to think that the people who have a healthy relationship with food do so because they have a fast metabolism?

[Fuckedoffat48b]

I am half way through my first pregnancy and I have gained… 4lbs. I started the pregnancy at the top end of a healthy weight, have dropped a dress size (!), look and feel great, and have suddenly noticed I have absolutely no guilt whatsoever about what I am eating. I had to increase my caloric intake by about 200-300 calories a day from the very beginning, just to maintain my weight.

Nobody is more shocked than me about this, as this is the first time in my life since I was about 13 that I have honestly been able to eat until I am full, and not gain weight.

It has been an absolute revelation, and made me realise if this is just how all the smug skinnies lecturing about 'just eating until you feel full' feel all the time?! If that is honestly the case then no wonder they have a 'healthy relationship with food' imo.

If food didn't make me fat I would have a healthier relationship with it too. AIBU to think this healthy relationship with food could actually be more body type than mindset after all?

i think its sooo varied and too varied to pin it down to being down to one reason.
dna.genetics.balance.home life.emotional health.exercise.natural body type.upbringing.where you live.income.
I think it all adds to different people relationship with food and weight so everyone is different.
but I do think very common factors like body image.stopping with the obsession with good and bad foods and teaching balance and spending more time with people to teach and help them with issues around food is key.
in all walks of life weve lost the care elemant and lost the time to take on things.so health.food,weight and many things in life are just going to the crapper.

So for me it’s a lot of stress eating... Just pisses me off when someone says ‘eat veggies and admit you stuff your face with carbs and booze!

That’s not what I said though is it? You’re picking and choosing the bits you like to try and make a point and taking that comment out of context.

You admit you have had problems in the past from eating the wrong foods, so why would you then say that eating a mostly veg diet won’t make you thin? That’s complete nonsense and you know it. If you say you truly are eating an amazing diet of nothing but fruit and veg, have been for some time, and you’re still overweight then it would be worth looking into. But to say you emotionally ate too much sugar in the past and put on weight does not in any way even suggest that a healthy diet won’t help your weight.

The OP has started a thread basically saying that “smug skinnies” are just thin because they have a faster metabolism, therefore all her weight problems are totally not even her fault because it’s just bad luck for her.

A bunch of people said, “no, actually we have to work at being slim and here’s what we do to achieve that”, only to be shouted down with, “eating a healthy diet won’t make you slim!”

Do you see the problem here? For anyone genuinely interested in having a healthy weight they can look to the billions of scientific studies about it. Eat mostly fruit and vegetables, exercise, don’t put in more than you use. Are you going to tell us all science is just wrong because you haven’t had successful weight loss? Are the thousands and thousands of people who have taken part in studies just “lucky”?

Being healthy takes effort

^This. And right there is your good relationship with food.

The 'no such thing as fast metabolism' is such balls - we all have skinny friends/husbands who scoff themselves stupid but remain underweight, while we watch every calorie that goes in but remain (slightly) overweight

You are only half way through op. My friend was like you and then put loads on towards the end and then more on after baby was here. Too easy to easy junk when sleep deprived.

We didn’t all have fast metabolisms 30, 40, 50 years ago.
But most people were slim then.

They absolutely were not! My parents have huge family trees dating back centuries with god knows how many photos from various time periods. People weren't particularly slim at all. Maybe with the exception of during and just after the wars when calories were limited to an unusual degree.

And people saying the studies all show people just eat too much. They absolutely do not. Studies in this field are hugely varied but the current medical consensus is that people do have vastly different metabolic rates and the presence of a single gene in some cases can make the difference between a lifetime of counting calories and fat shaming or being able to enjoy a healthy and abundant diet. Maybe 20 years ago the consensus was different and people read stuff then and didn't keep up with it but there's a huge amount of information in the public domain which shows that genes play an absolutely massive role in whether or not you're likely to be overweight. There was a really interesting programme on a few years ago now called ""Why are thin people thin" that was a refreshing approach. They tried to see how much it would take to get thin people to put on weight and they were all practically poring pints of melted butter down their throats throughout the day and few gained any significant weight. They weren't unusual people either, people with this type of metabolism make up a sizeable minority of the population. It's very frustrating when they appear to believe that they are that way because they eat "sensibly" (they mostly don't - they eat vast quantities of healthy food and have no idea of their calorie intake because they don't need to know it.

