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Why is it normal/OK to be obese in Ireland?.

Stonedpilot

A genuine question.

The amount of people that are gargantuan on this Island is so high I'm surprised the island doesn't sink. It's seen as like a disease by many. I remember living in a houseshare with Eastern European girls and they often commented at how absurdly fat they thought Irish women are.

It's bizarre to me that in other countries it's seen as a problem and thus people try and sort it but here the people whom are tremendously overweight are seen to have an ailment,disease, are poor unfortunates etc like its the same as leukemia or something.

I remember Katie Hopkins was on the Late Late Show making the point you can't be happy and fat (I don't know I don't care frankly) but they cut to a obese lady in the audience who had only just opened her mouth and the audience were in rapturous applause. No matter what she said they would have clapped.
Katie asked the question 'Why are you clapping?. Are you clapping because she is overweight is that it?.'

That kinda sums up the attitude here. Being fat, unhealthy and obese is something to be proud of and God forbid anyone point out it's lunacy to be the size of a manatee.
Strange. Now I will say I have all the respect in the World for people who do something about it work out, eat healthy, get involved in classes, long walks etc. Fair play to them and well done. But then there are other folk whom see it as a God given right to be obese and to be angry with everyone, and to take up a seat and a half everytime they sit on a plane,bus or train squishing whomever is unfortunately beside them.
Had a few incidents recently where I seen very overweight people be angry with total strangers.

I mean I attended a talk recently and the guy doing it was so overweight he got tired standing up and walking around the lecture room!.

As far as I'm aware no country is as tolerant to obesity as Ireland, no way does France,Italy,Spain etc see it as the norm here.

Odd.

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keeponhurling

Its cultural as well though.

If you are no more fat than the rest of your friends or people around you, then it's probably not a priority to lose weight (Ireland).

Whereas if all your friends are slim and healthy, then you'll probably follow their lead a bit more.

For example the Eastern Europeans thinking an Irish girl is obese, but the girl herself doesnt think so.

Wildcard7

Stonedpilot wrote: »

You mean the carbs?. Doens't every country have spuds too!.

I was a bit confused when I went to the freezer section in Tesco, and the "vegetable" aisle was filled with 75% potatoes. That part is unique to Ireland, IMHO.

Where I'm from, potatoes (/pasta/rice) is a "Sättigungsbeilage", a heavy side dish to fill you up. Here in Ireland people seem to think potatoes are a vegetable like broccoli or asparagus (yes I know potatoes are a vegetable, but there's a difference between eating a plate of chips and a plate of cauliflower).

flaneur

It would be quite unfair and inaccurate to say this is an exclusively Irish phenomenon. It's coming from a broader issue with hugely sugar-laden, processed food-laden 'western' diets.

As an English speaking country, we are heavily influenced by food and lifestyle trends in United States and very much part of the same culture in that regard, whether we think we are or not. And we are far more so than non-English speaking nations. We are cramming in a lot of sugar and highly processed carbs into our diets and it's all about snacking and grazing on very unhealthy foods.

Think about it: 20 years ago you absolutely would not have gone into a cafe and ordered a coffee the size of a pint topped with whipped cream and sprinkles and knocked that back with a big hunk of cake.

I was in one particular coffee chain recently (not a US one) and the sheer scale of the slice of cake I was given was ludicrous and it was the most sugary junk I have ever tasted.

Also with fast food the portions have increased a LOT. I remember being a kid in the early 90s and you went to McDonnald's. I distinctly remember in the early 1990s as a kid a "large" fries in McDonanlds and a Large Coke were the size of a medium today and the current "large" didn't exist and also it was somewhere you only went once in a blue moon. It certainly did not form part of your 'diet'.

We absolutely need to get back to basics and I don't see much evidence of it happening. What we are largely seeing is 'preaching to the converted' and the people who are already aware of healthy foods or who enjoy cooking and making things are the people who engage with the healthy eating message while a significant % of the population is feeding themselves into a hospital bed by the time they hit middle age.

I don't think it's enough to just accept that the market will regulate itself and we'll all get healthy again. We won't. There's a serious crisis when you see the % of people who are as fat as they are in Ireland, in the UK, in Australia, in NZ and particularly in the USA and Canada.

osarusan

I put demerara sugar instead of white sugar on my pancakes so I'm ok.

flaneur

Wildcard7 wrote: »

I was a bit confused when I went to the freezer section in Tesco, and the "vegetable" aisle was filled with 75% potatoes. That part is unique to Ireland, IMHO.

