Live well, live badly, die anyway

So Fern Britton is happy being a porker?

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/articles/20334600?source=Daily%20Mail.

Now, I am probably hoping for too much here I know, but I do hope this is the beginning of the resistance towards the diet industry. As quite a corpulent individual myself (17 stone with an easygoing 42 inch waist) I can only applaud her.

Diets don’t work. It’s as simple as that. Not only do they not work, but also they don’t make people happy, unless you are a masochistic control freak. And even then you’re bound to be disappointed in the end when it doesn’t flick the thin switch for the umpteenth time. The only diet, which works, is low carb. I know this because I’ve lost a stone and my blood sugar level goes back to normal – I’m a diabetic so this matters. When I stop, I put on weight and my blood sugar goes ballistic. Simple, empirical stuff.

It’s interesting that the main resistance to Atkins came from two sets of people. Those who can’t stand slebs and all they endorse. I’m one of those, and the fact that Rene Zelweiger or however you spell her was doing it didn’t really matter one iota, particularly as I didn’t know who she was before her name was associated with that mad, population slaying Atkins diet. The other main opponents were those in the diet industry. I wonder why? Could it be because that the only proper way to do low carb is to eat whole, unprocessed foods? Food that doesn’t come pre-packed in a ‘value-added’ box, where less fat equal’s greater greenbacks tot he companies making them. The same folks who make Pringles also produce Slimfast. Something ironic there? I’m afraid the organic-loving tree huggers are secretly endorsing Atkins when they say a back-to-basics approach to food preparation is a good thing. Robert C would agree with you (as long as keep mainly to green veg).

When we were in New York just over a year ago, we found a health shop on the other side of the Hudson which sold a cornucopia of low card products. We were stunned and delighted by the range. Our eyes popped out of our heads. Atkins bread mix for $2.99? For goodness sakes, it was £4.99 in the UK! We stocked up on as much as our little armies could carry. But our mistake was the same mistake the Atkins corporation made in the UK. Firstly, it overcharged us UK buyers. Yawn. But the second mistake it made was thinking that the UK low carbers would fork out two or three times the money for identikit products to those we already knew about before LC-ing. Not the case. And more to the point, low carb versions of ‘normal’ food generally taste shite. In the UK, like every other western country with the possible exception of France, it’s hard to get real food that hasn’t had hydrogenated glutemised wankjuice added to it, but it can be done. And the variety of prepared food may not be much and since the Atkins Corp have left these shores, its now even less, but the beauty of doing the ‘real’ way rather than the American way is that don’t get flashy labels, you don’t get claims about the health benefits you can neither prove nor disprove and here’s the clincher: you pay the same price as everyone else. Tesco’s mince is Tesco’s mince whoever you are.

So in the link above, the main objection I have is not to Fern Britton’s statement that she’d rather be fat and jolly. Its been said to the point of tedium that we as a nation celebrate thin-ness without recognising our own happiness despite looking like a human dustcart. But to stick her neck out is undeniably a brave thing to have done, and good luck Fern. My main objection is to the supposed "expert", Nora Lane, who gave a rather Blair-ite warning about her impending doom. I just wonder how much the diet industry is paying her to bleat in such a hectoring and annoying fashion? Diet gurus have spent the last 40 years getting it wrong. If they were right then we’d all be stick thin and ‘fat’ would be the new ‘thin’. So we spend our lives being lectured about how we are all going to die because we are 2 stone overweight, and we are ‘burden’ to the NHS. Ooooohh, poor NHS. Stop taxing me and I’ll go private then – sounds fair to me. Bollocks argument anyway: once I’m dead (and at my weight I agree this is statistically likelier to happen prematurely to me than Miss Stick over there) then the NHS is relieve of my burdensome self forever. Since diets being sold to us don’t work, it gives the industry an excuse to blame us individuals for doing what humans do. Eating, drinking, shagging and taking drugs.
Well, I’m just glad that we in Britain don’t do Puritanism anything like as well as the Americans. But I can see a day when we’ve been lectured, bullied and harangued to death by people who, if you look at their own little wee farty lives, aren’t any different to us.

So Fern, my blonde haired beauty, stay fat, and thank God someone is resisting in the battle we face against the might and hypocrisy of the government and Big Business to be super-thin, live-forever, silicone clad, Botox-induced clones.

As the saying goes: live well, live badly, die anyway.