Who makes you fat?

Deborah Coddigton has a thought-provoking column in today's Herald on Sunday. Entitled The market's to blame for obesity? Fat chance it begins:

It's official: we're a nation of idiots who can't make decisions to save ourselves or take responsibility for our problems.

That's according to two academics from Otago University, researchers in public health, Dr Gabrielle Jenkin and Penny Field, who specialise in the obesity epidemic.

Interviewed this week by Kathryn Ryan on National Radio, Field tossed off a comment which sent me into deep despair. Obesity, she said, was "not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we've proved successfully doesn't work".

Instead it's the fault of "big institutions and the market".

The obese as victims. It's come to this. Fat people are mentally incapable of choosing what's right and wrong when it comes to putting food in their mouths.

In New Zealand, 63 per cent of us are overweight or obese, so, by Field and Jenkin's reckoning, the brain power of 63 per cent of the New Zealand population is on par with labradors or ponies which can't stop eating themselves to death.

Government needed to do something, they complained, starting with more regulation of advertising, particularly on children's television.

What I interpret from this is that, zombie-like, our children are brainwashed into wanting bad food.

In turn, they demand this bad food from pliable parents who can't say no and, too dumb to discern healthy food from bad food, meekly buy that which "the market" or "the big institutions" persuade them to buy.

How conspiratorial.

If this is the case, we might as well give up. The Government could just nationalise all food outlets, supermarkets, dairies, greengrocers and farmers' markets and the Minister for Food Safety could have an army of inspectors to ensure we only eat healthy food, with no fat or sugar.

And why stop there? Why not have the Government issue us all with packed lunches every day? After all, it's not just our children who are obese.

And she's dead right. Obesity is not the fault of the government, or of the market. Obesity (other than for medical reasons such as hormonal imbalance) is the result of our choices. And progressively, we have as a nation and as individuals been making bad choices. That's why we have an obesity epidemic.

As we've mentioned before, She Who Must Be Obeyed and we have embarked on a bit of a mission this year; to get healthy, and to shed some of those unwanted kilograms that our bodies have laboured under the weight of for too many years. That too was a choice; going on eating as we were would have been all too easy, but it was doing us long-term harm. So we're following a plan which has meant we've had to eliminate a number of items from our diet. We're four weeks into a six-week phase, and the results are already becoming evident; clothes are far looser, and belts are needing to be tightened. We can't quantify it yet, because we don't weigh in for another fortnight, but the weight loss for us at least has been significant.

Has it been easy? Heck, no! Some of our favourite foods were on the prohibited substances list; what we'd do for a chocolate biscuit right now, or a slice of toast! But is it making a difference? Absolutely. We feel less bloated, less breathless and we're sleeping far better. We've never in our lives eaten as many fruits and vegetables as we have in the last four weeks, so that's great.

Did "the market" make us overweight? In a word, no. Our choices were what caused us to gain far too much weight; a sedentary lifestyle, convenience foods and comfort eating were our downfall, and they were all things that were within our control, but where we made poor or lazy choices.

We have made a choice to get healthy this year, just as in the past we made choices which had the consequence of turning us into Mr Blobby. And Deborah Coddington is right on the money when she suggests that blaming the market is just a cop-out.

Successive governments have made things to easy for us, and by and large, it's become far easier to abdicate personal responsibility and just blame someone else. We've changed our mindset this year, and thus far, it's working really well. We're not someone who is endowed with an iron will, and we reckon that if we can change the habits of a lifetime, pretty much anyone can.

We'll keep you posted on progress!