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?

[thatoldpinkumbrella]

Moomin8
most people in my office are fitness freak, and there's not one weekend without someone running somewhere, competing in something, climbing something, achieving a swim across the channel, or completing an iron-man or ultra trail running marathon. Most people are very fit and slim.

I am well aware that it's so not representative of the country and they are an exception rather than the rule.

[Zaphodsotherhead]

We also (in the UK) don't live in the greatest place, weatherwise for cheap, outdoor exercise. For a lot of the year it's dark before and after most people are at work - who wants to go for a three mile walk in the dark and the rain? And the sheer time input! I've recently lost three stone through taking up running. I'm lucky enough to have a job where I work a late shift, so don't start until early afternoon, so I can run in the daylight. But to get the miles in, I'm usually out there, pounding the roads and fields for two hours. Who (apart from either the very very motivated and sporty, or the lucky with work hours) has the time or inclination to go out in the dark for a couple of hours for most of the year?

And gyms are bloody expensive.

[BeforetheFlood]

The big-billion marketing campaigns are going to be almost impossible to counter.

It's coming up to the time of year when social media will be full of excitement over the Starbucks/Costa Christmas cups (which just end up in landfill, but that's a separate rant.) My daughters always get sucked into this, as do all their friends, and no Christmas shopping trip is complete without a Gingerbread Caramel Latte or whatever, at 500 calories and a week's worth of sugar. (On top of the McDonalds they had for lunch.)

[thatoldpinkumbrella]

If a woman who is a modern size 12 or 14 now wore a corset then she would likely find a 1940s size 12 fits perfectly with ample room.

that's simply not true.

[KatherineJaneway]

Look at the advance of technology in getting us the food we want quickly. I stopped into MacDonald's on the weekend for breakfast and the amount of drivers there to pick up food to take to people's homes was really surprising. You don't even need to walk to MacDonald's anymore (in some areas), you just use an app and they deliver to your door.

[velocitygirl7]

Vanity sizing doesn't help, I'm slim I'd say I'm a size 8-10 but according to primark I'm a 4 or 6! The last jumper I got from H&M was a small and it literally drowns me.

[Teateaandmoretea]

Oh yawn, there was rationing in the 40s.

BMI is based on weight and height ratio not dress size. A 12 is slim if you are 5ft10 and quite portly if you are 4ft10.

What matters is health and your weight being correct, comparisons to the past are totally pointless. And for the record my maternal grandmother was a very sturdily built woman 🤔. Not obese but hardly twiggy either.

[thatoldpinkumbrella]

Who (apart from either the very very motivated and sporty, or the lucky with work hours) has the time or inclination to go out in the dark for a couple of hours for most of the year?

inclination is the problem, time is easy.

If you have time to watch tv, be on MN, play games, you have time to exercise, it's a CHOICE. It's very rare to find someone who has such a busy day that they genuinely physically cannot find 30mn to exercise because they are busy 12 hours a day + 7 days a week.

The amount of people who are proudly claiming to slob on the sofa to watch tv and can't be bothered to go out exercising is staggering. It's a choice.

[BlackberryNettles]

Size 12 isn't "big" though. I'm bang on 9 stone and have to wear a size 12 sometimes, I'm 5 ft 7. To fit into a size 6 or an 8 I'd likely have to be lose 2 stone... Which would put my BMI at about 15!!

Just trying to point out it's silly purely judging by clothe sizes.

[BeforetheFlood]

In the 1940s women wore corsets and clothes were made to fit and suit the hourglass shape that created

Corsets stopped being the norm for women in the 1920s, with the 'flapper' look. Older women in the 40s might have worn a 'girdle' (to give support and streamlining) but I doubt that anyone was still wearing an actual lace up corset.

[Teateaandmoretea]

Vanity sizing doesn't help, I'm slim I'd say I'm a size 8-10 but according to primark I'm a 4 or 6! The last jumper I got from H&M was a small and it literally drowns me.

