To wonder why we were a thinner nation before we all knew so much about food.

[Bumblebumble123]

Isn't it funny that in years gone by, people didn't have the knowledge about food they have now. Peoples diets weren't dictated by calories or grams of fat or carbs, they were dictated by hunger. Yet now we have an obesity epidemic.

Is educating people on food counter productive? Would we all be better to scrap the info and start listening to our bodies?

I don't know the answer. I just find it odd that we know more than ever about food yet the nations waistline is getting bigger.

When I was growing up breakfast was bread and dripping, made using the cheapest grey white bread.

Dinner was a cheese sandwich using the same grey bread and a slice of the bulk bought cheese that sat in the fridge for what seemed like months on end (don't forget to cut off the blue bits before slicing).

Tea was homemade chips (made with sprouting potatoes from the giant brown paper sack in the garage) fried in lard, frozen string beans from the garden (more string than bean) and meat from a ham hock, which would have to last for at least two meals.

Too right we were thinner back then, the food was fucking grim!

Barbraofseville 😂😂😂

Frosticle I had a doctor explain to me that it’s similar to foie gras due to the type of food eaten ( his idea of KFC & Macdonalds etc) and it’s a cheap poor diet that sucks people in and they become addicted

As someone who is lucky enough to live in a small town and walks and gets the train most places. I also pick up fresh food on my way home to cook for the family. We walk to sport, local restaurants and friends houses for dinner. I quite often go for a walk with the wife on an evening around the local green.

When i talk to colleagues who drive to work, it is like talking to an alien species. Apart from the few who live in nice villages i feel like suburbia couldn't be further disconnected from a sense of community as they are separated by their 3mm of steel, glass and rubber, which they require to work, shop and entertain themselves.

I agree tufted I have about 4lbs to go to be in "normal" bmi. Ideally I'd like to be in the middle and that's nearly 2 stone away and that would still leave me a stone heavier than I was in my 30s but before I had kids. However I am now 3 stone lighter than I was at my heaviest. Even at that point people would not believe that I was officially obese and had over 5 stone to lose and 3 and a half just to be in healthy range. I am tall and have an even distribution of weight so whilst people would think I was a bit overweight, no-one thought I was obese. We really have lost track of what healthy looks like.

Its like when you were younger and felt fat and old and you look at photos and think how thin and young you looked! :o

It makes me laugh when I see stories on the news telling us how fat we are and how we all need to go on a diet, followed by someone complaining how austerity is forcing people to rely on food banks. The two things sound contradictory.

But the reason we are so fat is because life is more stressful these days. Work is not harder - quite the opposite in many cases - but is more stressful and is therefore more hard work. We have less freedom and more pressure, costs and taxes are higher than they were in the past. It's cheaper to buy unhealthy food than healthy food - anyone who denies this is living in dreamland, or has no idea how cheap unhealthy food can be bought.

Give educated people more money and more time, and (mostly) they will cook healthy food. They will drink less, smoke less.

Agree, I can make homecooked meals that are fairly economical but it definitely costs me more for chicken breasts etc than it does for pizza. I can do spiced chicken with wedges and veggies/salad for around £2.50-£3.50 a head and it's about 500 calories each or I can buy cheap pizzas for about £1.50 a head with around 1000 calories (most of them carbs a and cheese) per person. Eating the recommended amount of the pizza would be a couple of slices. We'd all be hungry if we only ate that so you end up overeating but still not really full. Lots of the supermarket offers are on the high calorie foods though I do think that is getting a little better.

Unhealthy food is cheap unless you have a real know how
If you can cook / eat dal your in for a really cheap meal . Lots of pakistani families on a low budget make their own chapattis and lentils daily and it costs next to nothing . A cheap curry can be made with cheap cuts of chicken , onions and spices costing less than a couple of £1 pizzas for a family .A big pot of spagh bol can be made cheaply and the sauce recycled.

I thought a lot of programmes on TV have shown how little about cooking some people know. I do blame the loss of proper Home Economics lessons for this. When I went to school we were all taught how to cook cheap simple meals from scratch.

