Spent the weekend with slim people and I now see why I'm overweight

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After having spent the weekend with slim people, it appears that they:

a) don't need as much food to feel full,
I couldn't believe that after X amount of food, they were full - I could have happily carried on eating.

b) can go much longer between meals without eating,
At one point in the afternoon, I was ready to gnaw my arm off, I asked if anyone wanted to stop for a snack (thinking they'd be starving) but no, they were happy to keep going

c) don't crave sweet stuff in the way I do.
I I need sweet things as pudding, I was almost desperate for some chocolate, whereas again they just did not seem to feel that urge.

I am a size 14 and they are 8-10 and now I can see why. It's led me to wonder is it something innate, something physical? Are you just born like that, not to have the appetite or the sweet tooth? Am I simply fighting a losing battle in the vain dream of being a size 10 one day?

I'm size 8-10, in my 40s and have 2 DC. I'm mindful about what I eat, but I find eating is very habit driven...you can get into the habit of eating larger portions and equally you can get into a habit of eating smaller portions.

A few years ago I gained weight following illness. When I got round to losing it, I found my appetite re-set in just over a week. During that time, whenever I felt hungry I reminded myself that our bodies are programmed to over-react to being hungry....we tend to go from slightly peckish to absolutely starving really quickly. I think weaning off sugar is similar.

I also started serving my food on smaller plates. A good guide to portion size is to buy a couple of low-calorie ready meals...M&S do some good ones. They're around 400 calories, so if you have them with a small glass of wine and some fruit/small dessert, that is about the right amount for a meal. It's amazing how little food that looks on the plate, but it really is what a healthy portion size looks like.

As a PP said, everyone is different in terms of their calorific need, but for me, 1600/day is about right, along with about 30 mins of exercise. I only snack if I know I'll be having a late dinner.

Also, I don't have any banned foods...I drink a small glass of wine most days and eat a few pieces of good quality chocolate (3-4 pieces normally). It's not about dieting, but having a healthy, sustainable lifestyle.

I think that continuing to eat when you're full is just as wasteful as throwing food away, so the clearing the plate = avoiding waste thing is a bit misleading. Ideally excess food should be saved for another day.

I am so sorry bananafish I shall ask for my post to be deleted.

Actually, if I am sad or upset I lose my appetite as well. I can't comfort eat.

I have several friends who had anorexia (very common at my very academic girls school) and it is a psychological disease. It's horrible, it changes your personality, you become very secretive and devious. Eating disorders are horrible, horrible diseases. I wouldn't throw accusations and cod diagnoses around lightly

@CaveMum yep I'm skinny PCOS too. The consultant who diagnosed me told me 'I know you're going to say 'but I'm not fat and hairy' but it's not uncommon to be lean and have PCOS'. I have acne and polycystic ovaries and don't ovulate, but no insulin resistance. I have an insatiable appetite for chocolate - I just don't want to eat much else!!

@LoniceraJaponica thank you - our posts crossed. I call it 'sadness starvation'. When my mum died I lost half a stone in 10 days.

Depends what size of plate you are clearing.

Six roast potatoes, half a pound of roast beef, gravy, veg, Yorkshire puddings vs plate half full of veg, two slices beef, three boiled spuds, splash of gravy and no Yorkshires looks different IFYSWIM.

What Acadia said.

I am slim and short and have always been. If I get stressed I loose my appetite completely. I can go days without eating.
I do like and enjoy food. I do get hungry and look forward to meals.
But if I'm out for dinner and feel too full after the main course, I am happy to skip dessert - even if I was looking forward to something beforehand. I simply cannot eat any more and I stop. I do not eat all meals consistently however - I may skip breakfast or lunch on various days.
However there is some caution for habit: in the past when I have esteem regularly I would get hungry around the mealtime. It is possible to teach / habit yourself into eating more

i am fairly slim - not bothered by food and would probably be happy to take my food as a pill if that was an option. I dislike planning meals shopping and cooking. I love going out for a meal because i don't have to do any of that [or the washing up afterwards either]

I can' t manage without breakfast or lunch but would happily miss dinner most days. I don't tend to feel hungry after about 2pm altho i do tend to eat something in the evening.

Im a size 8-10 and a constant grazer. I always have fruit and veg handy. Ive also noticed my friends who are much, much bigger eat far, far more than me. Im on my feet all day too. I may get to sit down for 40 minutes. The rest of the time im walking around.

Also, our grandparents ate pies, chips, crust, pudding etc because they had manual jobs and walked all the time. They were slim.

