Are your children fat? Why are they fat?

Tarzana

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

I had to tell her to sort her life out in front of everyone for her own good.

:pac:

That was big of you. Such largesse. Pun intended.

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

Many of these "people" felt they were the be all and the end all when we were in school. Elite players on the football team. Now they are stuck with big bellies and no ambition. The game of life isn't a sprint. And I passed them out many years ago.

Somebody is a tad chippy. Pun intended.

DildoFaggins

Glock Lesnar wrote: »

I'm currently at 8% bodyfat, and my arms are still 16 inches (and growing) didn't come here to argue just to gloat.

Sure Mr.Lesnar whatever you say.

Bafucin

It is just the way some people are. I am built like a pole, I eat like horse. Some kids gain it easier.

I eat takeaways and crap. Some people exercise and eat well but might be twice my size. Your build is your build some people are prone to being overweight.

mariaalice

I know the statistic's about fat children, we can only go by our experience's my children were never fat and between my sibling there would be 14 children none would be fat, where I live you don't see fat children much, its so rare that you would look and notice it, so where are all these massive over weight children.

Soft Falling Rain

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

I live in Germany but I travel back to Ireland fairly often. Though there are much more Plus Size Padlings in Ireland than you'd see on the continent, it's not as anywhere near as bad as the adults.

I was home for Christmas last winter and ran into some of the ”people” I went to school with for the first time in the best part of a decade. It's incredible to see how quickly they've let themselves go, and they're barely in their 30s: big bulbous bloodshot eyes, massive bellies hanging over their jeans barely contained in their Penney's shirts, huge pink balding heads with high blood pressure.

They all looked like raging Elmer Fudds. Most of them had stopped getting regular exercise since drinking took over their desire to play Gaelic football back in their early 20s but, really, it was all diet to blame. Supermacs twice or three times a week, fried breakfast every morning and a feed of drink all weekend. One morbidly obese girl I went to school with spends her weekends drinking TWO boxes of Tesco red wine (both nights) and listening to best of the 80s playlists instead of mixing with people, dancing, cycling etc. I had to tell her to sort her life out in front of everyone for her own good.

Once I saw the word people in inverted commas I knew this was going to be a fun read.

They all looked like Elmer Fudd eh? You're not from a town that takes part in a bit of incest by any chance?

Sam Kade

Rough Sleeper wrote: »

Nintendos, now there's a genericised trademark I haven't heard in a while. I bet your refer to nightclubs as "discos" too.

And wouldn't anti-social behaviour be conducive to weight loss? All that yanking down saplings and running from police sounds like it'd burn a fair few calories.

Police :rolleyes:

Barely There

I know a couple with quite a fat 18 month old kid. I mean he has rolls of belly fat going on.
They're always saying that'he's always eating'.

Feck sake - the kid has only just started walking, he's hardly making dinner for himself in the evenings. The reason he's always eating is because they're always feeding him.

Real lack of parental responsibility from some people.

Tarzana

Soft Falling Rain wrote: »

Once I saw the word people in inverted commas I knew this was going to be a fun read.

They all looked like Elmer Fudd eh? You're not from a town that takes part in a bit of incest by any chance?

I know a guy like Aongus there. Was in my year in school. Wasn't mad popular but wasn't excluded either. An inbetweener type, like many of us. But he was always chippy as hell, like he felt he wasn't getting the adulation he thought he deserved or something. Nowadays claims to the co-founder of a start-up but isn't on the founder's list on the website.

John_Rambo

mariaalice wrote: »

I know the statistic's about fat children, we can only go by our experience's my children were never fat and between my sibling there would be 14 children none would be fat, where I live you don't see fat children much, its so rare that you would look and notice it, so where are all these massive over weight children.

It's your social and economic situation.

I'm guessing you're close to or in a city, you and your peers are relatively well educated, active, babies are breast fed, use public transport, cycle, walk a bit, have energetic holidays, exercise etc...? We have caught up with the Americans now when it comes to waistlines. I reckon we will follow the trend. New Yorkers are the fittest in the USA. The city folk are the fitter folk.

In saying that, the inhabitants of some of the monster sprawling estates outside cities have incredibly unhealthy lifestyles.

ComplyOrDie

mariaalice wrote: »

I know the statistic's about fat children, we can only go by our experience's my children were never fat and between my sibling there would be 14 children none would be fat, where I live you don't see fat children much, its so rare that you would look and notice it, so where are all these massive over weight children.

McDonalds

mariaalice

John_Rambo wrote: »

It's your social and economic situation.

