Shocked yesterday at just how many people are overweight?

[Whatevskev]

And I know I’ll get loads of bashing but I’m not judging- myself and all my family may well be included in this observation

The day before I’d been watching a documentary about the 40s and was struck by how slim the vast majority of people were. We got chatting as a group and I remembered there was only one child at school who was considered to be overweight (this is the 80s) so I got a photo out and realised by today’s standard he wouldn’t stand out at all.

Then yesterday walking around town I started actually noticing and it struck me that only about 1 in 10 people if that would be classed as properly slim and how normalised carrying extra weight is. Many people who would have been maybe a size 12 so ‘slim’ are actually carrying so much more body fat than our ancestors.

Once I looked it was striking.
No blame on anyone- society makes it almost impossible to maintain a lower weight unless you have iron will with all the food availability and snacking culture and calorie laden drinks and meals.

And we definitely have reset in our heads what is slim and what is ‘normal’.

How on earth do we reverse this is a society or is it just going to rise exponentially?

@footchewer I agree with everything you say, but unfortunately French people are getting fatter too, you see a lot of overweight and obese people in the provinces. Processed food and takeaways are more readily available but I agree that people still tend not to snack and portion sizes in restaurants are much smaller. Children have to eat either at home or in the canteen, no sandwiches are allowed so it isn't necessary to prepare a meal in the evening. We eat soup!
In 2011 the average BMI for women was 22, by 2017 it had gone up to over 24. Still lagging a loooooong way behind that of the UK.

When I went to the US for a holiday I saw loads of overweight people. I soon found at why they were so big because the portions you are served in restaurants are enormous. I gained half a stone in 2 weeks because of overeating.

French and Italian women have the lowest BMIs in Europe, but it’s true obesity is catching on there too.

I think there is a much bigger range now. Size 6 or 8 would be very unusual thirty years ago. Now many young women are that size. There are also far more women who are size 14 plus which was considered fat when I was young. Now it’s fairly normal. I think alcohol has a lot to do with it. Women in particular drink an awful lot more. Snacks, food portions, takeaways and the amount of eating out people do now are all to blame.

Was on a flight the other day and noticed how easy it is for people to just easily eat mindlessly - 1000 calories : can of full sugar Coke, bag of crisps and a kitkat. That's almost a full day's worth of food.

There's healthy food shaming too : we eat a lot of lentils / veg and is amazing how many people feel its OK to criticise our diet :'rabbit food ', 'oh you're such a Saint' etc whereas 50 years ago meat and two veg and lentil soup and cheese for lunch would have been standard.

Well no I think a 6 or 8 now would have been a 10 30 years ago.

The cheapest foods are full of sugar, fat, salt, calorie dense and have no nutritional value from how processed they are, but they're cheap and fill up a family for roughly £100 a month .

^^

You'd think, wouldn't you? It DOESN'T fill you up, it raises blood sugar levels and makes you feel hungry. You'd be cheaper and better off eating veg casserole full of pulses, dhals, E c but people cba to cook.

@managedmis "1000 calories : can of full sugar Coke, bag of crisps and a kitkat."

Not just on planes!

Add on the 650-calorie sandwich full of mayonnaise for absolutely no reason whatsoever and you get what's known as the "packed lunch deal" for mid-week sedentary office-workers' subsistence feeding.

Your word 'mindlessly' is the key to it, in my view. You've got to be watching out all the time otherwise you will over-eat in the UK. I'm sure the US is just as bad if not worse.

(ps: Aaaaarrrrgggh 'pourquoi' not 'pourqoui'! How did I manage to make the same typo 3 TIMES!?!?!)

@MadameForest thanks - sad to hear France is heading our way.

The downside to the French preoccupation with la forme is one of the highest rates of anorexia in Europe. And it could be the highest depending on which stats you take.

I’ve always found that French method of talking up front about weight quite effective it will stop over eating in a way the British attitude doesn’t. Not everywhere obv

As for London mentioned by pp, there’s a whole host of reasons including what type of person is motivated by the challenge of finding work in a (new) city. But also a huge amount of applicants which means that any employer selecting on looks as well as skill will have an effect. Like pp the industry I worked in was full of young, slim people. Also wealth.

Although x post that is a downside

footchewer - except that I'm nearly 60 and probably the poorest person on here. I've just taken up running again because I was getting fatter and fatter and diabetes runs in my family. So I just had to stop eating and get off my arse to exercise.

So many people my age are using arthritis, bad knees, bad back etc etc as an excuse not to exercise. My poor body has been to hell and back (plus five pregnancies) and, yes, it hurts to run. But it's going to hurt a lot more if I get to fourteen stone and it has to lug that around as a matter of course!

And so much eating is mindless because 'it's lunch time'. So what if you're not hungry, you don't eat because the clock says so, you should eat because you're stomach tells you!

A size 10 in the early 80's is definitely a 6 or 8 now. Size 10 used to be 32-22-34 - pretty much standard sizing.

Just looking in Next now a size 10 is 34-28-37, whereas a 6 is 31.5-25.5-34

So even a size 6 now is bigger on the waist than a 10 used to be when I was late teens.

