October 18, 200718 yr Modern life is blamed for obesity, but whatever happened to willpower? 00:53am 18th October 2007 Comments Through a long afternoon at Wimbledon a few months ago, my eyes kept straying from the tennis to two women in the seats in front of us. Game after game, set after set, they munched: hamburgers, sandwiches, biscuits and chocolate, in unbroken succession. It was hard to believe that they were hungry - after the first couple of courses, anyway. They were simply grazing, as carelessly and naturally as any Guernsey in a meadow. I wanted to lean forward and plead: 'Don't do it! You're wrecking your lives.' Of course I did not. They would have been uncomprehending as well as angry if I had. But how are we supposed to square behaviour that we see all around us with yesterday's assertion by Dr Susan Jebb, of the Medical Research Council, that it is wrong to blame obesity on personal self-indulgence? The authors of the largestever British study proclaim obesity a menace to the nation's future. Self-inflicted: Reckless eating habits are making children fat Excess weight, they say, represents a greater threat to long life than smoking. But they suggest that it is an inevitable consequence of a society in which cheap food, labour-saving devices, motorised transport and sedentary work are the norm. The authors of the report offer no concrete recommendations. They seem to believe that the malaise is so deep-rooted in our 21st century way of life that it defies any realistic prospect of cure by government fiat or health propaganda campaign. Yet surely it won't wash to add our so-called 'obesogenic environment' to the interminable list of contemporary ills which are said to be 'the fault of society'. Such an attitude seems yet another manifestation of the denial of personal responsibility. Nobody in Whitehall will say what common sense dictates: that, except a minority for whom excess weight is a misfortune of heredity, the obese are not victims. The truth is that they suffer from a self-inflicted disability. The remedy lies with ourselves. We must eat less and exercise more. Discipline is a much-mocked word. Yet lack of it lies at the heart of a host of problems, from education and street behaviour to reckless eating habits. The collapse of the habit of family meals is a disaster. In most households, individual members simply eat what they feel like when they feel like it. It is a tragic paradox, that while tens of millions of people are passionately devoted to sport, this means spectating from an armchair rather than participating. A host of fans thrill to the feats of Jonny Wilkinson, without experiencing even a whisper of desire to take his supreme fitness as a role model. Most people never walk if they can drive. Dog ownership is declining, we are told, because people cannot be bothered to exercise animals. Even keeping a hamster is now thought 'too much trouble', as if the owners were expected to run around those damnable little wheels with their pets. For centuries, to be fat equated with being rich. Only the rich could afford the food - remember Charles Laughton as Henry VIII? There is a great scene in one of Alan Bennett's plays, where an old woman is pushed around the stage in a wheelchair by her butler. But when the butler exits, the woman leaps to her feet. "I can walk perfectly well really," she explains to the audience. "It's just that I'm so rich I don't have to." Today, all that is turned on its head. One seldom, if ever, meets anyone rich and obese. The rich know better. They employ personal trainers, and keep whole rooms full of exercise equipment and rowing machines. A cyclist is more likely to be a software tycoon than a shop assistant. Most upmarket women cherish their figures to the point of obsession. It is the less well-off, the less educated, who have succumbed disastrously to the cult of - to hell with the Medical Research Council, let us use the word - self-indulgence. After centuries in which every mouthful was precious, and seldom sufficient in most households, today the balance is redressed with a vengeance. Given the money to afford unlimited cheap food, the poorest are eating most of it. One of the saddest images of recent times was that of mothers crowding around a school at lunchtime, to push chips through the railings to their children, to save them from Jamie Oliver's healthy meals. Those mothers must have cared tremendously for their sons and daughters, to go to the bother. But they simply will not believe that, by feeding them fried food, they are contributing to ruining their lives. It is said, surely rightly, that obesity is infectious. If there are few very fat people on the streets, then others do not want to be like them. But now that they are everywhere, the condition becomes comfortable, socially acceptable. In our local NHS surgery's waiting room this week, among a dozen patients, I counted six who were visibly overweight, four who were definitely obese. Most were women, which somehow seemed specially sad. Far from idiotic medical bureaucrats telling people that it is not their fault if they are obese, it seems vital to tell them that it is and they will be sorry. Life is much less rewarding, especially in old age, if one is incapable of physical activity. No nanny minister, not even the bossyboots Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, can solve the problem. It is up to us. Among many things for which I am grateful to my wife is the fact that she feeds me healthy food and gets me out on the tennis court, even if, at 61, I cut an unimpressive figure with a racket. We are not remotely obsessed with health - Ms Primarolo would blow a fuse if she knew how much we drink every night. We simply want to be able still to see our feet over our stomachs when we get to 70. An American researcher, Michael Earles, says: "The solution to obesity is not that everyone should run a marathon. "It's the little things that begin to make a dent in the problem, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator and riding your bike to work." A few weeks ago, on a bright sunny day I decided to walk the two miles to our local station rather than take a car. Three kind drivers successively, seeing me striding out in a suit and carrying a briefcase, stopped to ask if I needed a lift. They were amazed by the notion that I was walking as an act of choice. It is a rich irony, that just when medical science is raising our life expectancy by leaps and bounds by overcoming diseases, the quality of that life is threatened by our own behaviour. Health Secretary Alan Johnson chose his words badly last weekend, when he likened obesity to climate change as a threat to our society. Each of us can far more readily address our weight than we can global warming. It beats me how any parent can stand by and watch their children pursuing lifestyle habits deadlier than cigarettes, and almost as pernicious as drugs. We all need to get together about this - citizens, doctors, schools, celebrity icons. Some unwelcome and unfashionable things need saying. Fat people may sometimes be jolly, but obese ones end up pretty miserable. They are going to see a lot of hospitals, and probably die before the rest of us. If we fail to change our own lives, we have only ourselves to blame for the consequences.
October 18, 200718 yr Again, our current culture path has been allowed to sink to new and disgusting lows. I for one hate the way we have fooled into thinking we need everything. The fact the our food is full of absolute CRAP might have something to do with the obesity!! And Large amounts of chemicals & god knows what in food + Low nutrition in foods = mass consumption of pure rubbish food. It all adds to the fact that for many years now lots of parents/families have children growing up in such unstable enviornments, in more than one way. (Single Parents, Young Parents, Bad Food, Lower Excercise, Bad Vaccines, Terrible TV/Media telling them what's what......the list goes on!)
October 19, 200718 yr It's a time-bomb, waiting to go off. Tick Tock, Tick Tock. I'm just hope I'm out of the country when it does go off. Tick Tock
October 22, 200718 yr Author It's a time-bomb, waiting to go off. Tick Tock, Tick Tock. I'm just hope I'm out of the country when it does go off. Tick Tock The first to explode will be Rik Waller and Michelle Fatmanus. Watch this space!!:rolleyes:
October 23, 200718 yr I had an idea for the government to fight back against obesity. Currently it's mainly measured on the Body Mass Index, so why not change the numbers around to make it look like obesity has decreased. For example say if your BMI is above 10 your obese, rise it to 20 before your classed as obese and the number fall, Mr Brown will be awarded with fighting obesity, yet in fact he didn't do anything :wink3:
October 23, 200718 yr Author Well according to the BMI, the majority of rugby players are obese................. :rolleyes:
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