There is no longer any doubt: we are unhealthily obsessed with health. We live in a society where to be healthy is not simply about wanting to avoid illness. It is a way of demonstrating your moral worth.
Attending a spinning class in the early morning is crucial, not because it will make you healthier, but because it will convince the rest of the world, and hopefully yourself, that you are not one of “them”.
You can say, look at me, I am not one of those weak-willed, lazy or feeble people who don’t work out.
Indeed, if you fail to look after your health, you will be perceived as a liability, both to yourself and others.
When health becomes a moral imperative we automatically begin to view those who are unhealthy as moral failures. But how big is the step from informally demonising unhealthy people to formally punishing them?
Very small it seems. David Cameron has now announced that people who are overweight or suffering addiction have to accept treatment, or else. Prof Carol Black, a senior adviser at the Department of Health, has been asked to examine the best ways to get these people back into a healthy lifestyle. If they refuse help, they can no longer expect to receive benefits.
Some people might be celebrating this initiative. When the Times recently published a feature based on my new book The Wellness Syndrome, written with André Spicer, some of the readers vented their displeasure at what they took as our sympathy with the unhealthy. As one commenter put it: “If people want to get fat, be depressed and drink themselves to death they can do that but not at my expense.”
This is the same rhetoric that Cameron is now using. He says that having taxpayers funding obese people and alcoholics who refuse help is “not fair”. What is fair, supporters may add, is to put a definitive stop to people living off their hard-earned tax money.
There is one detail that is often left out here. It may come as a surprise to some that, from a purely financial perspective, no group is more expensive to society than the healthy non-smokers, who continue to live many years after they retire, during which time they, too, become an economic burden to society.
These calculations aside, we may wonder if Cameron’s initiative will actually have the desired effects. The question is tricky, because it depends on what the underlying purpose of this initiative actually is.
If the intention is to give people a second chance, to live a slim, healthy and prosperous life – then the answer is no. We know, from existing studies, that obese people may well lose some weight, but that 80% to 95% will return to their original weight after a few months.
But here is the alternative theory. What if the intention is not to make people slimmer, but to make the obese reconcile themselves with the fact that they are worthless human beings, and hence unworthy of receiving any financial support from anyone? If that is the case, then the initiative may work very well indeed.
Even though the initiative fosters an “us v them” mentality, we are all in this together. The pressure to be healthy is not experienced only by the obese, or unemployed smokers with poor eating habits.
All of us are asked to become hyperconscious about what we put in our mouth, the number of steps we walk in a day, how many times we exercise a week, and what we actively do on a daily basis to develop a more positive, upbeat attitude. There is nothing wrong with looking after our health, but when the obsession of our own bodies goes too far, we tend to block out the world outside. Beyond the immediate domain of our bodily anxieties, there is nothing.
So when we pedal through another early morning spinning class, trying to make up for the chocolate bar we secretly ate the previous evening, we often take comfort in knowing that some people are worse than we are. An appealing way to cope with the punishing demand to be healthy, and the unpleasant guilt that it entails, is to project it on to others. A convenient figure, no doubt, is the unhealthy, fat people living off benefits. At least we are not like them.
And yet, even though early morning gym-goers seem far apart from obese people on benefits, they are likely to suffer from the same malady: an inclination to withdraw further into themselves.
The super-fit person escapes into his or her private wellbeing, replete with an exclusive gym membership, numerous wearables, diet apps, and a subscription to at least one health magazine. Meanwhile, the super-fat person escapes the wellness command by doing the one thing they have been told they do well: eat unhealthily.
Punishing the obese is likely to widen the gap between the super-fit and the super-fat. Those who would like to see themselves as morally superior on the basis of their detailed health routines are now given free licence to express their disgust for the fat. This might ease their own bodily anxieties, if only for a brief moment. But where, we may ask, does this leave the obese people who are warned that, unless they immediately resize their bodies, they will not fit into Cameron’s society, however big it is said to be?
