Warning: make friends with a pie-face at your own risk. A recent study found that people who forge close relationships with fatties are more likely to develop a weight problem than those who purposely exclude the plus-sized from their circle of friends. The reason? We are apparently influenced by the appearance of those around us and prone to imitative behaviour. So watching our nearest and dearest flossing jelly babies and gammon steaks out of their teeth while waddling towards the fridge with their free hand teasing a Bargain Bucket, is likely to incite otherwise svelte men and women to swap the salad bowl for a deep-fried Mars bar in likewise pursuit of an elasticated waistband. There's nothing you can do about it, it's social programming, and it's inevitable that your stomach is going to inflate like a hot-air balloon if you choose to have drinks with someone whose weight could be mistaken for a telephone number. Sorry about that. As a fat woman, I feel I should apologise on behalf of my kind for spreading this cultural malign. Our bad.
Researchers from Warwick, Dartmouth and Leuven universities analysed data on 27,000 people and came to the insightful conclusion that tubbiness is not the result of physiology but social influence. Fat-bastarditus, it would seem, is contagious, and the only real solution to the obesity epidemic is to round up all the hefty marauders, stockpile these cake-munchers in a field, and set them on fire. Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick said: "Consumption of calories has gone up but that does not tell us why people are eating more … People are influenced by relative comparisons, and norms have changed and are still changing."
So it has nothing to do with the accessibility and convenience of fast food and the availability of everything at the click of a mouse, both of which promote sedentary lifestyles? I would be more than willing to sacrifice my portly paunch for the greater good if I didn't think this analysis was absolutely ludicrous. While obesity is rising and the spare tyre is increasingly commonplace, this is not championed as a "norm," but considered synonymous with bad health and unattractiveness.
The Rubenesque body, for example, has not been hailed as the epitome of feminine beauty since the 17th century, and those who do have a penchant for super-sized ladies and gents are marginalised as perverse fetishists. Plus, if having a hanging-gut is an accepted part of the status quo there would be no need for fat men, women, teenagers and toddlers to be paraded around in their scanties like circus freaks as they endeavour to sweat off the blubber on innumerable TV programmes, because who would be interested? The number of outputting channels would probably half.
I am sceptical about the reliability of this investigation. First, to what extent are these results based on empirical evidence and not pre-existing attitudes towards the overweight? Last year, a close friend of several years, fuelled by an article in a glossy magazine, not-very-sensitively broached the issue of my weight, owing to concerns that she may have to sacrifice her UK size 10 physique should we continue our relationship. I assured her – as I brushed pizza crust out of my hair and coughed up chocolate buttons – that this was not a certainty, and she is probably lighter now than she was then, owing to an unspoken determination not to emulate my weeble-like figure.
Does this report, then, have any merit? This is not, after all, an innovative supposition, but rather one originating from the anecdotal. I can't shake the image of several boffins sat around a table at an all-you-can-eat buffet armed with clipboards and notebooks, observing the gluttony and inhalation of food and thinking "Shit! What can we say about this?" Before one of them decided it would be ingenious to recycle prevailing arguments about the obese, which have permeated the national consciousness to such an extent that they are likely to provoke the least dissent. That this bolsters established chubby stereotypes is incidental because we're told it's our own fault for being wobbly and transgressive. But is this a perfect example of science being used and manipulated to consolidate active social prejudices and lazy beliefs instead of questioning them? Probably.
I was a plump child who blossomed into a hefty adult, collecting chins over the years like a philatelist collects stamps, but I accept the full onus of responsibility for my marshmallow body. I eat too much, I eat unhealthily and I don't take regular exercise. I am not going to blame genes or bone structure or repressed devastation at not getting the doll I wanted one Christmas – I am greedy. Of course, some people are chunky for medical reasons, but it is fair to claim that the vast majority of us ripple as we walk because of poor dietary choices.
It's not unreasonable to expect an individual to take responsibility for their health, but what is not fair is to impose collective accountability for widespread obesity on super-sized men and women. If someone chooses to use my weight as a comparison (whether subconsciously or not), and then extend his or her personal weight limitations through over-indulgence because they will still be thin in relative terms, this is more representative of their arrogance and self-contentment than any wrongdoing of my, or any other cake-lover's, part. That a man or woman would use an individual's visible mismanagement of their weight as a springboard to precipitate their own weight problems is foolish, and no one's fault but their own. This is an equally valid interpretation of these results, and yet Professor Oswald and the wider media preferred to further vilify fat people in their reports as being influential social lepers, because it just adds to an existing discourse of disgust and repulsion directed at us pot-bellied porkers.
A recent news story outlining the necessity of establishing a special weight-loss school with the express purpose of encouraging rotund pupils to drop the pounds centralises the severity of this as a social problem, but there will always be fat people. And while there is a need for greater emphasis on food science and the promotion of healthy eating, wouldn't it be more effective to incorporate this into the mainstream curriculum rather than creating an institution that fosters the segregation of blubbery infants and adolescents from their slender classmates?
Surely being permanently surrounded by podgy boys and girls would normalise obesity and incubate the so-what-if-I'm-fat-I'm-thinner-than-them mentality that is considered so damaging? Some people are predisposed to being larger than their peers, whereas others can eat what they want and still have the same size waist as a malnourished seven-year-old and so, on a basic level, nature not nurture does unquestionably have some jurisdiction over body types and can't be controlled. Studies like these are, therefore, counterproductive because they encourage the tendency to define people by their physical differences, and make assumptions about personal attributes on the basis of appearance.
These so-called investigations also promote the concept of social exclusion on the basis of said dissimilarities, which is unfair since fat people need friends too: why does this have to be invested with sinister ramifications?
