Katie Grant: Struggling to carry this burden of obesity

Fat is no longer a personal issue, it is a personal choice that impacts on our neighbours and our family writes Katie Grant

Waiting to board a Scottish passenger ferry recently, I watched a group of women disembarking. They were a cheery bunch, all sporting those “hilarious” hats beloved of hen parties. They were set on having a good time. Every single woman was grossly overweight. As they struggled up the small incline, even the youngest already displayed the heavy-footed solidity of the middle-aged. Nobody blinked. Why would they? Obesity in Scotland is as common as the ferry. In the world obesity stakes, only the Americans beat the Scots.

Let us acknowledge the usual caveats. I’m not talking here about the minority whose weight is out of their control; those whose weight is a side-effect of illness, physical or mental, or a consequence of certain treatments. I’m talking here about the majority.

The question, “What’s got into us?” is easily answered. Chips, chocolate, sugar, saturates, cakes, pies, pasties, beer and Irn Bru. Less easily answered is what on earth’s wrong with us? We weren’t always like this. Anybody watching Dominic Sandbrook’s television documentary series on the 1970s will have been struck by how thin everybody seems to be. It’s easy to trot out the 21st-century mantra of “more sedentary lives” and “too much fast food”, but that’s not the whole answer. More and more I’m convinced that despite the proliferation of diets and celebrity workout dvds, we just don’t care quite enough.

There must be at least some truth in this otherwise, if only for vanity’s sake, obese women catching a reflection of themselves would think “woa … got to do something”, and men finding it impossible to see their toes, to say nothing of other important bits, would be embarrassed into some kind of action.

Sadly, lack of vanity is the least of it. Self-induced obesity is toxic. The Scottish Government’s own figures tell us that in 2008, some 65.1 per cent of Scottish adults were overweight, with 26.8 per cent obese. By 2030, over 40 per cent of adults will be obese resulting in rocketing levels of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and breathing problems, to say nothing of days off sick, disability and early death. Scots who could lead long, happy and productive lives are destroying themselves by too many visits to bakeries – and before bakeries leap up and down, let me say there’s nothing wrong with bakeries, except that if you live entirely on their products, you’ll end up as large as the shop, which cannot be good.

There’s also a moral dimension. Self-induced obesity isn’t a self-contained choice: it affects all of us. At the very least, it costs the NHS billions which cannot then be spent on cancer, mental health or special care baby units. I really hate it when people say “I pay my taxes, so why shouldn’t I eat what I like”. Democracy can’t work on that principle. True democracy requires us all to observe limits. It requires us to be thoughtful. It requires us to regulate ourselves so that everybody, including ourselves, benefits. My fondness for biscuits is your problem as well as mine. Your Macdonalds habit could mean my child is denied a life-saving drug.

Our role models are, sadly, very poor. Holyrood and our council chambers are pretty awful national mirrors. Our First Minister himself looks one curry short of a heart attack. As we lurch towards the independence referendum, I wonder if it ever strikes Alex Salmond that far from presenting the outside world with hardy men and energetic women leading Scotland to sunny uplands, the outside world sees more and more of us barely able to heave ourselves off the sofa. It’s not a good look. Instead of writing reports – Preventing Overweight and Obesity in Scotland 2010 is an instance of wordy obesity if ever there was one – why doesn’t the First Minister simply proclaim a national diet? Lose weight for Scotland

For the sake of Scotland’s children, he needs to do something radical. The annual Growing Up in Scotland report shows that one in ten Scottish children are obese by the time they start school, with the children of overweight mothers more than twice as likely to be overweight themselves. Worse, only one in seven mothers recognises their child has a problem – or at least admits to it. We have the archetypal non-virtuous circle here, a self-perpetuating loop of damage, and all the fine words in the world don’t seem to be doing much to break it down.

Actually, words are part of the problem. We should stop calling obesity an “epidemic”. An epidemic implies a disease you catch by mistake. Obesity is not a disease. Nor do you catch it by mistake. Basic obesity is, for most people, a self-inflicted condition caused by overeating. Simple. We also need to stop blaming everything from poverty to genes to the food industry. All these feed into our national obesity, but they don’t cause it in themselves. The food industry tries to seduce us and poverty often results in poor eating habits, but neither the food industry nor poverty forces you to eat more than you need on a daily basis.

One trouble is that we are all too nice. Readers may disagree that I’m nice, but sometimes it’s nice to be frank. We all know grossly overweight people whom we like and are reluctant to criticise. We all know people who struggle to lose weight and we sympathise. But liking and sympathy should not make us fearful of the truth, which is that if Scotland is not to overtake America in the obesity stakes, which would be truly shaming, we need to start caring at a personal level. The ladies I saw on the ferry need to care. Our politicians need to care. We need to make our children care, and you and I need to care, because if we don’t, as individuals, care about our weight, there’s a fat lot anybody else can do.