With the Miss England 2009 finals in just a few weeks we wonder if any of the competitors will cause as much outrage as 17 year old Chloe Marshall, the first overweight woman to reach the finals of Miss England, last year.
The criticism she received took on such serious moral overtones, she might as well have been branded with a public health warning. The media branded her a ‘poster girl for diabetes’, and a ‘frightening’ endorsement of ill health.
Paranoid that the ‘disease’ might spread unless she be hidden from public view, we scarcely noticed that she perfectly mirrored the average size of British women today.
What the response to Chloe’s story highlighted was the extent to which criticising the overweight has become a fundamental part of living and coping in Fatville.
It helps us to distance ourselves from our own weight issues by locating the problem ‘out there’ in the wider world. This was revealed by our study which showed that the vast majority of people who believe ‘fat people are lazy’ and ‘deserve to be taxed’ are overweight themselves.
Saying one person’s apparent ‘lack of self control’ got them to the size they are may seem like an obvious answer but it’s another way in which we remain blinkered from the real circumstances which has allowed obesity to become such a growing problem.
Obesity has been shown to be an issue that is has been created by a vast number of micro causes: everything from architecture to government policy to technological innovation has conspired to make getting fat easier than ever.
Luckily for those who were alarmed by the story of Chloe’s success in the Miss England competitions, they could be reassured that the title of Miss England went to on