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?

There is lots of research to show what works.
Fat shaming makes people put on weight.
If you want people to lose weight the environment needs to be designed so that the easy choice is healthy low calorie food and taking exercise. The opposite is true.

This is why fat shaming doesn't work.
but it's not fat-shaming, that's the point!

Telling women that a size 14 is average so it's absolutely fine to be a size 14, so a 16 or 18 are not that far off the mark anyway..that's the problem!

I simplified, yes not all shops are consistent, Nicole Kidman needs bigger clothes than Kylie Minogue etc...

It's also ridiculous to state that all overweight people have mental health issue, that's a very lazy way to put it. SOME do, SOME have physical issues, but Joe Public on average doesn't need counselling .

@simon I love veg. A big bowl of veg does not keep you feeling full, it has too few calories for that. You need pulses or chicken added to it.

I think it's going too far when someone says the population is getting fatter that people shout its fat shaming.

And fat shaming doesn't work. Very little does. We have an obesity crisis. Let's not try to pretend otherwise. It's not a secret. We can all see it.

Madeleinemaxwell exactly.

Telling women that a size 14 is average so it's absolutely fine to be a size 14, so a 16 or 18 are not that far off the mark anyway..that's the problem!

No it isn't. It's a symptom, an effect. The underlying problem is a chronic lack of self-esteem and other mental and physical health problems combined with our current food environment. If you don't get that, you don't get that, but you're missing out on a deeper understanding of the issue that could actually lead to positive effects.

As a PP said, read Giles Yeo.

WHO teaches their children to be hungry nowadays?

So many kids are "starving" when they leave school and MUST a snack on the playground
I know someone will pup up about their child who has a medical condition and must eat, fine, but 99% of children had lunch 2 hours ago and could at least wait until they are home, or in the park on the way home for their snacks.

No it isn't. It's a symptom, an effect.

no, again, you are looking at it backwards!
Or you imply that the entire population suddenly suffers from mental and physical health problems. Do you genuinely believe that?

I chop my squash, no special knife require, mircrowave for two minutes, I then add it to some vegetable stock and mash with a potato masher, or you can let it cool and manually mash it with your hands before additing it to stock or hot water with salt and pepper in. I have had to improvise and mix it together in a freezer bag before then pour it into a bowl and microwave it. A bag of ready prepared frozen/fresh veg is cheaper than a microwave burger, more nitritious and the fibre content would keep you feeling full for longer.

Sounds lovely. Again - working cooker, "spare" money for veg stock and an understanding of what it's for, a potato masher, a recipe, and knowledge that you'd eat the resulting meal (my kid likes dhal, her best friend lives off breaded nuggets despite a lot of parental effort - if you're a parent with a fussy child and £5 in your pocket...).

If you're missing one or more of the "ingredients" (not just the actual ingredients, but the contextual ones like a cooking pot and a stove) you are less likely to make a meal like that. There are always exceptions, but overall.

"energy-rich, nutritionally poor meals tend to be cheaper and quicker to cook" - sums it up well.

I'm pretty slim (size 6) mainly due to a medical condition. Every man and his dog feel it perfectly acceptable to comment on how "skinny" I am yet they never did when I was a size 14 a few years ago.

Fat shaming in Japan is thought to work very well, although not as well as many would like.

Another interesting read about Japan & obesity.

PRC. The shaming is not without negative consequences (S-Korea). 25.1 BMI = obese in SK.

You don’t need a cooker, just a microwave like with your example of the burgers, you also don’t need stock, salt and pepper will do. But if I make it for my son I don’t add any salt.

You can buy a hell of a lot of food for £5, I would never feed my son chicken nuggets, as a result at 4.5 he has never eaten them. He doesn’t eat crappy food as I don’t waste money on it.

I have no idea what a stove is.

I have recently been watching re-runs of FRIENDS (which started in 1994.) I cannot believe how absolutely super slim Monica looks (Courteney Cox,) also Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) is too. I mean, really slim. But when I watched it in the 1990s they didn't look particularly very slim - they just looked a normal size IYSWIM.