I'm guessing you're close to or in a city, you and your peers are relatively well educated, active, babies are breast fed, use public transport, cycle, walk a bit, have energetic holidays, exercise etc...? We have caught up with the Americans now when it comes to waistlines. I reckon we will follow the trend. New Yorkers are the fittest in the USA. The city folk are the fitter folk.

In saying that, the inhabitants of some of the monster sprawling estates outside cities have incredibly unhealthy lifestyles.

That mostly true children walk to school from the estate I live, in we have the dart and bus service so a lot of people use these to get to work and have to walk to them and walk when they get off. There is someone who teaches music near me and children walk to her to get lessons, I see them with there violins and guitars, children paly on the green, they walk to see their friends because there near they don't need to dropped to their friends by car, I never really though of this before but my wider family would be very active lots of sport form rugby to Gaa to running to cycling and we are all walkers both adult and children so maybe thats it. There would not be much going on about healthy eating though.

Wibbs

Diego Simeone wrote: »

No empirical evidence to support that. It's a tabloid headline that's been debunked by a number of experts.

Aye, though I would bet that complications that arise from diabetes type conditions will be worse. Dementia for a start.

biko wrote: »

Fat kids usually have fat parents.
It must therefore be the genes.

If it was genetic then waistlines wouldn't have steadily climbed in parts of the west over the last 40 years. Sure there may be genes involved at the extreme ends of the scale both thin and fat, but for most in the middle it's down to lifestyle.

generalmental wrote: »

Turned out that my Atkins/Paleo Diet that I had been on a couple of months before had actually caused me to get Diverticulitis I was only 35 and the doctor told me it is a condition for over 50s.

Since then I started eating properly and all healthy very very little processed crap and some exercise. Now im typing this as a 115kg man.

Balanced diet and some exercise it's the way forward.

I agree, though odd that a paleo diet was blamed for your condition. The paleo diet is a pretty good one consisting of good fats and veg and no processed crap(though don't get me started on the name). A few studies have shown that a high fibre diet may actually increase the chance of diverticulitis. Here's one such study. High intake of fiber did not reduce the prevalence of diverticulosis. Instead, the quartile with the highest fiber intake had a greater prevalence of diverticulosis than the lowest . Neither physical inactivity nor intake of fat or red meat was associated with diverticulosis.

mariaalice

ComplyOrDie wrote: »

McDonalds

That Mc Donalds thing is a lazy excuser the occasion Mc Donalds is harmless I think there is a bit too much emphases on food and not enough on exercise to be honest.

twinytwo

MrsYelnekoff wrote: »

It's 80% diet and 20% exercise!! I think once a week for mcdonalds is too much in my opinion. Once a month is healthier.

McDonalds is such crap though... I rarely eat it if ever and I usually wake up the next day feeling like **** because of it.

Wibbs

mariaalice wrote: »

I think there is a bit too much emphases on food and not enough on exercise to be honest.

I'd partially agree M. Though I would say it's a lot easier to not eat something containing 800 calories than try to burn off 800 calories through exercise.

Amirani

Wibbs wrote: »

Aye, though I would bet that complications that arise from diabetes type conditions will be worse. Dementia for a start.

Absolutely, this is the caveat. Despite the growing obesity epidemic in the developed world, life expectancy is still growing at extremely fast rates - including for obese people. However, what is happening is that quality of life is significantly decreasing in later years for these people, due to the onset of diseases such as diabetes. Living til your 90 is great, not so much if you simultaneously lose your eyesight and have to have a limb amputation.

Interestingly, being slightly overweight (i.e. not obese) seems to be best for your life expectancy. This is probably because you're more likely to be considered part of a risk group and thus will be subject to more health screenings and doctor consultations.

Shenshen

Wibbs wrote: »

If it was genetic then waistlines wouldn't have steadily climbed in parts of the west over the last 40 years. Sure there may be genes involved at the extreme ends of the scale both thin and fat, but for most in the middle it's down to lifestyle.

I think that's only looking at half the story, there.

Yes, waistlines have only started increasing rather recently. They started increasing at a point where our food started to become both more nutritious and much more easily available.

So, if you were genetically predisposed to overeating or to store your food more quickly than others, that would previously not have become very noticeable, as there simply was not enough nutrition about to allow you to grow larger than someone else with a different genetic makeup.

