There’s that age old observation that people end up looking like their pets (or perhaps pets end up looking like their owners?). This theory came close to being proven when, reported in The Guardian, 78% of vets attending a European conference on pet weight management agreed with the statement ‘obese pets tend to have obese owners’.
The article states that, according to the RSPCA, at least 50% of our pets are overweight.
That’s right folks, not content with making ourselves and our children fat; Fatville is affecting the poor moggies and doggies that share our homes!
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
Last month, at least 124 gyms and leisure clubs in London pledged to donate free access to gym seasons worth up to £3m, enabling thousands of hard up Londoners to sample a range of exercise and thus improve their health.
Backed by the government and linked to the MoreActive4Life campaign, the campaign even incorporates the ever popular social networking trend, as those who sign up will also be encouraged to use a buddy system on Twitter to motivate each other.
In Fatville we know (all too well) how difficult it can be to incorporate exercise into our lives comfortably if we think of it purely as lonely ‘exercise’. After all, it requires time, it requires effort and for most people, it’s just another ‘add-on’ which we feel obliged to squeeze into our already busy lives.
Whilst we remain sceptical about gyms as a sustainable solution for many, at least by using social networking, this fitness scheme begins to embed itself within the fabric of people’s everyday lives. By allowing people to communicate and interact, this initiative will hopefully have much more success in terms of sustainability, sociability and mutual encouragement.
In Fatville we often glance over enviously at our nearest and dearest neighbours, amazed by their superhuman ability to consumer copious amounts of fat-laden foods without ever seemingly putting on an ounce.
The reality is that France, like the US and the UK, is now suffering an obesity crisis of its own.
However the launch of the EPODE scheme in 2004 in 10 French towns has managed to buck the national trend, proving such a success that 8 Scottish towns will attempt to replicate the programme.
We like the sound of EPODE, as it directly addresses issues prevalent in Fatville, but will it work over here? Here’s hoping.
The Belgian city of Ghent has declared one meat-free day a week in an attempt to ward off obesity and highlight sustainability issues.
This initiative might sound a bit ruddy mental but it’s certainly got us thinking here in Fatville. Sometimes ‘health’ is presented as a pretty black and white issue; you’re either fat or thin, healthy or unhealthy, veggie or carnivore….
Losing weight can feel like standing at the foot of Everest, surveying an onerous and punishing task with a slippery summit. Breaking it down into little projects and little wins can make the whole thing seem much more attainable. And whether that’s walking to work instead of getting the bus, grilling the fish fingers instead of frying them or being 15% vegetarian; whatever floats your boat can probably work for you.
We say good luck to those veggie Burghers of Ghent!
Here in Fatville, we’re not surprised that, according to research conducted by Quorn, the middle classes eat more takeaways than the general population.
Although it might be comforting to imagine that being middle class somehow makes one immune to the strangeness of Fatville…the truth is that no demographic is safe from its charms.
Whilst all us Fatvillians like to think that obesity ‘isn’t my problem’, we’re all guilty of the bad habits that are quickly adding up to one big ol’ problem for Britain at large….
The concept of levying taxes on certain foods is mooted at regular intervals. Back in March, Dr David Walker called for a ‘choco-tax’ in The Telegraph, stating that “chocolate is sneaking under the radar of unhealthy foods. Today in the same newspaper, Dr Tim Lobstein, director of the childhood obesity programme at the International Association for the Study of Obesity, has called for a ‘fat tax’ on unhealthy foods, claiming that “our kids are eating themselves into an early grave”.
It’s the age old quandary isn’t it? The more you tell someone NOT to do something (like kids and smoking) the more the little blighters seem to want to do it.
Sadly, in Fatville, we have a similar problem with food.
We fear that telling people to run in fear from cream cakes and chocolate biscuits may actually exacerbate some of the dysfunctional and addictive behaviours that are already rife in our topsy-turvy world…
Encouraging children to use interactive computer games such as the Nintendo Wii will become part of a public health drive to tackle rising rates of obesity amongst the young according to The Times.
The findings of a pilot project in the East Midlands show that playing interactive games could increase the number of calories burnt by 42%. Active play for 60 minutes would burn 7½lb of fat (we love quantifying everything in Fatville).
Of course, this report came hot on the heels of the furore surrounding the Government’s Change4Life ad, which depicted a child playing video games underneath the caption ‘Risk an early death, just do nothing’.
Cue collective knickers in a twist from the games industry, with threats of legal action and accusations of classism and snobbery, citing that reading books is hardly an intensive calorie burning exercise (and illustrated by one Twitter wit).
From a Fatville perspective, it’s a tricky one. Running on a touch sensitive pad watching a cartoon figure of yourself replicating your movements on your plasma screen would probably be a symptom of Strange Activity.
Strange as it may be, movement that kids enjoy is very much an antidote to Fatville.
Who knows: it could help offset the damage that reading can do to one’s body (we’re just kidding)
The Independent recently reported that chances of early death from preventable diseases is the same as smoking 10 cigarettes a day for overweight adolescents.
If you’re smoker, you know it (even if you lie to your mum). The tricky thing about obese teens in Fatville is they often don’t know they’re obese. They see their similarly sized friends and feel perfectly normal.
If your friends smoke you’re surrounded by a warm fug of collective solidarity. You feel no need to quit…even with the distant spectre of lung cancer.
It’s the same with obesity. If you look around and see that all of your friends are fat, where’s the impetus to change?
In Fatville we ruddy love science that comforts us as we waddle down the inexorable path to obesity. We recall a story in The Telegraph earlier this year that claimed scientists have ‘discovered’ how some of us never put on weight while others struggle to shed an ounce.
Hooray for those clever boffins! Thanks to them we can happily console ourselves, safe in the knowledge that if there’s a ‘fat gene’ or a ‘thin gene’ being overweight is completely unavoidable. Many in our study seemed to think so.
It’s going to be tough enough to get out of Fatville without being told again and again that we’re up against genetics as well as everything else in our strange, strange world.