Great article.
A slightly tangential note on my experience of the structural aspects of obesity. I recently moved from an inner-city part of Australia (where trains, trams, quality bike paths, walks to the shops, are the norm) to a leafy, low density semi-rural region where practically anything you need to do involves a car.
In this new place, i cant help but notice how much fatter people are, and it’s got nothing to do with socio-economic status – the people here are on average wealthier.
It’s so important that urban design incorporate the idea of ‘walkability’,
I’d add that — in addition to the valid point on “walkability”, there is a climate factor as well. In warmer and sunnier places, you feel impelled to be a lot more active as the sunshine and warmth encourage outdoor activities in way that is somewhat less appealing in the UK. Nothing we can do about the climate, but the gym alternative appeals if they’re well sited and reasonably priced. Many are neither.
I walk and run in all weathers. It’s simply a matter of the correct clothing and, in the case of very hot temperatures, adequate hydration.
Usually in Britain we don’t get extreme weather, but I have done my 4/5 mile run in -10ºC where the major risk is slipping on ice, to 40ºC where the issue is adequate sun protection and proper hydration.
Proper preparation makes these extremes exhilarating as opposed to excessively challenging. As ever, if you’re not committed to the effort, the temptation of sofa/snacks/beer etc will win the internal debate. This is really where the challenge lies for most people, in my opinion.
It is not just a matter of hydration. It is inadvisable to physical exert in high temperatures for fear of overheating and heatstroke. For most of the year I only run at night and in the middle of the summer even running at night can be hard. But this is all a digression from the article.
It’s important that the activity is part of one’s day, not a seperate “errand”. Walk, or ride a bike to the supermarket, stop at the bank on the way and make a detour of a half dozen blocks to the hardware store while you’re out. You’ll quickly realize that a bit of rain and cold isn’t really so bad. In fact it’s probably good for the soul.
I always found riding to and from work to be far less enervating than the bus or subway.
This is what keeps New Yorkers skinny; not goals or will power, just a pressing need to get from point A to point B.
Sunshine and warmth in Australia tends to result in people jumping in their air-conditioned cars.
(One other big factor is that the walking environment in most Australian urban environments is boring, especially compared to UK cities.)
Australia also has higher rates of obesity than the UK.
Dionne Finch
2 months ago
My now 12 year old son put on a lot of weight during Covid when his sports and school were closed and he was stuck inside with easy, all day fridge access. He was just into the obese category and it’s taken the last 1.5 years for him to get back to a healthy weight. We did it together; I restricted his food to all natural, smaller portions with no snacking and he matured enough to wrap his head around the very important concept highlighted in the article – “most adults have two options: the discomfort of watching what we eat or the discomfort of being overweight. Learning how to feed yourself properly is part of growing up”
Well done Dionne to you and your boy, that’s an impressive achievement
Jeremy Bray
2 months ago
Good article. It is easy to forget that trying to sort out one problem has knock on effects. Of course we don’t want to humiliate and insult people because they are overweight but aggressive campaigns against “fat-shaming” and body positivity clearly make talking about the positive advantage of losing weight that more fraught. The problem of losing too much weight gets prioritised over the much more prevalent problem of excess weight.
In this case activist body positivity campaigners have done nothing to enable sane discussions to take place regarding excess weight.
Lindsay S
2 months ago
Having conversations around healthy eating isn’t hard because the focus is eating nutritious food rather than weight.
there is plenty of evidence to show that ultra processed foods lack nutrients which in turn leads the body to continue to crave food as it is screaming for nutrition. Eating better will in turn leave you feeling fuller for longer.
Seven of the eight comments so far, and the most liked ones, talked about activity levels. This dead-end approach has been the main public one for decades and it is part of the problem because it obscures the relevant issues which have to do with food choices and ultra-processed foods. These issues are appetite stimulation caused by carbohydrate addiction and appetite suppression associated with high protein and high fat foods. Standard wishy-washy dietetic advice (“balanced diet”) which is stuck in the “plumbing hypothesis” paradigm is the heart of the matter- it doesn’t deal with hunger. If you want to lose weight, lose the sugar, including fruit and fruit juice, potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, including whole grain anything. None of those foods is necessary for health or athletic performance. Eat meat, eggs and full cream dairy.
did you miss the comments that talked about eating or just ignore them? I’m sorry to tell you, but activity really is part of the equation and healthy carbs are among its fuels. Rice, for example, is a staple in parts of the world where obesity is virtually non-existent.
My comment was in reply to Linsday S’s, the first at the time, to emphasize food choices.