There's a good few genetic conditions that were recently practically unknown because our environment was such that they rarely if ever became noticeable - the number of Alzheimer-sufferers for example has been going up and up since people started to live longer. Previously, a lot of people with a genetic pre-disposition for it (although obviously not all cases are down to genetics) would have died before any signs of the disease would ever show up.

I'm not saying that the weight on people's body did not get there through their mouths - at a very basic level, being overweight always stems from eating more calories than you burn off over a certain period of time.
But I think that this is oversimplifying the issue and won't contribute anything to finding a solution for anyone.
Bodies are complex, and simply comparing a thin person to a fat person is not necessarily going to give you any clues as to why one is skinny and the other fat.

Personally, I think genetics is a very good starting point for trying to find an answer to that. Why would some people be more inclined to eat more than others?
Why do some people's bodies store energy more than others (I point you to all the posters on here claiming to eat like horses, not exercise and yet remaining stick-thin)?
How much is nature (or genetics) and how much is nurture (or learned bad eating habits)?

I don't want to point fingers at anyone for something I don't know they even have control over.

mariaalice

I think some way of living and life styles are more naturally prone to be healthy such as farming that involves a lot of manual work or for example living near a beach which I do, at 8.30pm in the evening you will see people swimming and cannoning, walking and running and so on, so you have a group of people who use public transport to get to work, and live near enough to a situation where you can use a recreation area that make exercise fun varied and interesting.

Amirani

Shenshen wrote: »

Personally, I think genetics is a very good starting point for trying to find an answer to that. Why would some people be more inclined to eat more than others?
Why do some people's bodies store energy more than others (I point you to all the posters on here claiming to eat like horses, not exercise and yet remaining stick-thin)?
How much is nature (or genetics) and how much is nurture (or learned bad eating habits)?

I don't want to point fingers at anyone for something I don't know they even have control over.

I think this may be fair. Genetics may well be the underlying cause behind some people's insatiable appetite for food and lack of restraint. It may have some effect on the metabolic process and hence how much energy ends up being stored as fat.

Using genetics as an excuse for being prone to weight gain though I think is probably incorrect. There's a clear causal effect here between people in developed countries eating too many calories and being overweight. Some may seem to defy this convention, but it still exists. As you alluded to, asking why do people overeat rather than why are people overweight is the sensible question here.

Shenshen

Diego Simeone wrote: »

I think this may be fair. Genetics may well be the underlying cause behind some people's insatiable appetite for food and lack of restraint. It may have some effect on the metabolic process and hence how much energy ends up being stored as fat.

Using genetics as an excuse for being prone to weight gain though I think is probably incorrect. There's a clear causal effect here between people in developed countries eating too many calories and being overweight. Some may seem to defy this convention, but it still exists. As you alluded to, asking why do people overeat rather than why are people overweight is the sensible question here.

I would definitely agree to not accepting genetics as an excuse. Not in the sense of simply pointing a finger to your genes and settling back not even bothering to attempt to maintain your weight, or even lose some if you can.

But I think it would be beneficial to try and get it into the public consciousness that if you happen to be slim and had no problems maintaining your weight ever in your life, it's not correct to assume that this is the same for everyone else and therefore everyone who is overweight "let themselves go" or are too lazy or too stupid to be as slim as you.

M1982

At the outset I'd have to say that my kids are not fat (not yet anyway) but I'll admit that I will have to go back and re look at the slippages in their diets over last few years.

I started out at the BFing, organic cooking, water not juice, no rubbish Monday to Friday Mum and I was ever so slightly smug about how healthy I was gonna raise my kids..... I planned on improving diets as they got older and having salads from an early age.....

Well that has all become a distant memory now. Dont get me wrong, I still cook as healthily as possible for them, and I try not to allow too much slippage but I will be the first to admit that I'm not wonder mum. Both my husband and I work 5 days a week so the girls are in creche and have very healthy balanced options there. But the evenings are such a rush of frayed nerves, cranky kids, washing, cleaning and trying to find playtime, that waffles, oven chips, ketchup, sausages and beans are becoming more frequent and steamed fish, brown rice and anything that remotely requires "selling " to a 3 year old is gone... Unless it's accompanied by a jaffa cake bribe.

I try to cook at the weekends, and put away lasagna and dinners in the freezer, but when I comes to the weekend I just want to get outside and play with them and have fun (oh and treat them to ice cream) and do playdates (where treats are offered) and visit grannies (never to be refused an opportunity to indulge)......

And the summer seems to be a haze of picnics and days at the beach. But unlike my childhood memories of brown bread and jam and a glass bottle of warmish milk, our stylish Next Hamper replaces the toddler in the buggy, so laden it is with luxury salads, juices, crisps, rolls, buns etc.

