Not Fat Enough To Be Fit

Fat is not poisonous. In fact we would die without it. It is as vital to our health as our blood. So when the word is used, it should be used properly, as the relative term it is. Currently it is seen as a virus which must be totally eradicated before the patient can be declared healthy. The word has become 'demonised'.

Personally, I am very lucky. No matter what I eat or how little I exercise, I am still fat enough. Some would say I need more fat. Obesity is being too fat. Pathetic, infantile Consumerism demands that we have no fat, because 'fat' has come to mean the same as dirty or ill - or even possessed by evil spirits. Fat = Bad. And now the Daily Mail has joined in the chant.

No child should be told they are merely 'fat', but an obese child should be informed that they have too much fat. And many should actually be told that they are don't have enough fat. The aim should be to produce a healthy level of fatness. The medical meaning of the word needs to be reclaimed from the media and playground bullies, and its biological function understood.

This latest splurge by the Daily Mail is not some 'down-to-earth' campaign against euphemism, but a cheap endorsement of the language of the bully. If the media wants to abolish lies dressed as truth, it should take on someone its own size, like the Ministry of Defence or the banking industry or even the food corporations, who have no compunction about monopolising the High Street with their adulterated, addictive junk and creating the level of obesity which will harm so many confused children.

Fat hatemongers like Fatty Littlejohn or Fatty Gaunt, or Fatty Ferrari might also take a look at the 'euphemisms' (i.e. LIES) which pay their fat wages and expenses, namely the 'advertising' which pollutes their pages and controls their content.

In a more primitive medical era, patients would be diagnosed as having too much blood and leeched or cupped as a 'cure'. Our approach to fat is a throwback to this ancient superstition.In reality, modern, consumerist alnutrition, and therefore obesity, is caused by poverty of self-esteem as much as material poverty. Comfort foods are means of instant achievement, and therefore some degree of fulfillment.
In a time when food is plentiful, and there is a glut of addictive additives, and people are harasssed into chronic self-loathing, obesity is as inevitable as road casualties after the invention of the car.

As Orwell noted in Wigan.
"And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. ... When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. "