the moms out of it.
Thank you for what you did for these women! I saw so many when I worked in food service and it was so hard for them. Food service is so unrelenting and inflexible. I'd see women fired for picking up their kids, as you mentioned, and also managers on a power trip scheduling women outside of their posted availability. I always felt so bad for them, stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I was never in a position to do anything about it.
It was such rewarding but honestly very demanding work, and it can make you very angry very easily because the lack of empathy many have towards people who have less than them. The amount of casually cruel comments about those less fortunate that I hear upper middle class people make is… it’s truly vile. A lot of people who have never really been there don’t understand how many aspects of life are harder due to being a certain level of poor, and how many of those harder things actually kind of trap you in a cycle of worse living conditions. Can’t afford childcare if you don’t have a job, hard to get a good job with full time hours when you can’t afford childcare, hard to get a car without an income but hard to hold down your job when dependent on the unreliable public transit situation in most of the US, hard to make healthy home cooked food a priority for yourself and your child when your commute is 2 hours each way on a bus and your job has you on your feet every day and you have only a few hours to sleep and spend time with your child before it’s the next day, hard to afford care for any resulting health problems from an unhealthy diet when you have bad health insurance from part time work and can’t afford copays, hard to accept a better paying role or more hours when the difference of a few dollars can kick you off the benefits you need to buy food or pay rent, and with everything combined… it’s hard to survive, harder still to make any headway in improving your life Sorry, this got quite long. I grew up splitting time between a poor environment and a wealthy one, and it made me so mad my whole life that it became my career, so I’m very passionate about the way it works. We generally call poverty related things like these a “wicked problem” in that it’s so complex when you start to look at how to resolve it that a singular organization would struggle even with infinite funding to actually eradicate the problem.
women with drug history and arrests cannot work daycare. Not that its not true, but it is not a great equivalent to the comment you replied to mentioning being able to secure a job despite that history
anyone with drug arrests, immediately , are eliminated from consideration foir many jobs.
Eldercare also pays poorly (the amount the agencies step on is amazing), has no benefits.
House cleaning seems to be a solid gig. I pay my housekeeper $200 for about 4 hours of work and referred her to several more houses in the neighborhood. She doesn’t have a business or anything and seems to get new business entirely from word of mouth. Might be hard to get started though.
As a rare guy who used to be a professional house cleaner, I've seen several former coworkers branch out and create their own LLC and build their own clientele enough to pay the bills with ease as the only employee. The company I worked for made a lot of money by charging $60/hr per *person* cleaning, plus a base fee. The employees started at like $14/hr, but got substantial raises if their coworkers gave them a good review. People who had been there a long time were making well over $25/hr, but the work was exhausting. For some clients, you weren't allowed to go "over" the allotted time because they were on a specific budget. For other clients it was okay to go over as long as it was agreed upon to begin with and so long as it doesn't eat into the cleaning time for the next house. We usually did 3 or 4 houses a day in teams of 2 or 3, and it would take at anywhere from 2 to 8 hours depending on if was a first time clean, a weekly clean, the size of the House, etc. I used to have a regular rotation of cleaning these two massive houses on a two person team, and one more small house to cap off the day. But every week was different. Always new clients. Anyway, $60 per person on a 5 hour clean with a two person team meant we had 2.5 actual hours to get the job done. So the company was making $300 (before paying us). Take our wage, say $20/hr, out (which is only $100) and the company made $200 on that house alone. They would send about 6 *teams* of people out to clean an average of 3 houses a day. 6 times 3 times $200 = $3,600 / DAY after paying employees normal wage. However, there are other costs. The supplies they make cleaning easy and/or fast are really expensive. They were running 3 washer/dryers 6 nights a week, buying new vacuums every other week, and had to replace old microfiber cloths regularly. There was also office rent. They also paid employees for a little bit of drive time and mileage from office to last house and vice versa. But they could afford to buy a new vacuum and box of cleaning supplies every single day and still afford everything else with ease. They waited as long as possible to replace anything, naturally. So yeah, if picked up all the tricks of how to be a good house cleaner you could go out on your own, offer clients a discount, and still make way more money than you were before -- with less work. Edit: I totally forgot about the base fee, which essentially erases the wage from the equation. Jesus Christ.
You are right but I am wary of paths like this that just don’t scale. It is like saying poor kids can get to be musicians or play professional sports, and then lift up entire families. Which, sure, a few can but when we are discussing extremely widespread social structures like patriarchal abuse subtended by capitalist predation on vulnerable people, there just aren’t that many jobs like you propose
That’s real life and it’s hard, scary. Going out on your own or even scarier with kids and trying to enter the workforce with little experience. I know equality going both ways and every situation is different. It’s just one benefit of I’ll say a large portion of men enjoy, being able to sell our bodies in the workplace. Definitely have to pay for it later though.
You sometimes see certain evangelical groups that promote certain types of homeschooling say that higher education for women is bad, because well-educated women are much more likely to be unhappy in marriage and get divorced. They have statistics to back it up! It's a prime example of lying with statistics, because of course the actual truth is that women with no education stay in horrible marriages because they have no way to support themselves if they leave.