How lovely for you. My dd has got a couple of tops in a 4 from Primark and is 4ft10 and 5 stone. Either you are buying different styles or you are very very small.

[Teateaandmoretea]

Just trying to point out it's silly purely judging by clothe sizes.

Yay an ally in this madness

[Skinnychip]

There is a lot of vanity sizing in clothes. Just after my son was born 10 years ago after i bought a size 6 skirt (not a stealth boast, i am the neight of a 10 year old so not superskinny) and it was uncomfirtably tight, but knew once i had shed baby weight it would fit. I still have it and its a snug fit. About 5 years later i bought a size 6 skirt from the same shop and i need a belt to keep it up.Im sure it was a true size 10 or 12. I have a fairly straight up and down figure so my waist is not actually very small. I wondered what small waisted people were actually meant to buy since that was the smallest adult size available.
I live in quite a middle class area and i very rarely see anyone overweught. In my family/friendship/schoolmum/work circles i probably can think of maybe 5 or 6 that are overweight.

[3luckystars]

I think its 3 reasons:

1. homework.
   If we didnt have homework, we would be off out every evening after school. Any night we have an activity, it's really stressful getting everything finished. On nights we dont have homework, we can go swimming or doing other things at our leisure and actually enjoy them.
   
   
2. beautiful kitchens
   Our kitchen was tiny growing up, now kitchens are massive and the heart of the home. All these renovation programmes on TV, the kitchen is where everyone sits, so if you are sitting in a room full of food most of the time, you are going to eat.
   
   
3. anxiety
   Lots of people are anxious now.
   Eating calms people down, there is a clip on the internet about a fight breaking out and one man stood in the middle eating crisps and was credited for defusing the fight. Other people eating has a calming effect. So now people are having 3 meals, and snacking all day.
   
   That's my take on it anyway, and maybe I'm completely wrong and I'm sorry if anything I have said offends anybody here.

[rwalker]

Shocks me at work we had a charity event sport based . At a guess most of them carrying at the very least a stone and half over .
Young lads in there 20's couldn't run more than a few minutes with out stopping and looking as though the were going to keel over .
They recon diabetes ( weight and diet related induced ) will be a massive problem .

[KUGA]

I think the majority of young people have no idea how to cook a roast dinner.
Fast food has taken over this country big time.
I counted on my local high street just how many takeaways there are and I counted 9 and that's not counting the supermarkets who sell the meal deals.
Basically a lot of brits have become lazy in all manor of ways.
And it is such a shame that their children will grow up to be the same as they will not no any thing different.

[velocitygirl7]

Ffs I knew that I'd get frosty responses!! People don't seem to want to accept what's glaringly obvious, although I can understand why.
My mum is overweight and loves that as she gets bigger she apparently doesn't go up a clothes size or in some shops goes down a size!
I'm not super tiny, I wear a lot of vintage and have a m&s 60s dress that is a 12 and a perfect fit. A modern day m&s dress in a 12 would swamp me.

[Straycatstrut]

I think it's really upsetting how many children you see walking around with junk food already massively overweight.

Super slim sized 6-8 me used to judge people who were big and wonder how they allowed themselves to get like that. Then my ex abused me, turned me into someone I didn't recognise and I turned to wine and junk food for comfort.

[SuzieQ10]

Absolutely agree with you OP.

People don't even seem to register how large they actually are.

[Zaphodsotherhead]

True about the inclination pinkumbrella but to keep weight off and to lose a significant amount, it really needs to be more than 30 mins a day (like I said, I'm running between 1-2 hours a day five days a week and the weight will go back on if I let it slip...). And, with the dreadful weather and darkness, where is the incentive to get up off the sofa and go out, even for 30 minutes? Walking the dog won't shift weight, it has to be a lot of energy used up.

So yes, people don't have the incentive, they would rather sit on the sofa and eat crisps, but if you go out in the dark and rain for 30 mins a day, walking the streets and losing not a single pound after 8 hours behind a desk... it's going to put you off!