We're sat mincing on mnet but still stuffing our faces with the same foods they ate. There's bound to be an imbalance!

They didnt snack though. Snacking is a very new thing.

I'm slim and a frequent grazer.

I am quite happy to have very small main meals, though, to wait for many hours before eating, or refrain from snacks when I know a big meal is in my near future.

@swampytiggaa are you me?!!

Eating 3 meals a day involves actually thinking about what to eat three times a day. I feel hungry when I wake up, and look forward to my lunch, but after 3pm I'm done. I rarely eat dinner unless I'm eating out.

Eating out is great because I don't have to think about anything, someone else makes it: I don't have to think about what I fancy (I dunno, I don't fancy anything, so it's easier to default to 'nothing'), someone has picked a selection of things to choose from, and I just choose something off the menu.

I went on a yoga holiday in July with a friend and ate three delicious wholesome meals a day, because it was all done and laid out for me. I came home and my good intentions to keep on eating went to pot.

I'm pretty average but I've worked with a few larger ladies (at different jobs) and they drove me to distraction talking about food. In the morning, they talked about what they ate last night/were going to eat at lunchtime. In the afternoon, they talked about what they ate at lunchtime/were going to eat for dinner. In between all this they were eating snacks and drinking lattes and hot chocolates. Portion sizes were also larger than I could manage.

I think if you're serious about shifting the pounds then three meals a day and no snacks is a good start. I'd say overeating is just a bad habit that people get into.

@DivisionBelle “Sugar and comfort food is an addiction. You can break it, within a week.”

In a week?! After a lifetime?!

Sounds like a challenge to me although surely it can’t be as easy as that???

The outer edge of the store thing doesn't work in UK supermarkets as that is almost always where the doughnuts and pastries are.

And the 5 ingredient rule would rule out most curries and chillis and even the hearty, nourishing stew your grandma might make (can't vouch for mine as I never sampled her cooking, though dripping and rissoles featured heavily)

I’d say it takes more than a week, but less than a month. The first week is definitely the hardest though, that’s when you get all the headaches and withdrawal symptoms. Then after about two weeks you suddenly get tired, but that passes after a few days.

The way to think about it is that your gut needs to retrain itself and there needs to be a change in the gut bacteria in order for them to process the more wholesome food, which takes more work for them, than the easy to digest sugars.

Size 14 is absolutely fine! I get mad when some fashion companies describe a 14 as XXL or something!

I've never had any cravings for sweet food, I don't snack between my healthy, home cooked meals and I've never needed to eat much to stay full.

However, at almost 40, I am a size 16, whereas I effortlessly used to be a size 8-10 in my twenties. I wish could figure out why - my exercise levels have remained pretty same ... surely metabolism can't change that much?

he says an interesting thing about hunger and what he learnt about it when he was trialing the diets and basically it was that hunger won't get worse and worse over the day- it will peak and dip and you won't fall flat on your face from a sugar low just because you haven't eaten for a few hours.
It doesn't work like that. Most people are scared of being hungry, they think something terrible will happen and that they have to eat immediately, they don't.

Except if you're like me and let your blood sugar drop too low, start shaking, and sweating, which then progresses to vomiting and fainting.
I don't know, i'm also a bit weary of giving things up. Toi avoid terrible migraines, I've had to give up all forms of alcohol completely, more than about 100g of red meat, and more than 30g of chocolate.

It's just a bit...dull. Like some previous posters, I also see food as one of life's pleasures. I feel a bit sad for people for whom it's purely functional.

I agree you can break it in a week.
I was astonished how quickly the weight slipped off at the beginning of the year when I adopted the following:

No snacking - if desperate for a snack, then fruit only (this automatically reduced the amount of sugar and rubbish I ate because I do generally cook healthy meals)
Reduce portion size, in particular reduce carbs. So I'd dish up my meal on a side plate and have say 2/5 protein, 2/5 veg, 1/5 carb (if that).
No fizzy drinks. Water only or lemon squash (reduced sugar) if desperate.
Increase exercise (from say 3x a week to 5x a week).

None of this was particularly difficult to do but it did require self-discipline and determination. I wasn't particularly hungry especially as I allowed myself to snack on fruit. As time went by the need to snack reduced substantially. I also found that my consumption of bread was hugely reduced. My body got used to a much lower intake. I lost one stone in a month and two stone in 2-3 months.

Over the last two/three months (holidays got in the way) I've slipped off the straight and narrow a bit and haven't lost any more weight so I need to refocus. But I am totally confident that I can get back into that way of eating and be perfectly happy with it. Just need to re-establish the discipline when back from holiday.