I look at very overweight kids and I get a lump in my throat because to a large extent that's on us as parents to try to avoid. I know that genetics and circumstance are cited as factors and I cant argue with science, but I still know I have a responsibility to help my kids escape that.

I don't want to be an extremist, and treats are fine, but the availability of sugar and fat at every turn makes a parents job difficult. I recently saw an add showing a parent in a supermarket with 2 kids who became older and increasingly overweight as the parent completed the shop agreeing to all of their demainds. the caption was simple. "say no one rather than repeatedly". If you say no at the supermarket, then you wont even have the rubbish in the house to refuse them mid-week. So that's going to be my starting point.....

Wibbs

Shenshen wrote: »

There's a good few genetic conditions that were recently practically unknown because our environment was such that they rarely if ever became noticeable - the number of Alzheimer-sufferers for example has been going up and up since people started to live longer. Previously, a lot of people with a genetic pre-disposition for it (although obviously not all cases are down to genetics) would have died before any signs of the disease would ever show up.

While I agree with your first point S, I personally don't buy the more people are living longer therefore Alzheimers is increasing. Not entirely anyway. IMHO it's increasing at a rate beyond that equation. Yes people are living longer than a century ago, but if you take the incredibly high childhood mortality rates of the past out of the stats, longevity has gone up by around ten years. I've seen this in family and friends families where dementia/Alzheimers has struck in the current elderly population, but there was zero family history of it. My family were/are long lived, great great grandparents seeing their late 80's/90s, a couple even hitting the century sorta thing and no dementia, yet currently there are a few coming down with it bad in their 70's. It's just my humble, but I think there's another factor or factors at play.

Bodies are complex, and simply comparing a thin person to a fat person is not necessarily going to give you any clues as to why one is skinny and the other fat.

It's gonna give you a few clues. Just as someone who became obese in 1920 suggests particular circumstances at work, so someone who remains skinny in 2014 shows particular circumstances at work.

Personally, I think genetics is a very good starting point for trying to find an answer to that. Why would some people be more inclined to eat more than others?
Why do some people's bodies store energy more than others (I point you to all the posters on here claiming to eat like horses, not exercise and yet remaining stick-thin)?
How much is nature (or genetics) and how much is nurture (or learned bad eating habits)?

I'd reckon a mix of nature, nurture, environment(and maybe some Lamarckian type inheritance at work). As for those who claim to eat like horses yet remain skinny, a few experiments have shown that in the vast majority of cases they quite simply overestimate how much they eat and underestimate how much exercise they take(doesn't even have to be "classic" exercise, fidgets burn off calories). This subjective thing seems to be at work with fat people too. Basically skinny people self report as eating more than they do, fat people self report as eating less than they do and average weight people are better at self reporting what they actually eat. You even see TV weightloss programmes that demonstrate this where they put hidden cameras up in people's homes. They get the people to write down what they think is their food intake, but inevitably the cameras paint a different picture, sometimes a very different picture. They also seem to show success when people become aware of this disparity between what they think they eat and what they actually eat. Maybe that's where efforts should be aimed?

Supernintento Chalmers

suicide_circus wrote: »

That they do, a better class of people really

We can tell it like it is here too.

Frada, you're the fattest one here.
Go sort your life out.

Any key?

A lot of the kids I work with have told me they are not allowed go out and play on the street as it is too dangerous...depends on your area I suppose. There is defo less playing...out all day playing rounders,tip the can,cycling bikes, climbing trees etc. well around me anyway.

Would be more worried about fat teenagers, so much harder to shift the weight when its gone that far. Can start to hold them back too.....

allibastor

conorh91 wrote: »

Was reminded of this by the Kindergarten thread, but in this case the consequences are more serious than personal appearance.

More than one quarter of 9-year olds in this country are already overweight or obese.

This statistic increases even further as children grow into teenage years.

We are walking into a serious health problem, it's time to stop tip-toeing around it.

Why are children growing up in a state of poor health? Are your children fat? Why is that?

My kids are 10 and 4.
They are not fat at all.

I don't feed them ****. I don't take them to the pub on a sunday and leave them run around the front and feed them coke and crisps all day.

I take time to cook proper food, so does my wife.

I spend many sunny days when I get home from work out playing with them, either in the park or the back or on the road. On rainy days they may watch more TV than usual, but will still play in the house.
At the weekend I am not watching 10+ hours of sport or some other ****e.

