Quaequam Blog!

It’s a good job I was staying at a hotel on Saturday because if I’d been in the privacy of my own house, I’d have probably put my foot through the telly watching News 24’s coverage of the so-called “fat epidemic“.

Apparently, 50% of boys will be obese by 2050. This is one of those nonsense statistics where you take the current trend and just continue it across time until you have a satisfactorily scary sounding soundbite to regurgitate ad nauseum.

In reality, I suspect that even if climate change doesn’t radically alter all our eating and exercise habits by that time, it will plateau at a much lower rate.

The BBC coverage (which I can’t seem to find online) was something else. At one point, a health worker went on camera lamenting that boys didn’t have role models such as Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham to encourage them to stay thin (I swear I’m not making this up). Another one complained that it is already too late to solve the problem.

Want to reduce obesity in this country? Well, take it from a fat bastard: the best way to do this is to shoot every health specialist and nutritionist. That includes Jamie Fucking Oliver. These people are paid serious amounts of cash to make fat people feel bad about themselves. The response? More comfort eating.

When I was a teenager, I was taken to a nutritionist. Her helpful advice was the tell me that if I didn’t do something about my weight problem I’d have heart problems by the time I was thirty (still seems to be ticking okay), and that her magic solution was for me to eat digestive biscuits every time I wanted a choccie bar. All going to see that nutritionist achieved was to make me feel bad about myself and to reinforce the notion that I was fat. Looking back at photos of myself back then, relatively speaking, I was certainly chunky but nothing compared to the Goodyear Blimp I am now. Yet in addition to the casual playground bullying and name calling, which was generally easy to handle, I had to deal with institutionalised bullying and name calling, which wasn’t. I became utterly insecure, ran away from the rugby team, gave up the one sport I actually felt comfortable doing (swimming), and generally became a fat caricature.

If society wants to sort out its obesity problem, the simplest solution is just to stop obsessing about it. This obesity epidemic industry has nothing to do with the interests of people who have serious weight issues, and everything to do with the egos, paychecks and sadism of those who enjoy peddling doomsday scenarios.

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