Celia WALDEN
This time last year, Britain found itself in the midst of an epidemic. It was the same epidemic the country has faced for decades – one of the leading causes of preventable death, and one of the biggest challenges to national public health. And yet, instead of fighting obesity, we decided to focus on the language and stigmas around it.
Language is important, especially when we need to distance ourselves from reality or shrug off unpleasant notions such as responsibility and accountability, and perhaps by reclassifying obesity as “a disease” or by banning the word “fat”, we could pretend that the epidemic making us the most obese people in Western Europe – with rates rising faster than any other developed nation, and a projected cost to the NHS of £9.7billion by 2050 – didn’t exist.
The strategy worked. By burying our heads in a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, by castigating GPS, health professionals and PE teachers who had the temerity to suggest their obese patients and pupils might need to lose weight, and by embracing a “body-positivity” narrative that left parents too scared to say the F-word in front of their permasnacking children, we were able to turn a blind eye to the debilitating condition affecting two thirds of British adults and a third of our children.
Then Covid-19 hit. Data was published. Incontrovertible links between obesity and severe cases of the coronavirus were established, and after one last fight to deny the importance of a national ill that might force us to confront the many cultural ills beneath, we were faced with an uncomfortable truth. Britain was fat: dangerously, scandalously and, yes, shamefully fat.
For the first time in years, the F-word was no longer being hinted at, whispered or spelt-out, yummymummy-style, but splashed across front pages and spoken out loud by scientists and doctors. After his own brush with death and a “Damascene conversion”, even our Prime Minister was forced to drop his jolly, “all the more for us Brits to love” posture, and declare “a war on fat”.
On Sunday, we were given a preview of his Government’s new obesity strategy, to be outlined in full next month. The series of proposals, presented by the Department of Health, include everything from better access to healthy eating programmes, family exercise schemes and bariatric surgery – which includes the fitting of gastric bands – to mandatory calorie labelling for restaurants, cafés and takeaways.
“This is clearly our moment,” said a health department insider, “because if people want to do their bit to beat this virus, then losing weight would be the
best thing they can do.” It shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic for us to acknowledge our Achilles’ heel. “Our moment” to address this should have come sooner, before Covid-19 had claimed the lives of 43,634 Brits (although, clearly, only a percentage of those fatalities were influenced by high BMIS), and before lockdown exacerbated our childhood obesity crisis.
As schools opened up again this month, one teacher described the moment she saw pupils arriving – “many of whom had gained up to a stone and could no longer fit into their uniforms” – as “jaw-dropping”. And while a doctor who asked not to be named told me he welcomed “the withdrawal of the PC gagging order on weight” – which has hampered the medical profession by for years – “so much damage has been done. We still need a greater degree of honesty in terms of discussing the vast importance of lifestyle factors versus any genetic predisposition to obesity.”
Yet there is still resistance. A recent BBC Woman’s Hour special, “How Are You Managing Your Weight During Lockdown?”, was branded “toxic” on social media. “Guilt-tripping from Woman’s Hour not what we need,” said one tweeter, adding: “Solidarity.”
Only there’s little solidarity for poor, dwindling Adele, who once again prompted online hate this weekend when she posted images of herself wearing her 2016 Glastonbury dress – but seven stone lighter.
Never mind that the 32-year-old singer was clinically obese before she lost the weight, was known to have suffered health problems and, according to her trainer, “really wants to set a good example for her son”.
Lost in the abstraction of their “body positivity” ideals, and desperate to have their “fat but happy” figurehead back, the “thin-shamers” didn’t seem to have considered the notion that Adele might today be “healthy and happy” – much less the fact that our weight debate shouldn’t now be muddied by talk of ideals, moralities and stigmas, but viewed through the only prism that matters: health.
If people want to do their bit to beat this virus, losing weight would be best