Why are we so fat?

Yes and grass is green and water is wet, everyone knows these things. It's not an excuse, emotional eating can be caused by a number of things. People should offer advice on avoiding emotional eating rather than blaming people for doing it.

Personal responsibility has to begin with person who wants to reverse their obesity.

True, I know loads of people who were skinny in their 20's and have a big belly at 40 because they didn't adjust their diet

Yeah plus you’ve more money to spend on beer and other shite when your that bit older.

I think if people understood how many kcal they should consume to stay as is and then based their activity and food around that- we’d be in a much better position as a nation.

Indeed. Pretty much like trying to get an alcoholic off alcohol with an "intervention". It very often - if almost never - helps. Or if someone is parenting in a questionable way you can't really step in and tell them there is a better way.

You have to wait until that person hits a point where they want/seek help before you can really step in and offer any.

Until then all you can do is keep giving signals that you are there for them when they are ready - while also visibly representing a better way to be so that they can "see it and want to be it" as the phrase goes.

An issue I suspect often is that some people have very slowly gotten into a spiral in relation to food or exercise. It doesn't happen suddenly overnight. So when they find they can barely take a walk to the corner shop without being out of breath - or they can no longer touch their toes - or they feel lethargic or difficulty concentrating - they just think it's old age creeping in or something.

You hit your 40s and you kind of think that a drop in energy, flexibility, concentration, libido and so forth is just par for the course. So it just does not hit a lot of people that they could be feeling a LOT better in all of those domains. They can often be doing it to themselves but thinking it's entirely normal and inevitable how they are degrading in that moment.

Unfortunately, there is no simple way to give them an hour of feeling their full current potential so you can tell them "You could feel like that all the time if you worked on it - it's nothing to do with old age YET". It reminds me of an alcoholic recently who was off the drink for a month and was feeling great and said "Is this what normal people feel like ALL the time???".

I just passed the mid point of my 40s and I knocked 15 minutes off my personal best marathon time last weekend. Old age will of course slow me down in all those domains eventually. Probably soon enough. But I will be hyper vigilant about whether it's because of old age really - or me letting myself go in some way.

And of course the parents play a part in that too. It's not that long ago when a friend of my daugther who saw me at work in the kitchen made some comment about thinking no one ever cooked cucumbers. I was confused for a moment before I realised what she was on about. I then explained to her that what I had was a courgette. She'd never had one or heard of them before. But she did remember vaguely wondering one time why cucumbers were always seemingly in two different places in the supermarket.

A few years ago on after hours someone started a thread complaining about what a waste of money steak was. He thought at the time that the fact people have to cover it in so much sauce proved that clearly steak was itself a completely tasteless waste of money and that people had to cover in sauce to convince themselves it was tasty and a good investment. There was some comical backlash against him at the time.

But it does go to show that people do often miss the point of how human taste and smell works. They do think sometimes that food is not tasty or worth it unless it's absolutely overpowered in flavour heavy sauces and additives.

Often the point of cooking if you get into it however is not to over power with flavour. But to season and augment meat and food in such a way that you give subtle changes over the course of eating. Because Human taste and smell is keyed towards change. You become used to a taste or a smell quite quickly. One of the reasons why you might find yourself eating a tub of cinema popcorn one kernel at a time at first but 30 minutes later you need a fistful to get the same pleasure.

But if you season a nearly naked steak just right - subtle changes in the flavour profile as you eat allow your taste and smell to return to the actual flavour of the meat too. It's an art. Every meal can be "special" in a way really. I just do not think smothering it in lab created flavour enhancers is my way of choice to achieve that.

Yeah it’s not the actual eating- it’s the thought of purchasing the food to make you feel better I think.

From what I can see binge eating makes obese people feel more ashamed and depressed.

apparently it’s a disease.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/symptoms-causes/syc-20375742#:~:text=Overview,other%20diseases%20and%20health%20problems.

sorry can’t post a link.

They definitely get a high from eating crap but then have a big downer afterwards

A bit like drug or gambling addiction. That high gets smaller and more elusive over time.

Spent a bit of time up there. The reasons are fairly similar, and made worse by the long dark winter and wild North Atlantic weather on the west coast.

Sometimes it is even more intertwined than that. It's not that they get the "high" and then plummet into shame. They can at times literally happen at the same time. You can be getting all the "high" and "shame" signals from the brain literally during each chew. Literally crying with shame while pushing the food into your mouth.

As I said it is one of the more insidious of all addictions/problems. As it is literally one of (if not the) only addiction where abstinence really isn't an option. I don't have to gamble. I don't have to cut. I don't have to masturbate or have sex. I don't have to get drunk. I do have to eat.

I am quite obsessed with food and cooking and healthy eating myself. In a "good" way. I can't imagine what it must be like to have a negative or detrimental relationship with food. It must be truly awful.

I've helped a few people get slim or get healthy with their food. They were not even that "problemtatic" in comparison to some. But it was a hard won battle in the end.