Obesity Post Mortem

I am now going to reward myself with a nap. Eating when one's hungry feels rewarding because one is less uncomfortable after it than one was before. Hunger is not a nice feeling; it's fundamental; it has to be satisfied if at all possible. If, for unknown reasons, one's fundamentals get fucked up it's not going to end well. I'm arguing that overeating is caused by fucked up fundamentals. It's the fucking up bit we don't understand yet.

Age may have something to do with it, but it's not the only thing obviously or kids wouldn't be getting fat.

What do you think are the underlying causes of disorders such as anorexia and bulimia?

I don't know. Does anyone? Seemed to have something to do with control when it occurred in my extended family. Whatever the underlying causes are, they are very complicated, as is overeating.

I don't think it's a puritanical judgment to say people eat for emotional reasons. That's not what I said. I think it's a puritanical judgment to think that people can should be able to control their unnatural eating urges. I'm defining 'unnatural' there as eating more tban one needs on a regular basis even when one isn't actually hungry because something has gone wrong with the 'natural' balance to just eat as much as one needs.

I have put on weight in the last few years because my mobility is impaired, but I still have a normal BMI. It has been suggested that I should try going swimming regularly, but TBH all that does is make me hugely hungry!

I actually think that at my age I would look really haggard if I was my previously normal weight.

But Bags you said you 'reward eat' only eat when you're hungry.
That's not reward eating. Reward eating is when you eat when you're not hungry, for emotional reasons.

I don't see why it's judgmental or puritanical to consider that people eat for emotional reasons.

What do you think are the underlying causes of disorders such as anorexia and bulimia?

That's the thing: eating something "just because it is there". I don't do that but MrBags does. I eat cake because I want to eat cake, because I'm hungry; I could stare at cake for hours and not eat it if I wasn't hungry (although, tbh, I'd probably go and find something more interesting to do for a few of those hours and then come back and eat cake, or a sandwich, or a bowl of soup, or whatever, when I felt hungry).

Which programme was it please? I love watching surgery type programmes (my mum was a theatre sister during the war and I must take after her !). This programme may also make me think again about eating some cake just because it is there.

I get hunger pangs rumbles a lot. I've found since I was in my late teens that mental activity (studying, writing essays, solving maths problems, etc) seems to use more calories than physical activity. Brains are very energy-demanding organs so that makes sense.

Obesity is a complicated issue and has multiple causes. Hunger is little understood and not enough studied.

Another factor worth considering is having time on our hands. After I retired I went from a size 10-12 to a 12-14 but didn't really notice as wearing casual clothes unto the day I had to dig out my best back work suit....and it was tight!

If I'm busy I don't feel hungry. If I get the 'munchies' and start doing something else I forget I was hungry. My downfall is when I sit down of an evening to watch TV. It's almost 1.00 pm and I haven't eaten since 8.00am, but been busy so no hunger pangs.

Boredom is a great stimulator is that 'what's there to eat?' feeling.

Yes, very complicated.

I said I do reward myself with food, janea. It feels like a reward anyway, a way to feel less tired by feeling less uncomfortable. I've just eaten four chocolates and have a cup of tea. I've been hauling and hacking down monster fuschia trees for a couple of hours.

I think looking down on "reward eating" is not a useful way to go. It's essentially a judgment, puritanical in my view. I've been trying to say this morning that I think we need to get away from emotional responses to obesity and find out what the real cause of it is. Since I "reward eat" but am not overweight, obviously, reward eating is not the real problem. Being able to eat when one isn,t actually hungry is the problem. What causes that? is a scientific, non-judgmental question and it's the one scientists should be investigating.

I really don't think it's about will power. I think some people's hunger feelings/need to eat for 'comfort' (how is stuffing yourself overfull comfortable?) is out of their control because of chemical imbalance somewhere.

I take your point luckygirl. What I am also guilty of is feeling that if there are lot of people around who are larger than me, and there are many more than there used to be, then I'm OK but I'm not I am overweight and borderline clinically obese but its easy to fool yourself if you are not as large as others. Sorry that may sound muddled but do you get my drift?

I worked on a brain injury unit and several of our patients could not control their eating as they felt hungry all the time due to brain damage.

I watched the first of the latest Gareth Malone singing series and it was horrifying to see the size of the (mainly women) who were in these choirs. They were quite huge. It was worrying that this seemed to be the norm. They actually looked really uncomfortable.

I remember as a child there was a fat lady over the road from us and she was the object of amazement from everyone because she was such an unusual sight. That is not true now.

meant to say yes teetime I think portion size is key.

You may not reward yourself with food bags but many people do.

