What if being obese is better for our health than being slim?

Warning – this post may contain the ramblings of an unhinged mind! Second warning – this is not a new idea, I have heard whispers of it before.

Earlier this year we sat down as a family to watch “Highlander”, a film released in 1986. “You will love this”, I enthused to my children. So, humouring me slightly, they stayed and watched.

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But what struck me was not the striking scenery or the imaginative use of safety pins. No – I was amazed by how thin everyone was, particularly the women who were slender and elegant in their pencil skirts. That did not strike me the first time I saw it. We also watched Grease from 1978 enfamille this year. They were all so slim.image We were slim back then.

I remember my Grandmother, a size 14, strapping herself into her girdle every morning. A size 14 is not large today.

Look around and we see people carrying a bit too much weight all around and the weight seems to be all around the waist. In fact waists seem to be disappearing.

In my case, I never really put on a lot of weight. My weight did start going up in the mid eighties when my other problems started to make themselves known – all as it turns out features of autoimmune diseases. I was seven and a half stone in May 1985 and possibly ten and a half stone in 2012. By 2012 I was still squeezing into my size 12 clothes and it was a squeeze but I wasn’t going to buy larger! Privately, I was distressed by the lack of a waist though.

Hang on a sec though; ten and a half stone and squished into slightly too small clothes is nothing. Many people would love to be in that situation. Now I plodded on with my little niggles. Sometimes I went to the doctor for medication, othertimes I just ignored them….. Plenty of people are suffering with similar niggles and they are often slim or only slightly chubby.

What I am wondering is if our obesity epidemic is a way of protecting our bodies and vital organs from whatever is in our diets that is causing autoimmune diseases. If converting our food into visceral fat stored around the middle is a way of preventing whatever the poison is from being processed. Stashed away, shut away and forgotten about. A bit like chucking the junk in the cupboards before guests arrive. Close the door and you never have to deal with it.

If this really is the case, and I suspect that it is, it has profound implications about how we view obesity and feed ourselves. Identify the poison, the cause, and a lot of vested interests in the food and health industries could be challenged.

Is this the case? I would like to find out.

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