More from the BBC: this article is written by a public health expert, who in all honesty believe British people need more nannying from the government. Apparently people need to be told what to eat and we like it. We love it when the government makes all our choices for us so that we can be healty and fit.

Sandy at Junkfood Science commented the article here.

But seriously, we need more nannying because we don’t know how to control our own lives? Sounds more like someone is a bit too fond of control to me. The piece is completely bollocks in my opinion.

I read a BBC article that proved to be quite interesting and has the possibility of education all those people out there thinking that fat people must be eating horrid amounts of (unhealthy) food and never exercises beyond walking from their door to their cars.

The article is quite an interesting read. Some researchers have been doing some tests similar to the studies the article refers to, where naturally thin people try their best to put on weight (fat) by doing such things as eating lots and lots and/or quitting excercise for a period. And, they struggled! Even whilst eating a lot of unhealthy food and not exercising these people had a hard time putting on weight and becoming fat.

How surprising. The amounts and types of food described sounds like what they think fat people must be gorging on day in and day out. Personally, had I been eating as much and so much sweets I would have been sick. I’m one of those people who don’t eat extreme amounts at all, and when I do have a bag of sweets it will easily last me a week or two, the same goes for a, say 150 grams bar of chocolate. I know people of all sorts of sizes who marvel at how I can leave my sweets alone even when it’s directly in front of my eyes for weeks and weeks before it’s finally empty. Most of them will eat it all within a matter of minutes. I don’t know why this is so. I do have a sweet tooth, and I like having some sort of sweet on a regular basis. Not every day, but around about every second day I will have some. But it’s enough to just have a few pieces of sweets or a couple of squares of chocolate on most days. I rarely eat much more than that. But then, I am a slow eater.

And guess what? I can’t remember ever being skinny and in my most slim periods I am still considered slightly overweight according to BMI, and softly padded to look at. At the moment I’m well padded since I put on a fair bit of weight during the last semester of my Bachelors and more whilst doing my Masters. I am one of those people whose weight will fluctuate a bit, depending on a number of factors, and they do no follow the Calories in – Calories out “rule” whatsoever.

I hope these trials to make people put on weight with dismal results will help creating awareness that it’s the same way for fat people. It’s just not that easy to lose weight, and much less so to keep it off. Sadly, I expect a more likely result is that they’ll think even more that what separates fat from thin is that fatties are able to eat ‘more than they should’ and don’t exercise. And if a fat person thinks he or she eats a completely normal diet and exercises plenty, then it must be a figment of their imagination…

I just read a blogpost about fat kids in the UK and I am fairly shocked. Apparently some people over here believe childhood obesity is so bad that they may have to take kids from their parents and they accuse parents of abuse(!).

I would really like to know where those kids are, because except a few examples in the media I haven’t seen a single child in the UK who is so overweight there seemed to be any need to take them from their parents. I’ve lived in the UK for a year now, most of it in a family area in an ordinary UK town, and I passed a school at least once per day since it was close to my house there and I saw kids regularly all over the place. I never saw a single one who seemed to be so grossly fat as to be in immediate danger. There were chubby ones, of course, but I didn’t ever see a child who looked very fat.

I’ve known fat kids as I grew up, and I was chubby myself. None of them were abused in any way, shape or form. Most of the fat kids were large boned and came from families of large boned people, so even at their thinnest they’d still look large.

As for taking kids from their families, how is that going to work? I thought it was known that it is not recommended to put kids on a diet? Take any one family where each child eats the same food and the same amount and have the same activity level, yet one is skinny and the other fat, is only the fat child being abused by the parents?

I am not impressed.