They walk more. That’s it. That’s the secret.
Portion sizes are a factor too!
I dont feel like they are. Traveling France and Italy a couple years back, I found myself not finishing meals much more regularly that I do in the states, Even though I was eating a bit more because I was walking 5+ miles a day.
Maybe i was in part over ordering due to language, or menu expectations. Maybe some of thw places I was in were touristy and over doing it to match ‘american portions’
But for instance, i got breakfast that was ‘oefs en cocotte de compagne’ at a café a couple blocks from the louvre, far enough to not be in the tourist trap surrounding area anymore.
It was massive- 4 shired eggs with a generous amount of mushrooms and gruyere, served with 4 pieces of toast. And I confirmed with the waiter that that was not a shared portion…
France doesn’t really do restaurant breakfast, that dish is a main. Breakfast is coffee and a croissant if you’re having it outside the house, otherwise it’s brunch.
Yeah european breakfast is mostly just a cigarette and a bowl of creme
Yeah, I mean brunch checks out. It was like 11:00 it was still a huge serving of a verrry rich dish though.
Nobody has ever had this kind of breakfast in France. Normal breakfast here is coffee and maybe the last of yesterday’s baguette.
Jesus, I top out at half that and I’m an absolute lardass, les that I used to be but still
I can do my weekly shopping without having to get in the car. Because in Europe everything’s all mixed together rather than zoned into miles of endless residential, that you have to drive for 25 minutes in order to leave to get to the big shopping mall was it’s one million car parking spaces.
i walk 10 minutes (1.0 km) to the second-nearest grocery store (because that has cheaper and better-quality food) and i’m already living pretty far out on the city borders.
And also didn’t replace all the fat in their food with sugar processed from corn.
Fat doesn’t turn into fat when you eat it - it turns into sugars, which then turn into fat. Eating sugar just takes one step out of the process and makes your body work less (and therefore burn less calories) turning it into fat.
We compensate with gym time, you can’t outrun a cheeseburger
Not being able to outrun your diet is a really strange concept to me, and I’ve exclusively heard it in this thread, and multiple times in this thread. Dafuq?
It’s a metaphor, exercise won’t fix a bad diet
Fast Food!
Ironically fast food applies a speed debuff
You can’t outrun your diet.
It’s not that simple, if you are healthier with regular exercise your hunger is also better regulated and your diet will be better.
To me, no one really needs to be told that being fit and healthy is better than not being fit and healthy. It’s more that, as a society, we’ve been convinced over eating can be repaid with excersise, to sort of balance it out (an idea pushed by food lobby groups). I’m not saying that you disagree with any of that.
We evolved as persistence hunters. Being able to run off our winter fat reserves would’ve made us poor persistence hunters and we would’ve died out.
calories in, calories out. Use more than you eat and weight goes down. Eat more than you use and weight goes up. It’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong.
It’s very wrong, if only for the simple reason that not all calories are the same. Eating 1000 calories worth of protein will not have the effect as eating 1000 calories of HFCS.
Please stop parroting this piece of reductionist misinformation that is used to sell us ultra-processed foods.
What you said is an explanation of why what I said is an oversimplification. It’s an efficiency variable, just makes the math slightly more complicated, doesn’t change the formula.
I mean, you can, but it takes a lot of running to expend the calories taken in with a pretty typical American diet, especially when you account for the increase in appetite exercise typically brings.
But it is possible. If you can burn 2000 calories on a single run, that’s a lot of room to maneuver to fit your macros while eating a significant amount of junk food.
you’d have to run over 3 hours to burn 2000 calories.
a 20m run usually burns like 200-300.
Depends on weight and speed, of course. According to the standard calculators floating around, a 200 lb (91 kg) person running a 10k in an hour is burning about 960 calories per hour. And that’s a casual/comfortable pace for runners.
People aren’t gonna be able to get off the couch and suddenly be able to burn 1000 calories per hour, but that’s probably a pace within reach for most people within a few months of training.
There are easier ways to control weight, but for people who enjoy running, those calories give a lot of flexibility in how to eat.
I lost weight after two weeks in Paris eating like a hedonist king because of all the walking.
