Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Fat people get worse treatment than drunks and junkies
Fat people are treated worse than alcoholics or drug addicts by society, according to the television presenter Anne Diamond. The former breakfast TV host, who once underwent radical surgery in her battle to lose weight, claimed obesity in Britain has reached crisis levels so quickly that the public do not understand it and stigmatise the seriously overweight. She said the cost of treating illnesses linked to obesity, such as diabetes and heart disease, will bankrupt the National Health Service unless action is taken to help people lose weight. But she added that she feared a likely Conservative government will only blame fat people for their size and not help tackle the problems of poor diet and lack of exercise that lie behind it.
Miss Diamond, 54, who made her name presenting TV-AM in the 1980s, returned to television in 2002 on Celebrity Big Brother having put on 5 stones. She weighed almost 15st when she appeared on ITV's Celebrity Fit Club in 2006, but during filming admitted she had undergone surgery to help her lose weight, having a gastric band fitted to reduce the amount of food she could eat. Miss Diamond is now writing a book about the global obesity epidemic and chaired a discussion at the National Obesity Forum's annual conference in London on Tuesday.
New research suggests three quarters of British adults are already overweight or obese, 10 per cent more than previously feared, with the NHS spending o4.2bn on treating diseases linked to weight last year. Miss Diamond said: "Obesity is one of those things that is hugely stigmatised in society, but the more we talk about it, the more we get it into the open. "We are much more sympathetic to credit card addicts, alcoholics and drug addicts than the obese.
"I think it's because obesity is fairly new - there have always been fat people but they stand out and it's easy to bully them. It's happened so suddenly, in the past 20 to 30 years for adults and in the past five for children. "Most people hate being fat, and just because they fail to lose weight doesn't mean they are lazy - it just means it's difficult."
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Yeah, sure, it's brand new: One night the subcutaneous fat fairy showed up with sacks of lard and proceeded to pump soft 'n' salty lipids into the formerly svelt fat cells of the British public at large...who writes this stuff?!
Ever more amusing is, being American, it's fun to sit back and watch as those slobs 'across the pond' suddenly realize they're every bit as fat as the 'fat, dumb, and lazy' Yanks they've been ridiculing for a decade and, of course, this woman's primary recourse is to get the government to do something about a problem that is entirely personal in nature.
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