Disclaimer: I recently quit smoking so if I appear to be ranting and rambling incoherently at times, it is because I am thinking of things I can no longer have…like nicotine. Giant cigarettes filled with enough nicotine to kill an elephant, empty Marlboro boxes and sore lungs, nicotine dreams and withdrawal nightmares. I love you, Nicotine, but your toxic ash fuelled injection system is tearing me apart. We had a good run together but for now I must stub you out. Goodbye forever, until next time.

So why did I quit? Well, for several reasons that you can probably guess. I’ll start with the minor things like causing cancer, cost, smell, and the other million health problems generally attributed to long term smoking. But to be honest I quit because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. We’re all hypocrites to some degree, I realise that, but for me personally this would have been too hypocritical for my mind to convince itself of otherwise so I decided to quit. I quit so I can complain about morbidly obese people. In many ways, my morbid obsession with the morbidly obese led to my cigarette cessation.

Globally, 2.6 billion people are either overweight or obese. In 1927 there were only 2 billion people on the entire fucking planet! It’s an epidemic that we really aren’t addressing, either too afraid to offend or just too damn lazy. My solution…why don’t we treat obesity similar to smoking? Imagine you saw an adult giving a child a cigarette, it would be outrageous and pretty terrible and obviously illegal. Why do we allow obese parents to pass on their dietary habits and feed their children into obesity? Isn’t it just as bad to give an obese child a Big Mac or a cigarette? Of course, parents can’t singularly be pointed at as the problem because there are other social issues at play and the food industry should shoulder a lot of the blame but at the end of the day the parents are responsible for their children, including their eating habits.

Perhaps a more maddening thing is the recent trend of fat acceptance. There has been a movement recently, HAES (Health at every size), that proclaims we can all be healthy and fit at every size and yay we’re all so fucking wonderful and I can shit rainbow dust but it’s simply not true. If you’re 160cm and 100kgs and over 50% body fat, you’re neither fit nor healthy. If you’re underweight and anorexic you’re not healthy either but since for some reason we’ve already decided we can accept one in society and not the other, I’ll focus on the obese people.

Those following the HAES movement are deluding themselves and unfortunately deluding other susceptible people who may have been otherwise able to diet and exercise their way out of obesity. They’re ruining their own lives and the lives of their children by simply accepting that it’s okay to be grossly overweight. Is it good that they are trying to increase their self-esteem? Yeah, I’ll grant them that. Is it bad that they’re ignoring scientific evidence, celebrating being morbidly obese, and deluding themselves into pretending they’re fit and healthy? Yes…

So let’s treat it the same way we approached smoking. Higher taxes on fast food, better education on diet and eating habits, run much more frequent campaigns on the negative aspects of obesity. Promote fitness and healthy eating as a lifestyle instead of just something you do when you’re overweight. There is no need to shame anyone but can’t we simply say how you’re living is going to affect the quality of your life? When I used to have a cigarette, I had to go stand outside and breathe in my delicious plumes of poisonous smoke and I thought that was fair enough really. How about we tell these fat fuckers to get off the mobility scooter and walk around for a bit?

*No cigarettes were used in the creation of this article

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