Two thirds of adults in England are obese or overweight. It would make as much sense to ask what is different about the other one third.

I have a few slim friends (most of them are overweight like me). I have observed that with the slim ones they are controlled most of the time. I don't think it's necessary easy for them or that they don't hear the same "food noise" as I do. I think they are just better at ignoring it because their image is more important to them than mine is to me. They also dress well and make the effort with styling hair, make up etc whereas I'm more lazy. Their strong desire to look good helps them to have that self control that I sometimes lack around food.

My most slim friend says she weights herself every day and has since being a teen, though got criticised by her parents for doing so. But if her weight goes up significantly over longer than about a week, she nips it in the bud straight away.

I'm not curvy so not prone to massive weight gain but have had times in my life when I have been heavier (though not overweight).

So I personally think genetics play quite a big part. I will say that when I've been heavier it's often been when I've had a mood disorder (PND, depression/anxiety)

In terms of my day to day - I exercise 6 mornings a week (DH does the school run and I get up early) and I find that helps me manage my mood, suppresses my appetite and gives me an endorphin lift so I'm not looking to "treat myself" so much.

Breakfast is always a homemade smoothy with frozen fruit, overnight oats, oatmilk and honey. Lunch is often homemade veg soup and a piece of bread and butter (winter) or salad in the summer, sometimes a sandwich or something but i always make these at home, mostly because i dont like the unnecessary cost of buying lunches out. Eat what I want for dinner, sometimes homemade and healthy, sometimes frozen pizza! I snack on fruit and don't drink alcohol often.

Oh and I'm crap about drinking water but do find that when I drink more water I eat less... need to go and drink some water actually 😅

I don’t think comments about concentration camps are appropriate to this thread.

I think we all know what people are doing right. Balanced diet, exercise, portion control.

I think possibly a more portent question is why people are doing what they're doing, if they are overweight. Mental health related and use fooe to feel better? No time to cook or exercise due to working hours? Can't afford fresh food? Don't know how to cook it?

It does seem an odd coincidence to me that a sudden change in people’s genetics giving them a propensity to put on weight also happened to coincide with the first point in human history where, in the developed world at least, physical labour stopped being the norm, and food became very cheap, freely available on literally every street corner, and massively calorie dense due to processing techniques and the affordability of sugar.

It’s genetics in the sense that we’re basically just chimps, genetically predisposed to overeating and laziness. They’re survival mechanisms. Like most mammals, we evolved in food scarcity, so we all have inbuilt systems for ensuring that we gorge when food is plentiful so that we can sustain ourselves on our fat reserves when it’s scarce. The problem most of us have is that food is always plentiful, and the scarce times to burn our fat reserves never come. It’s not genetics in the sense that a whole subset of people have entirely different metabolisms which mean they either get fat or don’t get fat.

I think takeaways and portion sizes are the biggest factors.

I live in quite a remote area. We didn't have access to these things for much longer and as a whole it was noticeable that the population was slimmer. But it is changing.

As a previous poster said, stress reaction is a factor. If I am stressed I eat less not more.

I have never dieted and I'm reasonably slim. I could be seen as eating what I like but I have also never eaten a whole packet of biscuits. I'm quite surprised at work when people discuss this kind of behaviour (when not dieting).

I'd say I eat a biscuit pretty much every day though so I am eating more than women on diets. I think the yo yo approach messes with your metabolism and I really hope weight loss injections will be successful in changing this.

I would question how this research is funded. If it was genetics then there would have always been 2/3s of obese people.

Unhealthy food is off the hook if we can blame it all on genetics.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that, generally speaking, women put on weight a lot more easily than men. I'm one of those annoying slim people, the same waist size i was 50 years ago. And I put much of that down to good fortune. But I think there are a few other factors. First, I'm vegetarian, and as someone said to me a long time ago, "I've never met a (very) fat vegetarian". Next to no processed food. Absolutely no biscuits, cake, crisps, fuzzy drinks, all that junk the supermarkets are full of. Like that wise man said:

"Eat food; not too much, mostly plants"

I eat a fair amount of carbs (bread, pasta etc), though. I like beer too 😀, but like the bread, I make my own. I agree with the PP who spoke about big portions. And how big is a portion of chips these days, compared to my childhood? Over twice the size! When my DS visits, I feel like I'm feeding him all the bloody time!

I'm sorry - it is an interesting question, but I'm not sure that this is the place for it to be asked. If the point of your post was "slim people tell us why, in your opinion, you are slim" then that's ridiculous. These people don't know why they are slim and others aren't; they know they are slim and they attribute it to certain characteristics. It may or may not be this.

If your point was, let's change the way we study human weight and the policies that we put in place for managing it on a population level, then I agree, let's study,.scientifically, large groups of slender people to see if there is a commonality to why they are the way they are. But the two are very different. One slender person, or even lots of slender people, telling you why they think they are thin is of no probative value whatever.

I think there is something in this. I used to live in affluent west London and everyone looked sleek and slim. I moved to the North and my job takes me into less affluent places- very overweight people who move slowly and use mobility aids relatively young. It wasn’t always like this-I grew up very poor in the 1970s and on,y one overweight kid in the class.
I’ve always been slim and never dieted. My kids are the same. I honestly think it’s down to portions and not much snacking. We always eat well yet my kids told me when they went to uni, their portions were half the size of other people’s. But we ate what we wanted-crisps and ice cream in moderation. Sweets at mealtimes. But the bulk of food is home cooked. I also don’t snack at work-there is an endless supply of cakes, biscuits and sweets so could easily be the size of a house if I wanted those things.