Which seasons are you watching? Cox and Aniston were very slim to start with but still looked healthy. By S5, the season where Monica and Chandler are having a secret relationship, Cox looked dangerously underweight. Everyone I knew commented on it at the time with people saying that it was actually hard to watch her scenes because of how unreal her emaciation was making her look. As Friends went on, Cox's weight loss was normalised (ie we'd got used to it) and by the last few seasons Aniston was similarly underweight but that looked normal on tv by then. The same is true of Sarah Michelle Gellar around the same time. Buffy of S1, 2 & 3 is a very slim but healthy looking young woman. By S4 her weight had dropped and by S5 she has started to look too thin and more frail than healthy.

It's been an odd cultural situation where as ordinary people become fatter on average, celebrity women have gone from being very thin to incredibly overweight.

I'm currently on a strict low carb/clean diet and intense exercise routine in an attempt to lose a stone and a half.

After this boot camp finishes I'll still have another half stone to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight.

I am wearing a size 10/12 at the minute yet I'm technically overweight.

I told someone my start weight and they were shocked. "You don't look that weight". But I am and it's not healthy.

I've lost about 10 pounds and look less blobby but I still look chubby.

However I couldn't see this for ages, I just thought I looked slim until I saw photos.

But no one mentioned it to me, no one said.

I had an eating disorder as a teen and used to barely eat. My mum was constantly on a diet. My dad fat shakes people despite being overweight himself...

Yet no one told me I'd got fat... perhaps that's why? They are worried I'll go back to barely eating and being obsessed with the scales.

Or you imply that the entire population suddenly suffers from mental and physical health problems. Do you genuinely believe that?

I said many and some. You said all and entire.

But yes, I do believe where there are no other issues like medication or hormonal problems, then mental health usually plays a part in obesity.

There's not a person in the country who could seriously believe that being overweight is fine and risk-free. Information to the contrary is everywhere. But if you're willing to accept the science on the risks of obesity, you also have to be willing to accept the science on the ways of tackling it, which let me tell you is not going around telling people they're fat and it's a problem.

We 'normalise' obesity because it is becoming normal. The reasons why it is becoming normal are (among others) increasing stress, anxiety, low self-esteem and the current food environment, plus we are genetically programmed to store fat in preparation for a famine that now never comes. People are fighting their genes, their environment, their own mental health, other people's attitudes and a whole host of other things.

We don't normalise something like obesity for it then to become more prevalent. We normalise obesity because it's already prevalent and current approaches to tackling it clearly and obviously haven't worked and won't work.

So change the record.

Is this where we pretend all the smoking didn't play a role in the slim waists?

I don't think any of the 4 to 11yr olds in my 1970s primary school smoked.

It may have played a role in keeping some of their parents slim but then so did the lack of takeaways, the one car households (if that), lack of huge supermarkets, lack of satellite TV and internet etc.

Oh come on people!!!

It is no coincidence that the recent outlawing of the single most addictive appetite suppressant in history resulted in a burgeoning obesity epidemic!

Everyone used to smoke, and that means children and non-smokers did smoke (regardless of choice) because everyone around them was smoking all the time. Passive smoking is a known issue!

I would be well skinny if I picked my twenty a day habit back up, and the skinniest adult people I know right now are still smokers or have food/health issues. Processed food is a newish problem and poverty plays a huge factor in that. As always there is a startling ignorance about the confinements of poverty on this thread (time/cash/resources). Jamie Oliver hasn't helped by trying to outlaw sugar because companies have just replaced the sugar with other toxic crap which are damaging to the environment as well as people. Food companies want to sell more, that means making the food as addictive as possible. Proper regulation of the food market is the badly needed answer here.

For some things you need good health too...I enjoy cooking and baking but need to call DH to chop up a squash for me (hypermobility and I suspect dyspraxia)
Sometimes I even get stuck with a particularly big potato

Although you can get a good variety of frozen pre-chopped veg in the bigger supermarkets.

Education is a big part of it too, I'm sure lots of people remember the Jamie Oliver documentary where DC couldn't identify various veg.

Definitely depends where you are. My workplace is full of middle class employees, most of whom would be considered healthy weights. If I go to the town I'm from however, a socially deprived area, and properly look around, the vast majority are obese, and it's heartbreaking looking at the amount of very overweight kids in the takeaways, and downing their energy drinks.

what if we take a step back even further ...:

'This is how we are: gluttonous, ravenous, lazy and short-sighted. To act any differently, the intellect must use complex arguments from philosophy and science to suppress millennia of adaptation. It’s tough. Famine sticks in our cellular memory; the fat and protein in meat provide some of the best actual insurances against it, so biology cries Eat it!'

