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.

I totally agree OP. I grew up in a family with considerable and various weight issues and I know that at least some of them were a direct result of abuse they experienced as children. These are wonderful, hard working and resilient people, who have had their self-esteem ruined by others. I get absolutely furious about fat jokes and judgements being made about fat people. None of us are perfect and I don't see why being overweight is any bigger a flaw than any other flaw but there's this idea that fat people are fair game and I HATE it.

@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.

I agree with this.

I agree OP. I am overweight, though not obese.

Reasons are; age (41) I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted and never put on weight...until I hit my late 20s.

Time: I work shifts and find it really difficult to motivate myself to exercise after an early shift (too tired) and can’t on a late as most gym classes don’t run outside the times; I’d have to go at 6am in order to do the class, get back, get ready and set off to get to work on time.

Which brings me to...commuting. On the WFH thread there were many people who did an hour or more each way every day, I used to and just used to grab a ready meal or takeaway after being out the house for 12 hours or more.

Also agree about PE, when I was at school I dreaded it. Full of bullying. There should be/have been non-competitive options like dance/aerobics for those who weren’t ‘sporty’.

There was an 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who said, “Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition men have at all times called in some physical aid to their moral consolations.”

In the 18th century there was the gin craze which caused huge problems

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze

The victorians took lots of drugs

wellcomecollection.org/articles/W87wthIAACQizfap

When I was a kid in the 70s there were less overweight people but far more smoking. Not great for the NHS.

Now we use food as a crutch instead

The person I know who's the biggest fat shamer is a member of alcoholics anonymous. Apparently using alcohol as a crutch is to be sympathised with but using food is to be laughed at as it's more visible

When I was a kid in the 70s there were less overweight people but far more smoking. Not great for the NHS.

Now we use food as a crutch instead.

That is such a good point.

Obesity is very complex and there is a genetic component, however today we live in an obesegenic environment. Take a look at the work of Dr Joshua Wolrich, NHS doctor. Podcast is 'Willing to be wrong.' He talks alot about weight stigma. Also, we can't assume that thin people are unhealthy and vice versa. Some thin people are metabolically unhealthy (BP, cholesterol, hba1c (blood sugar), whereas the bloods of some obese people are perfect. Also, many morbidly obese people have suffered trauma in their lives. It is complex and the conversation needs to be much more compassionate.

Can we have a sensible discussion about obesity without shaming?
I would say the answer to that is no, based on previous experience of Mumsnet. But you never know, there's a first time for everything!

I think a lot of it is education of nutrition in children and what is normalised. You see on here often if people say eating cereal is junk, children don't need crisps and biscuits every day, you don't need to give children squash to drink and they can eat adult food not nuggets and chips then a large proportion of people start flapping about how silly and unrealistic that is.

How many people give their children 5 fruit and veg per day?

How many sweeten their children's drinks?

How many give their children something shape with chips for dinner every night?

How many children have huge portions plus snacks?

Those habits then live with you all your life and you end up having to battle against ingrained habits. Not to mention if you have already been made overweight by these habits. We need to tackle early family behaviour as much as adult behaviour.

Kids menus in restaurants are pure crap most of the time which reinforces the idea of "children's food"

Even in adults there are lots of (tacky) joke signs about all I need is cake/ gin/ chocolate.

Our societal attitude towards snacks and junk is awful. You see people on here talking about the children having 10 Easter eggs. I have seen people use the salad drawer in the fridge for chocolate biscuits. What should be an ocassional food is now a daily food.

I say this objectively as someone who struggled with their weight significantly in their late teens/early 20’s so does understand.

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

Blueberries are expensive In the same way bigger/fancier Easter eggs are expensive.
A medium/small Cadbury egg 75p.
A banana is roughly 12p.
Apples are 4 for £1 or 30 something pence each. Rice cakes are less than £1 for a huge pack and so are yoghurts.

I could make you a list of easy snacks teens could grab for under £1 but they wouldn’t want those, they want Easter eggs because let’s face it they are nicer and fun.

This is partly the fault of society/advertising yes, but also the fault of a lack of home education and an abysmal U.K. attitude.
We binge!
We binge food and alcohol as a culture in a way that (most of) Europe don’t.
It’s such a different attitude and a big part of that IS OUR OWN FAULT! You can say ‘why do people always start having a go on threads about weight?’ but that’s Just another way of phrasing ‘why can’t we have a thread where everyone just agrees with and feels sorry for each other as victims of society?’ And the answer is...that’s not how MN works.
Although I do agree comments should be objective and respectful.

