Comment

It’s that time of the year again. Post Diwali, post Christmas, post New Year’s, and the winter of our discontent is upon us. All those bulges in all the wrong places that pop up after all the partying and celebratory feasting have begun to behave like guests who refuse to leave. It’s bad enough at home, in India, when fat-resistant friends who feel they have overeaten if they eat two leaves out of their Caesar’s salad keep giving you the once over, their perfectly strung eyebrows ever so arch.

But here in the USA, it’s getting to be increasingly like a cardinal sin. There’s no running away from those judgmental eyes, or the truth: The media has gone into overdrive about weighty matters.

Switch on the small screen and you either have obesity reality shows (NBC’s The Biggest Loser), or Good Morning America giving you tips about losing weight, more serious channels telecasting hour length programmes on the dangers of obesity or how fast foods are killing Americans.

If it’s not the programmes (and there a zillion others equally humiliating) there are ubiquitous advertisements plugging diet foods, diet books, pills, surgery, gyms, slimming gadgets and self-help groups-fatties of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your avoirdupois. After all, Americans spend, according to the newsmagazine US News and World Report $33 billion each year on fat fighting and such things, while two thirds of the population is supposed to be overweight, and thirty per cent of them have gone way beyond the tipping point of obesity.

The print media is as admonitory, and scary. The New York Times ran a series of five lengthy articles on the spread of diabetes and seemed to be sending a red alert out on obesity. There’s hardly a newspaper or magazine not taking on those extra pounds as if they were undesirable aliens: Try walking through a supermarket without being blitzkrieg-ed by tips about shedding fat. Fat may no longer be such a feminist issue (supersize me is quite alright, thank you) but it is swiftly and surely becoming a political one.

You even have Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (apparently he’s even thinking of running for President) taking on obesity as if it were the latest avatar of terrorism. The self-confessed “foodaholic” Republican politician has lost 120 pounds (he used to weigh in at 280 pounds two years ago) has made obesity a political issue, making it his mission to fight the fat epidemic.

He preaches nutrition and fitness: The bottom line of course is the toll obesity is already taking in terms of medical expenses.

It’s certainly not easy in this land of plenty where manifest destiny (that sacrosanct credo) can be measured in terms of the biggest everything—a steak or a plate of French fries.

This is, after all, the land of highways stretching to eternity, the Grand Canyon, the strrrrretch limos and Texas. American portions are Texan in size: Anywhere else one serving could feed a family of four, and then some.

This land has always reminded me of an Enid Blyton story (The Enchanted Wood) that has remained indelibly imprinted on my mind. In it a group of children discover a tree atop which is revolving world: Every so often it turns and another country slides into a place. And one of them is overflowing with all the goodies imaginable.

Going into a supermarket or any of the cavernous food specialty stores is like entering an ever-morphing Disneyland of food. Perhaps Alladin’s cave is a better example.
There’s nothing under the sun not available—in packs, and at prices that if you have the right coupons will hardly make a dent in your wallet. Deals abound.

But there’s a flip side to this orgy of excess. The dictatorship of the skinny and the habitués of page 3s the world over is unrelenting. The streets of American may be overrun with fatties of both sexes but media images and those coming down from the pulpit of the power elite (those who like the Duchess of Windsor are fanatical advocates of the diktat that you can never be too rich or too thin, never mind if the Duchess herself looked like a bejeweled plucked chicken) are equally unrelenting and in your face. Body dysmorphobia—the malady of those miserable with the shape of their bodies—is also prevalent.

Look at teen idol Lindsay Lohan who’s recently admitted to being bulimic-strapless dresses like the one she wore at a recent function are only held up by will power-or silicone-by most of the starlings and singers. The gap between image and reality is only getting wider.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com