Why do you think we got fat in the first place?

[waistchallenge]

I've had a history of gaining and losing weight since the age of about 21/22.

Weirdly enough, up to this age things were stable, not slim slim but about an old size 12 which was not deemed attractive at the time, when skinny was fashionable and not having boobs a round bottom, unfortunately. The figure I had then is in fashion now 😞

But I wonder where things went wrong?
I think it's important to consider why and the root causes so we can try and stop going back to being overweight in the future, or lose if that's what is wanted.

Being put on steroids for 4 months somehow added 4 stone. Was OK up till then, not managed to lose all of that 4 stone yet.

Yep, 100% comfort eating. I became fat during COVID lockdowns and I specifically made the decision to eat something every time a severely depressed/anxious thought entered my head.

Sometimes I look at my chubby body and am actually proud of myself because I know that if I hadn't had eaten excessively, I might not still be here.

I think it's the availability of food. We don't have to work hard to get food. Plus, our bodies still send us messages to eat more when it's cold, when we eat sugary food. Certain "foods" don't fill us but send the message to eat more.

So imo, it's a challenge. Not for everyone but for most people out of their 40s. I was size 10, now I'm size 12. I'm only 5'1 though. I know I'm big around the torso.

I try to eat the right things and mostly I do. Still I'm not "slim slim". It"s effort just to be normal
A lot of resisting goes in to being just normal (bmi 26) when I feel the reward should be a thinner body!

But health is it's own reward.

To everyone who uses the car for short journeys, have you tried cutting down and only using the car when you really have to? Sedentary lifestyles are really bad for us and this seems to be a relatively easy one to tackle?

I watched a documentary in Spanish recently so won't link, but Mexico has seen obesity rates begin to fall, finally, after banning some of the worst upf

I agree that it's the increase in UPFs, which are designed to be addictive and are not real foods.

Also, the obsession with calories in, calories out, which seems to sidetrack people into eating 'low-fat' frankenfoods that their bodies don't know how to process.

Dr Chris Van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People) is great on this.

More money. More junk food. More sedentary lifestyles.

Emotional eating, greed, laziness (why cook a healthy meal when you can grab a tasty takeaway)

Like all animals it's hardwired into us to eat as much as possible whenever food is available.

Problem is, too much food is constantly available.

And the more fat you get, the harder it is to lose and the worse it gets. This year I have really started to take control of myself but I tell you something it's getting bloody hard as the nights draw in, the weather turns and my SAD kicks in.

Winter is a diet killer.

Obsession with snacking. We used to wait for meals.

@crackofdoom I do hear that. I have a bmi of 26 so I'm not huuuge, but to get below 25 would involve tolerating more hunger than I can ignore. I already ignore some hunger. I have got down to lower weights in the past but always had a feeling of "this control is going to slip"

A combination of:

The women in my family being obsessed with trying to lose weight and being exposed to all the ridiculous diets and exercise fads they did. As soon as I hit puberty and had some puppy fat, i was roped into their diets with them which were so restrictive and unhealthy it caused me to binge.

Food was also used as an emotional plug gap, especially during times of extreme financial hardship where we didnt have food in the house and a family member would appear with donuts and crisps etc and everything then felt ok again.

It was also used as a reward. Like if I lost weight in slimming world, i was rewarded with a big bar of chocolate.

It had taken years and years to undo the idea that being overweight is wrong, unsightly, unattractive, lazy.

Much like addiction, this is going to be something i have to work on for the rest of my life. But the biggest turning point for me was realising theres no such thing as a quick fix magic diet thats going to fix all my problems and il suddenly be slim forever,

My weight gain is due to a combination of reasons - I've always been half a stone over the 'ideal' weight for my height since I was in my teens and whilst not model shaped, I was never overweight. 5ft 9" and 11 stones in my 20s and gained half a stone per decade up until 5 years ago and have put on a stone since then. Main reasons: comfort eating and lack of movement - ten years ago I had two dogs and would walk them morning and night as well as doing something active each evening either with the kids or waiting for them to do a club. Then kids left home, got divorced, dogs died - going out for a walk or run around a housing estate in the evening isn't fun (used to live in a small village next to fields) so I sit down in front of the TV at 7pm and don't move til I head for the shower at 9pm. I try to get up for the gym Monday-Friday before work but that's gone by the wayside over the past year partly due to bereavement, partly due to peri causing lack of sleep, partly due to an overall feeling of 'why the hell am I bothering'. Between April and October I cycled around 100 miles a week which keeps me somewhat fit but I'm still heading over the 13 stones mark and none of my trousers fit as it's all going on my stomach and tops of thighs!

