3 of 14

Write now Article Tools

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 in the UK 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

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about The facts about obesity in American adults?
We want to hear your view. Write now!