From this week, you will be able to get the obesity pill, Alli, over the counter: your pharmacist is meant to check that you have a body mass index of more than 28, but if you're a person with an eating disorder and not fat enough to qualify, your averagely resourceful 14-year-old smoker ought to be able to suggest ways around this.
I am against generalising about the views of the media, since so many are contrarian. But there is certainly a central channel of "sensible", mainstream media that holds to views until forcibly yanked away from them – one being that quick-fix solutions, that is drugs, are rarely the answer to anything, and are certainly no answer to problems caused by lifestyle.
There's a quasi-moral foundation to all this: it's not enough for hard work to be its own reward; short cuts must, somewhere along the line, carry their own penalty. The precepts under-pinning this are that individual flaws, such as smoking, overeating and sitting around, are "lifestyle issues" that can be tackled as easily as lacing up your shoes, where the iniquities of society are as immovable as geology, so even where you see a demonstrable causal link – between, say, poverty and obesity – it is reasonable to drug your way out of it. Nobody says "but won't Alli just encourage the chancellor to ignore the fact that lifestyle choices are really just a function of economic hopelessness?". But never mind that, back to these fatties.
This week also saw the first enforcement of a law banning fast food outlets from the vicinity of educational establishments. The victim was, predictably enough, an independent lard monger with little clout to fight the ruling. Bamboo Joint is a Caribbean takeaway 400 metres from a secondary school. Merciful heavens, I read the small print before I started spouting about how there's a KFC and McDonalds much closer than 400 metres to my local primary, and much fattier, besides (chicken in spice is a diet-book staple, it's practically the only edible thing in the diet canon; the devil's in the breaded coating). This is a local initiative, introduced by Waltham Forest council in London last month; it only applies to establishments with pending planning permission. So it's some small-scale tomfoolery that will surely unravel at the first scrutiny. But there's an instructive juxtaposition here, between obesity measures that discomfit right-thinking opinion, and measures with such respectable appeal that they make it into council bylaw books with very little contest.
Polite society can't stand solutions that make things easier for the individual, yet loves answers that appear to control the problem from above, by decree. This is just as much an easy answer for the council as a pill is for the obese person: no effortful, expensive ideas – playing fields, outdoor gyms, free leisure centre usage – just a big, red "no", stamped on planning applications. Every policy idea you hear about the obesity "epidemic" shares this easy-answer quality – take away their benefits, restrict their use of the NHS, tax their chocolate, tax their benefits so they can't afford chocolate, starve them! Even at their most benign, policymakers concentrate on the cheapest end of the spectrum – an educational campaign, a poster campaign, the dissemination of messages that have been around for decades and have precisely no impact.
I point this out not for soft-hearted, liberal reasons, not to say how unjust it is, how poisonous, the one-way-street of this debate, where the individual is expected always to take the hard path. Rather, a most cursory examination of the impulses behind overeating, after you've filtered out considerations like fatty food costing less, reveals that they have nothing to do with people being ignorant, or insufficiently reprimanded. They are all about boredom, hopelessness, demoralisation and a low sense of self-worth.
The factors are mainly emotional, and the disapprobation of society – whether tacit, or expressed through chicken availability or tax penalties – does not help. It's interesting that, when you listen to doctors at the coalface of the obesity problem, in the gastric-band business, or dealing with infertility or type-2 diabetes or heart disease, they never come up with punitive solutions, they always talk about prevention of obesity, and how hard weight loss is.
It's only those at some remove from all this who think bullying is going to help. And ultimately, I don't think these disciplinary solutions are intended to help, or rather, framed with any thought of actual efficacy. It's just a way of saying, "Eurgh! I can't abide fat people!". It would actually be better, for policy, for the obese and for society, if the people who get off on this moralising were still allowed to pelt missiles at the fat, in a purpose-built fairground environment.
mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk
