A slim chance of success! (From Swindon Advertiser)

A slim chance of success!

4:28pm Wednesday 17th October 2007

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SO, according to Health Secretary Alan Johnson, humankind is doomed. But not only by the black beast of climate change.

So maybe we don't need to turn the heating down to zero, get rid of the car and recycle absolutely everything we touch.

According to Mr J, the earnest former postman who's now in charge of the services that care for our bodily and mental wellbeing, we are eating ourselves to death.

His forecasts of disaster are based on a survey that predicted half the British population will be obese within 25 years.

And they are backed by an Oxford University academic named Professor Klim McPherson and by Tim Marsh, a top chap from the British Heart Foundation, who say that within 15 years 86 per cent of men will be overweight and within 20 years seven out of 10 women will be in the same parlous state.

So Mr J and ministers are formulating plans for what has been described as a concerted fight against the problem of the national flab.

And I hope that before they start they'll bear in mind a few facts about human nature.

Some of us are sick of being lectured about what we eat, how much we drink, whether we smoke and how often we take rigorous exercise.

After years of WeightWatchers, Slimming World, Rosemary Conley et al lots of us now refuse to look at pictures of their slimmers of the year.

You know, the ones that are supposed to inspire us to rush out and sign up for their classes.

Photographs of the Green Goddess Diana Moran in her spandex catsuit were all it took to drive some of us to the nearest supermarket to stock up on chocolate.

I mean, they are all so impossibly aspirational.

When I was the Adver's women's editor I got so fed up with reporting "I lost five stone in just three months and now my size 10 wardrobe, and my sex life, are wonderful" stories that I could hardly force myself past the local chip shop.

Mr J has been preening himself over the Government's achievements in improving physical activity levels in schools, healthier school meals, clearer food labelling and tougher restrictions on advertising foods that are high in fat and sugar to children.

How come, then, that the number of fat kids seems to be increasing?

"There is no single solution to tackle obesity," said Alan Johnson. "And it cannot be tackled by Government alone."

He's right there. But lecturing us isn't the answer.

Perhaps the diet and exercise gurus should try appealing to our vanity, instead.

Giant posters with pictures of women with enormous bums and flabby thighs and of blokes with huge beer bellies might work.

Especially if they have plastered across them a slogan that reads: "How can you bear to let yourself look like this?"

Do you really want it, Sir?

THE council wants a canal to run through the town centre.

Do you want it? Do the shops and business along its probable route want it?

Do the mums who will have to hold on like glue to their small children to stop them falling in want it?

Do the workers whose job it will be to remove and cart away the battered shopping trolleys, soggy takeaway trays, cigarette packets and other rubbish that Swindon's yobs won't be able to resist throwing into it want it?

And do people, who have had to put up with inefficient services that might be improved if more cash was available to spend on them, really want it?

It's a fair bet that they don't.

But the council won't know this. Nobody in the corridors of power at the Civic Offices has bothered to ask them.

Maybe somebody should.

That way £50m, the forecast cost of this misguided notion, might be diverted to something more useful.

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