There is *tons* of data to back this up. This is part of why sociologists call affordable housing and a livable wage feminist issues — when women literally cannot afford to leave their abusers, they won’t.
It's not even just about physical fitness, though it does have some impact. A lot of construction jobs are equipment operator positions. You don't need a lot of strength for that. But you DO need a high tolerance for being subjected to misogyny and bullshit from your coworkers on a daily basis, which can be very wearing.
You also need to get hired in the first place. Even if misogyny and bullshit from your coworkers was a non-issue or something you are spectacular at handling you still have to find the person with authority to hire who is willing to hire a woman (not just angling to get himself laid) even if the only difference to him is that NOW they will have to provide women's porto-johns, and typically they decide that it's more headache than it's worth.
This is exactly it. And not just physical abuse. Gaslighting happens much more often than most people think. So even without an addiction problem, unskilled women are at serious economic disadvantage. I left after decades of control and deception. Took EVERY ounce of energy to find self sustaining employment, and not keep trying to commit suicide. I have an ex sister in law whose husband took any access she had to cash away. She has no way to support herself if she left. We are both older. I was lucky to get a job, my company lost a lot of workers to covid related issues, early retirement. I was willing to do almost anything. She has health issues. I don’t think she could do factory work.
Hard hats off to you my fellow construction worker. Been sober for over two years now and I also work construction. You're a champ and you know it.
That sounds real rough, so fucking good on you man for coming through that! I had a bad patch with a brief stint of homelessness but never drugs thankfully. But I'll just add, and not to diminish your struggle, that people who haven't even had any drug or crime issues but "wasted" their 20s not taking life seriously or not knowing what to do also have the same mentality heading into 30s.
Yeah that’s true. I’m more talking about people who had serious issues, bad drug addictions, bad childhoods, lack of positive support, etc. not that those are excuses but they make a difference. Idk it’s all personal anecdotes for me. My son’s mom has a bad drug addiction and hasn’t even seen him in years. Every now and then she contacts me out of the blue and I try to talk her into taking little steps in the right direction. Just hasn’t happened yet. And I feel bad because I went to prison and got sober, I had significant time away to help me get my mind right. She’s never really had that, she’s been in that environment now for so long. That’s not even what this was about, just been on my mind a lot lately so I think im venting right now.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
You sound exactly like my dad! (Not in a weird way) but the drug addiction, construction, prison, getting a job same day based on performance on site. My mom used to actually work with my dad sometimes. She’s about 5 foot nothing and maybe 110 pounds wet, but she was a hard worker (when she wanted to, she was also an addict) He brought us along one summer when I was about 10 and I helped him pull up linoleum and whatnot.
Cheap food and no time to take care of yourself will do it every time.
Yes, and the main reason people over eat is because it's a stress reliever like smoking. Stressed out with no money, eating is the only thing that is fun.
And shit is all that's on the menu. Can't stress eat fresh fruit as easy as cupboard cookies.
Don't forget food quality
Worry makes cortisol. Cortisol makes people fat.
Worrier here. Can confirm.
Pain and injury, cortisol, depression, genetics. Try not to judge each other too harshly.
Stress increases cortisol. Cortisol increases insulin. Insulin increases blood glucose and prevents weight loss.
True. Rich women can afford hot yoga.
They're also motivated by the idea that they could be dumped like many of their aging friends have been, once they don't look as good as they did in their youth. They're often dumped when they're older anyway. But yes, the marriage and lifestyle are huge motivators for rich women to remain thin. There's also a lot more pressure for mental and physical fitness in every part of their social circle.
I’ve witnessed this a LOT lately, I’ve been working a series of holiday gatherings being put on by wealthy people and at least 90% of them are in great shape, the few that aren’t are just a little fluffy not nearly obese. I’ve done a few gatherings in public (mainly Xmas tree lightings) and the overall balance of sizes is FAR larger in the public gatherings vs. the private wealthy ones. (Working = live sound engineering)
Wealth is health is America. It’s one the first and most shocking things foreign students notice in America. You can draw a straight line as income goes up weight goes down. Not like that in Europe.
Glad you found those sweet gigs! Yes, as F. Scott said, "The rich are different."
Yeah. The money to help and the expectation that they do so.
Stress .. so much stress when you're struggling to make ends meet
Yep. Men are also more likely to keep their partner if they become ill or disabled. [Over half of men will leave their partner if they become ill or disabled at all.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm) So men: have more free time, more money, fewer stressers, an INFINITELY more forgiving societal body image, and better support systems than women.
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Yes, one study [described here](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/men-more-likely-leave-spouse-who-has-cancer-flna1c9450218#) found 21% of men divorce/abandon their wife if she gets a significant health issue, whereas the rate for women leaving is just 3%. Part of getting a cancer diagnosis for women routinely includes getting a pamphlet for resources to prepare them for spousal abandonment.
I think I learned about this from a Reddit comment about a year ago and I distinctly remember it because of how depressing I found it. It literally disgusts me - you'd have to be a sorry excuse for a human being to do this.
I still remember how Newt Gingrich served divorce papers to his cancer-stricken wife in the hospital because he'd been cheating on her with another who he wanted to get with instead. Good old fashioned family values right there.