Of course, activity can help and is good for one, but it stimulates appetite as well. Point is it’s not the key issue.
Muddled messages about the need for carbs, especially in the context of obesity is part of the wishy-washy eating advice usually dished out and your exercise physiology is out of date.
I once ate only meat for 10 days and lost weight while maintaining strength and feeling more alert. I then gave up as I craved vegetables! Nutrition is complicated, people are different and there is much conflicting advice. However all readers (excluding AIs) have bodies and can experiment by changing diet. In my experience diet is more important driver of weight change than activity, but don’t believe me – try something yourself.
Meat, eggs, full fat dairy, and vegetables are all you need, and in fact, all you should eat if weight loss or general health is the goal. It’s easy, saves a bundle at the grocery store, and there is no reason to restrict calories.
100% correct. “Fruit is healthy” is the dumbest dietary advice of all time. Hybridized fruit has the glycemic load of coca cola. Eat meat and vegetables and you can’t get fat, and you can’t stay fat. Even with very low activity levels. Eggs and full fat dairy are good (metabolically the same as meat), and animal fats are fine. Nothing else, including diet soft drinks. It’s simple and effective way to eat, but there’s no money in it.
Activity is essential, and this doesn’t become untrue just because burning calories is a mostly-ineffective way of balancing the calorie budget. It is true, yes, that you can’t outrun a bad diet, but that’s not the point.
The point is that exercise massively contributes to the mood stability that is required as a result of losing access to all the foods that previously did the same job. A second aspect is that attempting exercise while overweight and with poor cardiovascular health can have a certain shock value which can help maintain commitment (though I accept that it can also have the effect of making people give up entirely).
Going from unfit to fit has a long list of benefits that have nothing to do with weightloss – improved muscle tone, better bone density, better immune response, improved sleep, appetite control, reduced insulin resistance, improved injury recovery etc – all of which, ironically, set the conditions in which effective weightloss becomes much easier.
Semi skimmed and skimmed milk are the worst! Trying to explain to dieters that while the fat has been removed, it’s been replaced with sugar which then sits round your middle as fat, goes over so many heads! Artificial sweeteners have the exact same effect as sugar except they cause your body to crave more sugar than sugar does because you’re not actually consuming sugar!
There’s almost no difference in the sugar content in full fat and skimmed milk (4.8g per 100ml vs 4.9g per 100ml) It also isn’t added sugars, it’s the sugars that are naturally in the milk, the difference in amounts is due to the fact with the fat content removed everything else is there in slightly higher quantities to make up the 100ml, this includes carbohydrates, protein and calcium
My heavy-weight friends will try 100 trendy diets that don’t work instead of the easiest diet which does!
William Cameron
2 months ago
Sugar. Every School child you see is eating something made of sugar – washed down with a sugar drink.
They are fat because they eat sugar. This isnt “Mental elf” its physics. Shove high sugar levels in – you get fat.
Exactly. And modern hybridized fruit has the same glycemic load as Coca Cola. Kids should not be eating fruit — it’s a very sweet dessert — not a healthy food. Fruit juice causes tooth loss children and insulin resistance, just as sugared drinks and snack do.
Alex Lekas
2 months ago
The trouble is, we need to talk about children’s weight. —> That’s fine, but do we need to pathologize it? If this were purely socioeconomic, then poor kids would have always been overweight, if not obese. But they were not. This is a relatively new phenomenon that coincides with the digital age, the bubble wrapping of kids, screen time over outdoor play time, and probably some bad food choices.
As a parent, I had complete control over the children’s diet. There was nothing in the house except whole foods. No fruit either — ruins teeth and is as sweet as colas.
Mine are grown men now who still eat only meat and vegetables and look like super heroes.
Dougie Undersub
2 months ago
Both my children put on puppy fat as teenagers, my daughter very noticeably so. And yet we ate healthily and my daughter was the only child I’ve ever known who could eat half a Kit Kat and put the remainder back in the cupboard for the next day. She hated sports but was active in other ways – Scouts, ballet – so we tried not to worry ourselves or her.
Now she’s a lean, mean, very trim long-distance hiker. Go figure.
Jeff Watkins
2 months ago
The causes of obesity are clearly understood. Its the Western diet which has too little fiber, too much sugar, ultraprocessed foods, hydrated oils, too many chemicals etc (10,000 at the last count). The effects are also clear and at an early age 25% of 5 year olds have tooth decay and 20% of adolescents have prediabetis.
Chuck Pezeshki
2 months ago
More than a comment on how kids get metabolically destabilized — but there’s a vast complicit ignorance in the dietary field on pushing carbohydrates instead of having kids get satiated eating saturated fat and protein. They’re largely vegans, and they don’t care how many human lives are destroyed.
