After the All-you-can-eat Olympics, I'm feeling a bit Lanza-grotty – Aidan Smith

I knew the country had a problem but, seeing it close up and spilling over bikinis and trunks, over the sides of sun-loungers and very nearly blotting out the great, glowing light we were all there to worship was something of a shock.

When the telly news reports on obesity, the pictures used to accompany the words invariably come from pedestrianised high streets where members of the populace are shot from behind, from the waist down, usually in jogging bottoms which don’t look they’ve seen terribly much jogging. But in Lanzarote there was no hiding place. Nor was anyone bothered about discretion or interested in modesty. They were letting it all hang out. Stripped down, they craved rays on their bodies. Every single wobbly bit.

How did we get so… well-proportioned? I was going to say fat but nowadays you can’t, and even the Bash Street Kids’ Fatty has been renamed Freddy, in the hope of curbing playground taunts. The stats, though, are damning. Sixty-three per cent of our adult population are overweight. Now, some unfortunate souls round the five pools at our beach resort may have had hormonal issues, encouraging abnormal metabolism and the accumulation of body fat. The rest, though, simply looked as if they liked scoffing too much.

Though I didn’t interrupt the sunbathing to ask, it seemed there was quite a lot of lockdown tummy on view. Extra pounds acquired during Covid have not been shed. Those who’ve continued working from home ever since have been in the grip of their fridges and have stared down biscuit tins and lost.

A twinge of national self-consciousness – and the cast-off football shirts confirmed that many of my fellow travellers were Scots – caused me to wonder what staff made of the hotel complex suddenly being all pink and shoogly, as if a giant’s helping of kids’ jelly had been dropped on it. After all, a few months before, under headlines like “Brits too grotty for Lanzarote”, there were reports that the island’s tourism bosses had grown disenchanted with us and were seeking to woo “higher-quality” visitors, eg Germans.

Then I reasoned: hang on, we’re often accused of being shallow and narcissistic, selfie-obsessed and in thrall to Love Island. None of the bods around Playa Blanca would get anywhere near that procession of eight-pack abs and vertiginous cleavages so maybe this is a long-overdue reaction against the show and others like it.

Nevertheless, there’s slim consolation in being way bigger than you should be. And, unless you can’t help it, no excuse. Stop gutsing and gormandising. You don’t need all that grub. Don’t those heart-rending stories of children going to school on empty stomachs resonate at all? How 30 per cent of teachers have given their lunches to pupils? And how 90 per cent of the UK’s food banks are reporting increased demand?

But who invented the kind of holiday where you can eat and drink yourself stupid? Inclusivity may be the way of the world now, but all-inclusive can only be bad for the weight of the world. Can we blame America?

Not entirely. Las Vegas does lay claim to the all-you-can-eat buffet, begun in 1946 by Herbert “Herb” Cobb McDonald. For one dollar, you could consume “every possible variety of hot and cold entrees to appease the howling coyote in your innards”. Then, four years later, the first all-inclusive resort was opened by Gerard Blitz in Alcudia, Majorca – another Spanish island, by the way, which currently does not rate Brits as its most-desired holidaymakers.

My very first foreign holiday, aged five, was to Majorca. The only food-related memory I have is of the peas tumbling from my airplane meal as we climbed out of Edinburgh. The trip came to a premature end when my father contracted a tummy bug, having refused the inoculations, delivered via a needle in the bottom, which I’d braved on the promise of a toy dumper truck if I didn’t cry.

That wasn’t all-inclusive but I’m sure my five-year-old and his three older siblings won’t easily forget the hangar-sized dining hall in Lanzarote, the marshmallow fondue with geysers of chocolate and the ice cream and strawberry slushies available 24/7. Ach, we’re on holiday. This was, I imagine, the conclusion quickly reached by most of the grown-ups before getting stuck into the feast.

Other encouraging words proffered by my dear wife, as we sipped Prosecco at breakfast on the day of our 17th wedding anniversary, included: “We’re far from being the fattest people here… It’s like when you bought that season ticket for Hibs and they were rubbish all year long: you’d already paid so you were going to keep turning up whatever… Think of this as being the Food Olympics: at the very least we need to be competitive… Look at him with his fourth big fry-up… I love you just the way you are and we’ll diet when we get home.”

But obesity is no joke. It costs the NHS £6.5 billion a year. Successive governments come up with interventionist policies, only to wimp out of enforcing them. A Boris Johnson plan to restrict junk food advertising and ban buy-one-get-one-free deals has just been scrapped, with many Tory MPs dubbing it “nanny state-ism”.

This has enraged campaigners like Katherine Jenner, director of the Obesity Health Alliance, who says: “There’s no time to delay with addressing the crisis. Multi-buy price promotions don’t save people money. The government’s own data shows they can increase food and drink purchasing by around 22 per cent. They encourage the buying of more unhealthy produce.”

We’re safely back home now and, although you might have heard about the Lanzarote jet which had to offload 17 passengers because it was “too heavy”, that wasn’t ours. Still, the fasting has begun in earnest…