I think realising that energy out = weight off should be more pushed to the forefront. You won't lose much weight unless you get hot and sweaty for a significant amount of time. Strolling around with a fat spaniel for twenty minutes isn't going to shift four stone...

[joystir59]

I grew up in the sixties. No supermarkets. No plastic packaging! My parents shopped for the weekly planned meals at the local grocer, green grocer, butcher and fishmonger, where food was weighed out and wrapped in greaseproof paper, or, in the case of veg, tipped straight into my mum's cloth, very reusable shopping bag. A treat at the weekend was 2oz of weighed out sweets at the local news agents. I had a tiny amount of weekly pocket money which I spent on sweets, thinking very carefully on how to get the most for my money. There was one overweight kid at my senior school and I don't remember any overweight children at primary/junior school. My family was working class.

[rookiemere]

I've noticed that people who live and work in cities tend to be thinner. I think this is because they do a lot more walking. In ye olden days people who lived outside of town centres were mostly reliant on public transport to get places which also involved quite a lot of walking. Now that public transport infrastructure is so poor they'll drive. I worry a bit for my already overweight 20s nephews who has just passed his driving license as walking to and from the train station was literally the only exercise he got.

Gyms are grand but they trick people into thinking that the only way you can exercise is by driving to one and doing half an hour of vigorous activity before respreading on the sofa. I'm counting myself in there by the way. Whereas walking or cycling to shops or work is much more sustainable and gets you outdoors which is also good for mental health.

[alittleprivacy]

There's been quite a few articles released this last week or two that shows that shaming actually perpetuates the cycle and doesnt help people who are obese at all, it makes things worse.

Nobody should be shaming anyone. But maybe just as importantly people need to get the fuck over that being told something they'd prefer not to be true constitutes "shaming." I was with a couple of friends yesterday, both realistically obese/morbidly obese, both with mobility problems. One from a knee injury, one from a degenerative illness. Both were complaining about how their doctors were crap/horrible/rude/unhelpful because both of their doctors keep telling them that losing weight will help their respective conditions enormously. Both complained of being 'shamed' for their weight.

The reality is that there is no way around it, their doctors are 100% right. Carrying all of the extra weight is making their conditions much worse than they could be. Their weight is a direct contributor to their pain and their lessening mobility. Losing weight would improve their lives enormously. Maybe their doctors are both assholes who approached the issue in a terrible way. But form how they were talking, I don't think there is any way at all that they are willing to accept that the doctor has a point. No matter how it is said to them it is "shaming" not a hard truth that acceptance of could lead to a vast improvement in their lives.

I came come very close to obesity myself, I may in fact have been obese but I lost some weight before I weighed myself and realised how close to obese I was. (I thought I was maybe nearly a stone over-weight because my perception was so messed up.) And it was actually facing up to the fact that I was overweight and still gaining and that was already and would continue to negatively impact my health. Accepting that being overweight is actually a real problem and deciding to make the necessary changes to lose the weight is the most significant thing you can do. I did it for my future with my child, I'm not going to make him lose his mother a minute sooner than he has to. Being fit and healthy is no guarantee of a long life but being obese and sedentary massively increases the odds of it being curtailed.

[ScreamingValenta]

3luckystars I agree with your last two points, but surely homework can't be to blame? There has always been homework - when I was at secondary school in the 80s, I had homework most nights and it usually spilled over into the weekend as well. People still managed to get out and about - you just had to fit activities around your homework. In those days, school didn't finish till 4pm, either - nowadays I see a lot of children seem to finish at 3, so they should have more time than we did 30 years ago.

[redchocolatebutton]

I recently moved to 'forrin'
people are generally much slimmer than in the uk.
and that despite carb heavy meals and snacks.
but - people move much more. cycling up to 5km (3miles) is the standard. kids have pe 3 times a week + out of school sport is cheap and encouraged. outdoor/park gyms are well used.