It's not that easy

"You can be fat and love yourself. You can be fat and have a great damn personality. You can be fat and sew your own clothes. But you can't be fat and healthy. " Susan Powter

Almost every day my husband let's fly on one of his favourite pet issues - the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. He is right to be concerned of course - we all should be, even if our own families and friends do not suffer this way. And I confess that this is yet another issue that I acknowledge is there, but pay little attention to as it doesn't affect me, my family or friends. For I belong to that privileged sector of the world - I live in a prosperous country and I belong to the prosperous educated elite of that country. I am not fat - I was overweight for a while, but only by around 15kg which is relatively easy to lose if you put your mind to it. And I have. For most of my life I was skinny, even underweight. I was lucky that way. The people in the picture above need to lose much, much more than my 15kg, and even they are relatively slim in comparison to an increasing number. The pictures of those people were so distressing to me that I just couldn't post them. So I have chickened out and just shown the average obese. I now can't find the quote, but I saw somebody say that there are now so many people overweight in America that the average weight for an American is an obese weight.

How can this be is what I wonder? There is so much publicity about it - at every level of society - from The Biggest Loser on commercial, lowest common denominator TV, through St. Michael Mosley and his ilk on the ABC and SBS - for the more highly educated sector of society, right through to learned journals and university courses and research centres. And there's everything else in between. Hardly a day goes by that the topic doesn't get an airing somewhere whether directly or indirectly. Not to mention the evidence when you walk down the street or visit the local shopping mall. Everybody must know how they get to be fat - eating the wrong foods, too much food and no exercise and yet they do it. Just like any other addiction - smoking - we all know how unhealthy that is - and people still do it - though admittedly in smaller numbers than when I was growing up. Drugs - Ice is a real problem is it not and yet there seem to be no signs of it diminishing. Addiction to electronic devices - now how are you going to stop that?

There are just so many complicated factors at play with obesity. Here are just some. I'm sure there are more - for example I just won't even start on the problems of Aboriginal obesity.

Some people are naturally fatter than others - yes they are. I found it really hard to put on weight when I was young - I ate all the wrong foods and large quantities of them in a bid to put on weight when I was a university student. But I failed dismally, so I gave up. My best friend almost only had to look at a cream bun and she put on weight. Well she didn't because she didn't eat it, but still the tendency to put on weight was there. And I was no more active than her. I'm sure there there is some science behind this - something to do with metabolism I believe. But on its own it won't make you fat - or skinny.

Some people are stupid - well yes some people are not as intelligent as others, but they cannot be ignorant of the problems of overeating and obesity surely? As I said before - the message is loud and clear everywhere. Maybe if you find yourself grossly overweight you go into aggressive/defensive mode, even denial.

Food is basically not just a necessity but is also a major pleasure whether we cook it ourselves or consume food that has been prepared and cooked by others. It breaks up the day, it comforts, gives us an occasion to share and socialise with our family and friends and generally minimises stress - whilst eating anyway.

However, there is too much bad food out there - fast food and processed foods, in particular. Much of the blame lies at the doors of the fast food chains, loaded as their food is with sugars and fats and carbohydrates. But they are cheap - if you are poor you can feed yourself with a cheap hamburger, chips and soft drink for a few dollars. Never mind that you can feed yourself at home more healthily for the same amount. When you are time poor and don't enjoy cooking why would you bother? I myself succumbed rather too often than I should have to pizza or chicken and chips when my children were teenagers, after a day at work and husband away. Pressure can be applied to the producers, and indeed you can now get relatively healthy food options at Macdonalds for example - but people have not taken them up to the point where the unhealthy options are no longer viable.

For we do things we know we shouldn't all the time don't we? We get tired, we get depressed, we feel lazy. I suppose it's just that the educated only do it now and again, those less educated do it more. Is it as simple as that? Probably not.

if you are poor and ignorant and know nothing about how best to feed your children then it's probably little wonder that your children end up fat - particularly if you are fat yourself and therefore overeat. If your life is grim you seek comfort - and the things that give you comfort are food - of the wrong kind. Jamie Oliver recently wrote a book called Comfort Food, and I have written on the subject myself. in this blog, several times. There are numerous other books called Comfort Food and now that it's winter every foodie magazine has a section on comfort food. And most of that comfort food - if eaten in big quantities or often, is not good for you. A piece of chocolate every now and then is a treat - not a bar or more every day - that's disaster. Alcohol and cigarettes give comfort and consolation too - and alcohol, as well as its other deleterious effects, is also fattening.

So you become grossly overweight and then it's a real problem. For me losing my 15kg, however slowly was OK - I always lost a little bit of weight after a day of fasting, and because I wasn't grossly overweight to begin with I could see the difference as well. Mind you, as I neared my target and plateaued, it became increasingly difficult to make myself fast for a day. If you are grossly obese it will be a long time before you look any different and it will also be very much harder to do anything about the loose folds of skin that you are left with. For me, a little bit of extra exercise more or less took care of that. It takes discipline to lose weight and it is actually dangerous to lose too much at once. And those stomach stapling operations have their problems too. I suspect that you have to be an exceptional person to be able to slim down from excessive obesity.

For me, I fear it's perhaps too late for the people who are grossly overweight. On an individual basis we don't like to tell them. For years and years girls were encouraged to be skinny which led to anorexia and distress over body image and a backlash. And so we started to say that curves are alright. The current fad seems to be for a fat bottom - the bubble butt it's called - as these somewhat obscene pictures of Hollywood celebrities show:

Just a step further and you are moving into obese territory it seems to me. And so you get phrases like 'fat is beautiful', 'fat and proud', Rubinesque. All well and good to a point but teetering on the edge of encouraging the overweight. Do doctors tell people with enough conviction that they really, really must lose weight or they will develop Type 2 diabetes and eventually die? I gather not as much as they should. Nobody wants to hear that and they won't come back. As with all addictive behaviour, unless the addict admits to the problem nothing much can be done.

So what can we do? Michelle Obama has launched her Let's Move program aimed at educating children and also feeding them the right food at school. I just had a quick look at our own government's Eat for Health website. Boring. Worthy yes, but I really cannot see anyone engaging with it. There wasn't a single picture on the Home page - just for starters. It looks a bit like the Tax Office website - informative but dense and overwhelmingly off-putting Jamie Oliver in England is well-known for his efforts to improve school lunches - often the only food that poor children get in their day. Here we don't have school lunches provided by the government - children bring their own lunch to school - but there are definitely moves to educate the children into eating properly. Which is a start - although really it's the parents that need educating. What good is it for the child to know when the parent doesn't? Most children are not going to go home and tell their parents what to give them for dinner, particularly if home is grim. Food education in workplaces?

As with everything, I personally think the answer is in education and in programs to make sure that the right foods are affordable and available for those who need them. And I don't mean going organic and vegan and all those other extremes which are mostly only available for the wealthy anyway. Make it all fun is what I think. Not a dire lecture on what you are doing wrong. Make someone feel guilty and they dig their heels in, resist and even rebel in all the wrong ways. And it's the parents who really need educating. For fat parents will generally produce fat children by feeding them the wrong food. And let's not forget exercise of course. Maybe workplaces should make everyone go for a long walk at lunchtime - no that's not going to happen is it? Less productivity.

I do think there is hope. After all, although people do still smoke when they know they shouldn't the number of people smoking these days - in Australia anyway - is so much smaller than when I was growing up, when virtually everyone smoked. So maybe in a generation this will all pass. Let's hope so anyway. Or is it a way of reducing the world's population? No, no, no. Much too expensive along the way and not something like a plague that will wipe us all out in one go.