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.

I do think body image and self perception plays a part too, fuelled by the media treating women like walking clothes horses.

I was convinced that I was obese when I was 14/15, and so I basically ate like it didn't matter as I was already gross and fat.

Of course, looking back at photos, I was absolutely nothing of the sort. But it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For me as @ISeeTheLight, I’ve had an underactive thyroid for a few years undiagnosed which is why I’m guessing I might’ve put on weight. I was a fairly normal size 10 in my 20s until my late 20s when I went to a size 12 on bottom half but stayed a 10 on top but I had done a lot of exercise and been very active in my 20s and late 20s was more of a sedentary office job but still active. Emotional eating and drinking put on weight.

For me it is lifestyle.

I don't actually eat that much and don't eat for comfort either.

But I've changed from when u was at Uni without a car.

Regularly doing 15-20 minutes walk to bus station. Walking between buildings and lecture halls.

Walking home from town up to an hour walk with mates cos I want to save on the bus fair.
Literally walking everywhere and then when forced pay for a bus.

Now in the mornings I walk a few steps to the car on the drive.

Drive to work. Walk a few steps to my office. No stairs. Literally less than a minute walk on flat ground.

Sit down all day. And walk back to car. Get home exhausted and rest.

As soon as I got a car my weight increased.

Then when my job changed from a more active one to mainly sitting in an office weight got worse even though I eat a lot less.

@jesmonabullets
Don't use the word 'treats' and you eliminate the specialness of these foods.

The polarity of treat vs. healthy is damaging.

It's all food, composed of various elements - protein, calcium, carbohydrates simple and complex, vitamins, minerals, fibre both soluble and insoluble, etc.

The best approach is to promote balance and moderation.

I think relationships and kids too can be part of it- feeling the obligation to cook 'a full dinner' each night, end up eating same size portions as your partner - buying treats if you feel a bit shit or want to lift things in family , drinking coz they are doing so, takeaway coz they want one - etc, etc!!

Personally I was set up as a child. It was pretty much inevitable.

I have 3 sisters and all of us have issues with weight and one has/had an ED but is still really thin.

We were starved as children. Only on Christmas Day did I ever feel sated. We ate one meal a day, weren't allowed drinks except water, and never had sweets, fruity or allowed to bulk up the evening meal with bread and butter.

My mum would make a fray bentos pie do 7 people. 2 men, her and my sisters and I were all teenagers.

When I left and moved away it was access to all the things I had never had FOMO. Weight fluctuates but I am now about 4st more than I would like.

Still seem unable to stop myself from "treat" foods. I don't eat until about 3/4pm but once the bottle is uncorked ....

I was fat because I ate too much and led a sedentary lifestyle. Ate quite a bit less and fell in love with exercise and nutrition, I'm no longer fat!

I think it’s tiredness and find I go for the quick easy food because I’m always running between work the school and the train station

Yes I find it quite odd now how during my obese years the thought of being hungry even for an hour was horrible, I was constantly snacking or picking at things. Now being hungry for a bit doesn't bother me at all. I'm not going to die of starvation if I have to wait a few hours for my next meal.

I’ve lost 5 stone and kept it off. I always knew I used food as a reward or to manage tough feelings, but now I see that I also had lost sight of portion size and my portions gradually got bigger. Drastically underestimating the amount of walking I did.

also the idea that a woman needs 2000 calories a day. I eat 1600 and maintain on that weight, even though I am active, because I’m short. People say “you eat FAR too little” without fully considering the facts.

I now treat myself with other things, like a candle lit bath or a new nail varnish.

In the Olden Days Instead of a biscuit or two with our coffee we would have had a cigarette. We would not have thought of packets of chocolate biscuits in the desk drawer. 20 Players, well yes. Just saying.

I’ve thought deeply about this. For me I started to gain weight as a junior doctor working 100 hour weeks often on night shifts, that plus stress of the job probably wrecked my metabolism. I was exhausted all the time and had to be alert for the job so felt I needed the sugar rush to stay awake/alert on duty. I also had little opportunity to exercise due to long working hours, also the hospitals had zero healthy options in canteens and we were a captive audience (I even lived on site at one point).

I had started to lose the weight again after the European working time directive reduced the punishing working hours, and I deliberately tried to eat more healthily and started biking to work instead of taking public transport (I was only able to do this because I was working on a neonatal unit which had some shower rooms for staff at the time for infection control reasons, it remains rare, otherwise I would have been sweaty and smelly and looked unprofessional all day).

