What I learned this year: the insanity of the obesity era
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Version 0 of 1. The most and least calories in any conceivable meal In March, I met the Losers of the Year, as denominated by Weight Watchers, 10 women who between them had lost 720 pounds. The rubric of the weight loss world is that I should call them fabulous or awesome women; in fact, they were quite fabulous, but I feel to call them that is to endorse the worldview that excess weight is shameful, and to shed it is a fairytale dream come true. So they weren’t fabulous, OK? They were just women, with excellent but no magical characteristics. We ate turkey meatballs with mango salsa. Doubting the wisdom of the salsa, I egregiously ate some meatball on its own; it leached the moisture out of my mouth like a hand-held suction unit. Amateur’s error. Always eat the salsa. Thirty-year-old Jo said: ““I didn’t realise how low my confidence was. I couldn’t walk across a room without thinking people were watching me, laughing at me. I was really paranoid. The weight went on gradually, maybe a stone a year. And as your weight increases gradually, your confidence and happiness decrease gradually, and you really don’t notice it.” Six months later, I was undercover in a Hungry Horse, trying the doughnut burger, a meat feast clamped with – yes, really – two sugar doughnuts. The waiter was incredibly sweet to me, then slowly started to wonder what I was doing with a professional photographer, until eventually his solicitude cooled and then I felt guilty. 1,996 calories these monsters contained, or roughly all the turkey meatballs you could eat before you became so dehydrated that you dropped down dead. One day we will look back on the obesity era and think how curious it was that the business model was to load food with sugar and fat in unnatural combinations, while the social mores were to deride and shun people who showed any signs of having eaten it. How we’ll laugh. Hello, gay marriage … Two people who had definitely, positively never tried the doughnut burger were Peter McGraith and David Cabreza, the first gay couple to marry, in Islington town hall, on the stroke of midnight, on 29 March. It wasn’t the DJs or the complementing pastel bow-ties, or the euphoric crowd, the ever-eloquent Peter Tatchell, the lateness of the hour. It was the sheer, epoch-making significance of this moment that made it so emotional. “It’s a lot less boring than a normal wedding, isn’t it?” said someone in the crowd. You’ll notice, too, that extreme weather events in the UK have ceased since the law passed. The last big flood was in February. Take that, Ukip. Goodbye Great British Bake Off The year’s other loser-but-winner was, without question, Iain Watters, ejected from Bake Off following a baked alaska-based freezer event that may or may not have been malicious, and may or may not have been maliciously edited. His great big hipster beard and unswerving moral compass made him so much more than the sum of his recipes. “Everywhere I go, people want a selfie with me,” he said, and coincidentally, the novelist and intellectual John Lanchester had just put a selfie with Iain up on Twitter. “Everyone’s got a fan base – mine’s only the biggest because of what happened. And maybe my appearance as well – the beard; the beard was bigger than me.” Random things I learned How to make a DIY solar panel It’s really straightforward, you can buy the cells very cheaply as seconds on the internet, then all you need is some … other stuff. The more pressing skill to acquire is how to argue with people who still have an anti-solar clipboard from the 1980s, and will gaily tell you that it’s only viable in the Sahara (it is doing pretty well in chilly Munich), is more expensive than oil (its price has fallen 99%) and it can never be stored (battery storage is the next great breakthrough waiting to happen, after see-through panels were launched this year). The truly bizarre thing about this energy source is how much unwarranted prejudice it experiences. How to take a selfie in a gallery Never hold your camera below you, unless you are actively trying to look like Humphrey Bogart. Get your face quite close to the face in the painting; if you’re too foregrounded, you look much, much larger than the Princess of Eboli and people will think you’re fat. How to launch a campaign that works The Focus E15 mothers initially occupied the Carpenters estate in east London as an open space to talk about housing. Not just their own issue – that their hostel had been closed down and they were being offered alternative accommodation 100 miles away – but everyone’s. From victims of the bedroom tax to people who’d been revenge evicted, to people whose rents were just beyond any realistic expectation of what would ever happen to their salaries. One of the groups who came down to show support were the New Era 4 All tenants, at the time facing rent hikes threatened by Richard Benyon’s property consortium, and the American property investment group Westbrook Partners. Benyon’s lot pulled out, then so did Westbrook; the fight is not over, not by any means, but it has been won for now. The key to any success on this (Focus E15 were also partially victorious, as Newham agreed to house them in private accommodation locally) is twofold: build networks, and mean business. |