To think being slim should be normal for most people.

[DevilishDebbie]

By slim i mean sizes 8 to 12.

Obviously you get a minority who are not in this range naturally but for 80% of people this size should be natural, say they eat a reasonable diet of between 2000-3000 calories.

Im so sick of people at work making out i am abnormally thin for being a size 10. I watch what I eat but dont deprive myself. The same people making me out to be lucky to be slim eat fried chicken or pizza for lunch and seem to be able to demolish a whole pack of biscuits at 3 o clock.

Aibu to think that the normal human man/woman should be a size 8-12 and that to attain or maintain this does not require super human discipline or strength.

Is it normal swing? Not trying to be goady, just wondering. Even if I could eat all that and stay slim I wouldn't wanna junk all the time (maybe occasionally). I'd get bored of it and also I don't like how it makes me feel. Same with cake etc. If I ate it every day it wouldn't feel like a treat.

But it is simple. It's not easy. But it is simple.

I'm not disagreeing with you.

But I was not fat because I didn't realise that I was eating too many calories. I was fat because I was using food as an emotional crutch.

I'm much better now and slowly overcoming it but still nothing, absolutely nothing, gives me the comfort and cheers me up like a delicious meal does. It's my default thing when I'm having a shit day.

V v difficult to overcome that.

swing*

I don't think most children would choose junk food over healthy every time, maybe a few times then realise how it made their body feel and the novelty would soon wear off.

I love a calorific treat occasionally, but it wouldn't feel like a treat if it was all the time.
On the flip side, eating a salad every day is not enough food for a healthy body. Not enough carbs, fats or protein to sustain a human.

Food choices can also have a lot to do with education and lack of cooking skills and confidence.

Also some ppl with chronic conditions eat sugary stuff for energy. I have family members with conditions that cause fatigue and they have struggled with that.

saxatablesalt I get it cause I am an emotional eater too. Well, I was. So yes, I do get it, but it doesn't change the fact that it is just another excuse. It's entirely up to you whether or not you choose to do something about it. Heck, it is entirely up to fat people whether or not they choose to remain fat. What I am trying to say is that, if one makes the choice to be fat, one should not then spread misinformation (bullshit such as 'set point', 'cundishuns', 'starvation mode').

I hope that you'll be able to overcome your emotional eating. From experience, I can tell you that there's something exhilarating and liberating about not being a slave to food. Quality of life has shot up through the roof. Everything is all-around amazing after weight loss. I wasn't expecting it to be so good, but it is.

The hardest prisons to break out of are the ones we build ourselves. I don't believe that you can be happy and fat when you're imprisoned, stuck in a cell of adipose tissue, your movement restricted, your life limited. Liberate yourself. It's right there.

This thread is too long to read fully, looked at the first page only, why are people jumping on OP? Had you gone, say, to the Netherlands 10 years ago (haven't been since, and I know the rest of Europe is catching up with UK), it'd hurt your eyes how slim everyone is! Nobody was counting calories, people were eating bagels with salmon and loads of oily fish and pastries for lunch when out, but absolutely everyone was cycling (albeit on flat, created for easy cycling terrain)
People did use to eat 2500- 3000 kkal daily in the 50s, and people did get some middle aged spread, and some were bigger, some smaller from birth, like animals can be different from the same litter, but clinical obesity was very rare and sizes above 26-28 probably didn't exist.
I remember how I was shocked recently seeing beach scenes in the first Jaws. Plenty of middle aged bodies, everyone eating white bread and ice cream, but overall people looked shockingly skinny! Which they weren't - they were normal for the time! You possibly can witness the transformation of America (and the rest of the world followed, UK first) through each next instalment of Jaws.
We allegedly know more about nutrition than ever, and we are fatter than ever.
Surely it's not the people, it's the food which is on offer which must have changed fundamentally. Apart from the obvious as losing the culture of set meals and grazing continuously on the go and the prevalence and cheapness of junk food, even fruit and veg nowadays apparently have only small parts of vitamins and minerals of what they used to get from naturally rich soil 50-100 years ago. There was no intensive farming or hormones injected into animals produced for food. One of the theories of modern obesity crisis is we are constantly hungry, because we are craving nutrition, not calories. Only if we were offered a menu from Britain hundred years ago we'd probably understand what it feels like to be not hungry or craving anything at all.
Nowadays even if you try to grow organically all your own food you wouldn't be able to replicate the produce of the past, with all the plastic and pollution in the water/soil etc, not unless you move somewhere which hasn't been touched cultivated for decades. But even then you'd still not get the same pure rain from the sky or water from the ocean as a 100 years ago, and fishing is a whole different story.
Basically, if you manage to stay slim all your life nowadays it's either constant struggle and self deprivation, and it'd be very expensive, or you just have very lucky genes, still not to say you are healthy just because you are slim.