Then I got pregnant (before I’d lost as much weight as I’d have liked, I had assumed it wouldn’t happen the first month of trying…) I felt like absolute shit all through my pregnancy, in retrospect that’s probably when I developed my underactive thyroid but at the time I thought it was normal to feel that exhausted in pregnancy especially as I was still working full time, commuting, doing night shifts and evening shifts etc. Again in retrospect maybe I should have taken time off work or started my mat leave early as I just felt so awful but taking sick leave especially while pregnant is culturally very frowned upon in the medical profession. So I felt I had to keep pushing through. Eating was the only thing that made me feel marginally better for a short while so I ate a lot, I also found it hard to judge how much weight I was gaining in pregnancy as traditionally I went by whether my jeans fitted etc and of course they didn’t anyway due to pregnancy. But I had gained too much weight. Though I was surprised after I had the baby that it wasn’t as much as I’d actually thought.

Initially while breastfeeding the weight dropped off me fast but I then got puerperal psychosis and ended up sectioned and put on olanzapine. I went from a size 12-14 to a size 20 within literally weeks, and I was so out of it at the time I didn’t even realise. Didn’t even work, they had to stop it and put me on lithium. It was only later when I’d recovered enough to understand reality again that I was like “what the hell happened to my body?!”. At the time I was manic and psychotic and genuinely saw myself as super slim and attractive in the mirror. It was like it happened overnight to me. I was very depressed about it and because I was sectioned I had no control over the unhealthy food I was again being offered as a captive audience and had no opportunity to exercise. There was a swimming pool where I was sectioned in a mother and baby unit by that point, but I had to beg for permission to use it and for a staff member to look after my baby while I went so it didn’t happen that often. It only happened at all because I put in a formal complaint about the food and exercise opportunities for someone like me who was gaining significant weight under their care while deprived of my liberty under section and not able to make free choices.

I was only really able to try and lose weight when I got out of the hospital, but it was difficult while still on lithium which made me sluggish and I ended up getting very depressed to the point of being suicidal and my psychiatrist asked me to forget the focus on my weight for now as being on a diet was clearly making things worse, and focus more on my mental health. He said there would be time to lose weight later…

Almost 20 years later and I haven’t managed it. I genuinely think it’s so much harder to lose weight once it’s gone on than prevent it going on in the first place. It affects your hormones, appetite, everything. I’ve had a constant series of major adverse life events and stress since then including domestic abuse, divorce, child custody battle, child abduction, sudden death of a sibling, and let’s not forget two economic crashes and a pandemic in the background, all while trying to do a stressful job as an NHS doctor. I also developed an underactive thyroid at some point which I believe went unrecognised and untreated for years. I was going to Slimming World and eating less than everyone else around me, while gaining 4 pounds every week, it was soul destroying and really broke a previous link for me between being able to restrict my food to lose weight and know that that would work.

After my thyroid was treated I did really well for about 9 months when I moved from one soul destroying NHS job to another, in the “honeymoon period” at the beginning of a new job where they’re glad to have recruited you and are careful not to overload you with work in case you leave again, and you can actually stick to the work hours you have on paper. I started eating more healthily with home cooked food and less prepared food, and went swimming very regularly. Got down to a size 16. Then they started overloading me and my sibling died, then the pandemic happened and I couldn’t go swimming regularly anymore and I was very stressed and again turned to comfort eating. So gained again.

Now I have gallstones which is again making it hard to eat healthily, and the pandemic and neglect of the NHS for the past 10 years plus patient abuse is still making the job super stressful. I’m now a size 22 and don’t know that I’ll ever manage to lose weight now. I want to but I am basically pretty burned out from both home and work stress at this point and feel I need to find a way to resolve that first before I can get anywhere, while still earning money as a single parent to support us in the basic living essentials of life. I’d like to try the weight loss injections but they’re too expensive, hard to physically get these days, and I’m a bit scared of potential side effects especially with my gallbladder problems. Argh!! These days I am trying hard to go with the body positivity or at least body neutrality movement, accept myself as I am and try to look as good as I can while this size, while also trying to eat healthily and exercise more whether that results in weight loss or not.

