Do people really not know what to eat?

There is. There's a lot of toxic plants, animals and insects.

Admittedly I'd forgotten that they come and eat our chips out of the bins though.

Poor little thing

This is us in racoon form.

We do, and that's not stopping any time soon. This is why I'm so grateful that WLIs came along when they did. We really would be screwed otherwise.

Very true. As demonstrated by the raccoon.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8jnxxm70jo.amp

In the wild there arent items to harm the animal. Once that animal is around built up areas where there bins, they eat any old crap, watch seagulls, Im not sure chips are found in their natural habitat but they love em.

Bears, racoons, badgers, foxes, any animal which has its habitat urbanised will be going through the bins and enjoying and heading straight for the fatty calorie dense leftovers from humans.

Its about opportunity. We have too much opportunity to eat, we weren't built for this

What's silly, in my opinion, is learning that certain foods are carcinogenic, and making excuses to keep eating them 'now and again' anyway.

How would deciding not to eat processed meat give you anxiety?

We have to eat, but most wild animals don't routinely go for things that will actively harm them. They go for what their body needs.

The difference with humans is that we eat to survive AND to enjoy ourselves. It's a hard one to navigate, because we shouldn't deny ourselves pleasure for the sake of it but how do you prevent over indulging on things that are known to be harmful in this way without great will power.

And this is what makes the idea of messaging use so complex. There is so, so much shame and guilt already attached to this topic.

Well I was subject to shaming for my weight for over 50 years and it did bugger all to bring about useful change. I vehemently disagree that it’s a good strategy- it may work on a few people, but that is far outweighed by the damage it does.

Interestingly, obesity rates are also on the rise in several East and South East Asian countries too. Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines are all increasing. To the extent that shaming worked as a societal strategy, that's on the wane.

I think it could only really change in a shame-based society. At least, this was how it worked in Asia. People are super open about their opinions on your weight. They definitely comment if you gained weight. It’s something your boss would mention and it wouldn’t be seen as overstepping. Overweight people are negatively stereotyped. Just no comparison with the West on this.

I don’t think it’s good tbh—or at least, I don’t prefer that on a social level, which is why I’d prefer cheap, lifelong GLP-1s

People really forget that smoking was very negatively stereotyped in a way that obesity is not.

Gotcha.

Well, I’m in Overeaters Anonymous, and this is our stock in trade. We have to eat - so we identify any specific foods and food behaviours which are problematic for us, and aim to stop consuming/doing them. We continue with the foods and behaviours which are healthful, possibly adding others that we weren’t using before.

Identifying the harmful ones is not a trivial task, but you have to start somewhere. So you start with the most obvious ones, and go from there. For me, it´s sugar, crisps and similar salty snack foods, peanut butter, and eating between meals.

And then you have to replace them with something better. There are numerous possibilities of what that might be. For the food side, I make sure that my plates are full enough of good stuff at meal times that I am truly physically satisfied and can’t use being hungry as an excuse to put some of the problematic stuff in my mouth, And for the rest - when I’m agitated, I am learning to sit with my feelings, rather than eat to push them away. I make phone calls, I journal, I knit, I read, I meditate.

I’ve only been in for six months, but there are some who have been abstaining from their problematic foods and food behaviours for decades.

Sorry I meant solely about food

Fags, booze, drugs you dont have to interact with but we have to eat, you cant avoid it

Well it’s happening all the time, but for only a minority of people. People swap their preferred coping mechanism for another which is less harmful - think vaping instead of smoking.

Dogs don’t limit themselves, and you’re right, we are animals. But we also have a frontal cortex which gives us the ability to learn how our lower brain is driving our behaviour and find ways to circumvent or rewire it.

A lot of people have managed to give up alcohol, drugs, gambling, sugar…. you name it, someone somewhere has managed to kick it, in favour of something which doesn’t harm them to the same extent.

Which period in history has that ever happened though?

We are animals at the end of the day. A dog for example does not ration itself.

You’re right that people have always used things to enable them to cope with the challenges of life. The trick is to find coping mechanisms which are benign or even positive, rather than harmful.

Easier said than done. But possible.

UPFs are foods with weird, chemical ingredients added to them. Not fruit and veg that has been washed and peeled!

You would be amazed at the lack of education many people - usually poorer, less educated people - have around food and nutrition. I thought everyone knew about 5 a day, about the importance of eating a wide and varied range of fruit and veg, about what a rough portion size would be. They really don't. What seems obvious to many of us isn't to all.

When I was young there were less fat people BUT a lot more people smoked. People have always used something as an emotional crutch. (Not everyone but a section of the population.)

There was an 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who said, “Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition men have at all times called in some physical aid to their moral consolations.”

In the 18th century there was the gin craze which caused huge problems

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze

The victorians took lots of drugs

wellcomecollection.org/articles/W87wthIAACQizfap

It's a mess, and as mentioned previously, a mess that other European countries dont seem to have. It makes me sad that we have such an unhealthy relationship with food.

I actually think that some European countries are sadly starting to catch up on the UPF front. I’ve noticed that over the past ten years there are far more UPFs in French supermarkets than ever before - frozen pizzas, ready meals, pre-packaged sandwiches etc. There has also been an explosion of McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs in recent years, whereas you’d struggle to find one outside of a big city ten years ago.

Not wishing to jump on a bandwagon but I genuinely believe UPF are at the heart of many weight issues - they are addictive just like nicotine and alcohol. I'm overweight and I do eat some UPF although I'm trying to reduce them sensibly so I'm not just pointing the finger.

