Money talks, so they say. But I wonder if it can possibly do the trick where obesity is concerned? Politicians seem to think that money can motivate anyone to do anything. We’ve heard of schemes to pay mums to eat fruit and veggies during their third trimester – the so-called Health in Pregnancy Grant, and downright bribery to get kids to attend school and pass exams. All very patronising –as though money will alone solve social problems. Now council bureaucrats reckon they can bribe the obese to lose weight. It is doomed to disaster and in the long term, it could even make obesity worse.
The Pound for Pound scheme is the brainchild of Basildon Council in Essex, which is inviting 50 volunteers to take part. They’ll get nutritional information at the start of the three month period, a weigh-in at the end and a one pound Asda voucher for every pound of weight they lose. They reckon it’ll save the NHS millions. I say don’t hold your breath. They’ve tried a similar scheme in the USA, in Philadelphia, and they did indeed lose weight more effectively at first. But like just about every diet or quick fix scheme we’ve ever heard about in the world of fat fighting, most victims ultimately ended up gaining their lost weight – back to square one.
I’ve often wondered if I would have successfully lost my weight problem if some had offered me a million pound bribe. For a dream fortune, surely I could have summoned up the monumental willpower necessary?
The answer is, yes I would have – for a while. But I would have finished up a wreck, fighting a permanent battle with myself every day for the sake of what – money? I would have hated myself, resented the bribe, sought to comfort my low self esteem with food and plunged myself into a downward spiral of despair.
To think that fat can be fought with financial incentives is to completely misunderstand the problem. Fat happens for a huge variety of reasons – but it’s often caught up with emotional and mental attitudes. To wave a fiver in front of a fatties’ eyes is merely to tease them, and to lure them into thinking their predicament can be quick-fixed by unzipping your purse. It’s the same con perpetuated by the diet industry – all you have to do is buy this book/video/DVD . The only way to get ahead of obesity is to first understand its causes. Willpower and strength of mind, and even basic intelligence, aren’t as key as they fact that our modern Western lifestyle is constantly working against us.
Friends of mine recently spent a fortnight in Las Vegas, staying at one of the plushest hotels and sampling the finest restaurants on The Strip. They came home desperate for a proper meal that tasted of – you know- old fashioned food? They said it was absolutely impossible to eat well – there was simply nothing on offer, and even when they’d found that their room service menu offered a fruit platter, it tasted of, well, nothing. Everyone was huge, they said, and showed me the photos to prove it.
This belief that money can make the difference is a symptom of the very culture that’s to blame – our bankrupt lifestyle! We can’t turn the clock back to those good old days when Pops was the breadwinner and Mama spent the entire day wringing laundry through the mangle, milking the goat and baking apple pies – but we have to find an evolutionary answer because modern living is killing us.
And now they’re trying to blame fat celebrities, too! Yet another piece of research suggests everyone’s allowing themselves to get fat because plump celebrities like James Corden, the star of Gavin and Stacey, and Beth Ditto, who fronts the band Gossip are making obesity acceptable.
Fat is becoming the norm, but not because of celebrities. It’s no-one’s fault – it’s everybody’s – even those of us who’re slim. We’re all contributing to a mad, mad lifestyle where we eat too much, even in countries where the starving co-exist with the obese, and where we sit for too long in front of tvs and computers and the vast majority of us have forgotten how to move. It’s a world where obesity is killing us and wrecking lives.
And where, in an upside down way of thinking, we believe that market forces will solve one of the biggest global health epidemics ever and that everyone has their price.