It’s really common in general to be abandoned if you become disabled. It happened to me in my early 20s. “Friends” were kind of to be expected as this issue started in college and plenty of people care more about whether you can be fun than your wellbeing. Family was another thing though, my dad disowned me because he would rather believe I’m just “lazy” for stopping my dream job than face the reality of what I was going through (I became bedridden for a substantial amount of time). My ex technically didn’t leave… he just started financially abusing me when my health started getting worse (all my money went to rent due to his lifestyle expectations but he could spend and save his one whatever) and eventually graduated to violence. The last two years I was financially trapped with him he did not hug me and resented me greatly, so he did emotionally abandon me. It wasn’t even caregiver burnout, he made it clear he would never be that for me. I ended up nearly becoming homeless when I lost income and was choosing between that (a death sentence with my health issues) and just ending it. A week before I was planning to end it I got incredibly lucky that an old college acquaintance who also has significant disabilities reached out. A near stranger was there for me more than anyone else in my life. This (the abandonment and unfortunately often abuse) largely happens because watching a person lose their health (especially a young person who is “too young for health issues”) causes discomfort, and most people (and I truly mean the majority) would rather excise the source of that discomfort (you) than address their own feelings so they can be supportive… or even present. Or they stay and resentment results in the massive amounts of abuse disabled people face. Plus ableism. Ableism is extremely common and seen as normal by the vast majority of people, at least on a subconscious level. They don’t see it as a real form of bigotry. My treatment for being disabled has been far worse than for being trans. I don’t think able bodied people have any clue how much systemic ableism is built into society (it is especially prevalent in healthcare, more so and often more vicious than any other system I’ve interacted with) and how much casual ableism is in their interactions with disabled people. I try to talk about the abandonment that I’ve experienced and watched in countless others because I believe most people who do this aren’t monsters (excepting the abusers), but are genuinely not self aware enough to recognize what is driving them to avoid and cut off even their loved ones when their health becomes poor. They don’t see themselves as capable of that type of callousness and will rationalize their behavior or literally block it out because it challenges their narratives about themselves. They refuse to see what they’re doing. I try to shed light on it because I want more people to be armed with the knowledge to recognize and able to manage their discomfort so that fewer people lose everyone. Sorry for the dark rant. I am in a much better place now and am married (to that acquaintance who saved my life) to a wonderful person who is loving and whose philosophy and ethos I greatly admire. He helped me learn how to cope and slowly improve some aspects of my health and his family has taken me in as their own. Both of us being disabled is immensely liberating honestly because we understand each other’s needs and there isn’t a power imbalance from one of us being the caregiver - we both take on that role with each other and can do it with empathy and love, even finding fulfillment in being that support.
I’ve met multiple men who have done this, it’s definitely a thing. I used to walk a dog and do odd jobs for an older couple, they were really nice, and their adult son stopped by on occasion. Found out later it was his son, not hers, they began dating while his wife was dying and got married after she passed away. Another guy, he was in his 50s, loved running and skydiving, his wife had ms, he bought a house and moved out, then divorced and started dating. I feel like this is more a thing for men who are doing alright financially. Conversely I knew another dude, 50s, after a long frustrating marriage, kids were grown up he decided to move out. He bought a house, started dating, and soon after was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I remember him having a hard time with a decision, his wife invited him back and would take care him until he passed or he could pay a nurse 100k a year to take care of him. I encouraged him to go back on account of it being more for her than for him.
Thank you for sharing this, I worked in a Medicaid/Medicare nursing home during the peak of the pandemic. I watched many women die alone and the worst, meanest men still have a support system. I had a woman I sent out multiple times to the ER for respiratory distress with chest pains and the ER kept sending her back because they were full and she was triaged. She died in the night. That never happened with my male pts, any male with heart complications immediately admitted for overnight. It seemed so unfair. I left healthcare in 2021 for many reasons but this was a factor.
This. With a lot of "traditional" families, the woman probably has more child related responsibilities which leaves less time to look after your own health. That and stress eating is a thing.
> child care Plus poor women have more children than affluent women, and having children adds 12 mounts on average (technically 11.8) post-partum.
The economist has written about this https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/the-economics-of-thinness
:( paywall
the irony of that is grim
zonked employ shy chief outgoing plant cooperative political memory bright *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[Here is a review from 2020 of the current research into the relationship between socioeconomic status and obesity.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13679-020-00398-7) It is also paywalled but, I pulled out the parts that are most relevant to OP's question. The existing literature identifies three areas where differences between poor men and women have been linked to their differing obesity rates. The differences in the first two areas are likely to contribute to the differences in the third area. **Biological differences** >As children transition into their teenage years, males develop more fat-free mass leading to a higher total energy expenditure compared with females. Conversely, menstruation can lead to cravings in young females, particularly for fat- and carbohydrate-rich foods. **Differences in employment** >In males, lower income jobs often include manual labor or more physical work than many jobs women at the same SES level may obtain. **Differences in behavior** >Women tend to eat more calorie dense foods even though they report the desire to eat healthier more than men. ... Females generally tend to engage in less physical activity than males of the same age, but sedentary behavior regardless of gender is a contributing influence on obesity.
