Heya i thought i would post this thread to see if there are an Irish people out there .

I'm from Dublin and i have to say i adore it, i will however be moving up to Northern Ireland soon and i am excited/scared about it!

Also from Dublin Welcome!

Hey, welcome! An irish guy here..

Do you guys think the drinking culture of young ireland makes it hard to diet? I certainly do. I adore drinking and letting loose but i hate having to keep 400 calories out of my 1,200 for drink and then know that i WILL wind up eating when im drunk

Drinking is my biggest downfall, in fact at the moment I'm halfway through a self imposed no drink week, to detox. Already down 4lbs. I simply love a few glasses of wine with dinner or on nights in with my boyfriend, or if I'm at the beach (I live in Malta) a few beers. It's the worst thing for a diet, 100%. For me anyway! To be honest I don't even think it's the Irish in me, a lot of people here my age is the same. I can be quite good with food but definitely wine is my biggest weakness.

I guess it does, although I managed to give it up totally for a few months, and only now gradually easing back into it, my biggest problem is definitely take aways after drinking, and thats like 1000 calories on top of drink!! I guess in ways there isnt as much to do on weekends and evenings, and in otehr countries you see somebody just drink 3-4 drinks on a night out, I would drink them an hour!! I am lucky in that I hate wine, but cider, thats a different story! Malta is really nice and scenic by the way!

Oooooh cider don't get me started, I literally had to ban it from my life. I don't do weight watchers but I remember when I did, reading that a can of Bulmers can be anything up to 7 points!! I love it so much I had to just cut it completely. I remember a few years back in one month I managed to gain a stone from drinking cider almost nightly. Yes Malta is nice Been living here now five and a half years, love it here. Get back to Dub a couple of times a year too whenever I'm homesick

Do you think we Irish are getting fatter? I notice that a lot of young people nowadays tend to have terrible eating habits, they either hardly eat then eat junk or they just eat a of junk

I was talking about this with people before and i fear for children in the future, even now there are more and more obese children seen around. but what do you put it on? Parents? Lack of education? Lack of sport and more computer games? Hard to know really but yes I do ee a problem in years to come.

Yes children and definitely adults, especially in the past few years. I think it's more noticeable for me because I'm only there a couple of times a year but last December when I was back, I was shopping in Swords with Mum and I remember looking around thinking, oh my god, everyone, almost everyone, is overweight.

I put it on conveniece food 100%. There are so many take aways now, everywhere, between chinese, chippers, pizzerias, indian etc. And so many new restaurants and chains like nandos and starbucks open now. Add to that that people don't seem to make time to cook proper meals anymore so instead of cooking a meal from scratch, it's frozen convenience food.

Yeah alot of it, is people not bothered / making time to cook, so its convenience food for the family, and there certainly is alot of that around with all the take aways etc as you said. (ok it saves time and is convenient, but it costs alot more than it would to cook a dinner, I think anyway, and realistically how long does it take to cook a simple dinner?)