Site navigation

• Help | 
• Regions | 
• Contact us | 
• My email updates | 
• Sitemap

• Home
• Join
• News
• Members
• About us
• Benefits
• Campaigns
• Get active
• At work
• Equality
• Resources
• UNISONTV

• Back to Quick Links [.]

As pressure mounts - at work and at home - to conform to a fashion-led image of health, Amanda Kendal discovers that women and those on low incomes are losing out

D-day for dieting

There's an epidemic around. Barely a week scrapes past without a new report on obesity, each one heralded in tones of increasing dismay and disgust.

Yet last week marked the 11th international No Diet Day. Is such an event ludicrous under the circumstances? Or is it one of the few remaining points of reason in an increasingly one-sided debate?

Back in February, UNISON women met in Plymouth and the issue of body image was discussed on the conference floor. "Conference is concerned," read one motion, "about the promotion of ever more restrictive and narrowly defined images of girls and women together with similarly narrow definitions of femininity."

Another said: "Conference is appalled at the body image of women promoted and marketed from the latter part of the 20th century as the one to which all women should aspire."

Many delegates stood up to claim, no matter what the media said, they knew they were beautiful - "on the inside".

That two such motions should find space in an industrial conference was proof of the emotional impact of living in a weight-obsessed society.

UNISON is committed to dealing with workplace bullying. Issues surrounding dieting and weight are part of that problem but the consumer society can give certain kinds of bullying a veneer of respectability.

The union's head of healthy and safety, Hugh Robertson, says that "any bullying is completely unacceptable". The union works hard to help "empower women" - in the workplace and at home. As well as a raft of equal pay, flexible working and maternity leave campaigning, it also focuses on helping women feel good about and confident in themselves.

Robertson is concerned that responses to consumerism - that promotes the sugar- and animal-fat-dominated foods that lead to weight gain and then promote dependence on slimming products as a counteraction - deflect from a reasoned discussion on the question.

A recent survey showed that bullying is a major factor in girls as young as nine stepping on the diet cycle. An edition of the factual television programme, Sex Sense, revealed that in secondary school, girls' performance in subjects viewed as 'male', such as maths, decreases concomitantly as they become increasingly worried about their bodies.

Two years ago, an article I wrote was headlined Fat and fab. Fat. The word made me feel uncomfortable then and it still does. Why? 'Fuller-figured woman' is more than acceptable, 'Rubenesque' quite delightful and 'BBW' (big beautiful woman) absolutely fine. But whatever else you do, don't use the 'F' word.

Fat has never yet been positive. It is such an emotionally loaded term that some believe it is not too great an overstatement to compare it with the derogatory manner in which 'nigger' or 'queer' were used against black people and homosexuals - before they reclaimed the words for themselves.

So let's start with the health issue. The medical profession is effusive in its claims of the bodily damage that being overweight can cause. However, in 2000, a study by the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas concluded that obese people who exercise have half the death rate of those who are thin but unfit. So weight per se is not the sole issue in health terms.

Among the reasons cited to explain rising obesity are the 'MacDonaldisation' of food and the increasingly sedentary nature of modern life.

Fast and fat-saturated foods may be unhealthy, but often they are all that poorer families can afford. Healthier alternatives - such as fresh fish, fruit and vegetables - need to be made more affordable.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people attend health clubs and gyms. Surely that means a less lazy attitude than 30 or 50 years ago, since these exercisers now choose exertion rather than have it forced on them by work?

And how can people be blamed if they cannot afford gym fees or if they do not have the time to trek to an aerobics class or the energy for a game of badminton after a long day in the office?

What many 'experts' and 'commentators' choose to ignore are the other factors, such as genetics, that can and do affect metabolism and body shape.

Yet still, being obese is seen as a personal choice, and worse - one that society is allowed to castigate you for. Statistics released last year by the National Audit Office stated that obesity is already costing the economy and the NHS £2.6bn a year.

According to the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, in 1998, smoking was costing the NHS between £1.4bn and £1.7bn a year and causing 92,000 deaths each year. According to ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), the cost to the economy is an estimated 34m working days every year from smoking-related sick leave. Last month, ASH reported on new research that concluded that three people die every day as a result of passive smoking in the workplace.

But despite such statistics, smokers do not face the social disdain that people who are judged overweight do. It is doubtful that anyone walking down the street smoking a cigarette, has ever been met by a bawled: "You're a fat f***!" from a total stranger across the road.

If obesity is unhealthy, dieting reaps its own toll. Eating disorders are estimated to affect 70 million people worldwide. There are four general categories of eating disorder: bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, binge eating, and eating disorders not otherwise specified.

According to NorthWestern Healthcare - a leading US teaching hospital - eating disorders are "devastating behavioural maladies brought on by a complex interplay of factors, which may include emotional and personality disorders, family pressures, a possible genetic or biologic susceptibility, and a culture in which there is an overabundance of food and an obsession with thinness".

The diet and fitness industries are worth billions of pounds a year. These businesses have a vested interest in women remaining convinced that a slim body is a prerequisite to desirability.

The role models that are presented by the media - most noticeably the fashion and entertainment industries - present an image of womanhood that isn't just slim, it's un-naturally and unhealthily skinny. The Naomi Campbell case illustrated how supermodels have to take drugs to stay as stick-thin as the industry requires.

Victoria Beckham reportedly had to put weight on in order to conceive and maintain a healthy pregnancy to term.

How can protruding bones be any sexier on a model than they are on someone suffering malnourishment in the developing world or peering out from behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp in the Balkans? Yet people have been brainwashed into believing that this is the only possible version of feminine beauty within the West. Or at least into thinking that they have to outwardly adhere to such a credo.

Physical health apart, Nobel prize-winning geneticist James Watson has concluded that, because increased fat levels produce more endorphins, a natural mood-enhancing chemical, fat people can be happier than thin ones - if they accept their body shape. That, he also discovered, means a better sex life.

A somewhat risque joke doing the rounds suggests exactly that.

Q: What do fat girls and mopeds have in common?

A: They're both great to ride until your mates find out.

And should further - if equally politically incorrect - aesthetic proof be needed, then it can be found in the popularity of big women within porn. Hundreds of thousands of people clearly find large ladies to be very sexy indeed, and are prepared to spend their money to enjoy such images.

But the outward situation is such that Sumo Bruno - Germany's answer to The Full Monty - failed to secure a proper release outside the festival circuit. According to the organisers of the 2000 German Film Festival in London - where it was received with unmitigated delight by the audience - that's because distributors are convinced that people don't want to see a film where the hero happens to be a fat person.

It's a good thing that nobody told the producers of The Vicar of Dibley the same thing.

As UNISON women know, the fat debate is not an egalitarian one. Although medical reports rarely specify gender, the aesthetic issue means that the people who suffer most are women.

Whatever the health problems associated with questions of weight, if the issue is to be properly addressed, it needs to be done so outside of the judgmental and aesthetically subjective culture that informs so much of the present debate.

In the meantime, perhaps, after all, a little word reclamation is in order. So let us stand here, brazenly unashamed, and tell the world (and most of all, ourselves): "I am fat. And - whether in spite of or because of that - I am fab."

Contact the article's author