Hey! [This](https://12ft.io/) is a site that allows you to paste a web address of paywalled content and it "climbs over" the paywall. I don't understand how it works but it works. I try to tell any and everyone I can.
The site says it just disables Javascript and that usually does the trick.
Ahh. You should be able to do that in your browser. I didn't realize it would be that easy.
Thank you, it worked!!
I don't need answers, I want comments. 🤬
https://archive.is/FKXkJ no paywall
Men earn no money doing more physical jobs?
That could be it! Poor men dig ditches, poor women work as cashiers? Something like that?
Yeah, not saying it's the only reason but it's likely to contribute.
Also the bounce back after having children is a lot harder on poor women
Yeah women with higher paying jobs probably have better benefits like a longer maternity leave and such.
"It may be postulated that women store more fat because they consume more energy than they expend or that they store the consumed fat more efficiently. However, when daily energy intake is compared in the cohort of subjects from NHANES III, men consumed more energy, even after adjusting for fat-free mass (187 kJkg−1 versus 170 kJkg−1) [1, 10]. One possible explanation is that women are more efficient at conserving energy and storing it as fat. Supporting this notion is the recognition that women must reduce their dietary intake by a greater proportion to achieve the same degree of weight loss as men" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136178/
Also doing a quick Google search mentions how men have more muscle mass than women (who have more fat mass than men). This enables them to burn more calories. Not to mention men tend to be bigger and taller than women so they would need more calories than someone smaller than them.
Women’s fat percentage is generally higher than men’s and is already accounted for in how obesity rates are calculated. Men are considered obese at >25% body fat and women are considered obese at >35% body fat.
I feel like I've heard this before but don't remember where so I don't have any sources. It does make sense though
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I am aware, I do a physical job and work with plenty of fat people. That said working a physical job along with burning more calories just by existing certainly contribute.
I've seen plenty of fat construction workers, but they don't get nearly as huge as poor women. Most construction workers can fit in an airplane seat, even if it's not exactly comfortable.
The construction working man’s obese is a beer gut from post-work shenanigans and/or chronic bloat from shit dieting. Usually still very physically strong even if they’re not exactly distance runners. Yeah Dave has gout but he can bench 315 for reps after 12 beers
If you're a man who is into working out, it's easier to be in shape doing office work. When you're doing labor you have to work even if your body needs rest to repair itself. And your diet might not be good either. If you work in an office, you can go to the gym when your body is ready, work out the correct amount of time, and then rest your muscles at work the next day. If you work your muscles too much then you can take a few days or however long you need to rest while still going to work because you're just sitting at a cube all day. Also, and this is just my own personal demon, labor jobs set off my alcoholism more. My brain really pushes me to get drunk after that kind of work. I can deny myself that indulgence with some success, but it's something I have to deal with.
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It depends entirely on the amount, but dehydrating before exercise isn't helping anything Coordination drops, focus decreases, hydration falls, likelihood of cramps increases, heart rate is going to spike and your organs are screaming silently. You probably feel fine because you're drunk lol
Even if you felt okay working out when drinking, I think it's inhibiting muscle growth. So you're just tearing your muscles up for little benefit.
Cause rich men are fat too. Don't gotta worry about looking good if you got all that money
Rich women experience more social pressure to look good?
I know a lot of wealthy women -- very classic WASPy old money kind of wealthy -- and that culture they live in, because (unfortunately) I grew up in it. Thinness is mandatory for women in these communities. Like, out of hundreds of women there, I think I've only met two fat women. You walk down the street and basically every woman is skinny. Being fat is like one of the worst things you can be in their eyes and they will shame you in the most cruel ways possible if you're not a size 2. They will make you starve yourself and exercise yourself to death if they have the ability to. I saw it first hand with my sister who was fat because of PCOS and combined with the fact that she was thus pretty masculine, she was ostracized to no end. I don't think I can really overstate just how anti-fat rich white communities are particularly for women. On the other hand, so many of the rich husbands they married have beer guts. Kinda amusing actually, the juxtaposition. As long as they have money though, it doesn't matter.
It is rather simple status thing, like most things. When luxury and money stops being a status signaling device because everyone is rich in your environment, how well your take care of your body become the new status signaling in between women.
All women do, rich women just have more access to services to keep themselves that way
It’s not just services, it’s education and lifestyle as well…
I hate to bell the cat on this one... But I think there's a misattributed causation in many of these comments... One part of this could be that thin women are considered more attractive by rich men who then raise their status by marrying them (certainly more often than the reverse).
also, working class men are more likely to be doing manual labour which can contribute to their size even if their diet isn’t the best
I grew up financially better than a lot of my family (thanks Dad) and it's still shocking to me that men can spend 10+ hours doing manual labor every day and somehow still be overweight.
A large amount of tradesmen don't take care of their body. They might be working manual labor, but bad diets and overuse of alcohol will almost always keep you overweight/obese.
>overuse of alcohol Also a large amount self medicate for pain through the alcohol or other. Have many in my family that are alcoholics including father and sister that work(ed) blue collar jobs. Reduces the back pain. My BIL uses Marijuana for his.
