Dieting these days is simply assumed to be an ongoing lifestyle activity to fit into our lives alongside our work, our social obligations and everything else which makes up the bedrock of our ongoing routines.
This is what it has come to. Continual dieting is there alongside the conversational commonalities of everyday life, on a level with marital/partnership status, car ownership and whether or not one keeps a cat.
It is high time to look again at what is driving this dieting thing as an activity of everyday normalisation, with it frequently not even being mentioned any longer in the context of a temporary behaviour very specifically related to an outcome of permanently reigned-in weight.
All of this matters so much because the tendency is now to treat as an accepted banality an issue which has in fact become a largely unnoticed but major tension point between state encroachment and personal choice. Worse than that, it is not just about liberty, it is also about bad science and poor advice.
Dieting is often about being in control, or being controlled (and sometimes about both at the same time). People talk about the increasing complexity of modern life. Perhaps they could more accurately be talking about the increasing uncertainty of modern life. Existence has always been somewhat messy and somewhat complex for those in the middle of their individual journeys: what is newer is the paradox that as science knows more and more, the greater appears the uncertainty and discomfort about those things for which it can provide no easy answers.
This is what is meant when commentators talk of a “risk society” - an environment where dangers seem imminent and control seems marginal. In terms of weight, the conundrum expresses itself through our ever growing weightiness and the seeming backfiring of attempts to address it.
When everything to do with self-image, fashion, culture, food and weight all seem to be getting a little too much, one can always still try and pull it all in, literally and metaphorically, by going on a diet. Although uncomfortably aware that dieting’s sweet seductions are shallow and temporary, nonetheless it is doing something - and that can often feel a lot more in control than simple abandonment to the fates.
Moving from seeking control to being controlled, governments have been issuing nutrition advice for over 100 years - and their citizens at most pay lip service to the various eating strictures - but more commonly vote against them, through their stomachs via their wallets.
But modern states value predictability and control - and are flexible in their methods. Extended bureaucracies like simple answers and dislike disobedience, deviance and loopholes. From drugs to alcohol and from homosexuality to political radicalism, most forms of perceived deviance have at some time, somewhere, been “medicalised” to bring them under the direct control of the state (to do so throws up a smokescreen of non-judgementalism).
And the same homogenisation and medicalisation of hugely differing individual issues is now occurring within the weight arena: if this seems too far fetched then one only needs to witness in the UK the recent “anti-junk food” legislation and the moves to punish parents of chronically overweight children, including the option of removing them to foster homes. An absolute must-read in the context of all of this is Paul Campos’ book The Dieting Myth, which sketches the rampant over-exaggeration of the direct health risks of overweight.
However, once such a process of demonisation is underway, as it most assuredly now is with regards to the issue of overweight, to disagree is to stride beyond the realms of the merely deviant into the status of expressly disobedient - which is a short step from criminal status. The moralism of observing weight as distasteful ratchets up into accusations of fullscale sedition.
The argument goes like this - the state in its wisdom has spoken; overweight is a health issue and as such it becomes a moral issue concerning wellness, interdependencies and budgets. Weight is to be managed downwards and to disobey will result in an implicitly escalating scale of reputational and material penalties (including the denial of certain health care provision).
Biomedicine currently prioritises a sense of cure over comfort. The emphasis in almost all cases is to be seen to be powerful in the chemical intervention, with much less emphasis on empathy in relation to the inevitable, or on the emotional and psychosomatic dimensions. It is a culture that allows ten minutes and the prescription of a tranquilliser.
It is also a culture which disallows the complexity of overweight and seeks rapid intervention, preferably leading to the mapping of satisfactory digits to numbered targets. In the absence of a magic weight control pill (how Big Pharma would love to have one of those that was in any way remotely effective!), dieting is perpetuated despite the accumulating evidence that it is a largely ineffective alone as a long-term solution.
If the case for a hard structural link between weight and jeopardy to public healthcare is weakened (and it is nowhere near as firm as is commonly argued) then there are in fact a number of broader options which might otherwise be available to the individual.
These range from ignoring the issue through to electing to adopt a much longer-term lifestyle approach outside the increasingly discredited strictures of the fad dieting approach.
How, or indeed whether, we choose to shrink our bodies is in no way as individualistic a statement as we might have thought. It has all become very much wrapped-up in the latest manoeuvre to circumscribe our bodily freedoms, whether we like being overweight or not.
We must chew things over more thoroughly when dieting is as casually assumed as the clothes that we wear.
Author Malcolm Evans is founder of The Weight Foundation Charity, which researches dieting and publishes weight loss culture commentary.