Katie Hopkins, a former contestant on The Apprentice, plans to gain three stone in weight in order to lose it for a television programme. Hopkins is mostly famous for her “unique” views on topics of the day, with highlights including: “Ginger babies. Like a baby. Just so much harder to love” and “A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class the child comes from.”
Her weight gain plan has come about because last year she said she wouldn’t hire fat people on the grounds that “if you are obese you look lazy”. By putting on the spare tyres and then effortlessly losing them, Hopkins will show what a lot of nonsense it all is – that fat people merely need to stop helping themselves to seconds and go for the odd jog, and a dream gig at Hopkins’ antagonism factory will be theirs.
I expect she’ll succeed. But thanks to genetics and practised restraint, the thin tend to stay thin. Equally, the fat, thanks to genetics and habitual greed, tend to stay fat. It would be amusing if Hopkins couldn’t shed her love handles, of course. Nothing would make me happier than to seeing her marooned in fat ghetto with the rest of us, desperately trying paleo and Atkins and 5:2 and Dukan, only to collapse exhausted into a pile of Rocky Road mini bites at the end of it. But I suspect that a woman who can publicly state that “suicidal prisoners should just kill themselves” will have the force of personality to lay off junk food for a bit.
She is completely missing the point, of course. Nobody knows more acutely than the obese that we only have ourselves to blame. Nobody wakes up more determined to eat less and exercise more. Nobody feels worse when they read about the burden they put on the NHS or the likelihood that they’ll kick the bucket before they’re old enough to “get” Radio 3. Being fat-shamed by Hopkins is not going to reverse that trend.
This culture of self-loathing is exactly what the pedlars of fatness want. More people than ever are obese. That might be because humans have less willpower than they did in the 19th century or the last ice age. But I doubt it. Partly it’s because we lead more sedentary lifestyles, but people have been working in offices for close to a century and the obesity crisis is more recent than that.
What’s changed is that we have taken the decisions about what to eat away from parents and handed them over to advertisers and food companies. There’s no profit in restraint. By allowing a culture of blame, we encourage fat people to seek solutions in consumption. The companies that sell you sugar-pumped rubbish with one hand will offer you a healthy alternative with the other. If that doesn’t work, how about gym membership or a diet book?
“People have eaten sandwiches for hundreds of years,” food companies can argue. “It’s not our fault that you can’t say no to them.” But neither can the average consumer be expected to adjust for food pumped with salt, sugar and flavourings to trick the brain, honed over hundreds of thousands of years, into thinking it is nutritious.
In truth, I hold myself responsible for my weight. I know this all sounds like buck-passing. However, by blaming the consumer, food producers validate their policy of making food that tastes rich and gives you energy but doesn’t fill you up, for as little as possible. I would naturally argue for the free market in this case but the idea of the market presupposes we are capable of judging quality. Modern processed foods are so far from our evolutionary training that it’s impossible to say. We just don’t know what we’re doing.
At an individual level it is natural – and right – to encourage individuals to take responsibility for their health. But the idea that obesity is some kind of failure of personality only encourages negative feeling. The kind of negative feeling that can be quickly alleviated with a delicious doughnut. If major food companies agree about something, we should probably be suspicious. Doubly so, if witless wind-up merchants like Hopkins agree with them.
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