The difference between the thin people and the fat people is…that the fat people keep on eating after they’ve really had enough. I’m convinced that they do this because they don’t have that thing that tells you that you’ve had enough. It seems to go off eventually and tell them they’ve already had too much, but it doesn’t go off in time for them to stop before that.
In my family, I could never understand how everybody consistently overate, then sat around moaning “I’ve eaten too much, I’ve eaten too much.” I thought, why don’t they just stop? I did. (And got asked, “That’s all you’re having? That’s not enough to starve a cat!”) They did this so consistently that I am forced to conclude that they did not know they were eating too much until it was too late. Or else they didn’t hate that full feeling as much as I do.
At the same time, almost all the women in my family were really concerned about how many calories in this and how can you eat that, and why did you bring that, I’ll gain weight just looking at it. Blah blah blah. They spend 75 percent of their time talking about food, one way or another, about half of that was how much weight they thought they needed to lose. They sound obsessed about it, and some of them are thin (and make a point on how they sample the filling for the pie then spit it out, for instance) and some aren’t.
Decades later, when I met up with my biological siblings, it turns out that they don’t do that thing at Thanksgiving where you eat until you’re basically unconscious. And they are not fat. So the fuel gauge might be hereditary. Mine clicks on well before I feel stuffed, unless beer is involved, in which case it doesn’t seem to click on at all. (That is to say that I eat a lot more if I drink a beer with my meal, which happens two or three times a year and I always regret it.)
There are two things that have happened to me that tell me that body chemistry plays a powerful role in the ability to control eating:
When I weighed about 240, I went on an extremely low calorie liquid diet (supervised by a doctor each week) for six months. I lost about eighty pounds before he made me start eating regular food. I had lost all interest in food and often forgot to even drink all of the liquids that I could. When I began refeeding, within a day’s time I began to crave food again. Within two days’ time, I was eating compulsively. The change was dramatic and impossible to resist.
I now take a medication that takes away my appetite. It does so by altering my brain chemistry. It affects the same part of my brain that causes seizures.
(I am also nine years post gastric by-pass, but that alone was not a total solution. I weigh between 145 and 150 and I’m content with that.)
We’re started to be worried about our overweight population, too. Part of it is, I think, using “the wrong table” (you just can’t insert mediterranean hips, leg lengths and noses into sizing tables and profiles defined in Sweden), but part of it is also that we’re starting to see what we call “American sizes” more than once a year. Kids that would have been the fattest kid in the whole K-8 school are now only the fattest in the class; the ratio still seems to be “one or two chubby/fat kids per classroom” but class sizes are smaller and that fat kid is fatter.
Mind you, my SiL-the-doctor eats in just the way that’s supposed to make anybody but the Holy Ghost get fat (doesn’t touch fruit except for green bananas, almost no protein, has two candy bars while cooking and then doesn’t touch her meal except a pastry for dessert) and she’s thin. But she’s the only person I know who eats like that and “fits through doors”… I’m waiting to see her in 20 years’ time.
**Dseid’s ** right on this. Weight is extremely heritable - people who are separated from their biological families by adoption show little correlation in their weight with their adoptive families and an enormous correlation with their biological relatives, who didn’t teach them a thing about eating. So it’s not really an eating disorder that you’re looking at (in terms of some learned eating behavior anyway) so much as a vulnerability to weight gain that could be focused in any one of a number of areas in the energy regulation pathways - there are hundreds of genes that have been implicated in obesity, so it could be problems with satiety factors, or it could be other issues.
As far as Europeans being thin. I don’t think there’s any evidence that they’re thin. The U.S. has the most comprehensive and up to date demographic data which may be one of the reasons it shows such high rates of obesity - it may be that our data is more accurate or more “realtime” - the U.K. probably has the next best datasets, and they show high rates of obesity too - though granted, not as high as the U.S. - but they’re certainly not thin.
But not just obesity but thinness is also highly heritable, so the upshot of all of this is that you really can’t tell by looking at someone whether they have an eating disorder or not. End of story.