[[https://aeon.co/essays/are-we-eating-ourselves-and-our-planet-to-extinction]]

I think we should all be grateful to @Whatevskev for sharing such an original observation. Its never been said on here before. What a fucking pioneer! Tell us more stuff @Whatevskev: What (or rather who) should we point the finger at?

oops

Homo gluttonous: Humans have evolved with little resistance to abundant, easy food. Will we gorge ourselves and our planet to death?

aeon.co/essays/are-we-eating-ourselves-and-our-planet-to-extinction

" When you are expected to pay 79p for a single chocolate bar (kit kat, mars, etc) but then there is a 4 or 5 pack for £1, it's just encouraging people to buy (and eat) more."

That's down to the individual having no willpower though & not eating say one a week as they usually would.

@alittleprivacy

re your post at 11.50am, I am referring to the first 4 or 5 seasons of Friends. I thought Monica and Rachel looked fine and normal, but watching back now, they look VERY slim, especially Monica.. (because society so much bigger, they look quite thin now.) And I never said at any point that they didn't look 'healthy.'

I am simply saying thought they looked 'normal' at the time, but now they look very slim. I didn't say they looked bad. They looked fine. (And they still do...)

I was a child in the 70s and when I look at old photos, the kids seem more rounded then than they do nowadays. I look at old black and white pics of our family and OH's and there's all these little Barrel shaped women. So I'm not necessarily sure we are bigger. We have a family member who is scared of their children becoming fat and is very controlling with their food intake - not a healthy attitude.

@thatoldpinkumbrella

it's not fat shaming to state a simple fact.

What doesn't work is to pretend being overweight is "normal" and to be proud of.

Very true, and it is quite bad (I think) that 'big' (ie, obese) is promoted as beautiful, and good for women to be, and that size 22-24 plus women are perfectly OK as they are, because it is unhealthy to be so big.

I also hate fat-shaming though, so it's finding that middle ground, to encourage people to try and be fitter and more active, and lose weight safely and slowly (and to try and maintain that lower weight.)

I also agree with a pp that it doesn't help that we are being told by the experts that certain things are healthy and good for us one season, and then the next season, it's bad for you. One example is wine.. 'Wine is bad for you, wine causes cancer,' one news report will say in the Springtime... Then by Autumn, a news report comes out that says 'wine is good for you and extends your lifespan by a decade blah blah blah...'

So annoying, and no-one knows where they stand. I just eat whatever the fuck I want now.

Purely anecdotal I know, but I have older family members who have knocked back whiskey and wine for 50-odd years, regularly ate fatty high-carb food, meat, chocolate, biscuits etc etc etc, and smoked for some years, (maybe 10 a day now as they are so expensive,) and they are now 70-90 y.o, fit as fiddles, fairly slim, and more active than some people half their age.

Interesting to see how the fry-up (in the post from 10.43 by @TwelveLeggedWalk ) is half the calories of the 'healthy' breakfast with muesli and smoothie.

I think (and this is only my simple and humble opinion,) that one of the reasons for obesity is women being made to feel they could 'have it all' in the 1980s, and being made to feel like some kind of failure if they weren't a successful career woman, didn't own their home, and weren't a brilliant super-mom.

With all this came the advent of widespread microwave-oven use, and ready meals. So these became the 'norm' as many women didn't have time to cook from scratch as they were so busy and frazzled.

And there's no way men would do the housework and cooking, (most of them anyway.) So as I said, many women were frazzled, and stressed, and chasing their tails all the time, trying to do it all, and dished out ready meals/microwave meals. In addition, they were more likely to have a car, so by the 1990s, women AND their kids didn't walk so much.

Back in the 1970s (and before that,) many women I know didn't drive. In fact, I only knew a couple who did, and most of them didn't have their own car. Some families had only one car, some families had none at all. Everyone walked to school and work, many women didn't work (or only worked 10 hours a week,) and all ate cooked-from-scratch meals.

Society, and all its pressures on women especially are one of the reasons many younger people (and children) are obese now IMO. Not necessarily the MAIN reason, but ONE of the reasons...

I also don't think it helps anyone, to come out with snarky and sanctimonious remarks like 'well I work full time, and I manage to 'cook from scratch' and batch-cook super-healthy meals for MY family.' It just makes those posters look smug and condescending..... and like they think they are more superior somehow..