It feels like a massive conspiracy to make us all fat then sell us drugs to make us thin again. Nobody is looking at why this stuff is bad for us and why so many of us need the 'comfort' of food so badly.

It's also concerning how many people with food issues will/can only eat UPF - that can't be good for someone already having problems although I take on board the points about consistency of flavour etc.

It's a mess, and as mentioned previously, a mess that other European countries dont seem to have. It makes me sad that we have such an unhealthy relationship with food.

When it comes to traditional methods, my problem was not that they stopped working, but that I couldn’t stick to them for long enough - I never once reached my goal weight, despite literally hundreds of attempts. But I am a binge eater, and it was that which got me. Not everyone has that issue.

My current weight loss journey - not my largest weight loss, or the lowest I’ve got to, but the one which has lasted the longest - began two years ago. It was prompted by a seriously high diabetes number and the nurse adding a third anti-diabetes medication to my list. If, instead of offering me another tablet, she had suggested I try WLI, I might well have given it a go. As it happens, one of the meds I was already on was a GLP-1 mimic, although one formulated for diabetes rather than weight loss. I had been on it 5 years. When I started on it there was some initial weight loss in the first couple of months, of which about a half came back over the next few months (while still on it). Net loss was about 10lb, and when you’re over 20 stone that doesn’t make much difference. It was mere noise in the swings which were caused by my binge eating.

Ironically, a few months later, my Trulicity became impossible to obtain, in part because of the increased demand for the injector pens as a result of the licensing of semaglutide for weight loss. But it turned out well for me, because it made me double down on my efforts and add fasting to my regime. And that required me to accept a lot of uncomfortable truths about myself.

Between January 2024 and January 2025 I lost 4st 8lb.
Between January 2025 and January 2026 I lost a further 4lb.

There’s more to it than that, of course. But I do believe that, for me, something has radically shifted.

I hear, and respect, people saying that WLI are not an easy fix. People still have to do the work of changing their eating habits, even though the WLI help enormously by turning off the food noise.

For me, reducing carbs and UPF turned the food noise down quite a bit, as that deals with the physical hunger aspects very well. This style of eating increases GLP-1 secretion, reduces insulin, and influences other hormones in a way which make our natural appetite control systems work better against overconsumption.

But it did nothing for the emotional and situational (habit) drivers of my overeating. I had to find other things for that - a mix of psychology, community support, and more recently a Twelve Step programme

I am like an alcoholic. Getting sober is not easy, because they have a physical craving for alcohol, perpetuated by the regular intake of alcohol. If they can stop drinking and get through how ever many days it takes, then the physical craving leaves them. But the mental compulsion to drink remains, and has to be dealt with by other means.

Not everyone is like me with the mental compulsion part. But I believe many people re like me with the physical craving in response to UPF’s.

Yes, perhaps I too should be clearer in my wording in that it's not that traditional methods don't work in getting the weight off people. They just regain it. But this is the problem- formerly obese bodies don't behave like we want them to. Humans have undergone millennia of evolutionary pressure to gain and regain weight easily, because for most of us the ability to do this has been advantageous. Changing this would be a challenge indeed! It's actually quite plausible that WLIs are the only way for societies to reverse obesity rates.

I also think the guilt and shaming aspect of existing food and fat discourse do make this a totally different proposition from smoking. There is a very well established cultural context to all of this that we cannot opt out of. The stigma is there however well intentioned we are. It's a much harder proposition than smoking in that respect, which is one reason why WLIs are such an amazing prospect.

But I don't think you and I are broadly in disagreement here. We can roll out WLI access and try to rein in Big Food as well. The latter potentially has value beyond obesity rates, in any case.

Ah, you misunderstood what I said about the two-pronged approach, or perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly. The two-pronged approach was all my own idea, I didn’t mean to imply it was on the BMJ article.

For the public health measures - there is evidence that a low carb whole food based approach produces sustainable weight loss, when the dietary changes are maintained. There is a GP practice in Cumbria which has been offering this to their newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients, providing information about the carb content of food in an easily accessible form (teaspoons of sugar equivalent in a typical serving) and a group support setting. They have a high success rate in patients losing significant weight, maintaining that loss, and putting their diabetes into drug-fee remission. It is the basis of the Low Carb Program now being rolled out by the NHS - albeit patchily.

It’s not that diet (as distinct from “going on a diet”) doesn’t work. It’s that making sustainable change to diet is extremely difficult. How to provide the support so that more people can make the change is where the challenge lies.

I take your point about there being no direct equivalent to passive smoking. At the same time, I would contend that severe obesity does have a knock on effect on others around the person concerned. Not least - obesity in parents increases the risk of obesity in children. And while some of that is genetic, a bigger proportion of it is to do with the eating habits which are passed on. Although even saying that makes me worry about obese parents being guilt tripped, which is not what I would want to see happen at all. Obese people have enough stigma and shame to deal with already.

I have lots of thoughts on this topic and I think labelling and judging people is the opposite to what is needed to help shift a mindset and educate people! I try and feed my family well however I have one child with afrid- eating disorder so they consume a lot more UPF than I could ever want however we are trying to improve this obviously. I worry that school judge their lunch box, that people see what they eat and judge me as I have failed my child. My other children and myself generally eat well however there are a lot of UPF in our life without doubt from sauces and condiments to snacks even the advertised “ healthy” snacks !