The bigger problem is that obesity->fatty liver disease->estrogen destabilization in our youth, right when they need hormones to be as stable as they possibly can be during adolescence. This will lead downstream to mental issues and rapidly increasing PCOS, and collapse of fertility later in life. I think one of the pressing factors in the current socio-cultural “trans” fad is this hormonal destabilization. Problems don’t emerge as factors in societies until a population hits a certain threshold, no matter how badly the psychopaths long for them.
Much at stake here — potentially our entire civilization.
Peter F. Lee
2 months ago
I am surprised nobody has discussed the pervasive impact of fast foods. There was a time when we didn’t snack and only ate at set times, three times a day. Being svelte is not only a question of activity, it is also a question of diet (as in what you eat and when). Most parents I know seem to have a very layback attitude when it comes to their kids snacking between meals.
Sensible Citizen
2 months ago
It’s impossible to solve the obesity problem so long as doctors continue to give tired, warn-out advice, based on the 1975 food pyramid — the same “low fat” advice that has fostered the epidemic of obesity.
It is impossible to get fat, or stay fat, if you eat nothing but meat, vegetables, full-fat dairy, and eggs. Simple as that. No bread. No pasta. No diet drinks. No sugar. Nothing processed. Meat and vegetables — the easiest diet plan ever.
Modern hybridized fruit has a glycemic load equal to the sweetest colas, like Mountain Dew. Doctors should be telling parents not to feed their children fruit. Instead, we pour apple and orange juice down small children until their teeth fall out thinking it’s healthy. It’s not.
Weight control has been grossly complexified, in large part because there’s big money in obesity and big money in processed food.
Not to mention big money in all the health problems associated with malnutrition and poor diet.
It’s worth remembering that not all slim people are healthy people and also suffer health problems because of poor diets.
Matt Sylvestre
2 months ago
Over-correction in all things is a Progressive virtue.
Sensible Citizen
2 months ago
Unless your kiddos are buying the groceries, you have complete control over their diet. My kids were required to eat at home, only at mealtime, and only whole foods. We never had to talk about food because we didn’t buy anything other than meat, vegetables, full-fat dairy and eggs.
Great article.
A slightly tangential note on my experience of the structural aspects of obesity. I recently moved from an inner-city part of Australia (where trains, trams, quality bike paths, walks to the shops, are the norm) to a leafy, low density semi-rural region where practically anything you need to do involves a car.
In this new place, i cant help but notice how much fatter people are, and it’s got nothing to do with socio-economic status – the people here are on average wealthier.
It’s so important that urban design incorporate the idea of ‘walkability’,
I’d add that — in addition to the valid point on “walkability”, there is a climate factor as well. In warmer and sunnier places, you feel impelled to be a lot more active as the sunshine and warmth encourage outdoor activities in way that is somewhat less appealing in the UK. Nothing we can do about the climate, but the gym alternative appeals if they’re well sited and reasonably priced. Many are neither.
Until it gets too hot. Keeping up a running schedule in 40°C heatwaves is also hard.
I walk and run in all weathers. It’s simply a matter of the correct clothing and, in the case of very hot temperatures, adequate hydration.
Usually in Britain we don’t get extreme weather, but I have done my 4/5 mile run in -10ºC where the major risk is slipping on ice, to 40ºC where the issue is adequate sun protection and proper hydration.
Proper preparation makes these extremes exhilarating as opposed to excessively challenging. As ever, if you’re not committed to the effort, the temptation of sofa/snacks/beer etc will win the internal debate. This is really where the challenge lies for most people, in my opinion.
It is not just a matter of hydration. It is inadvisable to physical exert in high temperatures for fear of overheating and heatstroke. For most of the year I only run at night and in the middle of the summer even running at night can be hard. But this is all a digression from the article.
climatizing really helps.
It’s important that the activity is part of one’s day, not a seperate “errand”. Walk, or ride a bike to the supermarket, stop at the bank on the way and make a detour of a half dozen blocks to the hardware store while you’re out. You’ll quickly realize that a bit of rain and cold isn’t really so bad. In fact it’s probably good for the soul.
I always found riding to and from work to be far less enervating than the bus or subway.
This is what keeps New Yorkers skinny; not goals or will power, just a pressing need to get from point A to point B.
Sunshine and warmth in Australia tends to result in people jumping in their air-conditioned cars.
(One other big factor is that the walking environment in most Australian urban environments is boring, especially compared to UK cities.)
