Fat is a feminist issue
Here goes with yet another badly thought-out, hastily written post, tapped straight into the ‘write post’ facility because I can rarely be bothered to write it all out first in Word and then (lawks a-mercy) actually check my copy before publishing it.
A few thoughts on the third and final part of C4’s The Hospital, which aired on Tuesday and which featured lots of overweight people. You’ll recall, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, that The Hospital was a three-part documentary series about the strains put on the NHS by various conditions affecting, nay, plagueing the nation’s young. Namely, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy and obesity.
In Tuesday’s outing we met a number of ginormo-birds (they were all female although at least one of their male soul-mates was also ginormous) who wanted a gastric band fitted to stop them over-eating and help them lose weight. One man in the country, a Mr Super, fits 400 bands a year in up to four operations a day. Another man, who started out with tight curly hair in the film and ended it with a suspiciously gelled and groomed pudding bowl, tried to talk the ladies out of their bad eating habits in weekly 45-minute sessions.
The film explored some of the emotional and physical reasons why these ladies were so spectactularly overweight and took pot shots at the relative effectiveness of gastric bands versus help and support with better eating. The digested version? Gastric bands are v painful and mean you’ll never eat normally again. Some people still try and cheat, even with one fitted. Help and support plus an exercise regime can start shifting pounds in weight.
It was another great piece of documentary, enlivened by the new technique (as far as I can tell) of getting contributors to talk straight to the camera as if they were doing a ‘down the line’ news piece, rather than chatting to a film-maker who is usually out of shot.
What the film didn’t do was support anything that Zoe Williams concluded in an apparently unrelated column about obesity in yesterday’s Guardian. Williams reckons that “doctors at the coalface of the obesity problem, in the gastric-band business … never come up with punitive solutions, they always talk about prevention of obesity, and how hard weight loss is.” Well Mr Super in The Hospital was pretty punitive. He wanted to ban all “beige” foods if he got into power (bread, pasta, crisps) and delighted in wiggling his patients bits of fat while they were out for the count saying: “This bit of fat started life as a biscuit, or a chip.”
The Hospital also put the lie to another of Williams’ conclusions. “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,” she wrote. “They are all about boredom, hopelessness, demoralisation and a low sense of self-worth.” Yes, but what about the woman in The Hospital who looked at the pack of Hob Nobs while eating one to discover (apparently for the first time) that one Hob Nob contains 67 calories?
It’s all just a bit more complicated than either Williams, I or The Hospital film-makers can account for. Which is why cheap, easy measures to tackle obesity like encouraging people to eat less fat and get out more will always be on the social policy agenda alongside the really big, long-term challenges such as eradicating poverty.
