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Fitness and fatness may be closer than we think
(That's Guangzhou)
Updated: 2004-06-08 10:14

Sometimes language fails us. I learnt this week that there is no word in Chinese for the noise a cat makes when it's happy. What does this tell us - that Chinese cats don't purr? It reminds me of the story about Eskimos having no word for "toothache" because the bacteria that cause dental pain can't survive in the cold.

Language is after all a reflection of culture. And it's not just a question of missing words - individual words are often umbrellas for a whole range of meanings.

Of course, this linguistic phenomenon is by no means limited to Chinese. Take the English word "fit" - only three letters long and yet packed with nuance. You'd probably describe a marathon runner as being fit, for example, and yet athletes apparently catch more colds than your average coach potato. Then there's the vernacular fit, meaning "attractive", which leads us to the curious idea that a pretty girl who gets out of breath on the stairs is both fit and unfit at the same time.

But let's not get bogged down in the philosophy of language - after all, this isn't a mug's guide to Wittgenstein. It's just that my "fit" fascination is personal and long-standing, and goes right back to my tender teenage years.

It all started with my old swimming coach, whose real surname is lost in the chlorinated mists of time but whose popular moniker, Miss F, most certainly is not. The F, in case you're wondering, stood for Fat. But that was almost being generous. This lady was more than fat - she was an absolute whale. Her legs, I remember noting at the time, were thicker than my adolescent torso. Frightening.

She shared another characteristic with whales, however, in that she was able to swim at extraordinary speeds for hours on end without getting tired. When Miss F was in the pool, students and teachers stopped in their tracks and gazed open-mouthed. It was nothing to do with her size. It was the sheer beauty of her freestyle. She was a phenomenon.

So, maybe Miss F was actually Miss Fit, and not Miss Fat at all. Regardless, some of her colleagues questioned whether she was a good role model for the students. Despite her undisputed prowess in the pool, she was by any normal standard grotesquely rotund. If you had measured her Body Mass Index she would definitely have registered as overweight, if not obese. And being overweight is unhealthy, right?

While not all cultures and periods of history would agree (ever tried to find a skinny woman in a Titian painting?), our twenty-first century logic goes like this:

"Fat is what happens when you don't take care of yourself. It comes from eating bad food - fatty food - and lack of exercise. It makes you more susceptible to heart attacks and diabetes, cancer and osteoporosis. Keep slim and you'll live longer. If you are overweight, diet down to the appropriate BMI for your height. And if you can't shed those extra pounds yourself, the miracles of modern medicine may be able do your lazy, oversized backside's job for it."

It's a simple message. If we are thin already, we can smile smugly and feel reassured. If we are fat, we ought to channel our energies into the business of losing weight.

The only problem is that the accepted wisdom could be completely cuckoo.

Being fat - contrary to what the world's media claim on a daily basis - turns out not to be so bad for us after all. Slim people, even people of "normal" dimensions, die younger than people who naturally sport a few extra pounds around the middle. Apologies to anyone who has spent years of their life atop the bathroom scales, or spent chunks of their salary on dieting classes. But the news is: you have been wasting your time and will probably die younger than you would have if you'd let your weight settle at its natural level.

At least, so says the largest ever study of weight and illness, just published in the US. In a report that reassessed data from two decades of weight-related research involving 600,000 people, scientists discovered that people classed as "overweight" and even "obese" according to the BMI system tend to live longer and healthier lives than people in the "normal" bracket. And they live much longer than those classed as "thin".

It turns out that it's much worse to be a couple of pounds underweight than several dozen pounds overweight. Of course, good food and exercise are crucial to health and longevity - nobody is denying that. It makes sense to eat decent, healthy food and get a reasonable amount of exercise. But, as Miss F taught me a long time ago, people can do that and stay chubby. The difference is that we now know they are healthier for it.

The real killer, it emerges, is the crash diet. Shed more than about 10 pounds at a go by dieting and you are not just ridding yourself of love handles. You're knocking years off too.

All this reminds me of Woody Allen's film Sleeper about a health food storeowner who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up 200 years in the future to discover that banana cream pie and chocolate are actually good for you.

He wasn't far off. Who knows, perhaps in 200 years fit and fat will be spelt the same.

 
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