Being healthy takes effort

Not for many people, and for many more the effort is minimal, but they don't know how minimal because they've never had to make a greater effort. I'm overweight on less than 600 calories a day. Do you have any idea the amount of effort it takes to eat so little every day? And I'm still bloody overweight. I'd have a fantastic relationship with food if I didn't have to spend every minute of my waking life trying not to eat it. I've had to cut days out short to go home and cry because I've been so jealous of someone eating a bloody sandwich. Something that I just can't ever eat unless I only want to have one meal that day (the sandwich). So many of my facebook friends posted their "low calorie" recipes that helped them shed the pounds after pregnancy and that made me want to cry too. They clearly thought they were putting in this great effort but their low calorie diets were maybe four times what I can eat in a normal non-dieting day. I usually roll my eyes at the oppression and privilege olympics but I do believe people with fast metabolisms simply have no concept of quite how hard life is for people who can't eat what they can eat.

Having a healthy attitude to food is not about eating tons and weight. For me a healthy attitude to food is about not obsessing about calories or food and making balanced choices. The eating till full thing is misleading for overweight people as they have made their stomachs bigger.

I have pcos, and have counted calories that help me maintain vs lose weight (trial and error). My maintenance calories is approx 1800 per day when even when I am very active (ie more than 21k steps at 3.5-4miles per hour) - this is to maintain a weight of 11 and a half stones (I am a whisker shy of 5ft 7).

Compare this to my size 0 sister, who maintains her 7st figure (same height) on 3,000 calories per day with only sedentary activity (2-5k steps per day).

I agree that a naturally fast metabolism has a lot to do with weight gain, but this can only be said with certainty when you have done everything you can to lose weight. It’s no good saying shit like that when you have a bad diet

I think that it's got more to do with appetite and food preferences than metabolism, but I suspect that we have less control over that stuff than we think. I look at my non identical twins and one of them, from day one had a bigger appetite (drank more milk) and as a 6m old baby already favoured carbohydrate rich food like bread, pasta and potatoes over veg. DD2 lives off berries and lean meat, and when we occasionally go to the ice cream parlor in town she'll ask for ice cream with strawberries and then wipe the ice cream off the strawberries. My mother in law is very skinny and I always assumed she was just ruthless with the portion control but I look at DD2 and wonder if there isn't a genetic component to appetite. I can also relate to having an easier time with food in pregnancy - I had twins as I said, a higher calorie requirement than a singleton pregnancy, and for the last 4 months or so I couldn't eat large meals due to my stomach being squashed. 3 weeks after giving birth I was back wearing my old clothes and they were looser than before I got pregnant. And I just didn't have to think about it.

To me ‘having a healthy relationship with food’ means not using it as an emotional crutch.

I should also point out that 1/5 of the population does not lose weight through exercise, and it's really frustrating to hear thin people advise the overweight to do more exercise as if this is a sure fire way to lose weight. It is for most people but it does absolutely nothing for around 20% of the population. Michael Mosely has covered this in his diet documentaries for TV. He used to be in the camp that so many on here are in, saying it was as simple as eating less and exercising more that made thin people thinner. But he learnt this wasn't true during making his documentaries and is now far more knowledgeable about how much harder it actually is for some people (and the fact that for a small minority they will likely always be overweight no matter how little they eat and how much exercise they do).

Totally agree with you OP. If you only have to exercise minimal restraint or no restraint at all to stay thin then it's pretty damn easy to have a healthy attitude to food in most cases.

but people rarely do dig deeper do they? They take what thin people say at face value, and assume larger people don't know what they are doing.

But put quite simply if I snacked/ ate crisps and chocolate after dinner/ ate sandwiches in the evening as a 'light meal' after a massive late lunch then I'd be overweight. Size of the person I think has a bearing though, taller people can eat more and stay slim, I'm 5'10. But I'm yet to personally come across someone who is very overweight that if you delve into their habits doesn't have some bad ones. Sometimes they are only honest after they have successfully lost. Also wine doesn't make me snack.