Set point weight is heritable enough that strenuous efforts to alter it one way or the other (diet and exercise) will only result in a 5% change over time – I believe this was Glenn Gaesser’s conclusion, in Big Fat Lies . Which is why diets fail with such great frequency (Donna Ciliska said 90% of the time in her research). Which, as an aside, is why the diet industry is such a great moneymaker – so many repeat customers, but I digress. The bottom line is that the body violently defends its genetically preprogrammed set point weight, and the defenses it sets up when doing so (obsessing about food, hoarding food, etc.) can look like eating disorder symptoms, but in non-eating disordered individuals will disappear quickly when the dieting behaviour disappears.
In terms of thin v. fat, I could see why you’d have the impression that thin women are more obsessed with food and dieting, because they talk about it constantly. It’s socially accepted, even expected, for them to be conscious of what they’re eating and to talk about it openly.
Fat people don’t discuss their eating problems. Really fat people don’t discuss anything. Nobody talks to them.
DSeid, how fascinating. That was exactly my experience. At age 13 I was 5’2" and weighed 116 lbs. At the beginning of 7th grade I right quick dropped 24 lbs.
And for the next 10 years suffered from horrible bulimia as my weight fluctuated. It was just like Ray Milland’s alcoholism in The Lost Weekend. Up 10 lbs, down 12 lbs, up and down.
For the past 20 years I’ve tried a whole range of diets. I can do it for about a week, sometimes three. Then the bulimia returns and I eventually wind up gaining. The mental hell of a food obsession is far worse than being fat – it just is.
Another funny thing is sugar - I swear, I cannot handle refined sugar.at.all. Sends my mood right into the crapper. I wonder if that’s a side-effect from my years of unhealthy, low-calorie dieting.
You should check out Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. The author laments something I’ve always been frustrated with – the sheer amount of time and energy women and girls expend on dieting, food, punishing exercise, obsessing. She also points out how many women don’t think they have eating disorders (and their doctors would agree), but still count calories obsessively, occasionally binge and purge, etc.
I understand what the OP is trying to say, but for many women their disorders start around puberty. They gain weight around their thighs and chest and freak out (sometimes thanks to ‘helpful’ family members who comment on the weight gain and warn them about getting too big), thereby nipping the ‘problem’ in the bud. If it doesn’t begin there, then it often does in college, when they stave off the dreaded ‘freshman 15’ (i.e. natural weight gain occurring in the late teens). So of course they’re going to be thin – they’ve worked every single day to stay there.
I’ve had an eating disorder and have run three marathons (okay, to say I’ve had an eating disorder is somewhat inaccurate - you never really get over one).
I have researched nutrition and exercise ad nauseum. When I was younger, I researched nutrition manuals and books on traditionally thought of eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulemia - you know, before overeating was really recognized as a disorder - specifically to find a “how-to” manual. That’s one of the things about the disorder for me - nutrition was the way it started. I only wanted to get rid of a few extra pounds.
Then it was almost like a game. How little can I eat and still function? How far can I push myself? When I was immersed in my disorder, deprivation was something I was so proud of. I ate only 500 calories today instead of the 800 I had yesterday! It’s funny - reading this makes me realize how similar my desire to run a marathon and my desire to starve myself were. At one point, both were about mental limits and control.
I still run, or at least I’m trying to run again given that I gained weight when I was pregnant. But I don’t starve myself anymore. My family’s too important for that, but it’s still a struggle, especially given my current heavier state. My pregnancy was easy, but the resulting weight gain? Pure torture. Sometimes it’s almost harder not to starve myself or not to hate myself because of the weight. Other times I almost don’t care. But I think about food way more than I should - what I’ll eat, what I won’t eat, how I’ll burn it off.
I hate to attempt to counter your interpretation of statistics with pure anecdote, but have you been over to Europe? Walked around the streets and looked at the general populous?
Sure, we’ve got our share of tubbies, and the UK is the worst in Europe (indeed the highest incidence of obesity in the world is in Scotland - more than the US), but it’s the individual value of that obesity that sets the US apart. IOW, anyone with a BMI of more than 30 may be obese, but if 20% of Scots are at BMI 31, that doesn’t make the obesity necessarily worse than if 18% of Americans are at BMI 36.
It’s obvious just walking around and looking. I’ve spent extensive periods of time in the EU, the US, and Asian countries, and I assure you that your supposition is belied by the evidence of one’s own eyes. Unless the obese populations of Europe and Asia are hiding indoors. Grossly generally, Asian fat people are merely overweight, Euro fat people are porky, and American fat people are huge.
