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?

This has descended into more of a generic thread about why people think people are fat or thin, but in answer to your question, no I don’t think that the answer to why people are overweight is to look at why people aren’t. Maybe it might be useful to researchers on a large scale but not anecdotes on Mumsnet because the reasons why people aren’t overweight are as varied as the reasons that they are. Plus people who’ve never been overweight can’t know what it feels like and vice versa.

The best people to ask are probably those who have been overweight and lost it as at least they have insight from both angles.

One thing that does stand out though, is the bitterness and massive assumptions of some people on this thread. Some people just need to focus on themselves and stop hating on others just because they have something they want.

Ultimately, whatever the reasons are, if you’re not happy with your weight, whether you’ve over or underweight, the only answer is change what you’re eating!

Again, anecdotally in my family, I do remember eating purely home cooked food. My parents had a shop, and I remember being desperate for 1. A Findus Crispy pancake/cod in butter sauce and 2. For food that wasn't curried or spiced in some way. Now I try and cook most days from scratch but I'm conscious of not having the same thing, so it's a constant borefest trying to cook different things, whereas my mum would make Indian food from scratch and we ate it. But all of us have an addiction to sugar. For my mum, we've tried to tell her not to eat so much of it and she gets extremely aggressive and abusive, so it's very much like taking something away from an addict.

@Idratherbepaddleboarding
I was overweight at a BMI of 26 and now it's 21. I stopped eating such big portions, see less junk and moved a lot more. I was kidding myself that I wasn't eating much more than I should be. I was. Entire pizzas to myself for example. Since losing weight I physically can't eat as much as I used to except for chocolate and sweets. I also changed what I eat and now eat more protein although I'm still mainly carbs.

I’m not convinced about a straightforward relationship between poverty and obesity.

I live in a small village (not in the UK) and I quite like to peek into what people buy in our village shop when I am waiting in line to pay. The really really poor people are pensioners, it’s very common in Sweden to have a pension that puts people under the breadline after 40+ years of low paid physical job, for instance in forestry. These people tend to buy simple but healthy things - the cheapest milk, bones for broth, carrots, cabbage and potatoes. Herring on a good day. They are not overweight.

The overweight and obese group are sometimes tourists, but many younger locals as well, and their shopping trolleys are usually low fibre, high sugar. Fizzy drinks, white bread, sweets. Except for the white spongy substance marketed as bread, these things are expensive where I live and poor people don’t buy them.

I think the relationship is there but it’s much more complex than just not being able to afford healthy food. A cabbage, some potatoes, dry beans and a thick slice of bone with marrow makes soup for a couple of days. A large bottle of Fanta costs a lot and only makes people hungry.

Oh, yes. People in the UK often argue that healthy food cooked from scratch costs more, but that's not really the case as long as you have a working kitchen. I think it's more about advertising, having something that's cheap and comforting, food being the only "treat" that you're able to access or afford, not having the bandwidth to plan and prepare healthy food when you're struggling, food deserts etc rather than plain affordability.

It really is not that difficult to understand.

People who maintain healthy a healthy weight:

• have better diets (less sugar and processed food)
• are more physically active
• don't consume large quantities of alcohol.

The majority of people who don't have a healthy weight eat crap food and are too sedentary.

It really is that simple.

I know some people who have to deal with illnesses and disabilities will of course find it more difficult more to lose weight and/or exercise.

But for the majority it is just bad lifestyle choices and lack of will power.

Not what people want to hear in these politically correct times but there you go.

Did it say what caused the switch? It's interesting you've said that as I have 2 DC,

My DD stops eating when she is full, she will leave somw on her plate ect, refuses pudding or biscuits ect if she doesn't want them. My DS ( younger than DD ) just eats and eats and eats 🤣

Edited to say: many apologies this was meant to be a reply to CortieTat.
I didn’t mean to quote you crackofdoom
But similar point in a way!

I think the subject is more complex than that.

First whether you grew up with a parent who taught you that beef bone stock with beans and cabbage are healthy and how to cook them. And taught you to like and appreciate them.

Whether you have a good supermarket nearby from which to buy these items rather than being surrounded with fried chicken shops.

Or if you don’t, whether you can afford the bus fair to get there and back. Whether you are physically able to do so.

And bone broth or beef stock takes a long time to prepare; and if your electricity is on a meter, for example, you end up paying a lot more for it.

Cheap cuts of meat and cheaper ingreds often mean longer preparation or cooking time. So if you are a shift worker or an exhausted single parent, something quick and easy might be your saviour.

So while of course I agree that it is possible to make healthy choices at the supermarket if you have the know-how, if you were fed Fanta and frozen pizza as a child then 1001 ways with red lentils might not lie within your skill set.

I definitely think all children should have lessons at school in how to shop and cook though. Keep it simple. It doesn’t all have to be cross-linked to the curriculum! This stuff is worth knowing of itself. Just teach children 12 dishes or so they can cook that will stay in their repertoire until adulthood:

vegetable soup
simple classic tomato sauce with pasta
how to grill fish or cook in the oven
sausage mash and onion gravy
how to roast a chicken
how to make a green salad with a proper vinaigrette
how to make a healthy breakfast
how to cook say 10 vegetables
how to boil, mash, bake, and roast potatoes
a simple bolognese sauce for spaghetti
shepherds, cottage and fish pie
frying, poaching, boiling eggs and making an omelette
how to make a vegetarian casserole or curry
how to make an apple pie

Or how about a Saturday morning group teaching life skills; how to budget, do a supermarket shop, clean a house, how not to get scammed or mugged, and cook?
Common sense seems to have departed from education!