Low cal you have to do a hell of a lot of exercise to lose weight. Jogging 5k gently on a treadmill twice a week will not work.

I absolutely piled on weight during pregnancy.

So I see OP as the 'smug skinny' here.

Eventually I dieted it off (still with thanks to those on the then weight loss chat thread) and have been a normal weight for a couple of years now.

@teatea - my sister eats chocolates and crisps between huge meals and still maintains a 7st figure. I think if a lot of naturally thin people have never dieted or thought about nutrition and should probably stop giving advice.

lowcaljellyjunkie, how can you say most people 50 years ago were not slim? Official statistics belie your statement? Your photos might show people who look big, but fast forward them today, and they would be slimmer than those considered big today.

In terms of people eating too much, well yes, they are. People are eating too much for their energy expenditure level. Energy expenditure is not just exercise, it is also Non Exerercise Energy THermogenisis (NEAT) which makes up a difference of up to 2000 calorie difference between 2 similarly sized people. Here is an interesting article on this from the Mayo Clinic. This difference is the difference between one person seemingly eating more than their equally sized counterpart and not gaining any weight.

And please, can we please correct the erroneous view that overweight/obese people have slower a slower metabolic rate than thinner people - they don't. They actually have higher metabolic rates at baseline!

duchy she is either very unusual or eats a lot less in private than you think.

I personally think that comparing to history isn't helpful. The point people always miss is how many more people smoked. A bit like in France which is always cited as a wonderful example of everyone being slim, fags are/ used to be the crutch now in the UK it's food.

www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight-loss/does-metabolism-matter-in-weight-loss

Maybe because most of the people who have always been slim actually have to make an effort to stay slim? They make the effort to eat sensibly, never go into the habit of snacking or over-eating, keep exercising and so on.

Its' like people moaning about a slim person "Oh, you are so lucky you are so slim". Ahem, lucky to eat sensibly and getting out of bed or a sofa to exercise when others are chilling. It's not just "luck"

I agree. But careful, otherwise we'll be called smug skinnies instead of 'individuals at an entirely healthy weight for their height and build who eat healthily and aren't sedentary'
The 'skinny' comments seem to be direcred at anyonr who isn't overweight (probably because branding anyone who isn't overweight as skinny is comforting & somehow can be held as some criticism of the fairly simple view of calories in vs calories out)

Totally agree with your points ComtesseDeSpair Watched a programme which took slim & overweight friends who reckoned they over-ate (slim one) and under-ate (overweight one) and looked properly at their diets for a sustained period. Unsurprisingly, they were wrong, it was the other way round.

Isn't the current thinking that you can't out-exercise a bad diet?

Anyway you'd probably call me a "smug skinny" - never been bigger than a size 10 in my life. But I see how some of my colleagues eat and I know if I ate like that I'd pile on weight. Biscuits with every cup of tea or at every meeting, sugar in cups of tea (one cup an hour all day long), ready meals for lunch or salads with really heavy dressings and cheese. For them that kind of eating is natural but I couldn't eat like that on a daily basis.

A lot of is it possibly habit. I grew up in a household where snacking was not the norm, and even now if I snack I won't have a big dinner (or any dinner). Some days I crave a huge bag of Doritos or cheese on toast or something, but I eat that instead of my normal meal, not as well as.

I also find that if I eat too much I feel really uncomfortable and actually quite nauseous. My dad always told me it was a good thing growing up - I can be starving and want a huge pizza but as soon as I feel full, that's it, I can't eat anymore because I just feel sick.

Comparing history - ie looking at population data over time - can be immensely valuable, from a health planners POV (I'm assuming here that you want the NHS doing things like this, so they can prepare for the likeliest medium-term challenges)

Reliable height/weight data for children in the population is available, stretching back to the 1940s. They've not usually taken up smoking by age 11, so that's not a confounder. This can help contextualise other data.

Basically, yes we are larger. Some of this is because of the increase in non-Caucasians in the population (because biologically some people are, at the population level, both taller and heavier). But the increase is not all because of changing demographics.