We (Europeans) are just more active, including walking / cycling to work every day. Try it and see the difference.
i think it’s not just “activity”. lots of people in the US go to the gym a lot.
but what we have here in europe is integrating movements into everyday life. Like, when i drive anywhere in the city, it typically involves a 10 minute walk (to/from the subway/tram station). And i believe that does much more than going to the gym for 1 hour once a week. Because you stay moving daily, your body stays “awake” daily, instead of just waking up once a week and then falling back into slumber.
they also eat smaller portions, eat more non-processed food, etc, and have better food in schools and public institutions.
usa culture is the problem. our food culture is entirely different than most of europe.
the average take out meal in the usa is like 1200 calories, which is half your daily calories (or more if you are less than 200lbs) in europe it’s like 800.
Carbs are much worse than fat. So drinking dozens of grams of sugar every day and putting sugar in every food is worse than eating fatty food.
carne et lacte vivant
from caesar’s report about the brits: they live off meat and milk
Britain is projected to be the fattest country in Europe. So don’t think all those chippies and pub food aren’t taking a toll.
Brits are fat too, they just don’t have as many obese people as the States.
Wait, what is pea pure?
Misspelling of puree (or pureé), most likely referring to the UK’s mushy peas,which are ubiquitous in chip shops over there
I think I’m the only Northerner who hates those. Curry sauce though…
mushy peas
Yes, let us come to a conclusion by comparing the obesity of one nation to the abundance of delicious food establishments of another.
In what is likely a touristy or well traveled section. Sometimes the difference includes how we do our transportation too, like more walking/biking. Maybe a difference in how often we rely on said restaurants too.
It helps when everywhere in that mile radius (and more) is considered walking distance in much of Europe, but Americans would rather drive.
Walling that mile ain’t going to negate that much unhealthy food.
Nah, every american I’ve known who left America either immediately lost weight, or maintained despite eating 10x more and less healthy food.
I lost weight on a diet of fried food, meat, and fried noodles, I’ve seen other people lose weight eating ice cream 2-3x a day
I fucking promise you we don’t prefer to drive, it’s the only option we have. Our government fucked us
But…you are (supposed to be) a democracy. So you fucked yourself for 100 years?
Special interest groups with lots of money fucked us, unfortunately.
Facts. One time we were talking about how cool it would be to live really close to a mall as a kid.
Then we realized that our local mall has no pedestrian crossings or even sidewalks, so you’d still have to get adults to drive you even if you were across the street. Or play frogger across several lanes
Having recently moved to Europe, I occasionally miss the convenience of driving but overall it’s so much better.
Just getting to chill on my commute and not have to worry about traffic is so nice.
When it’s very cold or rainy it would be nice to drive to the store. I do miss being able to buy a week+ worth of groceries and loading up the trunk
Overall this is still way better.
I mean, you are allowed to own a car in Europe, just saying.
Of course, if you live in a dense city with barely any parking spots and roads that are impossible to drive through on work days, practicality may be limited.
I mean obviously.
I’m only here for school so I won’t be going through the expense or licensing to get a car
If I moved permanently I might get a car, but it’s just a convenience
I mean, yes that’s absolutely true, but many Americans really do prefer to drive even short distances. When I lived in North Carolina people regularly drove to the other side of the parking lot to eat, shop at different stores, meet up with friends, etc. I asked several people why they didn’t walk, and every single one said they hated walking and would drive or re-park if it was further than a few seconds walk.
Anon needs to learn that the UK isn’t representative of all of Europe
Europe does have an obesity crisis, and also nearly half of adults overweight. The UK is bad but not alone and not the highest.
But even then things are still not as bad as the USA. The obesity rate is about 23% in Europe compared to 43% in the US. Russia has an obesity rate of 30% skewing the European rate. For comparison other high European countries are Malta at 33%, Croatia at 31%, Ireland at 29%, Greece at 29%, UK at 27%, Germany at 21%. Lower rates are seen in Italy at 18% and France at 10%, but even those rates are not great - 1 in 10 people are obese and more are overweight.
So OP is right except the US is worse. Over a third of people are obese and many more are overweight - that is shocking even with how bad things are in Europe. It is certainly not projecting.
Edit: sorry the US obesity rate is 43% not 36%. Other figures updates to 2022 figures.