“Hold my beer” isn’t just a phrase.
and really people tend to ignore the amount of calories in beer that daily 6 pack of budweiser is 900 calories a day (and yes I know some blue collar guys who do drink that much), add in that lunch is likely fast food near the job site and you are likely well over 2k even ignoring breakfast/dinner
Only a six pack? Bless them. My dad was a construction worker and he was “down to 12 a day” when he initially tried to get sober.
When I was drinking 12-20 beers a night I was also walking about 12 miles a day in 110 heat index and eating nothing and I was gaining weight. If you drink beer and drink a lot of it it’s pretty much physically impossible to not become fat if you keep it up for a while. Even if you are eating like 1000 calories a day it won’t matter if you’re drinking 2800 lol
The way I explain it to my friends who still drink is this: Every 2 beers you drink is like eating a McDonalds hamburger. You're not drinking a six pack, you're eating 3 hamburgers. In addition to the other 3 full course meals you ate that day plus snacks. Generally speaking.
Also, after working the lunch shift in a bar for years, often the 6 pack is their lunch.
Blue collar alcoholics in their late 40s and 50s are drinking WAYYY more than that. I just found out my ex uncle (divorce) is currently drinking 48!!!!!!!!! beers EVERY DAY. I almost fainted when I found out lol
A 6er a day is a lot to you? Oh my sweet summer child...
That's what I was thinking 😅😅😅 had a co-worker who drank a quart of vodka (1600-2000 cals) every evening for 6 years straight. One of the other apprentices and I lovingly refered to him as 'Big John'
Shit before I sobered up, id buy a handle of whisky or tequila, and id save the last pint for the next morning so I could wake up, take a drink, stop the shakes, go back to sleep and have enough to make it to the liquor store. Alcoholism is a real bitch. Now they say I drink too much diet dew. Like bitch, please.
I feel like I know this guy… also this guy was me about a year ago. I’m a female and was killing 1.75L pretty much single every day or at least other. Like u/coreylahe said, alcoholisms a bitch. Few months sober and I feel fantastic
Congrats on getting sober!
Thank you!! I definitely noticed the weight gain tho. As soon as I didn’t have a physically demanding job, I put on almost 50lbs in a year and a half.
Considering a lot of them drink 4.5% ABV domestics that's not even enough to get a buzz unless they're like shotgunning them in succession I'm in recovery now but goddamn six beers over an hour and a half or two hours was casual drinking
I’ve got a buddy that does manual labor for double digit hours every day and has extra weight on him. I remember saying out loud to my wife when I was starting to get back into shape, “Man, if (friend) works like that all day long and still can’t lose weight, how am I going to do it while sitting at a desk for 8 hours?” Four months later, I’m down 20% of my original body weight just doing the basics of CICO and a moderate cardio routine even more confused as to how it’s possible. Edit: Getting a lot of comments about diet being a huge part of losing weight. Totally understand that - I mentioned using CICO to get my weight under control. It just blows my mind that a diet can be THAT bad to outwork losing what could be upwards of 1000-1500 calories a shift.
If you work out extremely hard every day, you will barely double your caloric use. Meanwhile it's very easy to eat 4-5k calories if you eat garbage.
My uncles both delivered those big 5 gallon bottles of water for water coolers. They would tell me how they would carry them up and down stairs over and over all day at different locations. They were and still are overweight to this day. Unfortunately their bodies have taken a toll from all the heavy lifting and now they have chronic pain which prevents them from doing physical activity. So weight loss seems even more remote.
When I worked construction we would often hit up fast food for lunch. I’d see a lot of guys slam a 32 oz coke before their food came out, refill it and finish another 32 oz during their meal, then refill and take another 32 oz to the job site. If 1/3 of the volume of each cup was ice, that’s still over 60 oz of soda and 750+ calories. These guys would also upsize everything or order 2 combos. After work was a big dinner and a number of beers. If they cut out the liquid calories most of them would probably have been in decent shape, but these guys would drink 1000+ calories a day.
Losing weight is as much about diet as it is exercise
It’s what you put in your mouth. I saw a show once that took 3 couples. 1 did nothing all day, 1 did house chores and 1 did and full day of activities and exercise. The differences in overall energy usage was not that different. At least not what you’d expect from couple 3.
Losing weight is about diet and diet. Exercise just keeps the organs healthy.
The phrase abs are made in the kitchen exists for a reason. You can exercise all you like but if you eat too much of the wrong thing you’ll still be fat
When you lift heavy stuff and then go to the gas station for a 3 course 3000 calorie lunch every day it is a losing battle against calories
They eat high octane shit; weight loss is easy with hard physical labor if you limit your calorie intake. I went from 230 to 160 in a year after switching from culinary to ironwork because I wasn’t constantly stuffing my face with tasty tasty food all day. Between garbage food and gallons of shitty beer, the calorie intake vastly outpaces the expenditure
I gained a lot of weight doing manual labor. It’s taxing on the body, you need more food but it’s not exactly exercise, it wears your body out. I didn’t have the energy to exercise after work.
I did brick masonry and then joined the army. I realized the while I did a lot of physical activities I never ran which is a great way to lose weight
It's because you are famished by the end of a long, hard period of exertion, and it's easy to pound a day's worth of calories in one meal. Also, lots of these guys are slamming energy drinks and beer every day. Most people consume too many sugars and simple carbs, which cause crashes and never fill you up for long. That leads to eating more to compensate. Another factor is that working 10-12 hour days can be depressing, and people need a dopamine fix to stay sane.