In fairness, I’ve maintained a BMI of no higher than 22 for over 5 years now (having lost nearly 6 stone) and I’d happily munch down one of those 75p Easter eggs in one go, so would DH who is also slim. Eating a full Easter egg doesn’t make you over weight, choices like eating a full Easter egg every day and not exercising make you overweight. I think weight/smoking get less sympathy than other substance addictions because they’re much much more common!

I think society has failed at addressing obesity because it is always thin people telling us fatties what the reasons are.

So you hear thin people saying - schools need to do more PE, schools need to teach children about healthy nutrition and how to cook healthy meals, unhealthy food needs to be more expensive.

So, they think, fat people were just never taught about sport, calories or how to budget, when none of that is true.

In my lifetime meat and 2or3 veg has been phased out so much that its practically immoral now. Most people eat pasta, pizza or stir fry daily. Italian pizza or pasta. Chinese food is all fried. Indian food is like a highly calorific creamy stew with lots of bread and rice.
Pasta is boiled pastry.
Pizza is an enormous helping of cheese on toast with some tomato sauce to make it seem healthier.

It's all been marketed as so modern and MC with the familiar disgust and revulsion at the old english ways. My aunts would laugh disgustedly at the idea of serving meat and 2 veg and always have some fancy sounding pasta dish daily.
Even the most calorific old fashioned meal, toad in the hole has half the flour/ eggs of a pizza. Chicken tikka masala has 3x the fat as fish and chips. But these more calorific english meals were not eaten daily.
I entirely blame pizza and pasta. We are all eating a vast quantity of (boiled) pastry and bread most days. Living on Gregg's sausage rolls would be the equivalent.

We live in an environment where it's very hard to use active transport. Streets are built for cars, so that's what people use.

Companies spend ridiculous amounts each year to convince us to buy and consume more food, so they can sell more. They wouldn't spend that if it didn't work.

You’re right about the shift to processed food, OP, but what has also changed in society is that it’s acceptable, and easy now to eat between meals. Having had some success at last with dieting last year by following a fasting regime (16:8) I think there’s a lot to be said about only eating during a shorter period, then not eating or drinking anything with calories in the longer period - which, thinking back to my childhood, was what everyone did, and there were far fewer overweight people then.

The rhetoric about it being someone else's fault is quite dangerous I think - it's the schools, it's the food industry etc - when ultimately it is indeed down to personal choice and responsibility.

When I was very fat, I saw my GP about a condition I was suffering with. What struck me at the time was how he pussyfooted around telling me that I was fat. Why can't we spell out the dangers of being fat like we spelled out the dangers of smoking, without worrying too much about them being sad about it? I'm sure smokers didn't like being shamed for smoking, didn't like the warnings and horrible photos on their cigarette packets, but ultimately it all led to fewer smokers. Too late, and not nice, for current fat people maybe, but long term fewer numbers of obese people as young people avoid going down that route in the first place.

I really recommend Dr Chattergees new book about weight loss. It's not really a diet book. It looks at current evidence and suggests why so many people are obese and it's far more nuanced than calories in calories out. He talks about how eating processed food messes with your bodies ability to tell when it's hungry and full and how your body stores and uses fat. How processed food is designed to be addictive. How everyone has a 'weight point' set by your bodies internal systems and that weight point is where all of those systems tries to get you to weigh and for a lot of people it's all out of whack which means you're constantly trying to battle against your body wanting to be fatter so craving high calorie foods. There's lots more too. It really resonated with me and my struggle with my weight which I always thought was purely because I don't have self control. He then offers tips and tricks to get your body to change those systems using current evidence. And it's working for me. I have changed how and when I eat but I'm still eating good amounts. Biggest thing is I'm craving sugar a lot less which means I'm not looking for snacks as much so it's easier if that makes sense. Just from making a few changes. Well worth a look if you're like me and have yoyo dieted and struggled with your weight.

@Crazycatlady007

Obesity is very complex and there is a genetic component, however today we live in an obesegenic environment. Take a look at the work of Dr Joshua Wolrich, NHS doctor. Podcast is 'Willing to be wrong.' He talks alot about weight stigma. Also, we can't assume that thin people are unhealthy and vice versa. Some thin people are metabolically unhealthy (BP, cholesterol, hba1c (blood sugar), whereas the bloods of some obese people are perfect. Also, many morbidly obese people have suffered trauma in their lives. It is complex and the conversation needs to be much more compassionate.

