Sisi’s ‘lose weight’ call creates a stir
cairo — President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi is demanding Egyptians lose weight.
In televised comments earlier this month, the president railed about the number of overweight people he sees and told Egyptians they must take better care of themselves. He said physical education should become core curriculum at schools and universities and suggested TV shows shouldn’t let presenters or guests on the air if they are overweight.
The next morning, before sunrise, he drove his point home by energetically cycling to the national military academy in a Cairo suburb. In black sweat pants, a dark top and a matching baseball hat, he told cadets that he was adamant they wouldn’t leave basic training before fulfilling fitness requirements.
It was the typical style of El Sisi, who sees even the smallest minutiae as needing his shaping and weighs in on anything from road building to filmmaking, often while scolding and haranguing Egyptians to correct their behavior. But El Sisi’s critics said he was fat-shaming and taking an elitist approach to a problem whose roots lie to a large extent in poverty. They also criticised him for not offering concrete plans to combat obesity and spread fitness.
No one disputes that Egypt has a weight problem. One in three Egyptians suffers from obesity, the world’s highest rate, according to a 2017 global study by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. It found 35 per cent of adults — some 19 million people in the country of 100 million — are obese, again the world’s highest rate, as well as 10.2 per cent of Egyptian children, or around 3.6 million.
El Sisi, who often tells Egyptians they must buckle down and accept hardships to get through hard times, said they must change their habits to shed the fat.