When my kids ask for McDonalds for breakfast I say no. when they ask again for lunch I also say no. Every few days/once a week I might say yes for dinner.

generalmental

Wibbs wrote: »

Aye, though I would bet that complications that arise from diabetes type conditions will be worse. Dementia for a start.

If it was genetic then waistlines wouldn't have steadily climbed in parts of the west over the last 40 years. Sure there may be genes involved at the extreme ends of the scale both thin and fat, but for most in the middle it's down to lifestyle.

I agree, though odd that a paleo diet was blamed for your condition. The paleo diet is a pretty good one consisting of good fats and veg and no processed crap(though don't get me started on the name). A few studies have shown that a high fibre diet may actually increase the chance of diverticulitis. Here's one such study. High intake of fiber did not reduce the prevalence of diverticulosis. Instead, the quartile with the highest fiber intake had a greater prevalence of diverticulosis than the lowest . Neither physical inactivity nor intake of fat or red meat was associated with diverticulosis.

Thanks for that. I will have a read of that later. But this is the kind of thing that I have been talking about when the information is so poor about proper diet.

Skullface McGubbin

suicide_circus wrote: »

Luckily you dont seem to have held on to any chip on your shoulder. You win at life I guess Otherwise they would have eaten it, leaving you with a bite mark similar that of Giorgio Chiellini.

Fixed

John_Rambo

mariaalice wrote: »

That mostly true children walk to school from the estate I live, in we have the dart and bus service so a lot of people use these to get to work and have to walk to them and walk when they get off. There is someone who teaches music near me and children walk to her to get lessons, I see them with there violins and guitars, children paly on the green, they walk to see their friends because there near they don't need to dropped to their friends by car, I never really though of this before but my wider family would be very active lots of sport form rugby to Gaa to running to cycling and we are all walkers both adult and children so maybe thats it. There would not be much going on about healthy eating though.

There you go, I look at my friends living in one off housing dotted around the countryside. Years ago people living remote would have farmed, walked, cycled, herded, butchered etc... now, they drive everywhere, park as close as they can to supermarket entrances and drop in to Supermacs on the way home and mow the lawn on the ride-on-mower.

Any key? wrote: »

A lot of the kids I work with have told me they are not allowed go out and play on the street as it is too dangerous...depends on your area I suppose.

Point proven. A lot of houses are built on roads that aren't designed to be walked on, let alone played on. Having an acre of mowed lawn is all very well and good, but kids don't get the interaction they need when they start getting past six.

Rough Sleeper

Diego Simeone wrote: »

I think this may be fair. Genetics may well be the underlying cause behind some people's insatiable appetite for food and lack of restraint. It may have some effect on the metabolic process and hence how much energy ends up being stored as fat.

Using genetics as an excuse for being prone to weight gain though I think is probably incorrect. There's a clear causal effect here between people in developed countries eating too many calories and being overweight. Some may seem to defy this convention, but it still exists. As you alluded to, asking why do people overeat rather than why are people overweight is the sensible question here.

This is the crux of it. The notion propagated in some fat-acceptance circles* that the main forces behind the growing weight issue are not the combination of a move away from manual labour to sedentary service jobs, the availability of appliances that remove the manual aspect of household tasks, the advent of home entertainment replacing sport and play during leisure time. and above all the widespread availability of cheap, convenient, high-calorie low-micronutrient content food, is breathtakingly absurd.

The main reason why people are gaining weight is that they're consuming a caloric intake more suited to African megafauna while maintaining approximately the the level of physical activity of a long-term coma patient. The obvious remedy is to eat less and move more. But this is a bit like heroin addicts should stop taking heroin - it is the desired end rather than a pragmatic solution, and doesn't deal with he crucial psychological factors behind the destructive behaviour in question. I know from my own struggles with procrastination that the end goal can be incredibly simple in theory but difficult to achieve, and it's so easy to fall back into old habits without even realising it's happened.

*Not to say that the notion that fat people deserve equal treatment isn't right, it's just the BS that comes with it I take issue with.

Any key?

John_Rambo wrote:

Point proven. A lot of houses are built on roads that aren't designed to be walked on, let alone played on. Having an acre of mowed lawn is all very well and good, but kids don't get the interaction they need when they start getting past six.

I do get annoyed about the amount of them who live less than a 10 min walk away getting dropped up to the gate ( school on very safe road).
They are mostly 9 and 10 and none would walk home without an adult.They would be quite afraid to. Its not all kids fault they can't be as active.