Myth Buster: Skinny = healthy

I had intended on doing this blog post later on in my series of myth busters but there have been a few things in the last few days which have driven me to write this now. We would all like to think that the world is obsessed with health. We try to convince ourselves that this is why we follow the weight losses (and gains) of our most notable celebrities. Unfortunately, this just is not true. The truth is, and I've known this for years, we are obsessed with weight. Tyra Banks gains 5 lbs and the furore is unwavering. She loses it too quickly and she's anorexic. It is not just in the world of celebrity that we are obsessed with weight. It finds its way into the lives of the skinniest people. This is so much of an issue that we simply equate weight with health.

Now, I am not going to sit here and tell people that being morbidly obese is a healthy option, but neither will I tell you that being underweight is a healthy lifestyle option. The first issue over the last few days that pushed me to write this post came from lunch yesterday. I was having...you guessed it SUSHI with Lucy and Piers. I'd found my Weight Watchers eating out guide and had brought it with me just out of curiosity. As happens when the eating out guide is involved, a game starts where people look at what they would eat in certain restaurants and equates it with how much they should be eating. In general, this is very entertaining. However, yesterday I mentioned that (on the old system of Weight Watchers) my previously favourite burger in T.G.I. Fridays was a day and a half of my then daily points. Piers made the comment that 'well, we can see where the problem started' and I had to immediately shut him down. My, slender, best friend used to eat the same burger. No one would bat an eye at her eating that burger and yet when I ate it this was a clear demonstration of my lack of healthy lifestyle. Sarah, my best friend mentioned above, has repeatedly said that I have a far better diet than she does. I eat plenty of fresh fruit and veg, lean meat and little to no processed stuff. Which just goes to show how easily people will ascribe health with weight.

What's more important though is the article I just read. This highlights something that I've known for a long time. The food industry WANTS people to be overweight. Companies make unhealthy processed food cheaper and market it as low fat, low carb etc. hoping that people will see it as a cheap means of 'getting healthy'. The food industry will push and push to get people buying their produce rather than actually considering what it means to be healthy. If people were more concerned with being healthy rather than being thin, the food industry would suffer massively. I started thinking about another article I read a while back, as well as experience with other weight watchers. Technically, if you were to stay within your calories everyday, you could eat <insert bad fast food outlet here> for breakfast, lunch and dinner and still lose weight. I know this to be true because I know people who've done it. Does the lack of weight mean that they are healthier than someone heavier who eats unprocessed, fresh food everyday. No. But this here is a massive image that the food industry wants to perpetuate.

I'm reminded of my watching Super Size Me a few months back. For me, the most disturbing thing in that documentary was not the amount of weight he was gaining or how sick he was becoming, it was one scene organised around Subway Guy, Jared Fogle. Now, for those who don't know, Jared Fogle was an overweight university student who reportedly lost 235lbs by eating 'low fat' Subway sandwiches. Incidentally, I feel the need now to assert the fact that , legally, for a food product to be described as 'low fat' it must be less than 3 grams of fat. The sandwiches that Fogle was eating was a 7 inch sub at 6 grams of fat. But I digress...Whilst I commend his success and don't doubt the truth in his methods, I cannot help but feel uneasy about the concept that Subway is a healthy method of losing weight. This is not the disturbing bit. The advertising campaign led by Fogle for his 'Subway Diet' involves him going into schools and talking to overweight children. Here comes my area of unease. One young girl came up to Fogle at one of these campaigns and said that she didn't feel like she could lose weight because she couldn't afford only to eat Subway's sandwiches. My mother's from Philadelphia, home of the Cheese Steak so I wouldn't dream of going into a Subway anyway, but knowing people who've worked there I know for certain that they are not the epitome of health food. In fact, one friend of mine who used to work there said that you'd be better off eating a stick of lard...yum.

Jared Fogle

I believe that it is this, damaging, attitude of weight being more important than health that is causing such a serious obesity 'epidemic'. By making health about someone's weight, people will go on crash diets which are doomed to failure and lead to people yo-yoing for the rest of their life. This does untold damage to your metabolic rate and is ultimately unhelpful. It should be an absolute responsibility of the law makers in our world that health, not fitting some vague number representation of a healthy weight, should be a priority and, where possible, make the food industry tow the line.