No jobs in my crap regional town, which means I have to go to work miles away so my day is much longer with commuting. When I lived in SE, I worked 5 minutes away from my flat and an early shift meant I was home before/just after lunch, I got into running in a big way. Late shift meant I had time to exercise in the mornings.

I didn’t drive for years when I lived there as everything was in walking distance (small ‘naice’ town). I live in a new build now in the NW with nothing in walking distance so have to drive everywhere.

Age is also a factor for me, I just feel so much more tired that travelling to work and back is all I can manage. I struggle to go to the gym/do my hobby unless I have the day off afterwards.

Also this idea that we should never feel hungry. So we eat more/snack more often.
People used to feel hungry at times.
We need to learn to be ok with feeling hungry because food will be coming at the appropriate time.

Plus eating until we feel full. Advice my grandma gave me which I wish I'd bloody listened to was always leave the table feeling like you could eat a little more.

This is because it takes a bit of time for our stomach to catch up and so we overeat then feel horribly full ten minutes later.

I was really thin as a teenager and young adult.

That was because I was lactose intolerant but didn't know it, so had really bad alternating diarrhoea and constipation along with horrendous stomach cramps.

Once I stopped eating lactose I put weight on.

I'm now fat, largely because of an accident 10 years ago that meant I had to relearn to walk and can't walk far (blue badge) and use a wheelchair.

I'll take fat and no stomach cramps over thin and horrendous pain.

My more general observations (not about me).

Firstly, what I notice most is the number of younger obese people. I think middle aged women have historically often out on a bit of weight. My grandmother was curvy/chubby but not fat from her 40s onwards. She ate a normal diet. I think after 40s it’s pretty easy to put on weight.

I think a lot of younger people teens to 30s - being so overweight is due to fast food. Even my son in his 20s eats an unbelievable amount of junk, delivered by deliveroo etc. He was brought up on meals made from scratch! Some of it is lack of time or not making time, when he’s working 50-60 hours a week.

And for children who have been brought up with constant fizzy pop, crisps, fast food, and UPFs sweets it must be even worse.

Second whilst there have always been slightly overweight people, it’s the more extreme weight gain now. As another pp said, to get to a couple of stone overweight can ne caused by simply slight overeating. But to put on 5+ stone I think it’s definitely ultra processed food that’s the culprit.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s there were no chocolate croissants, pizzas, giant packets of crisps. But ironically I think food available NOW is often much better in many ways, some of it healthier too than the past (spam fritters anyone?). The variety is amazing. The problem is just the sheer proportion of UPF that outweighs it.

We are in an environment that trains us to train our brains to seek solace, pleasure, relaxation etc from sugary fatty foods. Advertisers have to be far more subtle now than the Cadbury’s Flake in the Bath, telling us about the ‘goodness’ of sugar etc, but the M&S ads promote a sense of luxury and reward. For example.

The connection between ‘treats’ and chocolate and cake, all of it seems to train us to answer the sugar / UPF craving in our brain rather than actually listen to our bodies which tell us what we need via hunger. When I was putting on weight or maintaining an overweight BMI I never ever experienced hunger.

I am not saying we need to live a life of misery and privation, but a twinge of hunger followed by actually enjoying healthier food puts us more in control of our bodies, rather than being at the mercy of our marketing trained brains.

For me, it's pretty simple. I eat and drink a lot more than I burn off. I hate exercise but I love carbs and wine!

I think the world as a whole has an issue of making food fashionable rather than just to fuel your body. There are so many brands, pumped with additives, wrapped with colourful packaging. We have so much more than we need. We have nice food for 'treats' and special occasions. But we don't need it. Hence most people gradually gain weight unless they're very active.

It’s such an interesting question. I definitely eat for comfort - always have, always will I expect. My sister starved herself for comfort which I think is way worse.

but I’m not fat… and I don’t know why. I don’t think it’s ‘fair’ but it’s just how it is. So I do wonder about the role of genes and childhood diet (i come from a home where pretty much everything, inc cake, was made from scratch).

I wish we understood all this more!

