LighterLife, already in my bad books over TOAST and fat suits, are the subject of a BBC investigation tonight:

The liquid-based programme, aimed at people who are three or more stones overweight, involves dieters consuming just 530 calories a day for 12 weeks.

But Inside Out has heard from some dieters who have experienced disrupted periods, hair loss and water poisoning.

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I wrote the following letter to Lib Dem News last week but they saw fit not to print it. Fair enough, but here it is anyhoo:

Just what point is Sandra Gidley trying to make by prancing about in a comedy fat suit (People, 22nd February)? As someone who is at least as fat as she was when she ‘fatted up’, I can assure her that if her experience involved feeling exhausted all the time and being unable to tie her own shoelaces it wasn’t an authentic one. I’m not convinced her suit simulated diabetes for her either, one of the conditions highlighted in the article.

There is a creeping nastiness about the anti-obesity bandwagon that has been rolling on in recent years, employing both the patronising language about handicap that it is now thankfully regarded as insulting to disabled people with sinister innuendo about the cost of it all. It is clear that Sandra buys into at least some of the government’s rhetoric about fat being a ‘bigger threat than global warming’. You wouldn’t spot an MP getting out the boot polish to understand the ‘black experience’ nor would you hear them talking about geriatric care crippling the health service.

What’s worse is that this stunt is actually about promoting diet company and soup manufacturer LighterLife - this venture turns out to be about making diet industry Fat Cats fatter not the wellbeing of fat people.

Nobody likes a tourist, Sandra. If you want to understand what it’s like to be fat, talk to a fat person, not someone trying to make money out of them.

If you didn’t see the Lib Dem News article in question, it is basically lifted directly from Sandra’s press release, although the reference to LighterLife is conspicuous by its absence in the LDN version. See also the Southern Daily Echo.

LighterLife have been in the news recently as the main funders behind The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust (TOAST), which has rather rapidly taken down its website in the past week or so. They currently have a tube carriage advertising campaign which was annoying me even before I became aware of the TOAST controversy. Their programme is based around crash dieting for the first 14 weeks (during which you can only eat their official soups, shakes and bars).

I sincerely question what an MP is doing endorsing any commercial weight loss programme, let alone this one. The fat suit stunt fits in well with their general publicity material which is all about presenting fat people as miserable and desperate. This isn’t about empowering people; it is about making them feel bad and then taking money from them when they are at their lowest.

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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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