Losing weight doesn't cost money.
There are a variety of reasons people get fat, and a variety of reasons people stay fat. Treating the specific reasons for the specific people is a lot safer, and easier, than just having people eat less.
For me, I'm a stress eater. I need more money, and better credentials, and then I can get career tracked in a way that will reduce my stress enough to eat better.
Exercise does help, and I should be doing more. I exercise best (most consistently) with machines, but don't have the cash flow for a gym membership anymore. I also exercised great with rollerblading, but the serious accidents I had doing that make it a bad idea without an indoor rink, and the nearest indoor rink is both expensive and a ways away. I have to drive to work, so I try parking about a 10 minute walk away and walking uphill. It's something, at least.
No it doesn't, just eat more filling foods with lots of fiber. Veggies are cheaper than dirt, far cheaper than junk food, and far more sating. Junk food is engineered to leave you feeling hungry, to encourage you to buy more. Stop buying junk food completely; no more chips, colas or frozen pizzas. Buy vegetables, particularly the leafy ones, and eat as much as it takes to make yourself feel full. You'll lose weight and save money at the same time.
The chips are a good idea, but my diet is already so limited to PB&J, hummus and cheese and mixed green sandwiches, and the occasional whole grain rotini + prego chunky garden (and mixed greens), oatmeal, apples, frozen blueberries, bananas, and the occasional frozen quinoa dish that chips and occasional ice cream or Italian ice are a nice change of pace.
I haven't had a soda or the like since, I think pre-COVID.
I just eat too much, and don't exercise enough. I could probably use more water, too, but I don't like using the restroom at work. I do find that when I'm working I can often not eat without feeling and hunger pains, but I usually make up for that by eating a lot at night when I get home.
You should really try vegetables. I know bread is a processed plant product, but we generally don't count bread as a vegetable.
Poor people aren't living high on spinach and kale. They're eating butter sandwiches for lunch because they're too poor for nut spreads and jam. They're eating 5 boxes for 2$ mac dinners. They're checking which of the soup cans they bought on a 10 dollar for 10 cans sale years ago are still good (aka not puffy) even though they're long expired. The cheap vegetables are starchy roots, but even the 50c/lb carrots don't hold up to processed food prices.
You can spread out 1 cup of rice with 9 cups of water as a soup. I was stirfrying cabbage with almost no seasoning. And it would still be cheaper and more filling to indulge in mac dinners and hamburger helper.
It can if you live in a food desert:
> USDA’s Economic Research Service previously identified more than 6,500 food desert tracts in the United States based on 2000 Census and 2006 data on locations of supermar- kets, supercenters, and large grocery stores. In this report, we examine the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of these tracts to see how they differ from other census tracts and the extent to which these differences influence food desert status. Relative to all other census tracts, food desert tracts tend to have smaller populations, higher rates of abandoned or vacant homes, and residents who have lower levels of education, lower incomes, and higher unemployment. Census tracts with higher poverty rates are more likely to be food deserts than otherwise similar low-income census tracts in rural and in very dense (highly populated) urban areas. For less dense urban areas, census tracts with higher concentrations of minority populations are more likely to be food deserts, while tracts with substantial decreases in minority populations between 1990 and 2000 were less likely to be identified as food deserts in 2000.
* PDF: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45014/30940_er...
I'm pretty sure it does. Unhealthy food is a lot cheaper.