Two thirds of adults in England are obese or overweight. It would make as much sense to ask what is different about the other one third.

[H0TK]

This was a comment I read elsewhere. I thought it was an interesting comment.

Rather than wondering what is wrong with overweight people and why they eat like they do. What is different about the people who are not overweight?

I don't think it is about fat bashing; I think the whole food environment, availability and patterns have changed. This isn't the fault of (for example) individual night workers eating fast food, it's the social changes that have resulted in that environment. Some people don't put weight on in that position, many of us do.

Which is why I said “broadly speaking”.

The lack of understanding is really worrying. It may or may not be genetic - I don't know, but it does not follow that if it is genetic 2/3rds of people would always have been obese. If you can't understand why the statement is incorrect, I'm at a loss as to how to help you.

My dh who has always been slim has always seen food as simply fuel. He doesn't 'love' food as I do. It's simply something he eats to keep himself alive and when he feels hungry.
He has no 'food noise' and would after just have a bowl of cereal for dinner if he hadn't eaten or sometimes he forgets to eat. It's zero hardship for him to stay slim and he is baffled by people who struggle to diet or cut back. He simply doesn't get it.

It doesn’t equal noticeable rapid weight loss in itself, but if you’re monitoring your food intake AND doing even just a bit of walking exercise which burns just a couple of hundred calories a day, over a month that adds up to an extra pound lost. Over a year, almost a stone. And in reverse, if you aren’t expending those extra couple of hundred calories a day but you are eating them, that can mean a pound a month or almost a stone a year that you gradually gain, without it being the case that you’re noticeably overeating or being a glutton.

I used to never gain weight. I could eat what I liked, be as lazy as I liked and I would stay slim. Then in my late 30s and forties I had several major surgeries and the weight started to pile on really easily. The slightest bit of carb and I’d gain weight. It’s been a battle ever since. I’m certain if I’d never needed the surgeries I’d still be slim as I still have tiny wrists and thin fingers.

Weight is really complex. The bmi standard doesn't always work. It was in the media recently that treating obese patients just because they fit in the obese category is possibly a bit of a waste as not everyone who is obese has health issues. There is also more to it than calories in calories out.

I'm a bit overweight, but dh is very, very thin. He doesn't eat many snacks but he does eat them. He is highly anxious and that can put him off food. I also noticed that his family aren't into all sitting round the table together for meals. In my house, we set the table every meal time and all sat together and ate the same things. In his house it was normally a tray in front of the tv!

Anyway, I am not sure I think asking thin people what they're doing right is necessarily the wisest thing. People need to stop automatically associating weight loss with good health. It isn't as simple as that. I've been everything from underweight to overweight, and wasn't at my healthiest when at my thinnest. And everyone I know who has dieted to lose weight has ended up about the same size they were to begin with.

I'm trying hard to focus on health rather than weight myself.

People need to read Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris Chris van Tulleken. Apologies if someone has mentioned this already I have read the whole thread. For me this was an eye opener.

Not helpful in the context of the OP's question, but my brother's a GP and, unsurprisingly, the question of weight comes up a lot more than it should during his working day. Last year, he'd had a particularly trying consultation with a morbidly obese patient who insisted she lived on a diet of fish and salad, That was on a Monday.

The following weekend he and my SIL were shopping at a garden centre and decided to stop in the shop's cafe for a coffee. Sitting on the other side of the room was his "fish and salad" patient tucking into a large slice of gateau and one of those calorie-laden hot drinks topped with whipped cream. He still chuckles at the memory of her expression when she noticed him - wide-eyed with a forkful of cake halted midway on its journey to her mouth.

I think it's more a case of eating and drinking less junk, not eating less overall.

By junk I mean snacks and sugary drinks - crisps, crackers, sweets - fatty and sugary empty calories between meals and during the evening.

The slimmest people I know eat nuts, fruit, oats/ porridge, lots of veg/greens, high quality lean protein, Greek yogurt, eggs, fish, whole grain pasta and brown rice and brown/whole grain bread. They eat cheese and butter and cook with oil (not a low fat everything diet) and enjoy a dessert in moderation.

However, they do not graze through the day and evening, and they avoid sugary beverages.

Surely the simplest explanation is that people who are generally naturally slim (massive generalisation, I realise) have a better grehlin and leptin hormone regulation as well as how well they can process insulin.

So the hormones that tell you when you're hungry and when to stop eating.

I am fat in a family of thin people. I have got PCOS, and it feels like I am always starving, it's painful and it makes me feel sick and the only way to stop that feeling is to eat. Whereas all of my other family members can eat a childs sized portion of something and feel completely satisfied, or even fit to burst. They don't have PCOS or any other hormonal issues.