I was going to mention him , definitely recommend

@crystal90567 I'm sorry but I disagree. My family is Italian and non of them are over weight. They eat pasta daily and pizza at least once a week. Pasta has no fat so it's not boiled pastry which is all butter. The difference is they eat less, don't snack as much and eat lots of simple whole foods.

@rawlikesushi - I agree entirely there.

I have always been overweight since childhood. At some points very (bmi high 30s) but mostly in the overweight category.

I have no trauma in my background. Almost all of the rest of my family are a normal weight although my dads side have a slight tendency to podge if left unchecked. I was bought up eating lots of veg and healthy food and my family are hideously active. I was taught to cook at a young age and I understand nutrition. But I am always a bit fat. I am a sloth like emotional eater who is greedy at times. I know this.

My husband and I have been talking about this a lot recently as I remain frustrated at not being able to keep an eye on my weight. In my late 40s now this is for health reasons more than how I look and I have a strong family history of diabetes in one side of the family (despite them not being fat!).

He is a naturally slim sporty person who doesn't get my emotional ties to food, the fact that I view it as a reward and that my off switch is a bit fucked. He thinks the fact my fancy running leggings are now too tight is motivating rather than shameful. He doesn't get that I get more comfort and joy from being curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a film than going for a bike ride. And he loves the bones of me and is really supportive (he is never critical of my weight btw, but he has to listen to me obsess).

I am just finishing Dr Chattergee's book atm and the principles of being kind and ripple effects are speaking to me more than most things I've read/tried for years tbh. Maybe time to stop concentrating on weight and focusing on other things.

Eating habits are so varied and personal that it's all well saying eat less do more but I think it's mostly what your mental state is like.

Everyone I know needs to be in the 'right frame of mind' to lose weight, get fitter.

My sister was very overweight for years. We were always so different as kids, I was skinny and she was chubby.

As an adult she was in an u happy marriage and perhaps that’s what contributed to her putting so much weight on. By the age of 35 she was around a size 26/28 I’d say.

When her marriage ended she met her new husband quite quickly but then changed her eating and exercise habits totally. She started hot yoga several times a week and cut out most things like bread / cakes sweets etc and became vegetarian. I know if the original post it criticises there use of the word willpower , but wow my sister does have it. 15 years on she is still a size 12/14 (after cancer and menopause also)

Her change was purely diet and exercise and the ability to stick to a change in thinking forever I’d say . I remember my parents going on at her for years about her weight and it never made a difference. When she decided that she wanted to do something then that’s when the change happened so I certainly agree about the fat shaming thing.

One thing I would say that yes it’s cheaper to buy processed crap on the go rather than healthy stuff, but homemade healthy meals are cheap and that’s what made the difference for my sister. She now cooks proper food rather than eats convenience, and when she eats out will always choose healthy options.

Some issues with obesity are overlooked.
The actual feeling of being hungry, the ability to wait for food to be ready / available and the snacking or treat culture.

It's really advertising v willpower. It's about calling some foods healthy and good for you = boring; while others are a treat or a bit naughty = exiting.
As OP said in the opening post about the Easter eggs ... sweet gooey chocolaty melt in the month after school treat v bite into and chew a slightly acidic Apple or peel a banana that to teens looks like .... [I leave that to your imagination]

I lost weight by calorie counting. I found it very helpful to see calories on menus and clearly labelled on food (calories per portion not per 100g or whatever, make it easy).

I remember going to a supermarket cafe with a friend and they'd decided to put the calories on everything. I had been having what I thought was the lowest calorie option for weeks, but discovered that I was wrong and there were better choices. Costa do this now. I find it very sobering to see that my coffee and cake represent more than half my daily calories.

Good point @notjustanymum.
When I had my first child 20 years ago it was unusual and slightly mocked to take food out in your bag, for toddler. Meals were breakfast lunch and dinner with juice in sippy cup mid morning and mid afternoon. Poss one biscuit at playgroup.
Now its considered essential for them to eat and drink constantly. Essential for mothers to carry food for consumption every 5 mins.
Everyone else too. People won't go on a 30min run without carrying substinance. It's like we now think we have to eat or drink every 5 mins to survive.

Also great point @rawlikesushi. I was very careful in my earlier post to not use the word fat or describe fish and chips as fatty foods. Be kind, rules language use nowadays. Sometimes somewhat intolerantly. In many ways. There are lots of very firmly held taboos nowadays and using the words fat, fatness or fatty foods are some of them. Will this be deleted for me typing those words here?

I've never shamed anybody who is obese ( I'm a bit overweight myself ,bmi 32 but working on it) this thread thankfully isn't as depressing as your previous one.