Weight loss news

Too fat to do the job?

Ever been told you’re too fat to work? Are you, for instance, anywhere around 4’11” and 12 stones? Then you just might find you’re unfit to do your job. That’s what happened to one lady I chatted to over the radio airwaves recently – and I was appalled for her. She’s Maire Parker, and she’s been driving school buses in Gloucestershire for 20 years – and even won commendations from the Department of Transport. Now she wants to move to Northern Ireland, and so she applied for a job with a different bus company, TransLink. On the form, they asked for her weight and height. They calculated her BMI as 34.1, and so refused to even interview her. They said their drivers had to be medically fit and healthy – and on her BMI, Maire wasn’t. Their spokesman was a right JobsWorth – I just hope that someone in his family – or he himself – ends up putting a little too much weight on around his middle, and ends up getting fired. Would he be quite so sanctimonious then? To me, this attitude reeks of a narrow-minded, holier-than-thou, nanny state mentality which is going to become more prevalent as the obesity epidemic grows and spreads. Pretty soon, it’s going to be impossible for overweight people to get insurances, medical plans, plane tickets and even earn their daily bread without being forced to climb on the scales and satisfy someone’s random benchmark for optimum health and fitness. It’s traffic warden syndrome gone mad.
I fully understand the awful consequences of this obesity scourge. It’s going to be more and more expensive on the National Health Service, it is going to impact upon every part of our modern life.
But even fat people are human beings, and tax payers, too – and the NHS was set up to care for us all, not to preach or punish.
Of course, it is like the smoking debate and, to a certain extent, the debate over care given to drug users, gamblers and alcoholics. If a disease or condition is self-inflicted, should the rest of us take the time, trouble, and limited resources to help?
Compassion is a very expensive commodity. But we lose it at our peril. Do we really want to become a nation of traffic wardens?
I spoke to one top obesity specialist this week, who was adamant that obesity is not a health problem, it is a society problem – and the cure needs to be rooted inside society itself.
Finger-wagging and patronizing perfectly intelligent, but overweight, citizens is not the way to help. We have to address the causes of the problem. We’re programmed to eat and do as little exercise as possible – it’s in our genes. We’re like lions on the Serengeti plains. We’ll expend a little energy to get our food, then we’ll stuff ourselves senseless and sleep – for as long as possible.
That, in today’s sedentary lifestyle, with our groceries delivered via the internet and our meals shrink-wrapped for the microwave – is why we’re getting fat.
Solve that one – and you might have a chance. Build more cycle paths. Buy back our school playgrounds. Construct buildings where the lifts start only on the 2nd floor! But don’t persecute a perfectly respectable, hard-working lady bus driver for trying to earn an honest day’s wages.
Maire reckoned she might sue for discrimination. I have news for her – she can’t. Obesity is one of the few reasons an employer can still fire you, with impunity. In this country, it is still legal to discriminate against someone who’s fat. Even traffic wardens.

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