Australia also has higher rates of obesity than the UK.
My now 12 year old son put on a lot of weight during Covid when his sports and school were closed and he was stuck inside with easy, all day fridge access. He was just into the obese category and it’s taken the last 1.5 years for him to get back to a healthy weight. We did it together; I restricted his food to all natural, smaller portions with no snacking and he matured enough to wrap his head around the very important concept highlighted in the article – “most adults have two options: the discomfort of watching what we eat or the discomfort of being overweight. Learning how to feed yourself properly is part of growing up”
Well done Dionne to you and your boy, that’s an impressive achievement
Good article. It is easy to forget that trying to sort out one problem has knock on effects. Of course we don’t want to humiliate and insult people because they are overweight but aggressive campaigns against “fat-shaming” and body positivity clearly make talking about the positive advantage of losing weight that more fraught. The problem of losing too much weight gets prioritised over the much more prevalent problem of excess weight.
In this case activist body positivity campaigners have done nothing to enable sane discussions to take place regarding excess weight.
Having conversations around healthy eating isn’t hard because the focus is eating nutritious food rather than weight.
there is plenty of evidence to show that ultra processed foods lack nutrients which in turn leads the body to continue to crave food as it is screaming for nutrition. Eating better will in turn leave you feeling fuller for longer.
Seven of the eight comments so far, and the most liked ones, talked about activity levels. This dead-end approach has been the main public one for decades and it is part of the problem because it obscures the relevant issues which have to do with food choices and ultra-processed foods. These issues are appetite stimulation caused by carbohydrate addiction and appetite suppression associated with high protein and high fat foods. Standard wishy-washy dietetic advice (“balanced diet”) which is stuck in the “plumbing hypothesis” paradigm is the heart of the matter- it doesn’t deal with hunger. If you want to lose weight, lose the sugar, including fruit and fruit juice, potatoes, rice, pasta, bread, including whole grain anything. None of those foods is necessary for health or athletic performance. Eat meat, eggs and full cream dairy.
did you miss the comments that talked about eating or just ignore them? I’m sorry to tell you, but activity really is part of the equation and healthy carbs are among its fuels. Rice, for example, is a staple in parts of the world where obesity is virtually non-existent.
My comment was in reply to Linsday S’s, the first at the time, to emphasize food choices.
Of course, activity can help and is good for one, but it stimulates appetite as well. Point is it’s not the key issue.
Muddled messages about the need for carbs, especially in the context of obesity is part of the wishy-washy eating advice usually dished out and your exercise physiology is out of date.
Correct!
I once ate only meat for 10 days and lost weight while maintaining strength and feeling more alert. I then gave up as I craved vegetables! Nutrition is complicated, people are different and there is much conflicting advice. However all readers (excluding AIs) have bodies and can experiment by changing diet. In my experience diet is more important driver of weight change than activity, but don’t believe me – try something yourself.
Meat, eggs, full fat dairy, and vegetables are all you need, and in fact, all you should eat if weight loss or general health is the goal. It’s easy, saves a bundle at the grocery store, and there is no reason to restrict calories.
100% correct. “Fruit is healthy” is the dumbest dietary advice of all time. Hybridized fruit has the glycemic load of coca cola. Eat meat and vegetables and you can’t get fat, and you can’t stay fat. Even with very low activity levels. Eggs and full fat dairy are good (metabolically the same as meat), and animal fats are fine. Nothing else, including diet soft drinks. It’s simple and effective way to eat, but there’s no money in it.
Activity is essential, and this doesn’t become untrue just because burning calories is a mostly-ineffective way of balancing the calorie budget. It is true, yes, that you can’t outrun a bad diet, but that’s not the point.
The point is that exercise massively contributes to the mood stability that is required as a result of losing access to all the foods that previously did the same job. A second aspect is that attempting exercise while overweight and with poor cardiovascular health can have a certain shock value which can help maintain commitment (though I accept that it can also have the effect of making people give up entirely).
Going from unfit to fit has a long list of benefits that have nothing to do with weightloss – improved muscle tone, better bone density, better immune response, improved sleep, appetite control, reduced insulin resistance, improved injury recovery etc – all of which, ironically, set the conditions in which effective weightloss becomes much easier.
I agree. Diet is much more important than exercise. Eat only meat and vegetables and your weight will stabilize at a heathy level. Easy as that.
Semi skimmed and skimmed milk are the worst! Trying to explain to dieters that while the fat has been removed, it’s been replaced with sugar which then sits round your middle as fat, goes over so many heads! Artificial sweeteners have the exact same effect as sugar except they cause your body to crave more sugar than sugar does because you’re not actually consuming sugar!
