I think that all that has been said here is exceptionally true. I think one of the other culprits also has to be mentioned ... stress. When you have a dozen and one responsibilities and you're not doing enough of any of them, do you really want two more (diet and exercise)?

Isn't it so much less stressful to pop a pill? It's easy enough to swallow one thing per day then to deal with everything else, especially since food preparation and cooking seems to take me between a half hour to an hour per day. Add to it the fifty minutes of exercise - ten to get to the gym, ten to get back, thirty minutes there, and that's two hours gone. I'm a uni student, it's not so hard to me, but if you're working nine to five, with at the very least a half hour commute there and back, you might not want to lose a further two hours of what little time you have that surrounds that eight thirty to five thirty gap.

So perhaps one thing that should be covered more in fitness and diet magazines, to help lure people away from the pills, are ideas of how to incorporate such issues into one's regular responsibilities. How can fitness and family, fitness and dating, diet and financial responsibilities, be combined to make things more fun? How do we make it so that such elements of life add to things rather than take them away?

After all, how many people visit friends for a coffee, a card game or a drunken back yard party? In such cases, spending time at the gym or pounding the pavement in a jog can seem counter-intuitive when you barely see your friends already. But what activities can be brought into an unfit social circle? And how can healthy food replace the unhealthy kinds that normally occur with dates and social gatherings?

I think these are all the really hard, tricky questions that many people must face. Diet and exercise require time management - and Fitday and other calorie counters take a lot of time to fill out as well - and with so little time in our lives with those we love, it simply doesn't make sense to keep the two separate. Yet we also can't make those we love join our fitness or diet regime...

Sorry for the convoluted ranting, I'm quite tired. I just thought I'd try and give some reasons why people might turn to pills and surgery over time-consuming activities.