Where I'm from, potatoes (/pasta/rice) is a "Sättigungsbeilage", a heavy side dish to fill you up. Here in Ireland people seem to think potatoes are a vegetable like broccoli or asparagus (yes I know potatoes are a vegetable, but there's a difference between eating a plate of chips and a plate of cauliflower).

I'd agree on that but I think it's not unique to Ireland. It applies in the UK, US and quite a few other places too. It's very much cultural issues around food.
If you take something like a pasta dish or an asian dish here they're often served with a mountain of rice or pasta instead of a normal serving.

One area that drives me completely crazy is the motorway service stations here. There is usually no healthy food at them other than pre-packed salads which are usually limp and well past their prime.

Try being Coeliac and visiting one of them! All I can get sometimes is chips.

But for example, if you stop at most of them your choice is a fast-food outlet with burgers, chips, or possibly pizzas etc or, you get those weird canteen like carvery bars that seem to serve ENORMOUS portions of very overcooked 'hearty' food. I ordered a curry in one of them and she offered me rice. I said, yeah that's fine. Then she offered me chips to go with the rice and boiled carrots!?!

It was like some kind of huge meal you would serve up to a farmer who was out lifting rocks all day and needed a huge dose of calories. For your average person driving along the road it's incredibly inappropriate food.

A Little Pony

Also this myth that eating cleaner food like rice, chicken, vegetables etc is more expensive. I could easily fill a basket up with cleaner alternatives which cost less than if I started throwing in bags of crisps, cadbury chocolate, magums etc.

MrMorooka

LirW wrote: »

What's not entirely Irish is the taboo to point out a person is overweight. You simply don't say to a person that they're obese and it can have bad consequences.

It might be that all right. A couple of years back I ran into a Polish girl I used to work with, and the first thing she said to me was "oh, you have gotten fat". I was a bit taken aback, but she was right.

Then a few weeks ago I met a Polish wife of a coworker for the first time in a few years, and the first thing she said to me was "schudnąłeś"('you have lost weight'). Definitely other countries seem more open about these things.

Dial Hard

keeponhurling wrote: »

Its cultural as well though.

If you are no more fat than the rest of your friends or people around you, then it's probably not a priority to lose weight.

This. I was only thinking about the whole 1-in-3 (or is it 2-in-3?) Irish people are overweight or obese statistic the other day and thinking that's certainly not the case in my family or circle of friends. But then a Facebook acquaintance posted photos from a wedding she was at and literally every single person in the pics was fat. It was bananas to see.

LirW

Well it's not only poor people that are obese (even though there's a certain percentage) but working people too because many simply never learned how to cook and don't want/have the time for it. Once you know how to cook and have a reasonable routine you're pretty fast at it but when you never learned how to do it, it's intimidating and looks time-consuming. If you can handle a knife well, which takes practice, you chop stuff in light speed. If not you spend 25 minutes just figuring out how to chop without injuries.
I think cooking skills are a critical factor when it comes to obesity.

I read an interesting article not too long ago about the peak in gym membership in the states but people aren't dropping weight because they still eat pretty bad. It's not only what they eat but also that they don't make the time to sit down and eat slowly and chew properly, which leads to pretty bad eating habits.
Your diet is crucial to your success in dropping weight, much more than exercising is.

Dial Hard

LirW wrote: »

Your diet is crucial to your success in dropping weight, much more than exercising is.

You can't out-train a bad diet, as they say. Plus people tend to vastly over-estimate the amount of calories exercise actually burns and "reward" themselves disproportionately with food.

flaneur

I saw someone in the gym recently working away on a treadmill rehydrating with a BOTTLE OF COKE! and not even one of the 'personal sized' bottles .. a full 1.75l or whatever the smaller of the full size bottles is.

A Little Pony

If you can't put rice in a hob or a microwave and boil a few eggs while cooking some chicken strips/fish and a pot of vegetables then you would have to question the intelligence of that person.

flaneur

I think it's more a question of 'won't cook' than 'can't cook'.
It's a bit of hassle that someone's just deciding : nope, I won't do that.

Teaching people to enjoy cooking is an important part of life though.

I often wonder if it's a case of a culture that sees eating as a chore rather than something enjoyable.
It's almost like : Oh no! I have to make food now - open packet.. nom nom nom.
Where dinner is almost as utilitarian as feeding the cat. - Incidentally our cats are getting way too fat too for similar reasons! Feed the cat properly cooked or raw meat from time to time !

