The Swollen Generation
Australians are getting fatter. It would be a seriously deluded (and probably massively overweight) person who suggested otherwise. Back in the late 1980s, I boarded a plane to find two stewards in Business scrambling to remove an armrest so that the late Ricky May could lower one colossal cheek each into seats 9A and 9B. At the time, not one person to whom I related this story believed me. These days it’s common knowledge that this sort of thing goes on and that some airlines have even increased the standard width of their seats in order to accommodate our ever-expanding arses. Earlier this year, United Airlines outraged the obese by announcing plans to make plus-sized passengers pay for two seats. A portly friend of mine soon spotted the silver lining: ‘You’d get two meals!’
Time was, Australians would return from their first trip to the States visibly shaken by the enormity of the arses they’d witnessed. My own visit to Las Vegas in 1997 was like being teleported to a planet populated entirely by descendants of the Michelin Man; herds of gasping track-panted pachyderms waddling from one buffet to the next, never satisfied, one red-faced father of three (chins) loudly complaining about how the last $4.99 trough had been ‘stingy with the syrup.’ Nowadays, for this sort of undulating spectacle you need travel no further than your local shopping strip. Park yourself anywhere in Bourke Street Mall on a Saturday afternoon and, within forty-five seconds, into view will hove someone of whom you can’t help but wonder how they manage to mount a toilet without it shattering beneath them like a Fabergé egg.
Seemingly every night, television presents us with acres of shuddering corpulence in the form of The Biggest Loser, where that endless bullshit with the scales could surely be shortened to the host merely uttering five simple but pertinent words: ‘You’re all still too fat.’ (I recently heard tell of a woman who is so desperate to get onto TV that she’s been eating nothing but junk food for months, piling on kilo after kilo, in order to get onto The Biggest Loser. You know, that show where it’s all about health and well-being.)
At this point I should point out that, apart from that last bit, I’m not having a go at fat people here. Fat is one thing; morbidly fucking obese is another. Some people – John Goodman, for example – are clearly supposed to be fat. When they lose weight it just looks wrong. Mikey Robins may have saved his own life by knocking off all those kilos, but somehow he’s lost a measure of character in the process. When he first unveiled his new self, the effect was alarming, as though he’d just prised open the Lost Ark of the Covenant. No, I’m talking about those people you see on the news, always from the neck down, struggling across a pedestrian crossing in overlay footage accompanying the latest obesity statistics. People who are just a few months away from turning into that Mexican bloke who had to be craned out of his house, and cleaned by a team of zookeepers armed with rags on sticks. To me, once the rag on a stick comes out, that’s a cue to maybe start cutting down on the pastries. Although, when the morbidly obese person crosses that line where they can’t even get out of bed, I always wonder about the accomplice. Because there has to be one, bringing them food. They can’t get to the bain-marie themselves.
‘Hey, it’s all right for you, you skinny bastard,’ I hear some of you saying. ‘We can’t help it if we’re big-boned.’ Actually, that’s not fair; that whole ‘big boned’ nonsense went out with the Macarena. These days it’s customary for the morbidly obese to blame ‘genetics’ for their elephantine girth and pants by Ringling Bros. It’s not that they’re eating more than anyone else, it’s that their bodies aren’t breaking it down fast enough. It’s their genes that are to blame, and definitely not the buckets of French fries they’re shovelling down even while they walk up the street. While I don’t deny the charges of being either skinny or a bastard, I do wage a constant battle to avoid becoming what my appearance-obsessed friend Pieter Malkmus used to say was the worst of all looks: the skinny guy with the big gut (see John Huston in Myra Breckinridge). I always say that if you want to know where you’re headed, find a celebrity who looks like you but is about ten years older, and then keep an eye on them. For me, it’s always been Harold Ramis from Ghostbusters. I’ll never forget the shock I got when he appeared in Groundhog Day suddenly sporting what looked like a basketball down the front of his shirt. Is that me in a few years? I wondered. A pregnant Egon Spengler?
So, here’s what I resolved to do, and I’m aware that to some this may seem a tad extreme. I decided to stop eating so much food. Of an evening, where once I might have had a Magnum, or some Pringles, or several banana sandwiches, I now have an orange. Or nothing. Because I don’t want to end up as one of those people with no visible arse-crack – Single Buttock Syndrome (SBS), I call it – lumbering into a McDonald's, while already eating from a tub of KFC (I have seen this). That way lies the rag on a stick.
And finally, imagine for a moment what someone from a country where they have no food at all would say about a person who opts to have their body cut open and a plastic lapband fitted around their stomach in order to stop eating so much. I know what I’d say. Try putting the band around the fridge!
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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