The debate’s been rumbling on for two years but Jasmine Wing believes there is no question: being big is a heavy burden on your health…and your children’s.
‘Big is NOT beautiful! And plus-size is just a euphemism for FAT!’, declared controversial journalist Katie Hopkins, speaking on This Morning (ITV) in January 2013.
Hopkins went on: ‘raising our children and telling them they can be any size they want is wrong.’
Never a truer word said, in my opinion. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but fat is a scientific issue. Scientific evidence confirms that it is not healthy to be overweight. Therefore, being bigger than the recommended weight is not something to be celebrated or even condoned; instead we should work harder to ensure that children get the message about healthy eating and exercise.
Especially in East London. The London Borough of Newham, which includes the Olympic Park in Stratford, was recently revealed as ‘the least active in England’, according to UK Active; while the highest childhood obesity rates in Britain have been recorded in the neighbouring borough of Hackney.
Hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012 clearly failed to implant ‘physical activity into the DNA of the nation’, as prime minister David Cameron claimed at the time.
But we can’t afford to give up on this one. Instead we will have to make the message louder and even clearer: big isn’t healthy; it prevents you doing everyday things like running for the Tube; and it may even stop you getting the job you want.
Employers, warns Hopkins, are much more likely to pick candidates who demonstrate self-discipline, and being overweight is widely seen to indicate otherwise.
You will fly far higher if you present yourself the way companies like to see themselves, i.e. ‘lean and fit, agile, flexible’, in the words of Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway.
But you don’t have to be in the corporate sector to appreciate that allowing your body to acquire a disproportionate number of fat cells, is excessively bad both for you and your children.
If you won’t make the effort on your own behalf, at least sort yourself out so you can set an example to your kids.
With one in five children now reckoned to be obese, surely we owe it to them to get the message right.
And if we don’t, you may end up being one of those parents asking surgeons to perform anti-obesity operations on your child: there are now twice as many such requests as there were five years ago.
Jasmine Wing is Rising East’s Health and Wellbeing Editor.