Reduce Your Fat Footprint

One in six of the UK's children is now clinically obese screams the latest shocking weight-related headline - the US passed this threshold some time ago.

But it is not the raw numbers that should be causing the most alarm but rather the manner in which they are presented.

Everything to do with weight is being presented as if it was part of the landscape; a tree, a stream, a landslip. It is as if it is a natural phenomenon over which human beings have very little control.

In so far as any notion of responsibility or force for change is even admitted, it is pushed away on to third parties, including schools, the food production industry, the government, or retailers.

It is always someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility. It is something that just happens, not
an issue to which we actively contribute.

This week happens to be the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery by the UK parliament. This is something that was many decades in the making and it was only when a growing groundswell of enlightened opinion could see beyond greed and racism that a tipping point of emancipatory consciousness was finally reached.

Arguments to do nothing individually are always utterly beguiling. The African blacks are a sub-species, the trade of civilised nations depends on it, it's not that bad after all and surely they will benefit from westernising influences, it's actually none of our business because this is simply the way that things happen...

The parallels are actually not that hard to spot if you stop and think for a moment. Fatties are a sub-species, free trade in all things is our only way, it's just a sign of the times and nobody suffers anything from it, so what?...

And these latest outbursts of the overweight hysteria concerning overeating children also come just a week after many of the world's leaders sat down yet again to agonise about some pollution-reducing measures whilst the planet teeters on the brink of catastrophically self-accelerating overheating.

It has taken a couple of decades and more to get our "leaders" to even sit down and contemplate readjustments in our lands of plenty to avoid the despoilation of everything for all of us for all time.

We are still far from a tipping point back into personal responsibility. We have had a few ripples spreading around concerning the personal reduction of carbon footprints. The media still generally thinks of this concept has a huge trendy joke and mocks as uber-Liberal loonies those who are actually taking concerted individual action. Being ahead of the do-gooding curve has always been to inhabit a place of mockery.

Do we really want to have go through this whole cycle of prevarication and persiflage with regards to our growing weight concerns? Isn't it making an absolute mockery of the world's have-nots in that most evocative and ultimately disgraceful area of famine? Is not our attitude to food imposing a shadow of ongoing slavery on those who starve?

Is not global warming nothing if not a judgement on our excess and is that excess seen anywhere more wantonly than in our nutritional mess and waste?

Surely it is time to take personal responsibility and join the campaign, launched here and now, to Reduce Your Fat Footprint, whether we are remotely overweight or not.

Eat more humbly but well and enjoy food as nature's gift, not as a corrupted sign of any right we may claim to rape nature. Enjoy food for its great power of socialisation and not as a projection of any personal weaknesses we may have - acknowledge these independently of food and deal with them separately from food.

Food is our life force. Use it intelligently, preserve our dignity and spread the message of reducing everyone's Fat Footprint in as many constructive ways as you feel fit. Perhaps this time we don't have to wait forever for the dreary campaign cycle to crank its painstaking way round to us.

1. Prev:Lose Fat Instead of Muscle or Water Weight
2. Next:How to Lose Weight after Pregnancy