AIBU - With this new data on obesity and the NHS is it time to have some honest and difficult conversations?

[IAmADancer]

New data from a ‘landmark study’ has show that obesity costs the NHS around 14billion a year and that 2 out of 3 adults are obese.

I know this is a difficult subject but the numbers are pretty clear. With the cost of living crisis and a general requirement for both parents to work now to support themselves how do we support people to make the right choices and tackle a growing problem?

Im really interested to hear people’s opinions on what we can do with such stark figures laid bare.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/17/cost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs/

What would these kids have eaten 100 years ago?

No one needs to fat shame anyone. That really doesn't help people. But also, medical professionals should be up front and honest with people, as they are with smoking and alcohol. If a persons weight is damaging their health, a doctor needs to tell them that.

You can argue until you're blue in the face about the best diets, keto, WW, SW, Paleo, juice, intermittent fasting, but the reality is that cheap, easy, quick, tasty calorie dense food is just so widespread. You go to starbucks and you can smash 1000 calories without realising it on one of those pumpkin spiced abomination pretending to be something to do with coffee and a flapjack. Its so easily done. In the past we'd have had a filter coffee and a digestive for about 75 calories tops.

Plus we seem to have more sedentary lifestyles.

We need a bit of a culture change really, but god knows how we do it now the cats out the bag. Ban stuff and you make life bad for people doing a fine job of practicing moderation.

I’m healthier when I let myself get hungry before I eat. Then I can feel my stomach is full and allow myself to rest and digest. When my hormones were messed up I never felt hungry, ate mindlessly and craved sugar and fat, and ate from boredom.

bmi is rubbish, racist, sexist rubbish. Can you jog/swim quickly for 20 minutes? Walk up 3 flights of stairs with out getting winded. Balance on one leg for 30 seconds. Squat down to the floor and stand up again without wobbling, touch your toes? Lift and carry 7kilos for about 10 minutes Walk quickly and talk without losing your breath? This is the minimum for me- mobility, core and back strength and movement.

carrying about 20-30% body fat is normal for women, for our hormone health. Skinny doesn’t equal healthy and that’s the flip side of this debate. We don’t know what physically and mentally healthy looks like anymore.

Google the 'Eatwell Plate' - totally outdated. This should be shelved.

They probably would have died, seen as failure to thrive.
Child mortality was still fairly high in 1900.
(My youngest has ARFID, his paed advises us to let him eat whatever he wants, we try to keep it as healthy as possible but sometimes it’s impossible).

Well we have a higher tax in sugary fizzy drinks which is a damp squib. In plenty of shops, the prices for sugary drinks is the same as the zero sugar ones. Yes, when it was first introduced, there was a price differential, but over time, the sugar free ones have risen to the price of the sugary ones!

I don’t think the obesity crisis is surprising really - the majority of people are now in sedentary jobs, working long hours. A big proportion of the population are poor and miserable and more likely to comfort eat and eat whatever’s cheap, quick and easy as they’re depressed/tired/just don’t have time. We drive everywhere; near where I live there are few cycle paths and roads are dangerously busy for cyclists. People spend a lot of their free time online (like me now, sat on my backside wasting time, tired from work). It’s going to take a big societal change for us to get more active and eat better - we need more leisure time, job security, a wage we can live comfortably on, less pressure to consume, a better quality of life. How that would happen though, no idea.

This is true. My DS has the eating disorder ARFID and throughout his school life, we had to regularly explain to teachers that their food & nutrition lessons were discriminatory and dangerous to children with EDs.

Schools, NHS & health companies tend to split foods into healthy and unhealthy - totally wrong and not helpful.

My DS had an extremely limited diet - only accepting a couple of safe foods for months at a time. A couple of years ago, his teacher said crisps were unhealthy- crisps were a safe food and he hasn’t eaten them since. That was a good lot of calories he could have been eating!

The language around food used by the government, NHS, schools is extremely important and those who are medically underweight and/or prone to eating disorders don’t need to be constantly hearing everything’s bad for you.

Hve you heard of reverse dieting? Your cals are madly low, how are you even existing! I would ramp up the cals, get the metabolism going, fuel it not starve it. There is loads of info about reverse dieting. Also insulin is a big thing in weight loss/gain.

