My beautiful friends…WE CANNOT BE FAT

And it’s got nothing to do with the way we look in clothes

When I was very fat…

Let’s get something out of the way right at the top: we’re not doing fat shaming here. And look at me in the picture above carrying my post-lockdown pork. Who am I to be laying that on anyone else?

There’s no shame or moral lack in being overweight, because there is a whole food system scientifically designed to make us addicted to food which is catastrophically bad for us.

This kicked off in the 1980s when the Big Tobacco companies bought Big Food in the US and set about applying the same structure of addictive properties they’d put in cigarettes, to groceries.

Here’s a link to a Forbes story that sets what happened out pretty simply.

It really sank in for me when I read that the original information for that piece came from an article in peer-reviewed journal, called… Addiction. There it is, right there. Addiction.

Now the kind of foods the evil tobacco empires dreamed up are at the Pringles and Oreos low life end of things, but in the past 25 years, the pre-boosted palatability process has trickled up the food chain, to become all-pervasive.

Pretty much any food that is more than a single raw ingredient has got all kinds of additional crap put in it, to make it more nom nom nom – plus cheaper to produce, longer shelf life etc. And this is now just as true in more upmarket food retailers in the UK and Australia as it is in a Piggly Wiggly in Louisiana.

This really hit home to me the day I bothered to get my specs out to read the label on a loaf of M&S sourdough bread – to find it contained glucose syrup and palm oil.

That really shocked me from what must be the most trusted food retailer in the UK and I’ve learned a lot more about all this from a fantastic woman called Sophie Morris on Instagram. I first heard about the Big Tobacco link from her too.

sophie_morris

A post shared by @sophie_morris

So those are all the reasons why there is no shame in being fat – we’ve been cynically set up for profit – now back to my main point. Why we must not give into it.

WE CANNOT ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE FAT BECAUSE OF OUR HEALTH.

Obviously being obese is a health disaster. Even more deadly than smoking 40 fags a day, it lays us hugely more open to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, osteoarthritis and dementia.

The full apocalyptic regiment of later life disease.

But even being a little bit overweight is very bad for us too – and I speak from blunt recent personal experience.

Now I am a world champion yo yo dieter. I’ve been on every fad regime since the 1970s, from Scarsdale, through F Plan, to Atkins, Dukan and Amelia Freer, with a bit of Weight Watchers thrown in.

I’ve probably lost and regained about 10 stone in my adult life. Which is clearly very stupid, but at least I was a healthy weight for about half of it.

My last big loss was also the biggest, 12 kilos (two stone) which I lost three years ago, after piling it on in the second lockdown, when I was writing a book and Cadburys chocolate buttons became one of my major food groups.

I got that flab off using what I think is the best diet I’ve ever done – dear late Dr Mosley’s Fast 800.

Combining that regime with the excellent recipe book, an app (NutraCheck) which works out the calories and carbs of everything, plus becoming a serious gym bunny, I dropped the wobbleage painlessly in about six months.

It was a great relief to get back to normal after being the biggest I’ve ever been and have all my favourite clothes fit. Hello bikini, my old friend.

But a much greater advantage was being able to walk again.

Because while I was carrying that weight, walking suddenly became very difficult due to intense pain and weirdness in my right hip.

My GP sent me for an Xray which revealed I have congenital condition, hip dyplasia – which means my femur (thigh bone) doesn’t sit quite right in my slightly deformed pelvis. (The Mick Jagger hips).

The added weight pushed it out of place completely, hence the pain and difficulty in movement. Once I lost the weight, the hip went back to normal and I could walk again.

Just like that.

Permanently committed to both overnight fasting and the gym, I kept it off for two and a half years, but last winter a strange succession of not serious, but temporarily incapacitating health issues lead to a lot of time in bed and made it hard to exercise.

I put half the bloody weight back on.

One morning I started to get out of bed and found I didn’t know how to move my right leg. I had to lift it with my hands and when I attempted to stand on it, I nearly fell down.

Now it wasn’t just painful to walk – I couldn’t walk. It was terrifying.

My lovely osteopath did what she could to free things up, but advised me I had to lose the weight again and fast, before I did permanent damage to that hip – and she explained it in this way.

Five pounds (2.2kg) of extra weight on the body exerts an extra 25 to 50 pounds of pressure on the hip joint. So the 12 pounds I was carrying, added at least 114 pounds of pressure. No wonder I couldn’t bloody walk.

…now I am normal. (The snotty expression is because Peggy calls this my Duchess Dress, so I was getting into character. And it’s not my house.)

I have now re-lost the gained weight and with the gym and extra stretching, my walking is about 90% normal – but the really serious reality I’m facing it that I simply cannot ever put that weight on again. Not even a little bit.

My lack of mobility was so much worse this time with just half the weight regained, so the yo yo swing on the bathroom scales ends for me. Now.

And I’m telling you this, as a cautionary tale, because the damage of being just a little overweight (only just into the NHS category) has been so starkly brought home to me in real time – but for all of us carrying those extra kilos, even worse things are being set up over time. Invisibly.

Because while we can see the fat rolls and the jeans that won’t do up, we can’t see what’s happening to our systems with the visceral fat, systemic inflammation, fatty liver and all the nasties excess weight brings.

So this is why, for our future selves – and our families – we just cannot be fat.

(Plus, I do look so much better in my clothes.)

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