For me it was having kids then lifestyle change and busy, stressful jobs, poor sleep meaning I started comfort eating and drinking more then I guess got used to being heavier and found it hard to lose the weight. Also I think there was a hormonal aspect which has made it more challenging as after having kids I was diagnosed with endometriosis and have had ovarian and cervical cancer scares, loop excision etc. And if you are stressed for a long time it really fucks up your ability to lose weight as it messes up your cortisol, adrenal gland etc. I remember in my 30s and for most of my 40s trying lots of times to do what I did in my 20s when my weight crept up - go full on at the gym and do Weightwatchers- and it just made me ill and not lose weight. It wasn't until I got into yoga properly that my weight has stopped yo-yoing around and has been on an overall downward trajectory.

Also what has happened multiple times is that I go at it too hard and give up quickly, or get ill, or my job changes and I can't keep it up, etc. Now I'm in a steady job which doesn't make me ill and less stressed generally, and am back on the combined pill (low oestrogen wasn't exactly helping), I can go to the gym three times a week and work out quite hard without it giving me every cough and cold under the sun.

So basically lifestyle, stress, insomnia, hormones and not doing the right exercise for me at the time.

Also food just tastes really fucking nice these days.

In the olden days in the 1980s when the only olive oil you could get was from the chemist for your ears food was a bit shit really and the last thing I wanted to do was eat more of it.

This is my issue except it isn’t a couple of biscuits. I could literally eat a pack of them. I skip proper meals and reach for crisps and biscuits instead.
I didn’t grow up eating loads of junk food. I distinctly remember when I was twenty two or twenty three and living in a flat share. I ran to the local shop to buy cigarettes and a chocolate bar. I remember seeing a small box of chocolates and impulsively buying them. When I returned to the flat, I felt like I’d bought something illegal. A whole box of chocolates for me, I was giddy with excitement. After that instead of buying a packet of crisps, I’d buy a can of Pringles. At first I’d eat them over a number of nights. Then I started finishing them in one evening.

My weight stayed the same until my late thirties when I had my second child. Since then it’s creeping up all the time.
I lost all the weight with WW and went from size 12 to size 8 but put it all back on.

@Blackandwhitemakesgrey I'm afraid to say I've done the same thing with a box of chocolates in the past. I think I told myself I'd have one a day with my morning coffee, well that didn't happen.

Having said that, I was already overweight at that point and it's not how I got fat in the first place. Perhaps it showed I was beyond caring or I felt my body was a lost cause/too far gone at that point.

Exactly, and it doesn't even need to be snacking on biscuits or eating unhealthy food at all. It can be that, say, your metabolism has slowed and you don't need to eat as much but your brain and stomach tell you that you do, and it's just eating slightly too much over a long period of time, even if that food in itself ticks all the dietary boxes.

For me as well I put four stone on when I was pregnant with DD1, and thought the weight would just drop off me after. Two stone of it did, the other two not so much! The ways I'd learned to control or reduce my weight before just didn't work any more. I was BMI 20-22 before I had kids and after have been up to BMI 32, and have just managed to scratch BMI 25 twice in the last 18 years, currently BMI 27 and falling slowly I hope. Not trying to get to BMI 22 but 24 would be nice.

I was fine and my weight was good until I stopped smoking before my first child. I then developed a sweet tooth which I never had before.

Birth changed my body shape, not for the better. Mostly kept weight ok and settled at a reasonable weight but a bit higher than before.

Dh used to get home late, so I would cook for my only child earlier, but would end up eating her leftovers. She had a very small appetite.

But I had energy and time enough to get to the gym, so kept in check. Then I had a couple of serious health issues, one medical, one a car accident.

My energy levels and ability to keep active went right down. My sweet tooth got worse, but as my weight wasn’t such an issue then I allowed the habit to form.

Then BAM! MENOPAUSE! My ability to lose weight disappeared. In the past I had successfully used various things to cut down a few pounds and these stopped working. Lost my dog to old age, so no longer daily walking. So even though I stopped alcohol at this time, weight crept up.

Started eating better, smaller portions, some home yoga, Pilates, weights.

Then BAM! DIVORCE! So now I’m an emotional wreck and comfort eating. Can’t get motivated to do exercise at home. Dog walks with friends is out as I’m still in the same village as my STBXH and his new girlfriend (my now ex friend) has a dog and are out and about the village.

I am of course going to lose all this weight I’ve put on and get fit once I move away and get my new home. Of course I am!

Moral of the story- Life Happens, start good habits early, keep away from the chocolate.