Who says that the new year is a grim time? Next Monday there is going to be a conference devoted to the premise that the campaign against obesity is often misguided. Oh joy! Oh rapture!
Those of us miserably searching the sales rails for anything bigger than a size 14 can now rejoice, as the world will recognise that our dimpled cellulite is actually the pinnacle of human attractiveness. All those skinny waifs who looked down their noses when we searched in vain for extra-large, snootily informing us that a size 12 is extra-large, will now be forced to admit that their jutting hip bones are actually a hazard on which elderly people regularly cut themselves.
Low-slung jeans will be declared an instrument of torture, reserved exclusively for use in the humiliation of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
Skinny lattes will be barred at Starbucks, to be replaced by full-fat whipped-cream toppings on everything, including sparkling water.
Active fat people are healthier than inactive thin people, say the conference organisers, which is to be held in the University of Limerick.
Ah, yes, those of us who walk everywhere are vindicated. So that's why I have the cholesterol levels of a 25-year-old, when my skinny-ma-link contemporaries eschew everything that tastes good in a vain attempt to lower their bad cholesterol levels. All right, all right, so I walk most places for reasons other than love of exercise. First, I was too chicken and/or incompetent to learn to drive. Second, I don't so much walk briskly as trot in a red-faced undignified fashion because I am late.
Of course, it won't make a blind bit of difference what one conference in Limerick says. We have an ongoing love affair with skinniness that has nothing whatsoever to do with health. Legend has it that ultra-thin models first came into vogue when clothes were still being displayed to the discerning public in houses of couture.
The gorgeous full-figured models distracted the mostly male buyers (buying for the women in their lives, you understand) from the clothes. Thin women would draw less attention to themselves, went the reasoning, and more to the clothes. Except that women became enamoured of the hollow-cheeked look, and set out to emulate it.
That's one theory. Another places the blame about 60 years later, on the narrow shoulders of Twiggy. The wan, huge-eyed teenager set in motion two generations of frantic dieting. When she was declared the face of 1966, she was 16, 6½ stone and a size 6.
Those of you rendered deeply suspicious by the repetition of all those sixes are probably right. Twiggy may not have been marked with the sign of the beast, but she made an awful lot of women feel as if they had been rendered beast-like by her very existence. Just as women were being liberated from corsets, they now had to achieve by willpower alone the kind of figure formerly only achievable with the aid of whalebone.
As for Twiggy, who never had to diet in her life, is it not ironic that in a much curvier incarnation at the age of 59, she is credited with reviving the fortunes of Marks and Spencer? Mind you, in her case, "much curvier" means that she is probably a size 8.
My personal pet hate is the diet that urges you to drop a jeans size in two weeks by eating two bowls a cereal a day, along with a healthy dinner.
Perhaps it is because I remember working with families on social welfare where substituting cornflakes for meals before dole day was a necessity, not a fad. Dense of me, I know, to fail to see where the progress lies in well-off people voluntarily adopting a diet that some people still have to resort to out of bleak necessity, except the "healthy dinner" part would be out of the question.
Human beings are notoriously unrealistic. We don't look at the broad shoulders and calves inherited from our hard-working peasant ancestors and immediately decide that, even if we succeeded in losing the amount of kilos required to meet current standards of thinness, we would look ill rather than gorgeous. No, we dream of the approving attention that our weight loss will bring.
Most dieters are women. Most dieters diet to impress men. Those most impressed by successful dieters are women. Yes, I know there is a lapse in logic, but logic collapses when it comes to weight loss. You only have to look at the covers of those charming magazines dedicated to exposing the flaws of well-known women. They alternate between cover stories on those who have gained a few pounds and look woeful in a bikini, with those who have lost too much and look woeful in a bikini. Illogical? Cruel? Of course.
In some ways, what the conference is saying is nothing new. It has been known for years that rapid cycles of weight loss and weight gain are more unhealthy than staying at a high but stable weight. We have also known that diets don't work, because we have read it on the covers of approximately five billion new diet books, each of which claims not to be a diet.
It is all about lifestyle changes, incorporating exercise into our daily routines, changing from having chocolate as a staple diet to an occasional treat.
So why, if it is all so easy, is the invention of a new slimming diet still a sure-fire route to being a millionaire, and perhaps even a primetime TV slot where you can promote with a straight face seaweed and linseeds as the only route to health? It is all because it is no longer acceptable to feel guilt about anything except health. Most of the seven deadly sins have been retired, but gluttony and sloth still elicit massive social disapproval.
Incidentally, did you know that Gandhi (not notorious for being overweight himself) had his own list of seven deadly sins? They are: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality and worship without sacrifice. Can't see that lot catching on any time soon.
It makes you understand why working on losing a few bulgy bits seems much more manageable. If only it were.