To agree with Katie Hopkins?

[UnacceptableWidge]

I know, I know!!
Turned on Radio2, initially had no idea who it was and found myself nodding along to every word.

As a 'fatty' myself I had to agree with all she said. I did this to myself. I like food, especially junk food waaay too much. I hate exercise a lot. Nobody to blame but me.

The horror of agreeing with her may, possibly, finally force me to get off my arse and do something about it though I will never in RL admit that she has made me wake up and realise this is all on me

All I would add, as clearly she cannot be completely right and understanding life in anyone else's shoes, that her circumstance is different to mine.

My weight crept on gradually over the years.
My mindset has never been to actively put weight on with the intention of losing it again, I simply developed bad habits over a long time.

Hi HelenaDove. How much is due to binge drinking? Er, not much. Unless you're binge drinking every single day. In which case it's chronic alcoholism and not binge drinking. A heavy dose of 2,000 additional liquid calories once a week won't make anyone obese. Sorry.

Well when my DB stops drinking he loses 2 stone in about six weeks. And one thing i have noticed on these boards is drinking gets defended to the hilt.

On a recent thread called "NHS in a state" there were many posters (one in particular who was rubbishing people about using the NHS "just because its free and how ppl were going to the docs about trivial things and wasting NHS resources.

When i posted about my elderly mother not going to see the GP even though she needs to and that her legs are so bad they are green in colour this poster was pleased because it would save money.

The same poster was conspicuous by her absence on the recent binge drinking thread though. And its not the first time ive seen this hypocrisy on here.

I have an eating disorder in which for serveral weeks I only eat 1 meal a day, normally evening meal.

Then a day eating my weight in food then back to serveral weeks eating 1 meal.

I'm overweight and I know it's because I don't eat properly, I wish I could but I cant.

Great post VelmaDinkly.

I think you take her too seriously, she is a pantomime dame. She says some silly things, but when you call her "vile" you're behaving in the same wY that you are accusing her of behaving. Think about it.

I didn't like what she said about Ebola and Scotland (relying on England)...rather provocative and unecessary....but you know what, there is a grain of truth in it. It's why I think she's ok, she shakes things up a bit.

she is an idiot she clearly states herself she came to the realisation that having an emotional attachment to food to just treating it like sustenance are two different things. her gaining and losing weight right after cannot be compared to someone with a lifetime of bad habits and weight slowly creeping up.

Until I developed Hashimoto's, I was skinny as a rake (8.5 stone and just under 5'8). When my thyroid is in check, I'm my usual skinny self (more like 9 stone these days) but when it isn't (postpartum) I gained 1.5 stone out of nowhere. 10.5 stone is by no means overweight for my height, but I have a very slender build, exercise quite a bit, eat right, and NOTHING puts me back in my normal range, other than an adjustment in thyroid medication. Since developing Hashimoto's, I have come to realise that it isn't always a matter of exercise more and eat less. Hormones can do all sorts of wacky things to a person's metabolism.

YY stopgap Ive lost 3 stone 9 in 16 months. The last stone came off a little bit faster while i was taking the Mini Pill.

I dont need it for contraception anymore but i do have another 3 month supply which i will start taking if its a struggle to lose my Christmas weight because i need to lose that and a bit more.

Thyroid problems are a right bastard I have a friend who struggles.

I haven't even read this thread but the answer to the question "AIBU to agree with Katie Hopkins?" will ALWAYS be "Yes."

HTH ;)

