David Slack.
Do you feel like we do? We might have free will, but forces will always be working to undermine our good work, writes
There is less of me writing this than there was at the start of the year. Two funerals in a row I went to, and put on a suit and discovered I couldn’t make the trousers button. Also, people were helpfully pointing out to me that there was more of me than there used to be. This is something that it is probably not ever necessary to tell a person.
If you have spinach stuck in your teeth, you may not know and will appreciate the tip. But unless you don’t own a single mirror and never look down, your size will probably not be news to you. Well-meaning suggestions may well invite a snarl.
The question of what you do about it is your choice to make, and quite possibly something that, so to speak, exercises you a lot.
My solution has been to exercise a lot. Eat less, run more. I got moving. It had worked before, it worked again, and it has done my wellbeing no end of good.
A physio said to me as she massaged my busted achilles tendon, ‘‘if you want to lose weight, you just have to run far enough’’. Or something like that. This is not advice, I am not a nutritionist. It works for me, is all I’m saying.
And this is not a motivational pep talk for a New Year’s resolution. Maybe you want to lose weight, maybe you don’t. Maybe you plan to do it once you take care of other more pressing priorities. All of that is your call, and your right and your decision.
I hesitate to write about this at all because my own family has seen in the worst way where an obsession with weight can take you. But something’s wrong, and it worries me.
I showed a friend a photo of my 7th form class at Feilding Agricultural High School to prove that I once had a full head of hair. Thirty teenagers in jeans, and hair as long as Peter Frampton’s. She said: ‘‘What year was this?’’ I said 1977. ‘‘Look at you,’’ she said ‘‘every single one of you is thin.’’
And we were, and this was not because there was not enough food in Feilding so soon after the war, it was because the KFC and the McDonald’s and all those multi million-dollar marketing empires weren’t there. At the SaveMore supermarket, there were no giant bottles of Coke, no aisles of snack foods. Eating out was not something you did as often as watching TV.
We have made a different world, and it fills us out. It’s ultimately your decision whether to put that delicious slice of pizza in your mouth, but all the same there are powerful forces acting on you to take some more sugar, some more fat, another helping.
There probably is no such thing as a food industry executive who gets up in the morning and snickers like a Bond villain about the kids he’s going to make fat that day, but all the same he will go to work and no-one at the 10am meeting or the 2pm meeting or the 4.30pm WIP will stop and say ‘‘Hey, shouldn’t we feel terrible about selling children a bottle of orange juice with eight teaspoons of sugar in it?’’
What is your protection against these people who are not monsters but whose effect is monstrous? Eat right, exercise right. But good luck with that, because the temptation they set up is heavy and real. Also, let’s hope you have a metabolism like mine that makes it relatively achievable and not a hugely daunting slog. Effort in life is is not rewarded evenly.
Why not a sugar tax? Why not a school breakfast and lunch programme? Why not try to tilt things back a little?
There was debate this week about whether people have enough to live on in retirement, and also debate how you’re supposed to have saved anything when so many are paid so little.
Effort is not rewarded evenly in diet, nor in earning money, nor in providing for retirement.
A society that tilts the odds back would be no bad thing if over time our people were a bit thinner and our savings accounts a bit fatter.
@DavidSlack