Groovybabe

A new report has been released in the UK that says obesity is more dangerous than smoking. It reports that while smoking can reduce life by up to ten years, obesity can take 13 years off a persons life.

This is not telling me anything I did not know. Okay, so I wasn’t aware of the specific timelines but it was always very obvious just how much harm being obese does to a person. In fact, the main reason I started to lose weight was that I’d become seriously worried about my future and the fact that if I continued on the same path them I would not have one.

I’ve always likened the addiction of smoking to that of over eating. I think they are very similar addictions in terms of how hard it is to change. They both require lifestyle changes. Where a smoker can give up but may still have friends who smoke around them, an over eater cannot diminish food from their life entirely, either. And it is always going to be something they have to fight on a daily basis for the rest of their lives.

In light of this new report Sky News had two guest speakers on yesterday morning to discuss the growing obesity problem. One was a health minister type person and the other a LDN radio DJ. The minister type person was saying that this takes understanding and government action. The DJ said we live in a nanny state already and what was needed was for people to take individual responsibility. I think his words were something to the effect of fat people are greedy and lazy and need to stop eating pies and get up off their bums and start exercising. Apparently we as a nation have got fat because we dont watch what we eat. And, get this, we need to ostrisize (sp) fat people because until we do fatties won’t be motivated to do anything about it. His reasoning was that people stopped smoking when society turned smokers into social lepers and the same will happen if we do it to fat people, because they get fat too much sympathy. The minister type woman said that this will only make the problem worse and they need sympathy not discrimination.

It is a difficult one. What came to mind was that neither of them understood why people get obese. It’s because they use food as a crutch, an emotional tool. Because they know no other way of coping. Show me an obese person and I will show you emotional problems tied in with their food. I agree with both parties in some ways though. I don’t think obesity should ever be accepted. It is a strong health risk and it diminishes a persons quality of life substantially. But neither do I think fat people deserve to be ridiculed and discriminated against. They get enough of that already (being fat is the last discrimination that is accepted by society). But something has got to give. There is only so much a government can do and at some point the individual does need to take personal responsibility. I guess there should be programmes aimed at helping people to do this - like counselling. Something which in the UK is very hard to gain access to on the NHS.

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