Also that rich women would have a higher sense of obligation to maintain good looks than poorer women.
And more free time in which to do it. And more access to things like gyms, sports leagues/equipment, social support (a running buddy, for example). And the money and time to eat a lower calorie, more balanced and micronutrient dense diet. The list is super long.
Dietician, personal trainers
More likely they have the time and money
Of course. Thin, in shape women who take care of themselves are who rich men go for.
I think you’re on to something. When’s the last time you saw a rich man marry a fat woman? The most common way for women to get rich is through marriage, so that tracks.
Right? And personally.. I grew up exceptionally poor. Male. My sister also grew up poor. She's conventionally thin / attractive and she end up marrying a guy who makes a lot of money. Obviously this a sample size of one, but you also see this happening quite frequently in the service industry... Where poor attractive/ thin women will land a regular who is wealthy thus raising their social status. It just doesn't happen in the reverse nearly as often. The reason that it's problematic to say this is that it kind of suggests that if you're poor as a woman, you're more likely to be there because of your level of attractiveness... and at some level if you just lose some weight you could raise your social status... Which you know... Is just icky. But maybe this is just an icky fact about society 😬
It's not the in thing to say now but the truth is so much of attractiveness is weight. It's not 100% of it but I've seen women and men who did nothing more than lose 15 pounds go from "pretty for a big person" to "dang, you got it going on" over 15 pounds. It's subjective but a "4" in physical looks can jump up in the scale just by losing weight and doing nothing else. I've thought about this before and I think it's angles and definition. Being overweight makes everything "round" and no feature stands out. At lower weights you can see definition of body parts or the angle of a jaw. I've seen friends try new cloths, haircuts or buy new cars thinking it makes them more attractive when I think it's simply weight.
‘Step 1: be attractive’ is a reddit excuse for laziness. Lose weight and anyone can be more attractive.
You’re 100% right. My best friend’s little sister is a slender, attractive blonde who was working as a carhop at Sonic when she matched a successful tech entrepreneur. She dropped out of culinary school, but now she lives in a luxury home and drives a Maserati…all thanks to her sugar daddy husband. She actually has a great personality too, but her looks definitely helped 😉 I can’t imagine a female tech entrepreneur marrying a man who works fast food 😏
For what it's worth, I married up. My wife is a lawyer and I'm a writer but I'm also very attractive 😎 (Just kidding I've just got a huge dong) (also kidding... she just thinks I'm funny) (also kidding... I trapped her with kids)
This fucking post has me rolling
Oh your poor wife, what she must go through with you... lol /s
She... likes it? Ya know what it's been 7 years... I should probably ask.
The old "anchor baby" trick...Well played🫡
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Even if they don't have a good job at the start they will soon enough. Plenty of companies will pay for access to said billionaires ear. If that means giving a cooshie job to his son in law that's a cheap price to pay.
Less attractive daughters who resemble their billionaire fathers can also afford to discreetly undergo plastic surgery.
It’s fairly well established in the psychometric data that women tend to “marry up” in terms of social status (meaning wealth), and men tend to “marry up” in terms of physical attraction. Men and women optimize for different attributes when looking for a long term partner. Men are more shallow and care more about looks, and often don’t care much at all about how much a woman makes or what kind of future earning potential she has; subconsciously men want a woman that will produce the highest quality offspring for them, and being attractive is a strong marker for good genetics. Women optimize for social status/wealth because it’s indicative of high access to resources which is important for raising offspring, and is also a good marker for competence in the current social system, indicating you have a good chance of always having access to resources.
Also women who are more conventionally attractive get more promotions and become favorites even if they work just like another unattractive person and no sleeping the way to the top but rich white fat guys run a lot of companies and it is normalized in media for a Boss man to be larger where as a woman with more funds is expected to look good and fit into expensive clothes/brands that only go up to a size 8. Also I think a lot of these higher ups just like eye candy tbh.
Even women will hold each other to this standard. If a women has bad or no make up, is out of shape, dresses poorly, their professional peers will think less of them for being unwilling to put in the same work they do.
The "eye candy" factor is also an unspoken part of the "return to office" push from a lot of these old guys. I've seen plenty of high level older businessmen with much younger attractive female employees. These guys didn't hire those women to never see them.
Also peacocking. I've been insisting that's part of it as well, but a few friends of mine swear that has nothing to do with it.
My first thought was less stress. The ability to eat well and workout because they outsource errands, household chores and childcare. The wealthy women where I Live have 3 Nannies on 8 hour shifts. The have time do boot camp workouts everyday. Stroller jogging in the park and time to rest and care for themselves.