I think it's a shame that this message has been attempted by such an unpopular personality. I can't remember his name, but there's a bloke on the telly who proves time and time again that he can work with a "fat family" and through better diet and more exercise can help them all to lose weight. He would have been a much more acceptable face for this message.
A lot of overweight people quote doctors who have told them that they are healthy. That's great, and is obviously true in relation to the basic function of their bodies (liver, lungs etc). It's also a fact though that - if they wanted to - they would move more freely and be more agile if they weighed less. Regardless of their health on paper. That's not a criticism, it's not a dig at anyone here, if you're happy then the world is good in my view, but I do think it's true.
I think we have a tendency to over-think why people are overweight, look for psychological causes etc. I agree that for some the reasons for being overweight are psychological, for some they are physical and for some they are drug related. However, it is also a fact that 50 years ago the general population in the UK was at a much more healthy weight than now. What is different now? Well, we eat more, we eat less healthy and more pre-prepared food and we exercise less. So while I think KH has a really unfortunate way about her and can be quite obnoxious, I agree with her in that I think that the majority of us who are overweight could do something about it if we wanted to.
Problem is that discussions like this make people feel defensive, so produce a long litany of contributions where people share the unfortunate reasons why they are overweight. I would not seek to trivialise them at all, it is their life, but I can't believe that they represent the majority of overweight people in the UK. The majority of big people do have control over that situation don't they? Surely we all agree on that? Discussions like this do not produce a balanced view because those most invested in the subject are most likely to contribute.

Vycount, I agree that there needs to be a discussion about obesity in the UK. I just don't think Katie Hopkins has much to contribute to it with her experiment. It was easy for her to lose weight, but that doesn't prove it is easy for other people to lose it. It was over-simplistic bearing in mind KH is motivated, young, healthy, fitness oriented.

I am solely responsible for how much I weigh (I'm not overweight btw) and for looking after my health as much as possible. We do need to help more people take charge of their weight, but KH just makes overweight people instantly defensive I should think. Just her manner, contempt and general snarkiness, has the opposite effect to the one she maybe intends to have.

People get defensive because the underlying argument is that fat people are lazy gluttons who lack willpower and personal responsibility. And that is not true.

And it ignores all the research which points out how hard and complex behavioural change is. Look how difficult it is to stop people smoking. And things that make a difference are when you introduce environmental change - banning indoor smoking, stopping advertising, anti smoking campaigns.

We live in increasingly obseogenic environments. There is a fascinating book by a former FDA commissioner, David Kessler, describing how food companies systematically engineer foods to overeaten (including designing foods that can be swallowed quicker so we can consumer more and more in one sitting). These are tested, refined processes; deliberately done.

If it were truly as simple as eating less and moving more, then we would all be at an ideal weight and Katie Hopkins silly experiment does nothing to advance understanding.

I agree that most people are overweight because they eat too much pure and simple.

however, humiliating, mocking and belittling people is never the way to tackle any problem - including obesity.

I think that it's within our own power to decide whether we are going to base our diet on the engineered, refined and processed foods, or whether we are going to reserve them for occasional use.

I didn't say it's easy to change behaviours, but I think it's within the power of the majority of the overweight population to do so. Not those with mental issues etc... but the majority. The mind is the biggest hurdle, after that it is indeed a matter of moving more and eating less (and the right food). It worked 50 years ago so it would work now.

Ujjayi I've just watched that Adam Hills clip on youtube, that's brilliant!

I have to say I agree with some of what she says but I don't think it's her place to say it ( or anyone's really ), a lot of people are overweight due to diet and lack of exercise, not helped by the food that is easily available for us to buy ( the amount of fast food places and how cheap they are making it easier to buy junk food than cook ). Yes there are people who can not help their weight problem but that's probably only a small percentage?

I'm overweight because I eat rubbish and I don't exercise enough, I am not hugely overweight and if I drag my self of the sofa and walk everyday I lose it quite easily ( and I will be doing this ). You don't have to stop eating to lose weight, you can actually eat more than you are now, it's just about choosing the right food, cooking meals from scratch rather than going to McDonald's or shoving processed food in the oven.

A lot of us could do something about our weight.

Sorry, Thequibbler, but it is about personal responsibility. It's all very well quoting an FDA commissioner, but hat is a American perspective. As I said previously, what about Asia, the Mediterranean, Scandinavia? Why are Anglo-Saxon countries so much fatter? It's not genetics, it's culture.

In the same way that we're responsible for the way we live our lives (job, education, house, family etc), we are responsible for what and how we eat and how active we are. It's a complete cop-out to abrogate ourselves of responsibility because 'it's all society's fault'. It's not; it's our own fault. Blaming it on external factors is the worst kind of infantilism and it represents a refusal to accept responsibility. Maybe that's the problem; maybe there's something infantilising about Anglo-Saxon cultures, and our interfering, control-obsessed, health-and-safety-fanatical nanny-state governments are turning us into big babies?!

