Weight

Like most people, I think I have a fairly normal and sane attitude to issues of body-size when it comes to other people – but a pretty horribly skewed one when it comes to myself.

I lost about two stone last year due to a bout of depression (I’m fine now by the way, thanks for asking), and the reaction from people who didn’t know about the illness and only saw the weight loss was mixed – some thought I looked good, others were concerned. But most who remarked upon it were neither positive nor negative. Recently, however, I’veinevitably started to put the weight back on, and I can’t help feeling rubbish about it. Why?

If I see an overweight person on the street, or if I see a friend after a while who happens to have put on a few pounds since I last saw them, my reaction is an astoundingly mundane ‘oh’. I make no judgement, and barely even notice. In short, it matters not a jot.

There are all sorts of physical variables from human to human, and all sorts of indicators of health and well-being. So why do I and many other perfectly sane people reach for the panic button when an excess of chip consumption in our lives has inevitably sent the dial on the scales in an upward trajectory? Is it simply nature’s way of getting us to care about our health? Or an attitude thrust upon us by an evil, manipulative media who wants us all to be on an unachievable quest to be thin, cool and good-looking?

I have a problem with this latter theory. True, we are constantly bombarded in magazines and on television with images of perfect looking people, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives, looking like they haven’t had a decent meal inside of them for months. Media aimed at women seems to be particularly, though not exclusively, guilty of this kind of image-projection.

But in these times of media-literacy in which much material is filtered through several layers of irony in order to appeal to a naturally sceptical consumer, can pictures of rich, successful, good-looking thin people really be blamed for our obsession with weight? In my experience, most people have a much more intelligent, less polarised view than thin = good, fat = bad. I don’t read Heat magazine (God forbid), but from glancing at its various horrible covers scrutinising the physical faults of celebrities, there seems to be as many gaudily coloured arrows pointing at overly-thin stars than those with an excess of body fat (Heat readers, please correct me if I’m wrong about this).

So why do most people want to be thin? Is it due to the potential behaviour of a few barely worth mentioning idiots who might shout at an obese person in the street? I dread to think what prejudice bigger people have to deal with, both implicit and explicit, on a daily basis. But I'm more referring to the tailspin of despair prompted by the putting on of a few pounds.

I think we're afraid of judgement. Which is ridiculous since, as I said above, people who are worth bothering about would never make a judgement about someone based on how many pies they've eaten recently.

I could also attribute it to the fact that I'm an actor and that I'm worried I won't get work if I'm not 'lithe' and 'toned' – oh yes, because only thin actors get work. Timothy Spall, James Corden, Philip Seymour Hoffman – haven't seen them down the job centre recently. Even Hollywood stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and are carrying a few more pounds around these days, and nobody seems to care.

(By the way, I understand totally that the above paragraph probably rings entirely false for women in the entertainment business – but I won't presume to try and address that here.)

So in conclusion, I really don't know why this issue takes up such a massively disproportionate amount of our head space. In the words of Matthew Wright, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

(I don't have an attractive secretary trapped in a glass box though.)