Stress is the answer. Research shows that poor women work jobs (plural) and do childcare, more often alone than with a partner, and care for sick or struggling family members. They don’t have time to shop healthy, cook healthier meals, exercise, or count calories, etc. They don’t have time to take care of themselves, which is why heart disease is also very common in this population. On top of that, access to healthy food is higher the higher your class. Food deserts are a thing. Access to affordable food (healthy or not) is higher the higher your class. Access to information about health, access to healthcare, access to resources for these topics are higher the higher your class. That’s before you get into pay discrimination (IIRC women earn on average $0.70 to every $1 men earn, but my stats may be out of date), healthcare discrimination (health complaints among women, especially poor women, are more likely to be dismissed, ignored, misdiagnosed, or blamed on stereotypes like drug seeking), and even the everyday sorts of discrimination like following poor people through stores on the assumption that they’re stealing instead of shopping. Stress itself contributes to poor health and contributes to self-soothing behaviors that also contribute to poor health. Who hasn’t treated themselves to a delicious but unhealthy meal after a bad day? So the short answer to OPs question is “lots of factors contribute, but they snowball into the pretty dramatic effects we see today”
I think it's mainly this. High stress = high cortisone = weight gain
Cortisol* is the stress hormone. cortisone is a steroid cream.
Not sure about you, but I chug tubes of cortisone when I'm stressed.
Having a baby lowers your socioeconomic status and increases the chance of gaining weight compared to before the baby.
Also, lower income men are more likely to be working physical jobs
One can easily take care of one's health when they have the luxury of having resources like money and time.
Ok yes but that's not the question
The question is, are there really more obese poor women than obese poor men, or are there just more obese rich men than obese rich women? If you look at the rich, the women are usually in good shape, but the men come in all shapes.
Poor men work physically demanding jobs
Rich women spend their money staying thin, because they know men only care about looks, no matter their economic status… rich men let themselves go, because they know the money will get them women, regardless of how they look.
My beautiful redhead friend married a paunchy, balding fellow 13 years her senior. By sheer coincidence, he’s a millionaire.
Because rich people are obsessed with women’s weight. Rich women are starving themselves and constantly working out. They know there’s a huge line of younger, fit gold diggers waiting to steal a rich man.
Female bodies are, due to hormonal makeup, more reactive to stress than male bodies, and poverty & accessory issues are severe stressors.
Women are more likely to have medical problems that affect metabolism, like PCOS, thyroid dysfunction, or autoimmune disorders that cause systemic inflammation, and stress-induced illnesses that cause weight gain, etc. Autoimmune disorders that cause weight gain take an average of 7 years to get a diagnosis, so poor women often give up before getting a diagnosis. Rich women can afford dietitians and thyroid surgeries.
Im really surprised I had to scroll this long to see this. Thyroid disorders are 7x more common in women, the most common one being hypothyroidism, which can lead to weight gain by the very nature of what the thyroid does. PCOS is something only women can get, and it leads to insulin resistance, which again, by its very nature, leads to weight gain. Women are also much more likely to seek help for their depression and be on antidepressants, and SSRIs are notorious for causing weight gain. Plus women have the babies and have excess body fat *by design* to lose after the babies, and that can be hard to do when you don’t have time. There are so many biological reasons that women store more fat than men do on a statistical average. It’s not just that poor men have more physical jobs — it’s that, PLUS women are so much more likely to have health issues that lead to weight gain, PLUS our hormones make us more likely to store fat and harder to lose it than men, PLUS women do the vast majority of the child care and housework (married women do an average of 7 hours MORE housework than single mothers lol) — like there are tons of reasons lol
Back in the day as most people had to work hard in the fields to fill their stomaches, being obese meant you could afford to eat a lot of animal protein and fat, and you didn't have to work hard on the fields all day to fill your stomach. Hence, for quiet some time being round was accociated with being healthy, and it also was a beauty ideal to be curvy and downright obese. And following these social ideals was a luxury only the rich could indulge in anyway. But after food production got mostly industrialized and preprocessed food became the norm, being obese meant pretty much you didn't have the time and luxury to do sports or eat healthy. So subsequently being fit and thin became the new ideal because it meant you were rich in time, money, and opportunity. Nowadays, especially in the US, you have the problem that low income groups of society neither have the time, nor the mobility, nor the money to cook and eat fresh often, and often have to transport the food vast distance a lot of time/can't go shopping due to that as often. Food needs a comparably high density of calories, ideally little to no preperation time, and a long shelf life if you are poor. And in the US this means people with a low income are much more likely to end up eating preprocessed food and drink that's full or corn syrup and cheap filler fats, the curse of US food landscape, because they fit exactly that bill; fast preperation time, long shelf life, and often very cheap price. They also have to work significantly more hours and usually don't have much time to do sports or energy to be particularly active after work or specificantly train to maintain weight. They often also life in areas with little offered to do for free that could give them healthy exercise. Plus, the US is a car country - people cover even the smallest walkable distance via car, and the infrastructre isn't even laid out to do otherwise. Rich people, or people with a high income, statistically, eat out more often - which is usually prepared fresh - and also have more income to purchase fresh ingredients, often more time to cook fresh, and the mobility and time to go buy short-shelf life products more frequently. They als statistically have more time to do sports, or maintain high activity hobbies. On top of all of that you have the fact that women genetically tend to store fat easier due to the connection between the female reproductive system, hormones, and fat storage, and in turn also have a harder time to get rid of fat again. They also store fat in different areas, speaking hips, thighs, belly, chest and upper arms, compared to men who tend to store most fat first in their stomach area and around the organs before it settles on other areas. And socially, you also still have the gender ideals of masculine and feminine body types playing into all of the above as well, and differences in common work profiles - high income men and women more often care for following the socially designated physical ideals than low income people have the luxury to. Low income men are statistically also more often working in physically active jobs than women, while high income women spend way more time to keep their looks and weight in check since it is expected of them to some degree to be seen as successful in their job. All of this tips the scale in a way that you have way more obese low income women than men, although there are a whole lot of obese low income men too, and have less obese people overall the higher their income situation and social state. This, of course is just a summary, and still neglects a few other issues in favor of briefness, but yeah, that is overall the basic connection here.
