It ain't my fault, guv...

Evolution and the environment, not just gluttony, has led to a global obesity pandemic, with an estimated 1.5 billion people overweight -- more than the number of undernourished people.

Here we go again.

I've just seen this excellent article by Melanie McDonagh in the Sunday Times, which is spot on:

...I do know the cause of obesity: we’re eating too much and exercising too little. Especially in Britain, which is, apparently, the fattest nation in Europe.

So far so straightforward. But the moment you suggest that fat individuals bring their fatness upon themselves you enter the minefield that is obesity politics, which has a language all of its own.

The World Health Organisation calls obesity a “rising epidemic”, which is fine if you think of the term simply as meaning a common condition. But the word is normally used about disease. And fatness is quite unlike most diseases in that it doesn’t fall impartially on the just and unjust alike.

There are any number of diseases occasioned by fatness, but the condition itself is brought about by your own actions. Or inaction. It’s not a contagion like measles. You don’t catch it like the plague. It’s even unlike those diseases that you do bring on yourself by bad behaviour— syphilis, say — in that it’s not transmitted by bacteria. To talk about an epidemic of obesity is like talking about a plague of inactivity or a contagion of overeating.

Which brings me to Anne Diamond, the formerly skinny television presenter who has shared her weight troubles with interested television audiences for about a decade. Now, by dint of weight-loss surgery, she is down to a respectable size 14. Her essay this week in Hello! magazine about the way society stigmatises fat people is a model of the sloppy thinking that characterises much of what passes for debate on the subject.

“We [viz fat people] are normally considered to be lazy, slobbish and lacking in moral fibre,” she declares. “Yet nothing could be further from the truth . . . it can happen to anyone . . . We’ve somehow been caught up in an epidemic.”

Don’t you love that word “somehow”, which suggests that there could be some mystery about cause and effect? Normal people attribute extra fat to the fact that they’ve eaten their body weight in Mars bars or never go out on two feet when they can use four wheels instead. Celebrity obesity victims take a different view. “Fat isn’t a sin,” says Diamond. “and it doesn’t demand punishment.” Well, no, fat isn’t a sin, but gluttony and sloth are. As St Thomas Aquinas, no lightweight himself, put it, “gluttony denotes inordinate concupiscence in eating”.

So Diamond has set up a website called Fat Happens! to enable overweight people who want to become slimmer to share views and find supportive friends. The aims are admirable and the means exemplary; it’s the underlying premise I take issue with. Fat doesn’t “happen”; you bring it on yourself.

I used to be fat. Genuinely obese. A porker. Now I am merely overweight. The reason: nothing to do with genes, with circumstance, or with any external factors. It's because I changed how I behaved.

The change came when I was, wearing my think tank hat, writing a pamphlet about adult onset diabetes in the US. As I was researching it, the penny dropped: I was a classic case. I was fat, I had a sedentary lifestyle and I had a family history of diabetes. If I didn't change, I was a slam dunk to become diabetic.

Now that's what I call motivation. So I did what anyone with half a brain would do: I changed. I went on a diet and lost weight, and I started excercising again. Why had I been fat before? Because I ate too much, and of the wrong foods. Whose fault was that? Society's? My friends's? My genes's? Uncle Tom Cobbley's? Nope. My own. No one else bore the slightest responsibility. Not advertisers. Not restaurants. No one.

I was approaching 17 stone when I started to be sensible (I can barely write that without going red with shame, since I'm hardly a strapping 6 footer on whom it might have been ok). Within eighteen months I was down to under 13 stone. And that's where I hover now (and have done for the past 3 years). It's more than it should be - my ideal weight, I am told by the experts, is about a stone less. But that is partly compensated for by the fact that I run three times a week (if I'm being wholly honest sometimes it's only twice) for up to an hour each time. And I box for half an hour once a week.

I write all that only to show that if I - Mr Couch Potato - can do it, anyone can. And if you don't, and you're overweight, there's only one person to blame. And you'll find him (or her) when you look in the mirror.