Glacial pace of change

This morning Seth Godin was talking about change in media, governments and our culture.  He ends his post with the following two paragraphs:

Cultural shifts create long terms evolutionary changes. Cultural shifts, changes in habits, technologies that slowly obsolete a product or a system are the ones that change our lives. Watch for shifts in systems and processes and expectations. That's what makes change, not big events.

Don't worry about what happened yesterday (or five minutes ago). Focus on what happened ten years ago and think about what you can do that will make a huge impact in six months. The breaking news mindset isn't just annoying, it may be distracting you from what really matters. As the world gets faster, it turns out that the glacial changes of years and decades are become more important, not less.

And although he is taking about media and the world, the same idea can be applied to your eating habits.  My mom remembers going to dinner at her grandma's house.  They sat down and ate together.  And then, chances are, the kids were sent out to play -- which would have meant going out into the woods or to the lake to actively play.  I assume the women would have all cleared the table and helped the matriarch do dishes (and in this scenario, I really don't know what the men would have done).  So....eating then moving their bodies -- that's how we used to live.

Then small changes occurred.  Dishwashers, kids playing more video games, bigger plates at home, getting used to bigger portions when we ate out, eating out more often as we got more affluent (or fast food got cheaper), less sending the kids out to play and more driving them in the car to their organized sports.....

Individually, none of these things would have done anything to our weight -- they were have been small shocks to our system.  Collectively, however, they have shifted our culture and are some of the reasons our obesity rates are climbing.

When you give it some thought, does it seem sensible to you that slapping a Jenny Craig program over top all this culture change doesn't fix the problem?  It doesn't even address the problem.  It addresses the symptom of the problem.

So what's it going to be?  As I see it, we have two choices:
1. Live with our new normal and get on with being happy.
or
2. Address some of the changes that got us here in the first place (and get on with being happy).

Which one are you choosing today?