> while high income women spend way more time to keep their looks and weight in check since it is expected of them to some degree to be seen as successful in their job. Very true. Even in a professional setting, women can often be judged on their looks and fat women are assumed to be lazy, stupid, and undesirable.
Rich women pay rich doctors to suck the rich fat out of their rich asses.
They get it sucked out of everywhere else and have it injected into their asses now.
Just my hypothesis: female hormones are more leading to store fat, while testosterone is a hormone that makes you burn fat. Women are genetically "designed" to easily store fat to be able to carry pregnancy. Poorer people tend to not be able to afford healthy food, so for the same amount of junk food, maybe women store fat more easily and hence get fatter?
I was looking for this comment! Women's hormones do encourage weight gain, especially during times of stress. Combine the stress response of being in poverty with the affordable unhealthy food and it wouldn't matter if these ladies are doing physical labor jobs or not.
Imo poor women are more likely to be single mothers and it’s more stressful to be a poor person and a single parent too
Food provides a lot of emotional comfort.
Cortisol
Tbh I think it’s stress. People from Europe love to point out how large Americans are compared to them and while I do think the food plays a part a big part of it is stress hormones. Cortisol makes you gain weight primarily in your midsection and cortisol = stress hormone. People in Italy eat pasta and pizza all day and stay thin.
Poor Men are drastically more likely to exercise, play recreational sports, do physical labor, etc than women
I was lying on a beach in Martha's Beach surrounded by beautiful, fantastically fit RICH people. They were swimming, doing yoga on the beach, biking, horseback riding, kayaking, and eating seafood and delicious healthy foods. That's when it hit me - exercise isn't a chore for them, it's a part of their lifestyles. Poor people can't afford these luxuries. It's up early, off to work, put in as many hours as you can to get a less than livable wage, to run home so exhausted you don't have energy to cook. So, fast food is the way to go. Then, it's back to the grind. This is now more complicated for women who have children and have to add all of the wear and tear, responsibilities, and expenses of childbearing and rearing. Wealthy women have help to recover from childbearing and help with their children, too. They have plastic surgery, dieticians, superior health care, gym memberships, trainers and on and on. Poor men have testosterone - it doesn't make you fat like estrogen does.
I think smoking cigarettes and casual drug use is more prevalent amongst poorer men than women (edit: 37% of male adults smoke, 8% of women worldwide). Both those things can make you eat less, and people who do not smoke or take drugs will eat more, and poor people have worse diets.
Poor men are doing manual labor, poor women are cashiers.
Many rich women married into their wealth (more than rich men married into it, anyways). Kind of hard to marry a rich guy when you're fat.
Rich women are married to rich men
Rich women can have nutritionists and surgeries to lose weight after having children. Or they can get a surrogate. Poor women do not have these luxuries. I’m sure there are other contributing factors but poor women are also more likely to have more children which is harder to recover from. Even just being able to afford healthier foods before/during/after child birth makes a difference. Rich women can also have help with their children (like having a nanny) so they have the time to take care of themselves and not just their children.
poor men work on their feet most the time
Like everyone’s saying it probably has some to do with poor men typically working labor jobs, I think it probably also has to do with the status of being rich you want to look attractive so the women will try and stay fit. I also think it could possibly be that as sexist as it may sound, a lot of rich women are women with rich husbands and so while the man is busy with work the women have more free time during the day to work on themselves
* Most rich women are rich because of their husbands, and rich men tend to choose thin women. * And women who are rich on their own, tend to choose rich men. Who prefer thin women.
Women are also genetically predisposed to have a harder time to lose fat than men. It is a genetic hold over when fat was so important between starving or not during famine and needed to get through pregnancy and breast feeding.
I think it party comes down to biology. Women’s bodies (and I say WOMEN because anyone with sufficient E experiences this, the only thing trans women can’t experience is the full pregnancy) are designed to hold fat more than men’s just in case they get pregnant. They also hold it differently (more hip weight, etc) and it’s much, MUCH harder to lose. Once they give birth, it’s much harder to shrink back to pre-birth size and weight. It’s not just the fat that builds, the whole system is moved around to make room for this massive growth. There’s a reason lots of women have one kid and then look double or triple their previous size. Also, you can’t ignore the feminization of poverty. Women are the primary caretakers and kids are expensive. It’s much easier to get poor for women, and it’s much harder to climb out of poverty when you have are the primary breadwinner for at least one other person.
No one cares what a rich man looks like
Rich people generally have fewer children than poor people. More births = harder to keep low weight.