Emotional eating (speaking as an emotional eater)with the type of food which used to be on offer, say, 150 years ago would be made pretty much impossible physically. There's only so much braised cabbage or stewed lamb or apples etc you could eat "emotionally", most food would need to be prepared/cooked from scratch, the whole kitchen set up was a palaver, so food wouldn't be something which could easily be used as an emotional crutch for most people, except the richest few. And even the richest few didn't expect to eat outside mealtimes...

I dunno cassandra, my 75 yo grandmother is vastly overweight and has been since she was a young child. Dreadful emotional eater. Always cooked from scratch.

Also I could, and have, binged on potatoes.

Basically, in my head people getting so much bigger is mostly the result of the modern (esp Western) life set up and the quality of affordable food on offer :(
Eating is not supposed to be something associated with willpower/self-control or obsessions...
And yeah, the less nourished you are, the less likely you are to want to exercise (if move at all!), the more your body would be trying to set aside supplies of fat and prevent you from spending valuable energy.

hope that you'll be able to overcome your emotional eating

I hope so too!! I've lost a stone and a half so far, I'm getting there. Another stone and a half to go.

saxatablesalt
That's why I went 150 years ago, modern corruption was already there 70+ years ago though being vastly overwheight was still unusual. Even a 100 years ago sugar was already commonplace, though not in savoury foods at least...
The 100+ year olds(3 of them) I know never dieted though or counted calories in their life, they all seemed to enjoy their roast and hard liquor(in moderation though).
They also were brought up not to snack, though they had cups of tea with biscuits too...their bodies though probably grew and formed without any pesticides, hormones or artificial preservatives so they had a good head start even compared to the next generation (current 75-80 year olds. Who still had better food on offer than many modern kids)

Research suggests that young children need to eat little and often though. And I would rather my DS learnt to gauge his own appetite rather than following the rules of eating because its a certain time of day. I had three meals a day and strict no snacking as a child and that restriction is a large part of why as an adult I became overweight. I never learnt how to eat according to my hunger.

coffeemilknosugar I will probably be the only one but I have to agree to everything you said in your last post. It a harsh reality but you are right.

A few years back I was starting to veer towards a size 14 which I just refused to wear. So after doing research I cut my calories down from 2000 a day, which was several hundred calories too much, to just 1000 a day. It took me about five weeks to lose 14lbs and it wasn't easy at all but like you say it really was very simple. The weight dropped off. And despite 'crash dieting' I obviously didn't pile the weight back on because I just went back to eating 1750 calories a day, which is all I need to maintain the weight I happen to be.

It probably helps that my DH is from a scientific background so was able to correct so many of the silly myths that abound about dieting, the Law of Thermodynamics being the most obvious one.

Couldn't find longer beach scenes clips from Jaws(1975), but in Jaws 2(1978) people are all looking very fit and slim on average compared to a nowadays average American beach...

saxatablesalt

Children of what age? I don't think it's about children over 3, and I read it's better for your stomach to eat at set times, and your appetite/ hunger adjusts accordingly, if you are not hungry at meal time you either overate at a previous meal or were snacking?
I also only ate at set times as a child and I credited that to my staying slim till mid thirties (occasional snacks allowed, it was mostly fruit though, treats were raisins or from the age of 8 I could bake something, we did not routinely keep sweet stuff in the house).

