Too Fat To Work - Need More Benefit Money
- Thread starter Twila
- Start date
Micro-wave pie and chips. Oh yummy! Nothing fattening about that is there!:roll:
Gross!
Have you had a look at the cost of a bag of chips lately? I know they mean fries when they say chips but in this country --- chips are expensive. It blows me away that people will actually spend money on the things that cannot help but add weight to them. I've had customers who have been short on money put the healthy food aside as something "they don't need" and take the bags of chips and the pop instead. My best friend has a brother who was extremely overweight. One day about a year ago, he deceided he was too fat. He went on line, found recipes that were 500 calories for all 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner). On his self imposed diet, he has now lost over 100 pounds. Too bad these people don't know him. ;-)
Addiction is called a disease ... and it sounds like this crew has it bad.
I can understand a pension not being enough to buy healthy food though. Hydro went up 50%. Natural gas went up by 75%. Groceries have gone up by 25%. ODSP went up by 3%.....
I can understand a pension not being enough to buy healthy food though. Hydro went up 50%. Natural gas went up by 75%. Groceries have gone up by 25%. ODSP went up by 3%.....
Yeah, BUT who would really prefer to eat tofu over chicken? Is tofu actually any better for you than chicken? I think not. I still say eat anything you want- IN MODERATION.
:-(
Indeed sad;
I looked at their pics, and they are fat, but.......too fat to function.......that's a stretch..........no pun intended.
Any excuse'll do.
There's a his and hers team which waddles about our wee town. Approx. 30 years old, each would weigh over 300, each are short, and they both use a cane.........
One does get a bit tired of professional victims..............of society.
ukeright:
givvusabreak, eh!!
Indeed sad;
I looked at their pics, and they are fat, but.......too fat to function.......that's a stretch..........no pun intended.
Any excuse'll do.
There's a his and hers team which waddles about our wee town. Approx. 30 years old, each would weigh over 300, each are short, and they both use a cane.........
One does get a bit tired of professional victims..............of society.
ukeright:givvusabreak, eh!!
I wish you could inject them with what it feels like to be slender (not skinny, but the right weight for your body frame) fit and healthy. If they could just feel it for a bit, they'd never touch fast food, processed food again and they'd work hard towards getting there again.
I can only begin to imagine how sick they must feel. Polluted with toxins, body sore and tired from carrying such a tremendous amount of weight around.
When you hit 40, you loose muscle...alot of it if you don't exercise. So, they're gaining weight but loosing muscle.
I can only begin to imagine how sick they must feel. Polluted with toxins, body sore and tired from carrying such a tremendous amount of weight around.
When you hit 40, you loose muscle...alot of it if you don't exercise. So, they're gaining weight but loosing muscle.
Philip Chawner, 53, and his 57-year-old wife Audrey weigh 24st. Their daughter Emma, 19, weighs 17st, while her older sister Samantha, 21, weighs 18st.
The family from Blackburn claim £22,508 a year in benefits, equivalent to the take-home pay from a £30,000 salary.
The Chawners, haven't worked in 11 years, claim their weight is a hereditary condition and the money they receive is insufficient to live on.
Hereditary condition? Hs it been proven?
Mr Chawner said: "What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table. It's not our fault we can't work. We deserve more."
The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.
Have social services required them to undergo nutriotion education while they're on social assistance?
"We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.
"All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight," she added.
Instead of giving them food money, why not invite them to a healthy food kitchen if they don't know how to eat properly. Maybe offer nutrition courses in a room next to the kitchen?
I can guarantee that if social assistance programmes depended on charitable contributions rather than government funding, all these controls would be in place.
Each week, Mr and Mrs Chawner, who have been married for 23 years, receive £177 in income support and incapacity benefit. Mrs Chawner is paid an extra £330-a-month disability allowance for epilepsy and asthma, both a result of being overweight.
The incapacity benefits could be used for nutrition courses instead. Teach the man to fish; don't just give him a fish. If we truly cared about these people, we wouldn't just be throwing money at them to get them out of our faces. We'd be educating them to show them where they're going wrong. This would not only help us, but they'd appreciate it too. Let's stop just throwing money at them and actually help them.
Mr Chawner gets £71 a month after developing Type 2 diabetes because of his size. He was on a waiting list for a gastric band last year, but a heart condition made the operation unsuitable. Their daughter Samantha receives £84 in Jobseekers' Allowance each fortnight while Emma, who is training to be a hairdresser, gets £58 every two weeks under a hardship fund for low-income students.
We give them moey without teaching them how to use it wisely, and so hurt them more. We are responsible for the damage caused to their health. Had we stopped giving them money and instead taught them how to eat properly, the problems would have dissipated.
Emma, said: "I'm a student and don't have time to exercise" she said "We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don't know how."
Whadda ya know. Let's read it again. 'We don't know how'. Did any social worker take the time to sit with them to try to find out how they ended up in this mess in the first place? If they'd really cared, they would have. Heck, a journalist was able to discover this for crying out loud. Certainly a trained (or so we'd suppose) social worker could have done the same in a minute and figured out quicly that this family doesn't know how to eat properly. if never taught, it's not their fault. We didn't bother to teach them.
The family from Blackburn claim £22,508 a year in benefits, equivalent to the take-home pay from a £30,000 salary.
The Chawners, haven't worked in 11 years, claim their weight is a hereditary condition and the money they receive is insufficient to live on.
Hereditary condition? Hs it been proven?
Mr Chawner said: "What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table. It's not our fault we can't work. We deserve more."
The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.
