In OFM’s 200 issues we have written a lot about our diet – how and what we eat – but very little about diets. It’s not our thing. OFM celebrates food in all its extravagant glories. Weight loss diets shake their head over food and roll their eyes. And yet this edition happens to coincide with January, a time when many find themselves wriggling on the sofa and wondering why the clothes which fitted them so well three months ago have clearly shrunk. The arrival of a new year bellows new beginnings. We mutter to ourselves “something must be done” with the kind of sigh we usually reserve for discovering the milk has turned.
I know all about this. I am a big man much in the way Wales is wet. It has nothing to do with reviewing restaurants. I was a fat child, then a fat teenager and finally achieved fat adulthood. I have a metabolism engineered for a winter on the Russian steppe when a pogrom is threatened. Still, the job does present dilemmas. Like OFM, I too am here to enthuse about dinner. I abhor the language of diets, especially modern ones with their implicit moralising: ‘if you don’t eat like I do, you are not only fat. You are Bad.’ You are degenerate. I laugh in the face of pseudo-scientific faddery. I do not want Joe Wicks’s body. He’s all sharp points and angles. You could have your eye out on one of his abs.
And yet I also have to police my appetites, with the rigour of the Surrey Constabulary patrolling Guildford’s booze barns on a Friday night. I must behave like a double agent, cheerleading on the one hand, while surreptitiously monitoring my own behaviour. Sometimes, that battle goes public. Last summer, I recorded three episodes of MasterChef at a point when my weight had slipped away from me. By the time the episodes aired in November, I was back on it, at the gym five times a week, walking a rolling staircase to nowhere. I was quietly avoiding certain foodstuffs that publicly I celebrate. (Oh, crisp crusted sourdough, how do I love thee?)
But TV captures a moment in time, alongside appalling dress decisions. I winced when I saw myself. That billowing shirt on that undulating body? What was I thinking? I tried to prepare myself for the social-media onslaught, but it’s not easy. It’s called fat shaming with good reason. By the second episode I had decided to pre-empt the abuse, by misquoting Churchill on Twitter: yes, I was fatter than I might like. But I could lose weight. My tormentors would always be unpleasant ill-mannered scumbags.
It was a good line but I doubt it will ever stop them. Mention issues around weight management and there will always be someone wanting to point out the existence of food banks. Well done them. Personally, I think being sanctimonious is much worse than being obese. At least the overweight only have to deal with the impact themselves, whereas the judgmental impose their views on others.
One of the biggest problems around the discussion of weight is the use of military metaphors. We use the wrong ones. People talk about their battle when, in truth, it’s far more than that. It’s a long, unending war. And here we are again in January, which is as good a time as any to go over the top. So to those of you fighting the fight, I’ve got your back. Good luck.
And to those of you preparing to judge, try a little empathy. You just might like it.
