Solved?

Sooo...
Apparently, the Health Secretary has cracked this whole obesity epidemic thing wide open. Apparently, the key is...erm...eating less.

Gotta give it to him, he's an Ideas Man.

Apparently, the majority of us consume about 10% more calories than we need each day, so there are plans for the Government, town halls, and the food and drinks industry to work together to get us all thinner.

Let me repeat that: The central Government, local government, and the food and drinks industry - people who couldn't win outright against Gordon Brown, people who only win because only their families vote in the elections they stand in, and people who would happily inject high fructose corn syrup into toddlers' eyeballs if it would earn them a handful of pennies. This mob are going to be working together to get us all healthy.

Not because they particularly want us to be healthy, you understand, but because fat fucks are apparently expensive. We're the people having heart attacks and filling up diabetic clinics and bypassing our bypasses. Apparently in London alone, fat fucks cos the NHS around £890 million.

I have to say, I kinda think this is what the NHS is for - healing unhealthy people. And here, we come up against an underlying prejudice. You wouldn't get groundbreaking Government initiatives to stop old people being old, or people with disabilities to somehow stop having their conditions. But the assumption of course is that "you brought it on yourself" if you're overweight - it's a similar thing to the treatment smokers have been getting for years now, a kind of bully-mentality that entirely fails to look at the genuine situation because it's easier just to point and poke sticks.

There's an assumption that smokers, and addictive eaters, are just self-indulgent wuss-asses, who take everything they can get in an irresponsible orgy of self-harm because they want to!

Let me see...

Fat fucks are:
Stigmatised in the playground;
Overlooked and ignored on the dating scene;
Therefore less likely to find a partner, and
More likely to spend their life insecure, and frightened that any partner they get will leave them for someone 'prettier';
Considered less capable than their slimmer counterparts in the workplace;
Despised by 98% of the fashion and retail world, and so not allowed to wear 'cool' clothes;
Annnnnd THEN we get sick, and often die.

Now, you tell me - how likely d'you think it is that we actively choose this way of life?!

So yeah, we're a burden on the Health Service. But sooner or later, so the fuck is everyone - it's just a case of when, and what we get. At least, with the fat fucks, we tend to get our health problems out of the way earlier, and then we die, and we're not a burden any more. It's the thin fucks who jog till they're seventy and break hips, and then draw out their deterioration who are the long-term burden. But hey, let's focus on the short-term, and treat the fatness itself as the problem, rather than the reasons people neeeeeeeeeed to eat this way. You wanna tackle obesity, 1) normalise the fashion industry, to defuse the expectations of, for instance, young girls who want to be fashionable, and realise the stick figures on the runways are never going to be them, because that flips them into hiding under layers and needing comfort.
2) Defuse societal pressure to conform to notions of film-star figures, and action-star abs.
3) Promote images for boys and girls that make them feel alright with being themselves. That way, you defuse the playground and the dating game.

Do these three things, and you take the impetus for panic away. You promote the notion of a wider spectrum of 'normality', and you stop people needing to hide, to control, to fall into the endless, exhausting cycle of addiction, of binging and purging, of what, in trendier blogs and books than this, people call 'an unhealthy relationship with food'.

And let's not forget, I came into this thing all bravado and bullshit - I've always taken responsibility for my own fat fuckery. But that's me. It's not everyone, and even I know that some of the underlying reasons I've always done what I've done are emotional, not just physical. Yes, the physical ABCs of the thing is basically down to eating fewer calories, and doing more exercise. That, if you'll excuse the obvious example, we can pretty much do for ourselves - though undoubtedly the pills help!

But assuming that fat is just a physical issue is pretty much like assuming schizophrenia is just about acting weird, or depression's just about being a weakling. Tackling the obesity epidemic by focusing only on the physical just reveals that it's money, not people, that's the driving force of your actions.