Glob-a-log

It is the time of year that people obsess about their weight even more than at any other given time - if they are not starving, dying of AIDS or ‘living’ in refugee camps in the various charming bits of Hell we also call mother Earth.

Anyway, people do go on about the subject - some in a more intelligent manner than others. One cannot, for instance, find much wrong with the following quote:

I don’t know who is to blame. The issue of obesity is complex and is absolutely one our society is facing, there’s no denial about that, but if you break it down I think there’s an education piece: how can we better communicate to individuals the importance of a balanced diet and taking care of themselves?

Then there’s a lifestyle element: there’s fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they’d have been burning off energy outside.

Nothing much wrong, that is, until one learns that the one pontificating in this manner is a mister Steve Easterbrook, who is the UK CEO for the McDonald’s franchise…

Which is a bit like George Bush blaming certain types of video games for all the violent deaths in Iraq.

Enough about hypocritical little oiks like mister Easterbrook - or the whole very boring and very Western topic of weight.

Well, almost enough.

For I can’t leave you without sharing the following quote. It’s from a column by AA Gill. One of his colleagues has written a book about losing weight.

Gill was not impressed, to say the least…:

So, here is my broken resolution, and a final word on size and food. Pay attention. All diets work. When I taught cooking, people used to say that recipes didn’t work. Well, all recipes work, if you know how to cook. The Kama Sutra works, if you know how to shag. It’s not diets that fail, it’s you, you miserable, spineless, sticky-fingered fridge magnet. All diets come down to the same sentence: more in than out, you get fat; more out than in, you get thin. It’s not rocket science, it’s bicycle science.

And it’s not genetic. Your embarrassing, waddling mother didn’t pass on blubber, just bovine behaviour. And alcohol. Drink puts on pounds. It’s all sugar. The rises in drinking and size are not unrelated, and if you don’t get drunk, you won’t eat the scratchings, the kebabs, the Mars bar and the three footballers. If you really can’t manage on your own, then the best aid to weight loss is the support of friends. Ask yours to point and laugh at you and call you names in public. They should hold a doughnut in front of your face on a string as you walk down the street.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 18:37 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.