I think a lot of it is down to losing basic cooking skills.

When BIL was alive he did absolute marvels on his universal credit allowance food wise as he was brought up on home cooked meals and knew what cheap cuts to buy and how to cook them.

Unfortunately a lot of his money went on cigarettes as well as that's how many of the population stayed so thin in previous generations.

I mean some adults seem to know nothing. The other day at work I brought in stir fry leftovers. It literally takes minutes to cook because I use the ready prepped vegetables, sauce and noodles just adding chopped chicken and some cashew nuts. I had at least three people exclaim what a good cook I was and how they needed to be more adventurous in the kitchen. I was a bit surprised because it's so easy to prepare.

I would also say that what we should be striving for is a healthy weight - that doesn't necessarily mean having a BMI below 20 rather than being between 20-25. DM has always been very thin - she isn't that interested in food I think - and now has several osteoporosis, so there is a difference between healthy and slim.

Contrary to a lot of posts, I tend to lose weight when I stop cooking at home as much. I grew up in a big (and poor) family so I tend to batch cook even when it's just me. I end up eating it all lol. I cook large portions and hearty food.

If I'm very busy I lose weight because unless I buy a ton of ready meals and processed sides most are low calorie and reasonable portions. So this sort of caps me.

I am a busy person (not overweight) and I spend hours every day outside doing yard work, on my boats, engaging in very active hobbies like horses and boats etc. I can basically eat what I like without any repercussions but I don't have time to do that all day. I do a lot of yoga.

The biggest things. I don't snack. I don't eat crisps or cholate at all really (had a fair bit of chocolate at Xmas this year but that's abnormal for me). I don't put sugar in tea of coffee at all. I don't drink a lot of alcohol and no sugary drinks. I don't have much during the day and keep the bulk of my calorie intake to my evening meal when I sit down. I don't enjoy greasy or sugary food. I don't eat take out maybe once every 5 months. I don't eat in restaurants often either.

Problem is, we have all these. My daughter is now 12 and she has proper cooking classes at school (hemkunskap, literally “home skills”) she learns how to cook normal, balanced meals, ingredients are provided by school for free. Same with budgeting - later on there’s home economics where teens are taught how to budget.

We also have good, subsidised childcare and working culture where work/life balance is important. Combined with really shit and declining healthcare, high and growing prices of sugary drinks and snacks, and open access to the great outdoors there should be enough incentives for people to cook at home/stay slim.

Yet the number of overweight people, especially in the younger generation is growing and despite home economics we also have one of the highest rate of consumer debt in the world. I’m all for incentives but at some point you can lead horses to water but you can’t make them drink.

It’s still too easy to blame it all on a lack of personal responsibility. Of course adults are responsible for what they eat. But you can’t ignore societal influences. We don’t live in a vacuum.

If you look at photographs of a popular beach in the UK, Australia and the US in 1965, most people will be slim.

If you look at a photo of the same beaches in 2025, a large percentage will be obese.

It’s the societal factors that have happened in the sixty intervening years that are key; such as the introduction of processed foods, the growth of supermarkets, rising car ownership, the internet and screen use, fast food, manual jobs replaced by sedentary jobs, central heating, food manufacturers pushing profits through the use of trans-fats, palm sugar and artificial flavours and colouring.

We may he fighting individual battles with weight, but the battlefield is full of booby traps.

I’m normal weight. Bmi around 22-23, has been all my life. I don’t exercise much, and I love chocolate, which I have been known to over-indulge in. But I do have an ‘off’ switch, which I think some people don’t have. So if I eat an entire ‘sharing’ bag of M&Ms myself in one evening, or a big bag of haribo, or a whole packet of chocolate leibniz biscuits, I will feel a bit sicky and if somebody then offered me cake, I would not want it and refuse. And it would be a while before I did another stunt like that.

I have overweight friends though who can just go and go and go and never seem to get the ‘I overdid it’ feeling.

What's always amazed me is that a whole third of Americans manage not to be overweight, with the obesogenic environment there.

A lot of them will be fairly young and may become overweight (though perhaps not obese) in mid life.

But yes the food is worse than here.

It's not even just the food, it's the way things are arranged to make it very difficult to walk even when you want to in a lot of places, and the portion sizes, and the overwork and lack of leisure time, and the brutal, uncaring, hyper-individualistic culture and the stress it produces, and the cultural thing that treats people who don't drive everywhere like they're impoverished or just downright morally suspect, and the way that what benefits corporations is prioritized over human health, and how corporations are allowed to infiltrate schools and promote junk food to children, and the food deserts, and the lack of maternity leave, and the cost of healthcare, and a whole list of other things. It beats me how anyone's healthy there.

@ShortSighted101 When I first moved to the US, the portion sizes were what I noticed, they were huge!

I think things are slowly improving, more places are serving realistic portions now and there’s far more emphasis on small plates, salads and vegetables. But we’ve got a long way to go.

@Elsvieta I’m lucky to live in a walking-friendly city and walk to work as often as I can. The climate is a challenge though, as it can get very cold in the winter and roasting in the summer. Some days we’re advised not to spend long outside due to the heat index, for example. This isn’t all down to climate change, it’s always been more extreme than the UK, I love Britain’s more temperate weather!