Can we have a sensible discussion about obesity without shaming?

[BalloonCityBaseline]

I started another thread which got my thinking; why is it impossible to start any discussion about obesity without someone bringing 'will power' and 'personal choice' into it?
I always find on MN there is sympathy for those with addictions, people in poverty, people who stay in shitty relationships but there is no sympathy for those who struggle with their weight. For one, weight gain is seen as a personal struggle (you made yourself fat) rather than thought of as society's struggle (what can we do to address this and help people?)
Let's not forget that every country in the Western world is having an obesity crisis right now, yes even the Scandinavian countries and the skinny French. Also not one country has successfully managed to reduce their levels of obesity? Why?
The number one reason that we have put on weight has to be the shift to processed food and how available and cheap it is. God it's cheap! Easter eggs are now 75p in Tesco, the other day I saw a row of school kids all walking down the road munching a whole Easter egg each. But what's the alternative? That 75p would buy you absolutely nothing in the fancy health food shop across the road, and six of them would have to club together to buy one punnet of blueberries in the same Tesco so what choices do young people have?
Fat shaming just does not work. The number one reason kids are bullied in this country is because of their weight, with girls being likely to be bullied for being overweight more than any other factor. Do these kids lose weight when the bullies scream at them day after day? No, they often self harm and some end up depressed adults who take that shame with them for the rest of their lives.
As someone who has lost weight recently for the first time in their adult life I feel it coincided with a time in my life when I felt happy, busy, fulfilled, motivated and in control, which felt like the first time in my whole life. When I speak to others on the same journey they tell similar tales. The whole 'I couldn't fit into an airplane seat and everybody laughed' Take a Break narrative just doesn't ring true for so many people I know. Happiness and acceptance is much more likely to put someone in a mindset where they can change their eating habits and take control.

I'd be happy to hear other thoughts.

@SchrodingersImmigrant I'm sorry but this is bullshit. I grew up eating a varied diet as I have family in Europe so would go over there and eat loads of different things which weren't available here. I know for a fact that the Somali mums and the African mums in my area aren't feeding their kids processed food at home the majority of the time, you can smell it cooking when you walk past the houses, it's delicious. You see the tins and packs in the recycling. These kids are getting fed nutritious food at home. However if you put these establishments in areas where kids don't have their own MasterCard at fourteen like in the rich areas, that's making it difficult for them.
I consider myself pretty informed about nutrition and so I try to eat plant based Monday to Friday. If I forget my lunch at work there is a deli on the corner that does the most delicious salad with cashew and lime dressing for £3.95. If I'm WFH and I go to my local high street for lunch I have a choice of a Greggs vegan roll or a Subway. I wouldn't be able to buy a healthy vegan take away if I wanted. Even the meaty salads have loads of cream dressing and southern fried chicken in!

Having limited options is part and parcel of being vegan. I say that as one!

You can see the difference even in Made in Chelsea to “The only way is Essex”.

I am sure there are other factors at play too.

I have a 1940s dinner service and a modern Ikea one. The antique plates are a lot smaller than my every day service and that makes a real difference psychologically. If I use the smaller plates then my eyes tell me I've eaten a full plate of food whilst on the larger plate it looks distinctly "mean".

Clothes are also much more forgiving. As a teenager in the 1970s my jeans were corset like. They were a real struggle to get on and if I gained weight I noticed immediately! Nowadays my jeans just stretch with me and I don't have that built in early warning system. They are also much cheaper so the temptation is there to just go and buy a larger size when they do get tight.

You are mixing way too many things with super cheap chocolate and vegan options and so on and I am sorry, but in the end, it's up to the parents to work with the kids and feed them solid diet that if they actually stop by that maccies for that 1 thing, it won't hurt the weight.

You are just throwing excuse after excuse. Yes, it's hard, but it is by no means impossible to control children's diet.

And btw "homemade delicious food" is not always the "healthies" let alone good on calories🤷🏻My DH can which up the most delicious arabic food. His family all cook homemade food.
The amount of oil used is abysmal.

You don't need mastercard at 14 to not be fat and eat varied diet outside of takeaways

I'm getting confused over what your point is. Were the kids you saw eating this giant 75p Easter egg even fat? No one is forcing you to go to the high street for lunch, make a vegan salad at home.