I think set meals and no expectations to be provided with food any time you like is what still keeps most continental Europeans (esp French) from going our way ...

@CoffeeMilkNoSugar

PCOS is caused BY obesity, not the other way around.

I have PCOS and have never been outside of a normal BMI in my life, (even whilst pregnant) let alone obese.

Yes my sister and best friend both have pcos and have always been a healthy weight.

My gp told me pcos causes weight gain, was she wrong?!

Surely anyone with a scientific background knows that the laws of thermodynamics can't be applied as anything decisive to such a complicated live organism as a human body where there's loads more going on than just thermodynamics and in/out? If it was just that you'd get completely the same results on the diet of fish and veg as on the diet of shovelling pure sugar in your mouth, as long as it was the same number of calories

Aibu to think that the normal human man/woman should be a size 8-12 and that to attain or maintain this does not require super human discipline or strength

Yes, you are. What do you consider to be 'normal" human man/woman? Ever considered people who may be not fitting into a size 8-12 because of weight gain caused by medication, illness etc?

OP said most people Tea.

I just do not hold with restricting food intake for children because I strongly believe that's responsible for why I am overweight. I have so many issues with binging and restricting. I don't want that for my DS. Everyone I know who is slim and has always been slim simply eats according to their appetite. They might snack one day, the next they might not. They might skip breakfast one day, the next they might not.

That's how I eat now, and it's why I'm losing weight. I had breakfast this morning because I was hungry for it, not because it was "time" to eat. Yesterday I didn't have it because I wasn't hungry til lunch time.

My three year old sometimes has a massive breakfast and then hardly anything for lunch. Or sometimes he only wants a yoghurt for breakfast and then he'll have a snack mid morning and a bigger lunch. That's fine with me. I really want him to learn self regulation and not to eat according to rules. Because that's what I never did.

To be fair you should be able to eat 2000 calories a day and be on the 8-12 size scale. If you do the recommended amount of excersice.
Don't get me wrong I know a lot of people struggle to fit that into their daily lives and it can be tricky time consuming and often times we just don't want to but if you did your 10000 steps, and the right amount of cardio and weights a recommended 2000 calories is very realistic.
I have clothes ranging from 8-12 (vanity sizing) and I eat about 2300-2500 calories a day. Because I excersice a lot. I cycle daily into uni, I go to my sports club 3+ times a week and I dip my toe into running from time to time. When I was training for my marathon I was eating 3000 calories a day (roughly).
I think a lot of people lie about how much they eat. Some people here claiming it to be less than 1000 would likely be near anorexic (of course I don't know everyone's situation).
There was a study published about a year back (I remember the BBC covering it) saying it was better to be more slender and do little excersice than be overweight and to excersice. (On a health perspective)
But each to their own. I wouldn't tell anyone they had to loose weight. It's not my place.

Exercise I don't have an excuse for, I just hate it. I do not enjoy it on any level, it's just a chore to me.

I was raised in a very out doorsy sports mad family too so I think it's just my nature!!

For what it’s worth my Grandad was rake thin, you could see his ribs and he ate like a horse and never put on a pound. He had a quadruple heart bypass and heart disease and died of a heart attack because his arteries were basically just made me lard from where he could get away with eating whatever he liked. It also made his food education all the harder because he didn’t fully ever believe that he needed to modify his poor diet, due to the fact that he was so thin. In fact his capacity for eating and eating hugely calorific foodstuffs but remaining very thin was something of a party piece.

Exercise has v little to do with weight loss really. If anything people often go ooh, I've had a run, now I can eat this cake.

It's good for maintenance though, and obviously just a great thing to do all round.

I just do not hold with restricting food intake for children because I strongly believe that's responsible for why I am overweight

Salt,

Restricting food intake for children is a terrifying idea! But I still think the parents should decide when and what, and it's completely up to the children how much. Do not force food on them and offer plenty, and they will eat according to the appetite. I find if mine snacked and are not pretty hungry by dinner they literally would only eat if it's their favourite food or something junky, otherwise they would just gloomily move it around the plate. Which is understandable - they are not hungry!