Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

Afternoon all.

Am a happy bunny as have just bought a dozen large pillar candles at a booter at 50p each. That's a good stash.

Fuddle, I am overweight and know it. I should lose about 3-4 stones and drop back from 18/20 to 16/18 in clothes. Thing is, I think BMI is a very blunt instrument.

For example, I have a colleague who is exactly my height. Stand us side by side and compare the size of our hands, our wrists, our skulls etc and it's obvious that she has a very gracile, delicate bone structure. I have much heavier, thicker bones. Even if you took us down to our skeletons, we would look very different. Sort of race horses and cart horses; same species but not built the same at all.

She's built like a fashion model (and eats like a horse lol) but her bones are almost too thin for her height, looking as if she'd break if you pushed her over. I've some concerns about how well she'll fare in later life if her thin bones get thinner still.

Even at my very slimmest as a late teen, I was still a 14/16 and would get ill if smaller than that, so that is a physiological line in the sand for me. Saying that I should be smaller than a 14/16 and about 10.5 stone is an absurdity if I get ill when under that size.

There has only ever been one survey of British women's sizes and that was early 1950s. Girls and women were corsetted and tightly belted up until that era, and the habit of constricting the waist over time leads to a different body shape than that for women who have never worn garments which pinch about their waists. Some of our fellow posters will be old enough to have worn "waspie" belts; very wide and thick elasticated belts which really nipped your middle in.

We have a ridiculous set of images offered up to us as ideal and healthy. Grown women should apparently look like athletic youths but stacked like nursing mothers? Who decided on this? Most normal women are pear-shaped.

Re if you're overweight, ask yourself a few questions. Can you walk properly, without the size of your legs distorting your gait? Can you bend and move in all directions? Can you walk a few miles without half-killing yourself? Are your knees OK with the weight you carry on them? A bit of belly podge or a wobbly arris isn't going to kill ya, and why should ladies who've given birth be expected to have flat bellies like an adolescent?

We have enormous amounts of fat cells for a reason; so we can gain weight in times of plenty to see us over times of famine. Our ancestresses survived because they had this quality. We need to have a degree of caution as we aren't in a subsistence farming situation and nearly starving every winter, but it may yet come to that.

Treat all data with a huge heaping of commonsense. I have been in my Nan's village this weekend, visitng. My Nan is 90 and not too good on her pins but her sisters in their eithties are cutting about like girls. One of them refuses to go to certain gatherings because they're full of old people; she's only 86 y'see.........:rotfl:

[Deleted User]

Well said GQ, I've always been a big girl. I'm a size 18/20 now and at 65 can still do all the things I always have been able to do, including picking up and hefting about a 25 kilo sack of spuds when necessary!
We're both very active, we walk the lurcher for many miles each week, we run the garden, the allotment and do all the things needed to ensure we use the harvest including making the cider which is quite labour intensive. I'm classed as obese, but there is no facility at the GPs surgery to help with weightloss, and I'm not going to do a 'club' oh no, I'd go ballistic at the stupidity of being weighed and clapped at and given a star on my card!!!

We're healthy, fit, and old, we've not had to give up any activities because we're podgy in fact I can honestly say we're busier than we've ever been and for most of the daylight hours now we're retired. I don't think with human beings you can apply the 'one size fits all' rule, we come in so many different shapes and sizes underneath, as GQ says and I'm good peasant stock and proud of it, Cheers Lyn xxx.

mardatha

I've never listened to eating fashions or fads, and never bothered about my weight until this year. And only then because I felt fat. Lost 16lb on lowcarb so am now back to the weight I was when working. Been a size 14 for years and if the doc thinks I should be a 10 or 12 then he can just think away
Trouble with the internet and 24 hour news etc is that it brings all these "experts" out of the woodwork...plus TPTB are a load of manipulative crooks with an ulterior motive.

bluebag

Just watch some documentaries about mass food production in the US to see how much money is tied up in it. Animal welfare don't matter a jot and I think our welfare as consumers matters less.

Thankfully the standard in the EU and the UK is hugely better although beginning to creep toward the mass production mega farms.

Regarding young girls and dieting, the mantra for so many of them is 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'

I think a combination of food for maximum profit and a distorted body image by celebrity culture has done a lot of damage to the plain and simple fuel our bodies need.