If someone had shown me acceptance and made me love myself at size 12 I never would have got to a size 20.

Are you the poster who wants to divorce her DH because he brings junk food into the house, which you then eat?

"If someone had shown me acceptance and made me love myself at size 12 I never would have got to a size 20."

I think this proves that there is no one size fits all approach to tackling obesity. I was surrounded by kind, accepting people as I got fatter and fatter. I needed someone to give me a dose of reality - about my appearance, my health, the way it all impacted my choices in life - to find the willpower to stop, and I wish I'd been told sooner so I could stop kidding myself.

Maybe, ultimately, blaming other people - they didn't support me enough, they supported me too much, they made the portions too big, they buy junk - is just another one of many excuses.

@LadyPoison

I am sure there are other factors at play too.

I have a 1940s dinner service and a modern Ikea one. The antique plates are a lot smaller than my every day service and that makes a real difference psychologically. If I use the smaller plates then my eyes tell me I've eaten a full plate of food whilst on the larger plate it looks distinctly "mean".

Clothes are also much more forgiving. As a teenager in the 1970s my jeans were corset like. They were a real struggle to get on and if I gained weight I noticed immediately! Nowadays my jeans just stretch with me and I don't have that built in early warning system. They are also much cheaper so the temptation is there to just go and buy a larger size when they do get tight.

We only use our big dinner plates on Sunday when we have a roast. For the rest of the week, we use side plates. You can fit loads of food on a side plate. I can't imagine filling a full size dinner plate every night. We can have seconds of we want to. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't.

I got really patterned crockery so it never loots empty. They are massive though, but the print distracts well

My mum call them trays😂🤦 Hersare much smaller and they are not even really too old.

I sympathise with everyone who is unhappy with their weight

The thing that always makes me despair the argument that’s rolled out how expensive blueberries are (as if that’s the one and only healthy food )

As to greasy takeaways, they would not exist if people did not actually want them

And even if you HAVE to order a Chinese,( as blueberries are too damned expensive), you don’t have to order deep fried stuff. You could get plain rice with a veg dish

There is, somewhere, at the very least a small element of choice as to what you put in your mouth

@BoJoHoNo

I think there was more of it going on than you think. My school bus route went past a fish and chip shop, and on Fridays the driver would take our orders/money and phone them in for us to be collected as we passed!

I seem to recall it was a pound for a massive serving of chips.

@ClearMountain

I self medicate with food because I’m unhappy. I doubt that previous generations were unhappy in the same sort of way. People were more likely to be with groups of friends and family, with productive work and a place in life, and not so much feeling hard done by. Now we have isolation, unemployment, and the super rich and super beautiful being rubbed in our faces every five minutes.

Load of rubbish. What - you think one, two or many of your kids not living until their 5th birthday didn’t cause some upset? What about getting a simple infection or illness and living with it with no useful medication? Husband, sister, brother or parents likely to die suddenly and young? Wars, poverty of a completely different scale to the UK now. People in the past couldn’t afford the same junk foods we have now because they weren’t in cheap abundant supply. Sugar was expensive until the 60’s When you get right down to the nub of the matter, People are obese fundamentally for a very simple reason. Humans like and are programmed to eat high calorie, delicious food. If it’s there, readily available, it’s extremely hard to resist. Most slim people work hard every single day to keep themselves from eating junk. It’s a daily struggle and temptations are at every corner because junk foods have been woven into every part of our lives. Eating junk is the easy option. It’s there, cheap and delicious. There really isn’t much more to it than that. The solution though seems impossible

"Most slim people work hard every single day to keep themselves from eating junk.
It’s a daily struggle and temptations are at every corner because junk foods have been woven into every part of our lives."

I agree with this. I have been slim for several years now but, for me at least, it is hard. But then being fat was hard too, so I suppose it is a case of choosing which 'hard' is the least worst option.

A quick read and the answer is no. The judgmental of MN cannot have a discussion about obesity without reverting to type. The issue of weight brings out the daggers. In the UK there is zero respect for any woman over a size 10 from any part of UK society.

In the UK there is zero respect for any woman over a size 10 from any part of UK society.

Probably more like a size 8, vanity sizing being what it is.

@B33Fr33

A quick read and the answer is no. The judgmental of MN cannot have a discussion about obesity without reverting to type. The issue of weight brings out the daggers. In the UK there is zero respect for any woman over a size 10 from any part of UK society.