My mum used to talk if making a skirt out of a yard of material when she was young (early 1950's) as if you were under 36 hips it was cheaper as you only needed a yard width fabric .

i’m 5 feet 7 and I look my best at about 9.5 to 10 stone. That’s a BMI of 22 ish. There are women who are taller than me who would look gaunt at 10 stone

Agree, I was classed as underweight when I was a size 6 at 5'7, a size 6 is not the ideal for everyone.

A size 8 in the 1970s and 1980s was tiny and quite hard to come by in adult sizing. Anyone who fitted an 8 in those dsys would be remarkably slim. Jaeger used to do a size with a 22" waist. As a pp has said, a size 10 in the mid 80s was a 24" waist and 36" hips, but I now own some size 10 clothes with a 29" waist and 38" hip measurements.

A size 8 in the 1970s and 1980s was tiny and quite hard to come by in adult sizing.

Absolutely agree, in the 80s I was a size 8 and bought lots of clothes in the children's section of C & A!

I agree about what a size 10 used to be. Definitely much smaller than it is now.
I was absolutely obsessed with dieting when I was a teenager. I knew the calorific value of everything i ate in detail. Cottage cheese with lettuce tomato and a boiled egg was considered a salad, and what you ate if you wanted to be slim.

I read some of my mother's letters to her mother in the late fifties recently. I was surprised that a lot of the discussions centred on women's weight and being on diets. I just don't think there is anything like the stigma these days to being overweight and that is partly why there are so many overweight people. It isn't healthy to be obsessed with weight but the reverse isn't healthy either.
Women were judged solely by their looks and figure in the days before women worked after marriage. It was their currency in a world where they had nothing else to offer sadly. Being a virgin till you married, having a good figure, being able to cook and looking pretty were all that mattered. My mother still thinks this way. The idea was to 'catch' a man, and then keep him happy.

@Zaphodsotherhead - best of luck, buck that trend!

Definitely not saying exercise is bad, just that it's possibly even harder to sustain long term than good diet as a sole means of staving off obesity, because it requires regular time commitment and a base-line of good bodily health (though i take your point that it can be a choice between bad health and worse). Also, while I'm not a scientist, I'm inclined to believe the old saying that you can't out-run an appetite!

Based on your user-name, you won't need me to trot out the Douglas Adams 'lunchtime' quotation! However not everything in life is conscious and rational; that's why I disagree with PP who say things like "don't blame other people [ie. capitalism] for your own bad food choices". The urge to eat is instinctive, and getting into regular good habits around when and when not to eat might be one of the least difficult ways to control those instincts. To some extent this will make you mindlessly hungry at certain times of day but, if you're also in the habit of eating an appropriate quantity of good, nutritious food, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Easier said than done!

The really bad thing is that when people become mindlessly "hungry" all day, and the more I think about this thread, the more I think capitalism / consumerism must take a big chunk of the blame, for preying on that mindlessness. It has a massive influence over

• What we eat (shops, vending machines, restaurants full to bursting of utter crap) and how much of it.

• When and where we eat (whenever we walk past a shop, or an advert, or hear an advert on the tv / radio etc, leave work, get to work, attend a meeting ...)

• How we eat (I used to be able to can pretty much breathe in a kit-cat without barely noticing)

• Why we eat (sugar craving)

• Who we eat (just joking)

Of course it's easy to blame someone else for your own actions but few of us are as rational as we'd like to be.

@RoseQuartzGlow fascinating, and saddening, to read about your Mother's letters.

However it's not just women who are overweight. It's all of us, female and male, young and old, poor and rich hmmm.

Thanks footchewer - am doing my best!

And I agree that it's complex - I work in a supermarket (a tiny one, not really that 'super') and, yes, there's the 'wall of chocolate' and the 'snack' fridge and people making terrible food choices.

Personally I think a good start would be to abolish the word 'snack' and just call it 'eating between meals' like we used to in the old days.

Drinking more wine and smoking less has a lot to do with it too. Long commutes (not walking or cycling) and sedentary jobs have a lot to do with it. I maintained a healthy weight of 9 stone for years by smoking 20 a day, cycling half and hour to work and half an hour back and working in a 4 storey Georgian town house where I was up and down the stairs all day long. I don't have any of those circumstances now and am 30 years older. Plus 2.5 stone. I fear for the young women who are a 14/16 now - what's going to happen to them once they have children then go through the menopause?

What I have found has helped me with weight loss is that an awful lot of that ‘wall of chocolate’ isn’t actually tasty anymore. Cadbury in particular is disgusting sugary lumps of palm oil. It’s too sweet, doesn’t really taste like chocolate and the texture is horrible and gets all claggy in your mouth, coating it in a rotten waxiness for ages after. It’s not so tempting when you know eating it is the opposite of pleasurable.

Zaphods good for you, taking action and doing something about your weight. Running will get easier, the important thing is to enjoy it. I'm nearly 54 and run every day, I get up early to go in the dark and rain and wind in the winter but I can eat a little more of what I want and keep fit. I never eat more than 2 meals a day.
I wouldn't like it if my DH got fat and I know he certainly wouldn't like it if I did. It's mutual respect. French men don't generally like fat women maybe that is another reason for the lower obesity (and sadly higher anorexic) rates here.