I find both Irish people and Americans will tend to 'scoff down' food very quickly without any concept of savouring it. Where as, in France for example, food is more of a thing you spend time enjoying and chilling out with.

LirW

You'd be surprised how many people aren't able to cook themselves a pot of feckin pasta.

The other thing I see here a lot is the boiled vegetable. I'm not too surprised to see that people don't like many vegetables because boiling them takes so much fun out of eating vegetables. Many boil them to watery mush. Then a carrot tastes marginally like carrot and the broccoli has the worst texture. It's so much nicer and fun to incorporate it in your dish somehow (I cook a lot of asian food and one of the reasons why I like it so much is exactly that, you have a bit of meat, and tons of mixed crunchy veg, I also make all my sauces from scratch).

Day Lewin

Have you ever visited the United States, OP?
They're huge,, they're all huge.
The United Kingdom?
Massive.
Take my word for it - if you travel a bit in those countries, you'd come home to Ireland and find the population pleasantly normal-looking.

flaneur

Well considering that they've started redesigning ambulances, starting in the United States, but now also in Australia, the UK and I am not sure about here but I would suspect it's probably considered in the design anyway, to accommodate heavier people.

In the US they've had incidents they couldn't get the patient into the ambulance due to lack of heavy winching equipment!!

Also reenforcement of hospital equipment due to heavier patients risking collapsing operating tables, X-ray machines and so on.

It's a signifiant problem for MRI machines as many of them can't really accommodate someone more than about 130kg (roughly 20 stone) due to the tables being unable to move people along and a risk of someone becoming jammed inside.

If you do get jammed inside, I'm not quite sure how you'd get out.. a tug of war team perhaps or, you'd just have to stay in there until you lost a few kg.

B0jangles

MrMorooka wrote: »

It might be that all right. A couple of years back I ran into a Polish girl I used to work with, and the first thing she said to me was "oh, you have gotten fat". I was a bit taken aback, but she was right.

Then a few weeks ago I met a Polish wife of a coworker for the first time in a few years, and the first thing she said to me was "schudnąłeś"('you have lost weight'). Definitely other countries seem more open about these things.

On the other hand, a Polish friend of mine said one of the nice things about living in Ireland was that there weren't constant ads for weight-loss pills on the T.V. and radio like there were when she lived in Poland.

_Roz_

As a fat person, I have to say I don't see that many fat women around. I'm always surrounded by skinny or healthy sized women and feel like I stand out a mile, and am spectacularly self-conscious of that. I certainly wouldn't say it's normal or common. As for ok - I figure if you're not affecting the people around you, then its nobody's business but yours. I certainly don't take up two plane seats.

[Deleted User]

I much prefer boiled broccoli to crunchy broccoli. And I'll happily eat a plate of it.
There, I said it.

Irish Guitarist

Maybe if the Late Late Show got a doctor to give medical dietary advice instead of booking some 'controversial' tabloid nobody to boost their ratings the audience might listen to them.

flaneur

I agree with the overcooked vegetables. You can steam or even boil (quickly) vegetables without destroying them!
You're not trying to make carrot soup.

LirW

bluewolf wrote: »

I much prefer boiled broccoli to crunchy broccoli. And I'll happily eat a plate of it.
There, I said it.

Nothing wrong with it, that's personal preference.
I for example despise the most popular fruit: Apples. Go away with anything that even smells like it.
But at least you're aware of your preferences, what you like and don't like and you certainly know the texture and taste of crunchy broccoli compared to mushy one and made your decision based on that.
It gets sad when people don't even know how a cucumber tastes or children not being able to name certain fruits or vegetables.

blacklilly

I don't think it's ever been considered acceptable to be obese. It's also not acceptable to laugh/sneer/bully someone that is.

Speaking from experience, I was a very ill child which meant I was underweight and spent a lot of time in hospital between the ages of 3-6, during this time I was put on steroids which bloated me and that's where my experience of bullying began.
I started comfort eating and the bullying got worse. I experienced this throughout my entire primary school education. I was hit,punched, spat at, stood on, pushed and shoved nearly every single day. I was called every hurtful name you could think of. Que more self loathing, I dropped out of every sport I played (scoccer, gaa, tennis, swimming).

I remained overweight throughout secondary school and college although thankfully didn't experience any further bullying.

At my largest I was a size 18.