Everything in moderation is my motto.

hauxwell

Unlurks again (waves )
I have been fat since I was a teenager and have a build like a seal crossed with a rugby league player Even at my thinnest I was a 14 and had to starve myself to get there. All the women in my dads side of the family are short, stocky with a thick layer of fat all over. I appear to naturally be about a size 18 and I am fairly happy with this. Recently I have become a little unfit due to staying in too much due to depression but I am getting better and can walk for miles. (Not too keen on hills mind!)

My retired parents despise the fat and my dad, who would naturally be a chubster literally exercises like crazy and hardly eats to maintain his low weight. I have to take extra food with me when I visit as their meals are so small. They used to comment on my weight til I told them not too but my mother still occasionally offers me money to lose weight!!!

I am very healthy and usually reasonably fit and being fat has had no impact on that. Tis also very old style as I seem to keep alot warmer in winter than my thinner chums! My other half is classed as obese but cycles up hills, walks miles, gardens and does a physical job. Doesn't appear to have made a difference to him either.

GreyQueen

bluebag wrote: »

Regarding young girls and dieting, the mantra for so many of them is 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'

I think a combination of food for maximum profit and a distorted body image by celebrity culture has done a lot of damage to the plain and simple fuel our bodies need.

Everything in moderation is my motto.

I know some women in their forties who dieted like crazy in their teens when they should have been adding to their bone mass. The upshot is that they had osteoporosis by their thirties and are in a poor way in middle life. Gawd help them and their crunchie-type skeletons in later life. I know someone who has broken a hip by coughing and they were only 48.

I, too, am from sturdy peasant stock, with a robust build and a skull you could probably bounce rocks off without damaging the contents. My mum was recalling her old foster-dad. He was still working at 67 when she was 17 and helping him out on the combines.

These men were expected to lift and carry UP LADDERS sacks which weighed 18 STONE. Which was considerably more than they did weighed themselves. Mum tried moving one of these full sacks off the end of a chute, just dragging it aside so the next sack could go on. She couldn't budge it an inch. Yet Grand-dad could carry it up ladders.

Dad, too, recalls runty-looking little old farmhands routinely lifting more than their own bodyweight many times a day and thinking nothing of it. Wonder what the gym bunnies would think of doing that?

Of course people didn't get fat in those days, they worked like stink and ate a lot. If we go back to a pre-industrial type of living (and I'd be surprised if we had anything else by the late 21st/ early 22nd century) podge won't be a problem.

And, mercifully, glossy colour pix of "celebrities" won't be around either.

[Deleted User]

Do you think they'll air brush the fashion pictures of farm hands and peasants GQ? Perhaps they'll only use Gucci sacks for the produce being carries up the ladders, in designer colours of course!!! with the label tastefully sewn on the outside so you can see you're getting an altogether better class of spud!!!

GreyQueen

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Do you think they'll air brush the fashion pictures of farm hands and peasants GQ? Perhaps they'll only use Gucci sacks for the produce being carries up the ladders, in designer colours of course!!! with the label tastefully sewn on the outside so you can see you're getting an altogether better class of spud!!!

:rotfl:

I can see it now, Lyn; bib-and-brace overalls, artful smudges of dirt over sculpted cheekbones, the westering sunlight back-lighting the tumblesdown shack........

Actually, I have probably seen that advert somewhere already. I'm distinctly "seeing" it in mind's eye.

fuddle

Even the fashion industry know Jack all about body shape. Every calculator and Marks and Sparkies bra measuring team I might add (although this was in my early 20's) measure my ample chestage as being 38DD. Through standing and trying every size of bra available I am a 34K (sorry.. yes it's a tiresome heft to lug about - my over-the-shoulder-bolder-holder works hard I'm afraid)

One size doesn't fit all and it's ludicrous to base a person's health/disease risk on a height and weight.

katep23

De-lurking to say, as I understand it, BMI is only useful as an indication of malnutrition, not as an indicator of being overweight.

BMI is a very blunt instrument which doesn't take into account muscle mass - for example, I had a male friend who at 15 stone and 6 foot ran mile every day, played rugby regularly, there wasn't an ounce of fat on him but he was classed as obese. This would also apply to every player in any international rugby team :cool:

fuddle wrote: »

Even the fashion industry know Jack all about body shape. Every calculator and Marks and Sparkies bra measuring team I might add (although this was in my early 20's) measure my ample chestage as being 38DD. Through standing and trying every size of bra available I am a 34K (sorry.. yes it's a tiresome heft to lug about - my over-the-shoulder-bolder-holder works hard I'm afraid)

Lord, I thought 32F was awkward to buy for