On a scale of one to Orson Welles and Queen Latifah, how fat are you? Mildly overweight, Rubenesque, or “I can’t see my feet” fat? We are in an obesity emergency, though many NHS workers have been advised to use more polite words than obese.
Why, when they call people who smoke, smokers? Why are the fat no longer shamed, when according to reports by Glasgow University, obesity now kills infinitely more people than cigarettes, causing 47 per cent more life-years lost than tobacco.
Britain’s losing battle with obesity is becoming a drag. Smoking is responsible for a few diseases, notably lung cancer; but being overweight causes a multiplicity of them.
As a smoker, I have been “fag-shamed” all my life. Is this equitable or kind, when smoking, by suppressing the appetite, keeps me thin, thus saving the taxpayer more dosh than it spends on the legions of lard-arses? And why this revolt against the habit of our ancestors?
Non-smokers are addicted to a kind of vile, sanctimonious fascism; “We’re trying to live healthy lives, you know,” but it is a canard that we have only recently discovered that smoking has risks. Back in the Thirties, cigarettes were referred to as “coffin nails”. It’s always better to be a cavalier than a roundhead, and smoking has an age-old conviviality to it. To deny this is to deny the attraction of smokers, from Churchill to the blessed Farage (the former of whom lived far longer than many of today’s obese population).
There is a conspiracy of lies around being fat just as there is around the notion that Western democracy is in good shape. What, for instance, has happened to personal accountability? Do the obese think their weight is a “condition” imposed upon them against their will? And imposed by what or by whom, exactly? I know the dangers of smoking. With obesity, the truth is swathed in the bandages of soft illusion. Being fat isn’t a disease or a mental disorder, but some researchers seem determined to prove there is an association between obesity and psychiatric illness.
Some 75 per cent of Britons are clinically overweight, but decline to take responsibility for it. I have friends who are obese. Even when their breadbaskets are as conspicuous as Poirot’s whiskers, they claim they are “voluptuous”’, or “curvy”. Body positivity encourages this self-deception. There has even been a publication devoted to the fat, entitled Just As Beautiful. Launched in 2010, it was crammed with pictures of plus-sized models bursting out of their underpinnings; only they can’t have been “just as beautiful” because the magazine recently folded.
There is a counterproductive taboo attached to “fat shaming” when there isn’t to “fag shaming”. We should not criticise the poor blubber guts in case it hurts their feelings and makes them feel slighted (what about my feelings, when hostesses send me outside in January to dodge the sparrows and the blackbirds in case they take out a class action suit?).
The health agencies set up to tackle obesity all agree with this. And yet stigma is a useful means of dealing with what we might call antisocial behaviour. Smokers never come half as near to ruining anyone’s day as fat people do – particularly the sort of pot-bellied bloke who waddles around Waitrose without his shirt on. Every age has its ideal of beauty, but even the subjects Rubens painted never looked on the verge of splitting the canvas.
Consider Bridgerton. I rather enjoy the Netflix show, which portrays Regency England’s racial diversity. Last night, I took a gander at the new series, to find the producers had gone for the final frontier of diverse casting. This season’s female love interest isn’t plump. She’s humongous; her breasts a human tsunami. No doubt my distaste for obese actors is due to an inner defect, but thin actors making love on screen is sexy; fat people doing it is a turn-off – which is why Louis B Mayer put Greta Garbo on a diet when she arrived from Sweden looking like a giant chokladbollar. “In America,” he said, “we don’t like overweight people.”
In consequence, the divine Garbo was never without a cigarette, likewise Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift. Far better a thin smoker than a fat swinger. Obesity is a problem for the developed world, and the problem we have in dealing with it is the domination of the debate by people who are basically Left wing. The World Health Organisation argues that obesity has been imposed upon the poor by capitalist food corporations, so once again individual agency is removed from the equation. Enough, already.
Why aren’t fat people ostracised like smokers, and permitted only to eat outdoors? Why aren’t they put in ghettos, with reality television series about morbidly obese people on repeat? I wish my fat friends were thinner because I hope they will live longer and be less of a burden on the taxpayer. Last year, obesity cost the NHS £6.5 billion, while smoking set us back less than half that. But how do we say such things today? Well, we do to smokers. It goes against my principles to shame anyone, but as Groucho Marx said: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have some more.”
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