Through all of her adult life my mother has battled her weight. Unfortunately for her there exists a genetic propensity towards obesity and although it has never been an extreme physical handicap she has never been entirely comfortable with her body. She has taken most of the popular trails towards salvation: Weight Watchers, the Rosemary Connolly diet, appetite-reducing fudge etc and some of them even worked for a while. She has reached her so-called Target Weight a couple of times – embracing the notion of a size eight jumpsuit with all the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning – and yet those halcyon days never seemed to last very long and the weight gradually crept back. For those of you who remember Maggie the Nimble girl flying ‘like a bird’ through the ‘seventies in her hot air balloon – well, even she couldn’t stay up there forever.
A recent government report says that 50% of adults in the UK are overweight and one in five are obese, compared with one in ten French people. Now this statistic strikes me as ironic because the only things that seem to come over to England from France are loaded with calories and dripping with saturated fat!
Of course this has all been said before; obsession over weight is nothing new. The British may be heavier in general than the French but since I moved to America I have seen some of the most overweight people ever. My mother would look like Twiggy next to some of the men and women I’ve seen loping around the shopping malls in their stretch ski pants and oversized sweatshirts and I know for a fact that there are not that many under-active thyroids in this country! The simple fact is; they eat too much. And - like everything else that is American - Big Food is coming to a restaurant near you!
When an American visits England they joke about the size of everything: our tiny houses, our miniature refrigerators, our narrow roads. When they go to a pub they complain about the warm beer and the single ice cube that floats resolutely in their ridiculously small glass of Diet Coke. There is no such thing as Small in an American restaurant – they specialize in Large, Extra Large or Gigantic and even a Regular Diet Coke comes in a veritable vase along with a whole freezer-tray of ice cubes. Everything in America has to be larger than life and that, unfortunately, applies to some of the Americans themselves.
I can still recall how shocked I was when faced with a typical American breakfast. Now, I’m not condoning the British custom of bacon, eggs, sausage and beans as a healthy way to start your day but very few of us these days actually sit down to anything more than a bowl of cornflakes or a croissant before we go to work. Aside from the oddly-paired partnership of bacon with maple syrup or grits (grainy porridge) slopped over sausage patties the Americans like to eat doughnuts for breakfast. Now, if you eat a doughnut in England it is usually accompanied by a nice cup of tea in the afternoon or maybe a mug of Nescafe for elevenses. Not so in the USA. Over here they buy doughnuts by the dozen and then devour at least three or four of them at one sitting. And have you seen the size of an American cookie these days? Forget Boasters and Hob Nobs – American cookies are the size of tea plates.
Obesity rose 6% in the USA between 1998 and 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The increase affected all regions of the country and all demographic groups. Since 1991, obesity among American adults has increased by nearly 60% nationally.
I recently saw a film called Shallow Hal starring Gwyneth Paltrow in the unlikely role of a heavily overweight Peace Corps volunteer. The premise of this comedy is simple: Rosemary is fat, shy and has no confidence until she meets Hal. Hal is totally superficial and only dates women who are slim and beautiful, that is until he is hypnotized to see only the Inner Beauty of a person rather than their obvious physical attributes. Because Rosemary is such a kind and caring person Hal sees her only as the Gwyneth Paltrow we all know and love – svelte, curvy and gorgeous! The comedic slapstick arrives from seeing chairs collapse under Rosemary’s supposed weight and getting a glimpse of her gigantic purple thongs. At one point Hal’s sleazy friend Mauricio describes Rosemary as a Rhino and refers to her ankles as ‘cankles’ - an anatomical appendage that occurs when someone is so fat that their calves hang down over their ankles. Sure, it's hysterical, but are we supposed to laugh or become conscience-stricken? If it is at all possible to fuse politically incorrect humor and sensitivity, it didn’t happen for me in this particular instance.
I was wary to tackle the subject of obesity in my novel Bitter & Twisted because I write satirical humour and I was afraid that an overweight character in one of my books might be perceived as nothing more than a ‘cheap joke’. I have been the subject of many a cheap joke myself in the past so I certainly didn’t want to propagate the idea that it is OK to laugh at somebody just because they don’t fit the expected mould. Being fat, being gay, being black, being Jewish – none of these things should be the cause of ridicule. So, when I created my character Annie, I had to be careful not to make her obesity the center of attention. She is beautiful, she is kind-hearted and she is human and it just so happens that she weighs fourteen stone. Her story is one of survival and, ultimately, of personal growth and success because of her weight, not despite it.
For all those years I watched my mother deny herself the pleasures that most of us take for granted. And to what end? She ate lettuce instead of chocolate; she baked her potatoes instead of frying them. And even now, at the age of sixty-three, she cannot resign herself to the fact that a piece of cheesecake now and then won’t kill her. Her guilt is too deeply ingrained. Her perceptions are skewed.
Pardon my pun, but humour is a funny thing. What might be hilarious to one person could be nothing more than insulting to another. And I have done my share of laughing over the years, I am not entirely blameless. I like to think, however, that by satirizing the subject of obesity, I have somehow neutralized it and turned the joke around on those who throw the largest stones.

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