There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob

If political reality means we can’t tax the overweight, then at least let’s have tax breaks for those who bother to take exercise, writes unashamed metrosexual Dan Jones

Hands up if you employ a personal trainer. Actually, that’s a trick question. If you can raise your arm without wincing in pain then either you don’t have a personal trainer, or yours is letting you slack off. (Get a new one.)

For those of you with your arms pinned to the sides of your bodies from the sheer build-up of lactic acid — ask your trainer — well done. A few years ago your friends might have sneered at you and called you a metrosex-ual. But this is 2009, and having a trainer now puts you in the same club as a great number of high-fliers, captains of industry, newspaper proprietors and Academy award-winning actors. The Spectator is definitely the magazine for you. Feel free to reward yourself with a high-protein, meal-substitute snack bar.

But hang on. There’s bad news. I’m afraid that if you are employing someone to keep you lean, mean and red in the face, you may also be mentally disturbed.

Let me explain. Despite the fact that Britain is fast catching up with America in the deceptively fleet-footed race to be the fattest nation on the planet, there are many people who are more concerned that we are becoming dangerously neurotic about our body image.

The theory goes something like this. Popular culture today celebrates images of extreme and freakish youthfulness, thinness and pert-breastedness (female), and six-packed muscularity (male). As a result we are led to associate only the very physically beautiful with true success. But the sheer impossibility of attaining these sorts of physiques is leading to a national epidemic of self-loathing.

We struggle gamely against this, whether by dieting, exercising, gobbling fat-burning pills and superfoods or buying expensive fitness contraptions (all mechanisms of the capitalist plot to keep us unhappy and spendthrift). Some of us even resort to expensive plastic surgery or dangerous steroid abuse.

Alas! Billboard culture has already doomed us to failure. And when all our impossible, airbrushed aspirations come to naught we look glumly down at our bellies and feel depressed at being imprisoned within such well-padded cells. The result: we have a Mars bar to make ourselves feel better. And so the cycle continues.

The leading exponent of this sort of guff is Susie Orbach, the veteran writer and psychologist who has been arguing since the publication of her 1978 book Fat is a Feminist Issue that ‘for most people the problem is not their fat intake or their actual size, but the torment associated with fat in their minds’.

I’m sorry, but this is just fatheaded. The problem isn’t the mental torment caused by seeing airbrushed billboard images of David and Victoria Beckham showing off their beautiful bodies in matching Armani pants. The problem for most ordinary people really is their fat intake and actual size.

As a nation we are failing catastrophic- ally to deal with the fat crisis. Within a decade half of us will be clinically obese. We have known about this for years, and done virtually nothing. Almost everything about modern life inclines us towards fatness. We are sedentary workers, sugar junkies and motorised transport addicts. We disdain manual labour. Our national dish — whether it’s fish and chips or chicken tikka masala — is takeaway. We have neglected physical exercise in our schools and instead successfully indoctrinated in our children the supreme right of the individual, by which it’s okay to be anything you want, even if that thing is a lazy fat slob.

This has terrifying implications. Unless we take urgent action (and perhaps even if we do), within the next 20 years the NHS is likely to collapse like an antique chair under a circus elephant’s hind parts. It will have been crushed under the weight of the weighty, overrun by fat man’s diseases: heart attacks, high cholesterol, type-2 diabetes, cancers and strokes. And we will all suffer as a consequence. Now tell me: where does that stand in your hierarchy of concern?

Rather than waggle our fingers at society and the media for encouraging people to seek thinner, more defined bodies, it might just make sense to welcome any possible way by which we can cause people to take responsibility for their fatness. A couple of years ago the Times restaurant critic Giles Coren made an impassioned case for taxing the fat. Unfortunately the majority of the UK electorate is now overweight, which would make that rather bad politics. But if we are not to punish the fat, then why not at least reward the thin with a tax or national insurance rebate if you can prove with a GP’s certificate that your BMI (body mass index) is within a safe range?

For that matter, why not provide Fitness Vouchers along the lines of Childcare Vouchers, allowing people to pay for gym membership or personal training from their pre-tax salary? Why can’t we follow New York City’s lead and ban trans-fats? Why is PE not a daily element of the schools curriculum, rather than the dismal two hours a week it currently occupies? Why isn’t food science compulsory in schools up to the age of 16, so that we can send the next generation of young adults out into the world able to make serious choices about what they put in their bodies? The fat crisis is coming, and it’s coming to kill us. So why aren’t we doing everything we can to educate and reward people for being thin?

Well, I suppose because it might make them unhappy. There are people who would be upset at BMI discrimination in the tax system. (You can hear the rumble down Whitehall as the fat-and-proud protestors roll down to Westminster.) There are demented parents who would continue to feed their kids trans-fat-laden junk food because it’s their right to give them what they enjoy, whether or not it gives them diabetes from their teens, and the rest of us end up paying for their ignorance. There are children — probably the same ones — who would hate the tyranny of daily PE. So we don’t force the issue.

Yet by and large, those of us who try to trim our waistlines, shave the convexities of our buttocks, or prevent our own jowls from strangling us: we’re the good guys. And we should be rewarded. It irks me that ‘poor you’ apologists like Orbach chide those who worry about their weight and let the corpulent majority off the hook. It bothers me that I pay the same national insurance contributions as folk who waddle around all fat and clumsy when I am statistically far less likely to hospitalise myself through my love of cakes. It gets right on my man-boobs that we would rather blame big corporations for selling us airbrushed images of perfection than blame ourselves for failing to exercise restraint when the cheese trolley comes round. And while I defend your right to be fat if you so desire, I don’t see why I should pretend it’s anyone’s fault but your own, or why I should pay for the consequences.