Weighting for redemption

As I write these words, I am nibbling on a delicious crunchy cherry scone. I’ve been meaning to lose weight, and so naturally I feel ashamed and guilty. I promised myself I’d swear off these things, but I couldn’t resist. Maybe I’ll start the South Beach diet on Monday.

As I write these words, I am nibbling on a delicious crunchy cherry scone. I’ve been meaning to lose weight, and so naturally I feel ashamed and guilty. I promised myself I’d swear off these things, but I couldn’t resist. Maybe I’ll start the South Beach diet on Monday.My scone addiction is no longer a private, personal failing. These days, it’s a public menace that ranks right up there with al-Qaeda. Just ask U.S. Surgeon-General Richard Carmona. Obesity “is every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat,” he warned recently.Don’t think we’re off the hook because we live up here in Canada. America may be full of blubber, but we’re not so svelte ourselves. According to Statistics Canada, nearly half of us are now overweight or obese. And a third of our kids are too fat, a situation Statscan’s senior scientific adviser calls “a public-health tragedy.” Many doctors and public-health officials warn that obesity in Canada has reached “epidemic” proportions.According to the experts, being too fat leads to all kinds of horrible diseases. The Centre for Science in the Public Interest says obesity is the second leading preventable cause of death, after smoking. “An obese person has a 50- to 100-per-cent increased risk of premature death,” warns an international association of health clubs. “Fat is the new tobacco,” says Dr. Anthony Graham, the spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.Are you feeling guilty yet? Is that a frappucino in your hand, or is that a smoking gun?Perhaps you’re wondering how fat is too fat. Let’s just say that according to my BMI, I’m right on the edge. This scone could push me over.If you don’t know what your BMI is, shame on you. It stands for body mass index, which is a crude height/weight ratio, and it has become the universal standard for measuring obesity. Just Google “BMI calculator” on your computer, and you can figure out yours. According to the BMI, a 5-foot-4 woman who weighs 145 pounds has a BMI of 25. That makes her officially overweight, or, as it’s now sometimes known, “preobese.” A 5-foot-10 man who weighs 209 lbs. is obese. This means Mel Gibson is overweight, and Russell Crowe and George Clooney are obese.Far be it from me to question the wisdom of the elders, but I smell a rat.So does Paul Campos, who’s written a scorcher of a book called The Obesity Myth. He calls the war on fat a witch hunt masquerading as a public-health initiative. He says that most of the obesity research being done today is little more than propaganda masquerading as science, and that almost all the studies that are alleged to show a link between fat and disease and early death show no such thing. He also says our obsession with weight amounts to cultural hysteria.On top of that, he points out, the only reason nearly half of us are “overweight” is because in 1997, the World Health Organization moved the cutoff point way down the scale, even though, according to Mr. Campos, there is not a shred of evidence that people with a BMI of 20 lead longer, healthier lives than people who are 70 or 80 pounds heavier. Being really, really fat is bad for you. But being fat and reasonably fit is way better than being a skinny couch potato.These days such views are heretical. Perhaps that’s because so many people have an interest in defining overweight as a problem that needs a cure. When the New England Journal of Medicine published a skeptical editorial saying that the data linking weight and ill heath were “limited, fragmentary and often ambiguous,” it, too, was blasted. “We got flak from just about everybody except the fatties,” said the former editor.Once considered a private vice, fat, like smoking, is now firmly entrenched as a leading public-health concern. All across the country, experts are being paid to figure out how to get us to take it off. There are endless studies about the causes and the cures of fat. The causes are said to include fast food, urban sprawl, cars, eating out, working mothers, technological advances in agriculture that made food cheaper and consequently increased demand, farm subsidies, the time people spend with TV, computers and video games, irresponsible small businesses that sell junk food instead of nutritious snacks, the decline of phys ed in schools, the lack of bicycle lanes, and even the amazing success of the anti-smoking campaign (because people who stop smoking often gain weight). The suggested remedies include taxes on junk food, class-action lawsuits against Big Food, better food labelling, health-care premiums on fat people, banishing junk food from schools, rewards for those who exercise, subsidies for health clubs, more gym class, and, of course, scads more public education. No one has yet suggested a public education campaign to promote smoking.In truth, the chief cause of fat is prosperity. That’s why the children of skinny immigrants from Korea are tall and strapping. That’s why the Americans, being the richest people in the world, are also the fattest, and why they’re getting fatter, and why the rest of the world is getting fatter, too. But the solution (other than winding back the clock to, say, the Depression) has not yet been discovered. Despite the gazillions and gazillions of dollars I and other health-minded citizens have invested in dieting, health clubs, weight-loss programs, treadmills, bicycles, and no-fat yogurt, we keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds. We are highly motivated, successful human beings. We’re not dopes. We know our Food Pyramid. We can count calories. It’s just that for 99.9 per cent of us, it doesn’t work.”Despite a century-long search for a ‘cure’ for ‘overweight,’ ” says Mr. Campos, “we still have no idea how to make fat people thin.”This irrefutable fact of nature, however, will not deter the proselytizers and the demonizers, the moralizers and the food prudes. A deputy health minister told me recently that one of the biggest items on the government’s agenda is stemming the tide of obesity. To which I say: Good luck, Bub.In only one way is fat the new tobacco. Both fatties and smokers are the last people in society against whom we are allowed to rampantly discriminate. They are widely regarded as moral weaklings and their behaviour as underclass. Of the two, being fat is socially much worse. Try getting a promotion if you’re really fat. Try getting a date. If we treated anybody else the way we treat the overweight, there would be a dozen human-rights commissions condemning us for it.Which isn’t to say that I am happy with the little rolls around my middle. Not at all. Statistically, my height and weight make me a completely average Canadian woman. But secretly, I know I’m pre-preobese. And I hate it.(Source: Globe and Mail, July 2004)