Being fat is killing us, so why do we keep eating?

There is little to envy in the life of early man, but he did have one thing going for him: he wasn’t likely to be fat. In fact, one doesn’t even have to look back that far. Photos of most people before the Seventies show a svelte lot, bar the odd club-dwelling aristocrat or banker. The other night, my parents and I looked at slides of them in the Sixties and Seventies: everyone was stick-thin, not because they were vegan or juice cleansing, but because there just wasn’t all that much food about, and what was there, wasn’t particularly nice. That’s my theory, anyway.

We are victims of an age of gorgeous, unhealthy plenty, and it shows in devastating statistics. A study from the World Obesity Federation found Covid death rates were 10 times higher in countries where more than half the population was overweight – Britain and the US among them. Not a single country with low levels of obesity had a death rate of more than 10 per 100,000.

Being fat kills. But a year into a lonely, frightening and boring pandemic has left us in the worst possible position to lose weight. Ever more rooted to our sofas and our screens, both for work and play, we are more sedentary and less used to venturing out. With everything uncertain and menacing, the one source of reliable comfort has been eating.

In a world without security, one thing you can count on is the pleasure of food. Or, as the rise of extreme fitness and health food fanaticism shows, its opposite: the reassurance of control and showy self-discipline. For every cake-baking addict, there is a kale-munching marathonrunning, squats fanatic.

Either way, too much of our lives revolve around our bodies. Until we find other horizons in which to explore pleasure and pain, we’re going to struggle to slim down before it’s too late. The sobering death-rate figures suggest it may already be so.