TheQuibbler, I was going write a comment like your third paragraph.

There have been programmes on TV which have explored this issue. Its shocking how we have been manipulated by both the food industry and the diet industry over the last fifty odd years.

There is massive investment by food companies into finding the dream snack food that has the texture and taste that people cannot stop eating. Pringles is one such product. Entirely manufactured to be eaten until they're all gone (once you pop you can't stop). They have no nutritional value whatsoever but they are a normal part of our eating culture. Available everywhere, heavily promoted and advertised.

I think another poster further up the thread commented on how these foods cause changes in our brain and body responses which in some people will lead to addictive responses to certain foods. I believe that this is certainly the case and that additionally food companies are desperate to exploit this and produce 'foods' (I use the term loosely because they are not really food) that will be addictive to their users.

So, it is not really all that simple. At best Katie Hopkins has opened the debate on this issue albeit in a shallow and confrontational way, sadlt she cannot be taken seriously if she continues to slag off people because they are 'fat'.

Babycham I agree that I am responsible for what I put in my mouth and we all have personal responsibility.

However the food industry/diet industry and even governments have a responsibility to manufacture foods which are healthy too. They don't, they just want to make lots of profit by manufacturing addictive 'foods' that have not nutritional value and market this crap to us consumers mugs.

This is a much bigger issue than merely castigating people for eating 'too much' and requires committment from goverments to investigate and hold the food industry to account for their part in the obesity epidemic.

Incidentally, in countries where the fast food culture has been introduced, incidents of obesity have increased. America was first to go down this route and the UK has been a part since certainly the 70's.

What I think it really sad is that, although many of us are so knowledgeable about the food industry and the pitfalls, we still can't bring ourselves to vote with our feet and avoid these unhealthy foodstuffs. Don't look on the research, books and reports for excuses, use them to bolster up the resolve to break the pattern maybe?
But yes, KH was very much the wrong person to highlight all of this. Or was she... maybe we need a bit more time to see what happens next?

Katie Hopkins callousness means many folk disagree with her automatically.
She is a professional cunt, as distinct from a gifted amateur cunt.

Growing up in the 1960s, none of my classmates was overweight and I can't remember seeing a morbidly obese adult until the early 90s.
However, there has NOT been a collapse in willpower /moral fibre or a major genetic change over the last 30 years. The problem is that our environment has become obesogenic and humans can't evolve that quickly to cope.

Being nasty to people won't change that problem. We need to reverse the obesogenic factors. This would require political will, to fight vested commercial interests, change infrastructure etc.

btw, most overweight people became that way over years, so an extra 2000 cals most weeks above the amount their body burns - whether alcohol or chocolate - would indeed make someone overweight eventually. Indulgence once or twice a year is quite different.

babycham taking in 2000 extra calories a week will lead to obesity over a period of time. If 3500 calories = 1 pound of fat, then that = just over a pound gained per fortnight. It doesn't matter if those calories are taken in through food or alcohol. 2000 excess calories a week is actually quite a large excess . Many people become obese much more slowly than that - through eating 100 excess calories per day, on average.

As a person with thyroid problems I would have been one of those who were dismissed by Katie Hopkins.

I take it she didn't have her own thyroid zapped with radioactive iodine before the so-called experiment? No. Thought not. Then she cannot judge the effect of low thyroxine levels on other people.

I now have no thyroid gland due to needing RAI treatment for persistently relapsing Graves Disease.

I have struggled with wildly yo-yo-ing weight issues all of my adult life. I now have to take a high dose of synthetic thyroxine daily. I eat as healthily as possible and walk my two dogs well daily.

Still I remain overweight. It can be very depressing and frustrating. Losing the weight is not always as simple as some people think it must be. There are some medical and MH issues which cause some of us to hang onto it more than others. We are all different, all with our own crosses to bear.

I assume Babycham that you are leaving out people with drug/thyroid difficulties etc. Your post doesn't make that clear.
Oh, and research clearly shows that there can be genetic links.