But what are you looking for? There really has been a lot of excuse making on this thread too (poor teens can only afford massive Easter eggs etc.).

At the end of the day, for complex reasons, some can handle their calorie intake but some cannot.

I "self medicate" with alcohol. I drink more than the recommended units (I'm sure I'm a raging alcoholic by MN standards) because I think I deserve it because of my stressful life. But I need to stop and no one should make excuses for me. The answer is, I need to stop drinking so much. What is the difference with eating way too much?

The answer is, I need to stop drinking so much. What is the difference with eating way too much?

You can totally cut out alcohol. You can’t just stop eating. It’s also much easier (generally) to avoid alcohol in supermarkets than unhealthy food.

Posted ages ago and but caught up. Just saw the last few posts.

'Most slim people work hard every single day to keep themselves from eating junk.'

I find this message so miserable tbh.
That even if someone loses weight they will still have to work work work. Telling self no. On and forever. A trap just in front of you your whole life.

Plenty of slim people don't work at it like that. A combination of stuff and different for different people but no. Many people enjoy food and eat well have a bit of cake it whatever they fancy and just don't think on it.

The discussion here is about addiction. It's like assuming that every person who doesn't drive to oblivion every time they start is exercising iron control. They aren't. They just don't have an unhealthy relationship/ dependency on it.

I've given stuff up and you can just stop. Easier said than done and I've gone back but I had a great 8 years without.

The fact is when you eat better, you feel better, you do a bit more of whatever it is (walking eg), that makes you feel good, you get on a self sustaining improvement thing. And if one day you fuck up. You don't think that's it I'm done for. You think it happened pick up where you left off.

Sorry that's long and I haven't caught up so may have misunderstood.

But as someone who knows a bit about addiction. The idea that I will never ever have it out of my mind, having a constant struggle, thinking about it all the time and saying no no no no. That sounds awful to be. And with my psychology (and I know everyone is different this is honest) I'd just think it's not worth it.

In fact you can be pretty much free. Know what circs set you off, never think just a little. But it's doable.

I was very slim if not underweight until 46, then suffered a trauma, retrained in a new career with a young child and started binge eating. I put in so much weight and just really struggled with my self image. I also have a mental illness and poor mental health. I take two lots of medication. I still struggle with weight. I absolutely hate being overweight because I’ve spent most of my life being slim. I had no idea how hard it was to get out of the cycle of binge eating. I self harm in other ways and am basically a complete mess!!

I seem to have posted what you did Lacey.

It's also true food is everywhere. But. You can shop elsewhere. You can walk to the bit you are buying like you have blinkers. You can shop online. If you're wealthy you can shop online from a fancy organic place where that stuff isn't even on offer.

It is an addiction. Despite what people upthread said, it's not less socially acceptable than drugs or booze. It's the results that are not. The excitement at the desert course or the cake shop etc is fine. A shared normal social joy.

I do think a major issue is that so many people use food esp calorific food to show love. So that's a massive emotional hurdle.

Having said all that I have no idea how to help dh because in the end I just don't get it.

Valencia do you have an OH to support you, have you been to doc?

Trying to fix everything at once is too much it just makes you feel defeated. Please seek help for self harm and MH with doc or MH boards on MN I think a thread just for you would be good it'll get lost in the noise here xx

@PurpleDaisies

The answer is, I need to stop drinking so much. What is the difference with eating way too much?

You can totally cut out alcohol. You can’t just stop eating. It’s also much easier (generally) to avoid alcohol in supermarkets than unhealthy food.

I see. So this is why alcoholics get zero sympathy on MN (other than on than the alcohol support site). Not trying to start a bun fight between the obese and alcoholics, but you are doing no favours to obese people. I can choose not to buy the wine today and an obese person can choose to eat less than 2000 calories today.

You can totally cut out alcohol. You can’t just stop eating. It’s also much easier (generally) to avoid alcohol in supermarkets than unhealthy food. It's also totally possible to cut out refined sugar and junk food, by never buying it or going down those aisles. I did for many years when I was a skint student with a food budget of £1 a day. Noone needs to eat this type of food in the same way noone needs to drink alcohol. However, it would be a pretty boring existence for most people if they never ate any treat foods and drank only water.