I recently got down to a size 12 from a size 14 but I have to watch everything I eat. I have always been a size 14, even when I was a teenager. I am the kind of person who could put on a pound just by looking at some chocolate.

I did not really diet, just focused on reducing the amounts of food I was eating and stuck to these principles:

• every meal has to have 1 green vegetable/1 other vegetable/1 fruit/1 source of protein.
• pasta/potatoes/rice/bread.. are optional depending of my activity levels and do not take up more than a 1/4 of my plate
• I got smaller nice plates and binned the huge IKEA plates (best thing I have done, I eat about a third less food without noticing)
• I can eat whatever I want but if it is "treat food" i have to either make it from scratch (cinnamon rolls, cookies..) or make a special trip to the shops to get it. Usually my laziness beats my craving and i give up or I get extra exercise
• I start each meal with a tall glass of water. It does reduce my appetite
• I walk to work and to wherever I can. About an hour every day
• I got into yoga by doing the 30 days boot camp with Yoga With Adrienne (YouTube), it is great
• I go swimming about once a week (but I am a former swimmer and swim long distances, usually between 1.5 and 2km)
• apart from the occasional Starbucks latte, I only drink black coffee, black tea or herbal tea and never add sugar/milk.

I have never really snacked but maybe you could try postponing eating your dessert until around snack time? And make it a piece of fruit?

But I agree, biology does play a big part in how quick you put on/lose weight. I have always had a decent diet (fruit/veggies, no soda, rarely got takeaway, no sweet things/biscuits/crisps at home...etc) and yet always been size 14. My (adopted) brother on the other hand is tall and lanky and at 25 mainly lives off extra sweet tea, burgers, fries and candy. Unfair

read the thread. Learned loads, thank you for the insightful posts.

I drank 2 large glasses of wine and ate 3 mince pies as I read the thread...

this is probably a significant factor in the shape of my massive arse.

We have a kid that is chronically unwell, and I use food as a crutch. I eat when I am happy, when I am sad, when I am worried and when I am celebrating.

I love exercise, but, I manage to make myself so busy doing other things (which I enjoy less) that I don't actually move as much as I need to for basic health.

It's a mindset. I need to put myself first, stop dicking about and...finish this bottle of wine to start afresh tomorrow.

OP - I have spent years observing the eating habits of the slim and have noticed the following (none of which I put into practise which is why my BMI remains at 26)

• some of them do just seem to have faster metabolisms or something which means that they can eat cake & pudding, snack why they fancy it and magically remain slim. Some of these women are in their 50s so it can't be put down to being young

• others appear to fall into the above category but you gradually realise they walk the 2 miles to work and the 2 miles home again each day or they have a dog they talk for a brisk 30 min walk each day with a longer walk at weekends so, whilst they don't class it as exercise, they are exercising

• others are incredibly regimented around food. One friend stunned me once in refusing a bit of cake on her own birthday on a Monday as she was going out on Friday and would have a slice then. I would have seen it as the perfect reason for two slices of cake if not more. Likewise, when she gets raging PMT, she permits herself two small squares of dark chocolate. I have a massive bar of chocolate and the best part of a tub of Haagen Daas.

• Others are less regimented but just seem less bothered about food e.g. at a drinks party, they won't even notice the crisps whereas I will spot them as soon as I walk into the room, hear them calling to me all evening, have one or two and suddenly have scoffed the whole bowl.

When I was younger I didn’t have much interest in food and at 5’3” was around 7.5 stone. I ran 2 miles every morning, then rode 10 miles, round trip to work and rode my horse almost daily. I had boundless energy.

When I was 30 things very went wrong. One day, while peddling home from work, my blood sugar plummeted, it had never happened before and it went on to became a long term problem. I could no longer go all day without eating and also noticed that I had no energy unless I had just eaten, which gave me a short burst of energy that wouldn’t last long at all. I started over-eating just to get any do physical work - housework.

At about the same time, age 30 I had a bad riding accident which prevented me from ever running again and within a year I’m about 20 lbs overweight. It got much worse from there. About 10 years ago I developed auto immune disease and have been on steroids for most of that time.

I don’t really over-eat because I’m hungry, I do it for the energy just to be able to do things, such as house work. I don’t understand it. Does anyone else have this problem? It's as if my metabolism went wrong all those years ago.

Alcohol is my downfall. As soon as I get a glass of wine in my hand I get the raging munchies.