I tried exercising on so many occasions but I was so self conscious due to my appearance always being commented on and slagged that I couldn't give it a proper go. I felt that everyone would be looking at me, judging me and laughing. I made excuses as I had zero self belief. I was so caught up in my experiences as a child.

About 2 years ago it all changed for me, I literally woke up from being this overly self conscious, low in confidence, not good enough person and thought to myself that I didn't want to live like that anymore.

I started exercising and looking after my diet, I am now 4.5 stone lighter than I was at my heaviest and a size 10.

What I'm trying to say is, I didn't enjoy eating myself fat, I didn't like myself, I had been so badly bullied that I felt absolutely worthless.
My parents didn't neglect me, they tried everything but when you are being pulled apart both emotionally and physically for 8 years of your life, you are fortunate if you can survive it.

I do not believe obesity is simply a physical issue, it cannot be viewed in isolation of the emotional side.

flaneur

I think obesity can be quite a complex issue with a whole range of factors. It's never very helpful to jump to any conclusion about why someone's fat. It could be anything.

However, I don't think that means that we can just pretend that obesity is not a major health issue that needs to be tackled. There's irrefutable evidence that for many people it is directly linked to diet and exercise.

Also the high sugar diets that we are consuming are opening a world of problems with diseases like diabetes.

Cee-Jay-Cee

The way I see it is that people use PC crap to justify themselves being fat. Like that woman on the late late. It's seen as some sort of badge of honour to defy the masses and declare that your happy being fat whereas if they were really honest they'd admit they're not happy and wish they were a regular size. Applauding her was not helpful but the fact it was in defiance of Katie Hopkins does sort of justify it in that case but ordinarily she shouldn't be applauded.

I seen an extremely large woman and her slightly smaller but still rotund husband on a flight last summer. She had paid for two seats as there was no way in hell she was going to fit one seat. Anyway she tried to do up her belt but the two ends were about a foot away from each other so she called over a hostess and asked in the most ignorant and demanding manner, for an extender belt. It was if the hostess was to blame that she needed an extension belt. She then bitched and moaned about the seats for most of the flight. It was as if her attitude was 'I have a right to be fat and everyone else is going to have to Accommodate me!" rather than her having to make allowances or finsessions for her huge bulk.

Dyr

flaneur wrote: »

I think obesity can be quite a complex issue with a whole range of factors. It's never very helpful to jump to any conclusion about why someone's fat. It could be anything.

In most cases the cause is putting too much food in your pie hole

flaneur

Bambi wrote: »

In most cases the cause is putting too much food in your pie hole

Not necessarily too much, but the wrong type of 'food'.

And you do have to figure out *why* someone is doing that. I don't think very many people intentionally put on a stack of weight.

If you ignore the lack of knowledge about how to cook, how to enjoy food or underlying psychological problems about self-esteem or comfort eating and all of those, you don't really deal with why some people overeat.

You can also get some outlying cases like people with thyroid problems who will pile on weight or people who might have undiagnosed heart problems who stop exercising entirely. I know a couple of people who went from quite active to very inactive and put on weight and subsequently discovered the reason they were so lacking in energy was a faulty heart valve that had stopped working.

All I'm saying is that if someone's presenting as obese, you need to get to the bottom of why. If it's just bad diet - deal with it. If it's psychological - deal with it and if it's an underlying medical issue it's vital that you sort that out too as most of them are not particularly good for you if you let them linger.

I don't think there's anything particularly "PC" about that!

tedpan

flaneur wrote:

I think obesity can be quite a complex issue with a whole range of factors. It's never very helpful to jump to any conclusion about why someone's fat. It could be anything.

Hmmm, I don't know about that. There are too many excuses these days.

An excessive amount of food and drink is the reason in 99.9% of cases.

I used to be very obese and decided to change my ways.(still have some weight to lose) Anyone who says different is kidding themselves.

Coffee Fulled Runner

Boom_Bap wrote: »

I think a better question is "Why are people obsessed with other people's appearance?"

Not appearance but health. Needlessly costing the state millions in health care for obese related illnesses. Private insurance doesn't cover all the costs involved either, so a argument about private or public health care is pointless.

Dyr

flaneur wrote: »

Not necessarily too much, but the wrong type of 'food'.

And you do have to figure out *why* someone is doing that. I don't think very many people intentionally put on a stack of weight.

You're on about the cause of obesity.... It's eating too much

You can go off and find out why someone is eating too much but they're still going to have to address the whole stuffing their face issue