You can’t allow companies to produce crap food, advertise it and sell it at very cheap prices and then blame people for succumbing. Especially when so many people have busy hectic lives and have to find comfort somewhere. Take the nhs away, creating a society of even more fear and people will need even more comfort.

They shouldn’t be allowed to sell ‘sharing’ bags of sweets knowing full well that they won’t be shared but that this serving size will become normalised. They even scan people’s brains to get their junk food recipe just right.

On the other hand, there isn’t a lot we can do so we do need to take some personal responsibility. I’ve created an easy life for myself though so I find it fairly easy to maintain a healthy weight….I know that if I didn’t have this easy life I’d be guzzling a family bar of Aero every day like I did when my ND kids were small.

@Dinoflaw your comment is a little harsh I think. I was advocating personal responsibility. I pay privately for support as it happens, and do not receive any funded or NHS support. I do not blame food companies, my upbringing, the government, or anyone else for my obesity.

Does your comment apply to those that choose to have babies and need support from the NHS? Smoke? Find themselves needing support for mental health concerns? When are individuals entitled to help in your view? Only when conditions are hereditary? (Prepensity to Obesity is in fact a hereditary condition btw). Just pointing out that your stance of “I have to pay for you fatties” is not actually that logical.

Sorry that was for the poster who said she couldnt lose the stone and a half and did everything right but couldnt shift it. Those cals are crazy low. Like for a child.

My DS had an extremely limited diet - only accepting a couple of safe foods for months at a time. A couple of years ago, his teacher said crisps were unhealthy- crisps were a safe food and he hasn’t eaten them since.

DS’s school did the same with cheese! He used to be happy eating it on its own, now won’t even touch it!

Huge discounts on selected items of you have a nectar card. Tesco do it as well with clubcard

That’s so bad! Imagine telling children who need good amounts of calcium and protein in their diets, that cheese is unhealthy!

Why is it a difficult conversation? Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I'm really late to this thread but have to comment on it really...

I am overweight. The doctors love to remind me any time I have a single problem.
I also remind them that I have a condition that stops me losing weight. When discussed with the doctors, they admit that I have a good diet, a very active lifestyle, and that anyone else would be shedding weight if they lived my life.

Medically, the weight doesn't come off me, and doctors say my weight isn't detrimental enough to my health for them to do anything else about it but I should keep trying anyway...even though they have admitted that I will not lose the weight because of my condition.

I don't think whacking prices up on processed foods is ok when so many are struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and healthy foods are extortionate anyway. People would be starving and children wouldn't be eating.

Yeah because there weren’t any antibiotics not because they couldn’t eat burgers.

I don’t know, I’ve always been slim, never had issues/emotional attachment to food, but also never had a big appetite so tend to just graze through the day and that’s always worked for me. If I want chocolate, I eat it, but I just never eat much of it because I don’t feel the need to. I think it’s different for everyone but the general problem in the West is that we eat far more than we need.

I’m obese. My blood sugar was too high last year, I was having awful stomach aches. I felt generally unwell. My GP was lovely and don’t mention my weight as a factor for my feeling unwell.

I decided myself that I needed to start looking after myself. I started eating low carb, lost a few stone and my blood sugar retuned to normal, my stomach aches and aches and pains stopped.

I felt embarrassed asking for help from drs when I was clearly not looking after myself. That attitude has helped me to get fitter and healthier.

Today in a weight watchers Facebook group I saw someone state that they removed 4grams from their bread roll to reduce it from 4 points to 3 points. Many applauded the poster. They are just cheating themselves and to me it shows a lack of understanding about nutrition.

I believe it already is in the North of England where life male expectancy now falls below pension age (I think)

Basically, anything that is not butter*.

Low fat spreads and margarine are UPFs, and margarine is pretty much plastic, (dreadful stuff, invented for Napoleon's army and dyed yellow to resemble butter).

*I wouldn't eat spreadable butter either.

This!

Failure to thrive was a very real reason for child death. Not every death was down to not being able to treat a condition.

Autism wasn’t diagnosable in 1900, it still existed, alongside eating disorders that are more treatable and manageable nowadays.

This is a niche point but the best butter IMO is President spreadable - butter softened with cream to make it softer. But still just cows milk at the end of the day.