I personally don't believe in "willpower". I have ADHD and autism, and therefore I lack impulse control a lot of the time, and that could be seen as a lack of willpower, however when medicated, I no longer search for dopamine so am no longer impulsive, I sleep better so my grehlin and leptin regulation is much better, and I'm able to consciously make better eating choices. We are just ruled by our physiology, and so for some, their physiology allows them to be able to eat better. I'm not saying that they aren't sometimes having to consciously think about their choices, but that if you've never been fat, aren't predisosed to being fat, then those choices become easier to make.

I'm not medically educated though, and I could be wrong, but I have been fat for a large portion of my life and I've tried everything I can to find some way of creating lasting habits and results.

I think there's a lot of truth in this. My dsis is a doctor and also has ADHD. She was a binge eater until she was well medicated! It really helped her stop bingeing

I'm fatter than I'd like to be (and have been throughout my life) at 68kgs and 5 foot 7 but this is still the normal range. I'm calorie counting and exercising at the moment but I'd say the key to staying slim is not snacking, not eating loads of processed food (I wasn't allowed it as a kid and never developed a taste for it, in fact I actively dislike it) and doing lots of walking (dogs help with the latter). There's also a good dollop of luck and genetics in there too though, nobody in my immediate family is overweight.

I work in healthcare and I never see someone a normal weight, everyone is underweight or overweight/obese. I'm usually shocked when I see someone a normal weight now. I suppose I only see the unwell so obviously at the extreme ends.

Time

In my early teen years I suddenly put on weight (then undiagnosed PCOS and insulin resistance).

I dealt with it by cutting out sugar and refined carbs and sticking to whole foods, with an emphasis on vegetables and protein. I also ate more earlier in the day.

It was quite a stark realisation that I couldn't have half a tube of Pringles or packet of biscuits as a daily snack, and it took a lot of willpower to stick with it, but I gradually changed my habits and am now an intuitive eater at a healthy weight. I also didn't used to be able to have just a bit of sugar - I would always crave more - but I now naturally feel satisfied with a lot less.

I lost a stone in a month just by swapping from shop brought bread products to baking my own - turns out bread and cake is fine, it's all the weirdly named additives that aren't

Now I cook everything from scratch, and grow as much of my own as possible. I think processed food plays a bigger part than most of us realise

Are you losing weight on 1200 calories a day?

My BMI is 19 and I have basically been the same size (apart from pregnancy) for the last 25 years with very little effort. I am active as I walk and cycle a lot, but I don’t do any specific exercise. I think I must have a good metabolism as I can pretty much eat what I want (and did when I was younger). Now I am more careful but that is for general health rather than weight. I eat mainly wholemeal bread, pasta etc, eat a lot of vegetables, don’t eat after 8pm, haven’t drunk alcohol for about 10 years. Don’t have biscuits or cakes in the house unless I have (very rareIy) done some baking. I can still eat an entire takeaway pizza or family size bag of crisps when I want to, I just don’t do it very often! I’m not really sure how much obese/overweight people eat. I read somewhere that humans are “opportunistic omnivores”, we are kind of programmed to eat what we can when we can, which leads to over eating when food is so abundant!

All my family are slim. My mum, my dad especially had unhappy childhoods.
And I have plenty of therapy to get over bits of mine.

Just have really fast metabolism and I have to eat every 4 hours or I feel awful.

Anaesthetist so unfortunately most of my work revolves around a degree of self neglect and it scares the hell out of me. Most of us are cycling addicts as a result

Isn't a lot of it just age? So most of the non overweight adults are younger or elderly?

Certainly that seems to chime with what I see around me. A lot of people are slim when young, put on weight in middle age and lose weight when elderly.

Its basically this. My diet is now similar to this, though I tend to have something sweet most days - some choc or a pud. But basically most of the diet is proper food, that is not sending your body into sugar highs or lows, and not highly processed food designed to make you keep eating more and sending you body into a ' eat more' spiral.

When I ate crap I kept craving crap and overeating.

Its not just genetics and its not just hormones - two thirds of the population do not have genes or hormones destined to make them obese. Its that we have high availability of food that messes up people's natural appetite regulation and sends them into over-eating spirals.

I firmly believe most people can change this cycle if they change their diet long term. It will take time to reset your body, but it will work for most people.

I agree. I'd love to know exactly what it is that's making us all bigger. I suspect it's processed food and more sedentary lifestyles, though. Even food we don't think of processed absolutely is processed.

I am very slim and according to Mumsnet it’s because I survive on lettuce and air and/ or don’t take medication for other conditions. so I’m lucky and I starve.