You’ve also got to consider that “obesity” is a single threshold. I’ve been to the US many times and there are WAY more morbidly obese people in the US, and some who are so fucking huge they would definitely turn heads in the EU.
also nearly half of adults overweight
One thing worth pointing out is that the “overweight” category (BMI between 25 and 30) actually has lower all cause mortality than the “normal” category (BMI between 20 and 25:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37405977/#gid=article-figures&pid=fig-1-uid-0
I think that suggests that being merely “overweight” probably isn’t a significant health problem.
Europe does have an obesity crisis, and also nearly half of adults overweight.
Hm?
“overweight” is a serperate medical category to “obese”
Ok, but just like BMI, those categories include neither muscle nor bone mass.
That matters in the individual case, but not in the aggregate, unless we’ve any reason to assume americans have particularly dense BONES
I mean general guidence for parents was to force feed your child a gallon of milk every morning until like 2015 so they would grow up to have denser bones.
This is not satire btw.
Wtf are these numbers?! US is generally reported with just shy of 40% obesity rate, not 75%. And I cannot find ANY numbers for obesity on the WHO website for the US.
It’s cut off, that’s American Samoa which has a very large large population
10-40% (and rising) of the population being obese is indeed a crisis.
Where do you have those numbers from? I’d like to look up my country.
And does have an obesity problem!
“I visited europe” goes to the uk
The uk is somehow actually less european than the caucasian countries and kazakhstan which everyone criticizes for pretending to be european.
The idea that the UK has less in common with France than France does with Kazakhstan is hilarious.
Bravo!
Is the UK american, or the US British?
How to start a war with a single question.
Fun related “fact”: Shakespeare supposedly sounds more period-accurate in a generic American accent than a modern British accent because the British dramatically changed their accent some time after the US split and the American accent has changed less over the centuries.
The British accent? There are hundreds, if not thousands of different accents.
And there are equally as many American accents.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english
One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”
American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.
It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.
So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.
As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.
That’s super neat. Thank you for sharing that and linking the article! I appreciate it! :)
I love weird trivia like that. Another fun one is that scientists have discovered 3 or 4 different regional accents across the US in the calls of crows.
Yess, I love weird trivia like that, too! I didn’t know that about crows; that’s awesome. Thank you again for sharing that, seriously :D
Are they all distinct accents, or are they slight variations on an accent?
Bit of column A, bit of column B…
Well, they’re all equally fancy to me!
What’s generic American mean?
vowels tend to be spoken with a flatter, wider mouth/tongue shape
West Coast/Californian
Think Midwestern, not New York, Bostonian, or Southern twang.
There’s more monarchists in the US.
yes
Which existed before the other?
The US is British, that is why they speak English and not Americans.
Given that the British keep fucking latinizing their damned language you’d think they were trying to move away from English. Seriously you don’t say solder off you sod off, remove the L you Saxon fuckwads.
Now, now, I know it’s frustrating, but try to soldier on.
Exactly!
Notice how anon never mentions seeing any fat people tho…
The trend for obesitas in Europe has been steadily climbing. I read that in the Netherlands the adults have over 50% overweight
overweight is not obese
And yet both are true if you look at the numbers
Splitting hairs. Yall are fat now too
Can’t speak for all of Europe, but I was in Germany for a couple weeks and I saw just as many fat people there that I see at home in America.
according to wikipedia the united states are 42.9% obese and germany 24.2%, what may instead be happening is either not being accurate in your headcount or that in germany obese people go outside more than in america or that maybe obesity is distributed differently, potentially similarly in both countries but you were only for example in rural areas in america but only in urban areas in germany
Or perhaps they were in a touristic area which had lots of Americans.
Check the actual calculation. In a study I saw about the most obese cities, the calculation was number of restaurants per square mile. So nothing to do with actual obesity.
Restaurants per square mile? That’s an obscenely stupid metric for measuring obesity.
You can’t rate world cuisine on England
Absolute zero is a useful reference point.
Low key amazing comment
I love how the post never mentions the country, but everyone just knows.
They did say fish and chips which is kind of an iconic British food.
Curry shops even moreso.
Hilarious that this is true and yet the US is still somehow fatter.