I'd be interested to know how many GNers never said to their Cs or GCs that they could have dessert if they ate all their first course. I certainly did

www.webmd.com/parenting/features/why-praising-kids-with-food-doesnt-work#1

'Food given as a reward can lead to an unhealthy emotional connection between eating certain foods and feeling good.'

Yes I did think the pathologist was a litte on the heavy side himself but in his commentary he didn't make any judgements or observations other than directly clinical ones which was very informative.

Following on from that and the conversation here about hunger I watched another programme this week which looked at many factors in obesity but interestingly portion size. A researcher told us that dinner plates in 1950s were about 8 inches and today are typically 12 inches. Wine glasses became much larger in the 1980s associated with wine bars and more eating out. Another one reported that ready meals are almost one third larger than they were 10 years ago.

They showed an experiment where they gave two separate tablese of people the same menu but served on the larger plates and glasses. The table with the larger receptacles ate 40% more and drank 80% more!

I am trying to be much more conscious of portion size and am for a time going back to calorie counting and weighing/measuring which would be a pain long term but I am keen to monitor it for a while.

Ooops pleasant! I am hopeless at proof reading.

Hmm. I 'reward' myself with sweet stuff. I have to be hungry first though. I simply don't want to eat if I'm not hungry. So I'm not sure reward eating is really the problem. I think the real problem is that a lot of people simply don't know when they're not hungry and can carry on eating even when they're full. I think that must be an internal body messaging problem.

More needs to be understood about why people can eat when they don't need to.

It is indeed far more complicated than just consuming too many calories Bags. Google 'grehlins' (the 'hunger' hormone).

I think part of the problem in our society is that food consumption in our society is no longer a simple matter of eating to stay alive or eating enough calories to enable you to do do heavy manual work.

Food is now seen as a reward, a comfort or a treat.
'I deserve a treat today so I'm going to have a cream cake with my coffee.'
'I'm feeling miserable so I'll eat six chocolates instead of one.'

And worst of all, 'If you eat up all your greens, you can have pudding.'

That was interesting, if not pleasent viewing. I watch far to many episodes of Silent Witness.

Seems we think alike on this subject, anya. Wild animals don't get fat unless they need to be fat (for insulation, for example, in cetaceans). Wild dogs don't get fat; some domestic ones do. We actually have a lot more body fat than other apes. I agree with Elaine Morgan's hypothesis about that: she thought it was because we had an aquatic phase and, like cetaceans, needed more fat, for insulation.

I think I've got to the point where blaming people for being obese is getting annoying. It's like blaming people for catching malaria or chicken pox.

Society has made a start by calling what's happening now an obesity 'epidemic', but we need to stop the blame. It clearly isn't something people just have conscious control over.

bags I've thought for some time that hunger has a genetic basis - a sort of hunger gene. I also wonder if it can be switched on by our modern life styles.

For example, in days gone by when it generally wasn't possible to eat more than you needed, unless you were very rich, then people learned to live with a certain degree of hunger and accept that. It might also relate to different types of body fat (,such as brown fat) and the ability of fat cells to store fat. Therefore in the past our bodies functioned more or less as nature intended, storing what little extra was available as fat against times of famine.

But now we have constant access to food in many parts of the world our bodies are still programmed to store fat and that time of famine never comes naturally. And that hungry gene just keeps on firing because it has come to expect food at all times.

MrBags has as much knowledge on the subject as I have. I weigh 51kg. I don't know what he weighs but it's a lot more than he should. Knowledge would appear not to be the crux. I think it's about hunger control. Maybe a large proportion of the human population don't have hunger controls?

If this were shown to to be the case, it wouldn't surprise me. After all, until very recently in human history, we haven't really needed hunger controls. It was all we (except for the very powerful) could do to get enough to eat. We've only just begun, as a species, to need hunger controls.

However, increases in obesity in a population do seem to be the result of easy access to plenty of food. Tricky.

If we thought of obesity as a disease like another, one that one has very control over, would it help? I keep wondering this having watched MrBags trying to stop his weight going up, and failing, over many years.

I used to think it was a simple case of eating less, and the bottom line is that I still believe that: people who don't get quite enough or only just enough calories don't get fat. However, I now think that the feelings of hunger some people have are not properly controlled so they feel hungry and therefore eat when their bodies don't actually need more food. How is that anyone's fault? I don't even know what controls feelings of hunger except that it's not just will power.

Having spent quite a lot of time in and around hospitals lately Alima I noticed how many of the staff, especially the nurses, are overweight and obese.

It would seem that knowledge does not translate into action.

Incredibly interesting. As for watching something like this acting as a deterrent did you notice that Mike the doctor looked quite large? If it didn't put him off .........