I’ve never heard a fat person say: ‘It’s my fault, I love grub and I just eat too much’

OVER the past few days, this paper has been serialising BBC broadcaster Jenni Murray’s ‘battle with the bulge’, as told in her new memoir, Fat Cow, Fat Chance.

And, like lots of obese people, she traces her weight problems right back to her childhood. Her relationship with food was defined by other people when she was still a tot, she reckons, and so she was destined to be a fat girl right from the start.

The only flaw in this logic is that, try as I might, I couldn’t see a whole lot in Jenni’s early life that was vastly different to every woman of her generation, or later generations either. As a baby, she was fed every four hours for 20 minutes at a time, which was still the standard advice for new mothers when my own children were infants. Then, as a toddler, she had an indulgent granny who gave her chocolate bars as treats, though indulgent grannies are hardly rare.

And Jenni was a slim child, she says, because her mother cooked healthy meals, with huge portions of fruit and vegetables served three times a day.

Her only real criticism there is that her mum insisted on clean plates – again, that ‘waste not, want not’ mantra was commonplace with parents old enough to remember wartime rationing. Then when she was 15 her mum advised her to wear a Playtex girdle for an hourglass figure – at the time, the height of fashion among stylish teenagers, more like a modern ‘body-con’ bandeau dress than a spiked Iron Maiden.

Scapegoat

I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, and Jenni Murray has clearly had a miserable battle with her weight for decades, but I’ve yet to meet a person who admits to struggling with their weight who’s also willing to say: ‘It’s my own fault. I love my grub, and I eat far too much of it.’

I’ve no doubt that childhood issues play a part in adult obesity, but there’s only so long you can go on blaming your granny or your mother for your addiction to crème eggs.

The advantage of finding a scapegoat, whether it’s a kindly granny or a rogue hormone, however, is that you are magically absolved of any responsibility for your own weight: a big boy did it and ran away.

Parents who feed their children rubbishy food, processed meals and takeaways are undoubtedly setting them up for a lifelong battle with their weight. But they’re also providing them with a lifelong reason to do little or nothing about it.

Far too often, it seems to me, people are more concerned with finding an excuse for their obesity or that of their children, rather than a solution to it.

UK nutritionists are now warning of an obesity ‘tsunami’ amongst children who have been off school for months, and our own experts fear we’re not far behind. Parents, said consultant nutritionist Gaye Godkin, are ‘pulling their hair out with kids who have gained so much weight’. The pandemic is a handy culprit for this trend, but somebody had to go to the supermarkets and buy the sweets, the pizzas, the crisps and the fizzy drinks that fuelled this weight gain in the first place.

Baking was a popular way of keeping youngsters occupied under house arrest, but were there no elderly neighbours who might have been glad of a batch of chocolate-chip cookies or a loaf of banana bread? There were any amount of excuses available for getting fat over the past three months, in other words, but any amount of options for those who sought them, too.

Nobody’s blaming parents who overindulged their children with goodies to get their families through the toughest times. But there’s a difference between accepting blame and accepting responsibility. Blame is defeatist; responsibility is resolute.

Taking responsibility means accepting not just your part in what has happened in the past, but what you can do to change it in the future.

Shaming

Nagging and shaming overweight children won’t work: Jenni Murray still remembers the sting of her mother’s ‘you look like a baby elephant’ taunt. But letting them believe that this is their identity for life is wrong, too. There are still two months before the schools reopen, the beaches and the parks are accessible again, so there’s no reason to keep kids stuck indoors.

We can’t terrorise parents out of tackling their children’s weight gain with dire threats of eating disorders. There is a big difference between giving a young child the message that their weight is not their fault – because in childhood, it really isn’t – and in telling them that there’s nothing they can do about it. The solutions are in their parents’ hands right now: let’s hope they don’t just reach for the excuses.