There is a vast difference between eating shitty food once a day while being able to walk everywhere and eating shitty food three meals a day and not walking anywhere.
The US both massively overeats the shitty food and is very sedentary for the most part. A bit contributor is our absolutely terrible work culture that wears people out so much that they seek pleasure from food and entertainment in the few spare hours they have each week because they are constantly advertised to encouraging that behavior.
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It’s sugar.
Sugar & HFCS
eats a tub of sugary chocolate sugar every morning
Pretty sure it’s the milk, guys!
Stop eating anything with milk in it
NO!
Replying to your edit since you felt it was reasonable to retroactively be rude in an edit like a coward instead of at least in reply.
Damn, i guess managing my weight to be within 10lbs of my desired target weight for the last 10 years doesnt count because ive never in my life weighed enough to have to lose a lot of weight.
I consciously work to shed weight when I’m over and gain weight when I’m under. But what do i know?
I’m just a fuckbrained dogmatist.Right? I’ve never had more than an extra 20lbs to lose so I guess I know nothing about weight management.
It’s not the milk lol.
As someone who’s lactose intolerant, it is annoying to find stuff without dairy in it. Not impossible of course, but it is in the most random shit.
It’s the HFS. Not fucking milk. Like, yes, milk as a drink is high calorie and was forced on us by marketing in the 90s-00s, but drinking milk isn’t what’s making people fat.
The people who managed to NOT gain an extra 160 pounds that they needed to lose might know something about not gaining weight…
It’s not just the milk but milk is a rich source of nutrition and over consumed in the west.
The obesity crisis is due to excessive calories in all foods, including massive overuse of sugar in processed foods, high levels of red meats and fat etc and low levels of fruit and vegetables. This is combined with physical inactivity.
Southern Europe doesn’t have the same levels of obesity - about 10% in Italy compared to 20% in the UK and 36% in the US. They have a “Mediterranean diet” which is low fat, low sugar, with more fish, fruits and vegetables. Japan also has low obesity rates of 5-6% and again has a much healthier diet. Their rate is going up and it seems to be due to increasing westernised diet.
And the overuse of sugar is because the sugar can mask cheaper ingredients and lower amounts of spices.
Why sell an instant curry full of expensive spices if you can cut half of them out and just replace them with sugar and salt? Why use decent meat if you can just use cheap shitty meat and add sugar to hide the fact that it’s flavorless? Why use real cream in the sauce if you can add some skim milk powder, palm oil, a thickening agent, and yet more sugar at half the price?
Or food is getting enshittified and it’s having a real impact on our health. But since public health doesn’t factor into food companies’ bottom line that’s not just tolerated but desired.
Having just come back to the US from Europe, I immediately miss nutriscore on groceries. A to E letter grades for the purpose of comparing two similar products to tell which are higher in sugar/salts/saturated fatty acids and which have more protein/fiber/fruits/vegetables/healthy oils. It was so nice picking up, say, two boxes of cereal and going “oh. This one is full of garbage and this one isn’t.” Not a perfect system, but a very valuable one
In a similar vein, Germany has a neat labeling system¹ for the conditions under which animals (for meat, dairy, etc.) are kept. There are five levels, each of which has specific minimum criteria per type of animal. Basically, 1 and 2 are shit-tier, 3 is semi-decent, 4 is vaguely free-range, and 5 is “organic” (as vaguely defined as that term is).
That makes it easier to avoid buying from animal torture dungeons, plus it stands to reason that products from animals kept on better conditions have a better chance of being of good quality.
The labels are voluntary. However, you can find them on a good number of products, especially since a label with one of the higher levels has marketing value. I know I definitely prefer products that are at least level 4.
Notably, there are efforts to pressure supermarkets into abandoning level 1 and 2 products altogether, with Aldi having promised to do so for most products by 2030 and other chains giving weasely but vaguely affirmative statements.
¹ Yes, the website doesn’t seem to be fully translated. But at least the level definitions are in English.
By cutting out milk, you also cut out most ultra processed food which is the more likely culprit. Europeans consume plenty of dairy.
You are being downvoted because what works for you is not going to work for everyone, and pretending like it will makes you look like an asshole.
I’m going to tag you as the milk guy
I drink a gallon of milk a day (no joke). Take a look at my profile picture 😁