Have social services required them to undergo nutriotion education while they're on social assistance?
"We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.
"All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight," she added.
Instead of giving them food money, why not invite them to a healthy food kitchen if they don't know how to eat properly. Maybe offer nutrition courses in a room next to the kitchen?
I can guarantee that if social assistance programmes depended on charitable contributions rather than government funding, all these controls would be in place.
Each week, Mr and Mrs Chawner, who have been married for 23 years, receive £177 in income support and incapacity benefit. Mrs Chawner is paid an extra £330-a-month disability allowance for epilepsy and asthma, both a result of being overweight.
The incapacity benefits could be used for nutrition courses instead. Teach the man to fish; don't just give him a fish. If we truly cared about these people, we wouldn't just be throwing money at them to get them out of our faces. We'd be educating them to show them where they're going wrong. This would not only help us, but they'd appreciate it too. Let's stop just throwing money at them and actually help them.
Mr Chawner gets £71 a month after developing Type 2 diabetes because of his size. He was on a waiting list for a gastric band last year, but a heart condition made the operation unsuitable. Their daughter Samantha receives £84 in Jobseekers' Allowance each fortnight while Emma, who is training to be a hairdresser, gets £58 every two weeks under a hardship fund for low-income students.
We give them moey without teaching them how to use it wisely, and so hurt them more. We are responsible for the damage caused to their health. Had we stopped giving them money and instead taught them how to eat properly, the problems would have dissipated.
Emma, said: "I'm a student and don't have time to exercise" she said "We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don't know how."
Whadda ya know. Let's read it again. 'We don't know how'. Did any social worker take the time to sit with them to try to find out how they ended up in this mess in the first place? If they'd really cared, they would have. Heck, a journalist was able to discover this for crying out loud. Certainly a trained (or so we'd suppose) social worker could have done the same in a minute and figured out quicly that this family doesn't know how to eat properly. if never taught, it's not their fault. We didn't bother to teach them.
I found that healthy food is cheaper in Ottawa too if you make the effort to shop around. Did social services not interview them in the beginning to find out how they'd ended up in this situation in the first place? if so, they'd likely have realised that the problem was education. They didn't know how to shop. So teach them to shop. A lot cheaper than giving them a salary for al these many years. Had they nipped the problem in the bud in the beginning, they'd likely have been on social assistance for one year at most, not 12.
Pasta and potatoes are still cheaper than greens and keep better when you only have the cash once a month for groceries. Even the food banks are canned, KD and chock full of cholesterol. Not many social services want to take the time to instruct in eating healthy on a next-to-zilch budget. Their efforts are more like "you should be shamed to live out of my pocket"....
One belief I have is that 'laziness' is a learned trait. If they'd never learnt to work, how are they supposed to know how to work. It would be totally unfair of us to just expect them to get up and go find work if they legitimately don't know how. We never taught them nutrition obviously either. We could blame it on their parents, but they're not there anymore necessarily. So what do we do?
We could just cut their assistance, but they'd likely starve to death. It would seem they genuinely don't know how to work. We need to teach them. What we coud do is instead of paying them social assistance, pay them to attend a nutrition course. This could:
1. Teach them how to eat properly.
2. Give them a sence of accomplishment by getting a college nutrition diploma.
3. Teach them some discipline (showing up to lessons on time, creating projects, studying, handing in assignments on time, etc. giving them the sence of organization that will be needed when they finish the course and go find a job).
4. Give them a nutrition diploma that they could then use not only in their own lives but on their resume. And this woud give them their teacher as a reference too when they go into the work place.
5. show them we really care about them and don't intend to just throw money at them to shut them up.
If they don't know, they don't know. Obviously no one in their lives ever taught them how to eat properly and how to budget, etc. If they've never been taught, it's not their fault. Nothing to do with lazines. Let's not take what our parents have taught us for granted. Obviously their parents either didn't care or were never taught themselves.
Every single word that came out of their mouths is complete BS. Fruits and vegetables are too expensive? We don't have time to exercise(why? It's not like you work or anything.:roll
! Blah blah blah!I could stand to lose some weight, but I at least have a job and get a modicum of exercise. I can lose the weight if I apply myself, just like these lazy sacks of poop can. Too bad there wasn't something that could be done to force them to lose the weight and therefore get a job and get off disability.
Bacon fatties for lunch? Yep. It's hereditary all right.:roll:
And that's a bad attitude. 'Take your food and money and shut up. We don't want to see you again until next month's paychek.'
And then the next month: 'what, still not found a job yet, and fatter still. Her's more Kraft Dinner. Now get lost.'
If we treat them like that and don't actualy care to find out why they're like that, we're not dealing with the root of the problem. Nutrition courses and providing them with healthy food might cost more in the short term, but wil get them off assistance in the long-term.
Unfortunately, politicians always look to the short term. Let's think about this. If we give a man 10,000 dollars for 12 years, and another man 10,000 dollar plus an additional 20,000 dollars every year for education (which we give not to him but the school which also provides his healthy meals, and life education too) for 2 years, which is cheaper in the long run? One is 10,000 x 12 = 120,000 dollars. The other is 30,000 x 2 = 60,000 dollars. To which system would you rather pay your taxes?
Me, I'd rather pay my taxes to neither but instead have them deducted from charitable contributions to less bureaucratic private charities that could in fact provide more long-term oriented help rather than just throw money at them.
Worst case scenario, if money's a little short, have the students all have to do volunteer work at school too, thus saving money on cleaners, cooks, etc. This would also give them experience for resumes...and make them feel good about themselves.