In conclusion, olanzapine has a hell of a lot to answer for in my case, along with pregnancy, work stress, bereavement, domestic abuse and all of the fallout from it. And my tendency to turn to comfort eating to deal with stress (I often wonder if I was a smoker instead I’d be slim, or just fat with a smoking habit also!) But I also blame a background of coming of age in the very fat phobic 90s and childhood of 70s-80s poor dietary advice. And a background U.K. culture of long working hours and tendency to squeeze as much out of employees without giving anything, without adequate provision for exercise and showering facilities and healthy food options at work, and a focus on the car pushing out lots of bike lanes on the road, creating “food deserts” etc. We definitely live in an obesogenic environment so although I accept some degree of personal responsibility I also think my personal challenges in life and the wider U.K. policies and accepted culture (including ongoing “fat phobia”) makes it very difficult to remain slim. The cards most definitely feel stacked against me. But I haven’t totally given up yet.

OK this turned into a bit of an essay lol which nobody may actually be interested in reading but it still feels good to get that off my chest!

Because we ate. A lot.

I would also say the availability of convenience food.
When my parents wanted to get petrol, they went and got petrol, went into the station and paid. These days, people get their petrol, go into the station and get coffee, doughnuts and deli food.

Being less active, using food as a treat/ reward. Having more disposable income to buy extra food.

I agree with other posters.
It has become normalised to walk about in public eating and drinking. I see school children going into Greggs every morning coming out with pastries and coffees. This would never have happened when I was a child.
My mother frowned upon people eating and drinking in the streets and people scoff at this but she has remained slim all her life.
People don’t do as much physical exercise. Walking everywhere was the norm when I was a child and young woman. Now that’s a rarity.
Even at school children did much harder physical exercise.
Take aways and fast food.
I don’t remember ever having these as a child. Only dish and chips as a treat.
Fizzy drinks. These were only bought very occasionally as they were expensive. Same with cream cakes.
Fresh fish and vegetables were relatively cheaper and bought not from supermarkets but fishmongers and greengrocers.
There is so much crap available now it’s frightening.

@LittleBigJam I agree, my 20 year old will order a takeaway. I may not have cooked from scratch but there may have been pasta with tuna/broccoli, prsto sauce and cheese to grate over it. But she rather blow 20 euro on a takeaway 🤔
I likeva takeaway occasionally myself, but it's the breezy ease with which she orders herself a takeaway!!! If id done that whole living at home my parents' jaws would have dropped yo the floor!

I'm mainly interested in people's personal experiences because the main drivers at a societal level are well known, i.e. what happened to you not what do you think happened to everyone else. And also it's pretty apparent from reading the replies that people cite different causes for themselves gaining weight personally vs. the posts which are observations about society.

I only successfully keep weight off when I’m having regular counselling which suggests to me I use food to numb my feelings and stress effects my weight.

Also I’ve been on a diet or off the wagon since I was about 12, so I don’t even know what normal is for me. I’m starting Zoe soon so I’m hoping some data helps me to make informed choices on what is good for me to eat.

Can I just say that we are all valuable human beings regardless of our size and I can see how much posters are beating themselves up for weight gain and I wish you weren’t and I wish I didn’t either x

Another thing is portion size. I think this has increased a lot so now it’s normal.
When I was a teenager I used to have one beef burger and some baked beans that was it. No chips or bread bun and it filled me.

Portion size just creeps up without you realising.

examples from this week alone - DH and I sat down with a cup of tea and some malted milk biscuits. I ate one. He ate six. Prior to the weight loss, I’d have eaten six too probably.

took the kids to Krispy Kreme (we have a factory here). DH ate one of the big fancy ones, biscoff or Nutella. Double the calories and size of the small plain ring ones. There are more calories in a Nutella one than in some of the dinners I make. So we all had a donut, but my donut was technically half of DH’s donut.

I wouldn’t have thought of any of that before. I’d just have eaten it and thought “I’ll walk that off easily”

Your metabolism slowing down at say 30 is one thing which affected me. I could moreorless eat what I wanted before then. Afterwards, I still could to a certain degree but it wasn’t as easy to lose it as before. I was fairly lucky though, in my 30s I could lose fairly easily on diets with exercise. 40s harder but still doable. 50s significantly harder.

I keep reading that the idea of a metabolism slowing down is a myth unless thyroid is causing you problems.

I've always believed it was true as well but from following a lot of fitness/nutritionists, they all now say it isn't true.

First stone overweight: sent to stay in a posh hotel by my employer to work, for months, and they paid for anything I ate. So I ate.

Second stone overweight: IVF drugs and not being able to exercise during surgery.

Third stone overweight: resting after an injury.

That’s interesting! Never heard that myself but it does make sense. No one tested me for underactive thyroid until I was about 37/38. Took a year or so to get correct levels of levothyroxine for me.