This is double offensive when you understand that obesity is much higher in holocaust survivors than in the average populations they returned to.

Perhaps you are saying the survivors somehow lack self discipline?

There’s increasing research to suggest it is genetics. Our ‘set’ weight varies between different people and one person could eat exactly the same as someone else and absorb more calories from it.

I think we may see this change slightly.

Stereotypically, my generation was brought up to clear our plates, eat everything you were given, be grateful (someone somewhere is starving etc) and generally taught to eat far more than necessary. Holidays and birthdays required big special meals to cram in even more calories and so on.

Now, more people are raising their DC to recognise their own bodies cues, eat sensibly etc. Hopefully this will become the norm.

I do think hormones and genetics have a role to play. I've got 4 half sisters, the two on my Dad's side are naturally slim and have never been overweight. The two on my Mum's side were skinny as children and into early adulthood but did get obese as adults, mainly due to ill health. They've both been slim again at various times, but it's a struggle and they have to work at it.

Mum was thin all her life, though she bulaemic as a young adult (including just before being pregnant with me, I do wonder if this had some kind of genetic impact on me).

I was a chubby child, 13 stone at 16 and have battled with weight my whole life, I've been slim a few times but only with serious effort (keto or, currently, Mounjaro) and it's never stuck, my default is fat it seems. I do have an under active thyroid, but I don't think that's the whole problem as it's generally controlled by medication.

As a child I thought about food all the time and felt like I was always hungry. This never really went away.

I’m in my 60’s and been slim all of my life and never been on a diet.
I think overweight people eat more, but only by a teeny tiny amount. So for example if you eat an extra 100 calories a day it’s not much but over a year you will gain about 10lb.
Carry on doing that for 10 years and you will be obese.

That's a very, very good point.

This bemused me, healthy weight people are not one mass with a hive mind. They are individuals. People are posting like they are all the same

this group are a healthy weight for many reasons.

sporty
eating disorder
physical illness
will power
too poor to eat
stress
etc etc etc

so many reasons, but like overweight people , there is no one reason they are as they are. There are all different.

Agree. Willpower, family etc doesn't explain why obesity has absolutely rocketed since the 80's. 60% of people in this country don't live in poverty, nor are they abuse survivors. It's something to do with the food environment. Food companies spend millions trying to invent foods that circumvent human appetite controls. Not to mention the constant availability of addictive fast food. I also think things like Deliveroo and Just Eat are to blame too. That if you fancy a KFC you dont have to think about getting into a car or waiting until you are near one, you just phone snd someone drops it round. The proportion of the average Continental European diet is made up of 18% UPF'S Ours is something like 80%.

What the last decade or so of obesity science has shown us, is that this is far more complex and involved than we were taught or ever thought possible.

e.g. the experiment in which the gut biome of two adult humans was extracted. They were identical twins with the exception that one was obese and one was a healthy weight. That biome was given to two mice who were then fed exactly the same food as each other. The mouse that had the 'fat twin; biome got fat. The other mouse did not. One mouse did not have mroe willpower than the other.

e.g. the understanding now of the variation in leptin and ghrelin responses across individuals and how those differences allign with weight.

e.g. the biological warfare that is ultra processed foods, with millions of dollars going into researching how to tweak these 'foods' to make your body demand more and more of them.

e.g. the WLD that are rebalancing hormones, and in doing so suddenly these 'lazy, greedy' people are making far different food choices. Not just the amount of food, but the types of food is being changed. And they are active more often even before the weight comes off, as inflamation is reduced and leaves them without everyday pain etc.

Many obese people have shown they have the willpower to lose several stones in thier lives. But there has to be a reason that these disciplined people 'suddenly' find they cannot maintain that loss. Less than 5% of people who lose significant weight keep it off for more than a year. When you see what weight loss does to leptin levels (10% of body weight loss, more than halves the leptin your body produces) and ghrelin (10% weight lost more than doubles ghrelin levels) you realise that significant weight loss triggers mechanisms in your body that significantly decrease who full/satiated you feel after food and significantly increase hunger levels. And that goes on for months, years after weight loss - even if you put the weight back on.

This stuff is multifactoral and is not about self-control anywhere near as much as was commonly thought 10-20 years ago. It bigger and more complicated than that.

2/3s of adults is the majority. It seems more like a systematic issue.

The average lifestyle isn’t set up for health.

I think very carefully about the food I buy for my family. We are fortunate to be have to have the money to afford it, the knowledge about food and the energy to actually do something about it.

I think the government need to step in tbh. Reform working practices, more leisure time, better regulation of food particular ultra processed foods.

I have toddlers and it’s crazy what people think appropriate food is for 1 and 3 year olds. People look at me like I’ve grown 2 heads and I’m being mean for saying no to squash, haribo, doughnuts and crisps!

Genes and a childhood diet of mostly lentils and veg helps.
That said menopause has made me put on weight in the wrong places.

@ComtesseDeSpair I am similar. I like being thin, I like being able to have a wardrobe of lovely clothes that all look good and I can wear most things in a size 8 and know they will fit/look good. I then basically don't have to think about it for the rest of the day. I also feel physically great for being thin - I can run a lot, have a lot of energy, go to the gym, feel really good. This outweighs any need to overeat - the benefits to me of being slim are greater than a need to eat another portion!

No snacking