We didn't have supermarkets so we just bought the food we wanted for planned breakfasts, dinners and teas from the grocer, green grocer butcher and fishmonger, carried home in reusable shopping bags. We had sliced cold meats and wedges of cheese wrapped in paper, and small quantities of sweets weighed out in paper bags (4oz/100gr). And we didn't graze between meals.

We know a lot less about food, farming, production and the seasons now.

Just about anyone could cook simple, quick, healthy meals if they really wanted to. It's just that they don't need to, so they don't.

Remember when I mentioned the omelette upthread? That £1.50 pizza is the slow, expensive option in comparison.

Some people do not know how to cook omlettes. The lack of even very basic cooking knowledge is not uncommon.

So when I have shared houses, I have made chilli from scratch - very easy, while others use expensive sauces. Chilli con carne is so easy to make, but people still buy ready made sauces and add it to mince, onions and kidney beans.

I think a lot of it is that people feel that they are being denied something if they don't have something they want. I only had sweets once a week when I was a kid. Only had deserts on Sundays. Always had wholemeal bread and fruit for lunch (This was the 70's/80's). I never felt I was being denied anything, that was just the way it was. Also, walked about 2 miles to and from school every day. I can't believe how much some people drive nowadays for very small distances. None of the above was to do with money as we were fairly well off.

Walking is the big issue. I remember how far I used to walk as a matter of course. I am always amazed at the threads on here saying a small distance is too far for a kid to walk. I understand they may not want to walk it, but physically kids used to routinely walk far. I used to routinely walk 5 miles as a teenager to go to the local shopping centre. I would have preferred to be driven, so it wasn't my choice, but I had no choice as we did not have a car.

I don't think this is about the people who use a jar of sauce to make chili/spag bol. In the main, the sauces are not unhealthy and high fat options and are combined with fresh ingredients. To me it's the cheap bread/pizza/salty fatty ready meal curries/pre packed burgers you microwave etc etc that are more of an issue.

Also yes, omelettes are good and fast (if you know how to make them) if you are making it for one or two - pain in the arse if you are feeding 4.

I think it’s quite simple, people are bigger because of the convenience of pre packaged food that is available so widely and easily we eat it becasue it is there. We had a takeaway last night and over ordered, so for lunch I’ve just finished it off. I’ve had a Cadbury split pot chocolate yoghurt for pudding. I will probably have an orange and a couple of biscuits later on and tea is shop bought fish cakes and either mash if there’s time or chips if I’m pushed.

Prepackaged food is generally (to me) quite tasty and it saves me a lot of time, which I’m short of. That’s why I eat it. I do walk a lot and manage to stay at a size 12, although my weight is very slowly creeping up. I know exactly what makes a healthy diet, how to avoid becoming obese, how much exercise I should do, but unfortunately it isn’t stopping me eating all the wrong things, because I like the taste of them.

I read about people saying they can cook from scratch very cheaply, but I don’t know how they do it every day. I can’t bring in many meals made from scratch for less than an Aldi pizza/fishcake/breaded fish and I certainly couldn’t do it every day for a fortnight.

I do think it is so much easier to stay slim when younger. I never had to think about my weight until I hit my late 30's when I seemed to go from a (proper) size 10 to a size 14 in around a year.

We eat when we aren’t hungry and we move less.

waxon my point was that cooking knowledge is extremely low amongst lots of people. A jar to make a chilli can be replaced with tin tomatoes, tomato puree, chilli powder and black pepper at a fraction of the cost. If you don't know how to do that, you will not know how to make lots of over things from scratch that are healthier.
Although I buy pizza occasionally.

shockers I rarely eat when I am not hungry. But I move around a lot less due to a disability. That is when I got fat. I do find it hard to ignore hunger pangs.

And when I was slim I did used to have to ignore hunger pangs to stay slim. Only way I ever found to stay slim. But it was easier when I could be physically more active.

I genuinely don't know anyone who is larger than a size 10/12, apart from one woman at work who is rather big. I sometimes see larger people in the street, but all this talk of an obesity crisis seems odd to me as people just don't seem that fat to me.

Heron

How big is a size 10 and how big is a size 12