There’s almost no difference in the sugar content in full fat and skimmed milk (4.8g per 100ml vs 4.9g per 100ml) It also isn’t added sugars, it’s the sugars that are naturally in the milk, the difference in amounts is due to the fact with the fat content removed everything else is there in slightly higher quantities to make up the 100ml, this includes carbohydrates, protein and calcium
“Full-fat dairy” to me means heavy whipping cream. Milk is pointless unless you’re four years old or making béchamel sauce.
My heavy-weight friends will try 100 trendy diets that don’t work instead of the easiest diet which does!
Sugar. Every School child you see is eating something made of sugar – washed down with a sugar drink.
They are fat because they eat sugar. This isnt “Mental elf” its physics. Shove high sugar levels in – you get fat.
Interestingly it’s also what they shove into my veins when they want to excited the tumours for a CT scan.
Exactly. And modern hybridized fruit has the same glycemic load as Coca Cola. Kids should not be eating fruit — it’s a very sweet dessert — not a healthy food. Fruit juice causes tooth loss children and insulin resistance, just as sugared drinks and snack do.
The trouble is, we need to talk about children’s weight. —> That’s fine, but do we need to pathologize it? If this were purely socioeconomic, then poor kids would have always been overweight, if not obese. But they were not. This is a relatively new phenomenon that coincides with the digital age, the bubble wrapping of kids, screen time over outdoor play time, and probably some bad food choices.
As a parent, I had complete control over the children’s diet. There was nothing in the house except whole foods. No fruit either — ruins teeth and is as sweet as colas.
Mine are grown men now who still eat only meat and vegetables and look like super heroes.
Both my children put on puppy fat as teenagers, my daughter very noticeably so. And yet we ate healthily and my daughter was the only child I’ve ever known who could eat half a Kit Kat and put the remainder back in the cupboard for the next day. She hated sports but was active in other ways – Scouts, ballet – so we tried not to worry ourselves or her.
Now she’s a lean, mean, very trim long-distance hiker. Go figure.
The causes of obesity are clearly understood. Its the Western diet which has too little fiber, too much sugar, ultraprocessed foods, hydrated oils, too many chemicals etc (10,000 at the last count). The effects are also clear and at an early age 25% of 5 year olds have tooth decay and 20% of adolescents have prediabetis.
More than a comment on how kids get metabolically destabilized — but there’s a vast complicit ignorance in the dietary field on pushing carbohydrates instead of having kids get satiated eating saturated fat and protein. They’re largely vegans, and they don’t care how many human lives are destroyed.
The bigger problem is that obesity->fatty liver disease->estrogen destabilization in our youth, right when they need hormones to be as stable as they possibly can be during adolescence. This will lead downstream to mental issues and rapidly increasing PCOS, and collapse of fertility later in life. I think one of the pressing factors in the current socio-cultural “trans” fad is this hormonal destabilization. Problems don’t emerge as factors in societies until a population hits a certain threshold, no matter how badly the psychopaths long for them.
Much at stake here — potentially our entire civilization.
I am surprised nobody has discussed the pervasive impact of fast foods. There was a time when we didn’t snack and only ate at set times, three times a day. Being svelte is not only a question of activity, it is also a question of diet (as in what you eat and when). Most parents I know seem to have a very layback attitude when it comes to their kids snacking between meals.
It’s impossible to solve the obesity problem so long as doctors continue to give tired, warn-out advice, based on the 1975 food pyramid — the same “low fat” advice that has fostered the epidemic of obesity.
It is impossible to get fat, or stay fat, if you eat nothing but meat, vegetables, full-fat dairy, and eggs. Simple as that. No bread. No pasta. No diet drinks. No sugar. Nothing processed. Meat and vegetables — the easiest diet plan ever.
Modern hybridized fruit has a glycemic load equal to the sweetest colas, like Mountain Dew. Doctors should be telling parents not to feed their children fruit. Instead, we pour apple and orange juice down small children until their teeth fall out thinking it’s healthy. It’s not.
Weight control has been grossly complexified, in large part because there’s big money in obesity and big money in processed food.
Not to mention big money in all the health problems associated with malnutrition and poor diet.
It’s worth remembering that not all slim people are healthy people and also suffer health problems because of poor diets.
Over-correction in all things is a Progressive virtue.
Unless your kiddos are buying the groceries, you have complete control over their diet. My kids were required to eat at home, only at mealtime, and only whole foods. We never had to talk about food because we didn’t buy anything other than meat, vegetables, full-fat dairy and eggs.