Weight loss

The beautiful British actress Samantha Eggar has died in LA. I hope that will be the last in a spate of deaths among friends and celebrities in the past three months. First it was Terence Stamp, the handsome actor who starred with Samantha in The Collector, which made them both into stars. Then the legendary Robert Redford, whose many fabulous performances in exceptional movies make today’s film output look positively anaemic. The Way We Were, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Indecent Proposal are just a few of the brilliantly entertaining films he starred in. I met him only once, on a flight from New York to LA. He was charming, standing up from his first-class seat to exchange pleasantries.

We’re getting fatter. We even have a whole day dedicated to it now, World Obesity Day. We are reminded about our expanding waistbands and inflated cheeks every time we walk down the street, or look at an XXL model stuck onto a magazine cover to make the rest of us chubsters feel empowered. I don’t feel empowered at all. I feel alarmed — and confused. In a time when such advanced medicine is at our fingertips, the obesity problem is worse than ever. In America, one person dies from cardiovascular disease every thirty-four seconds, making it the biggest killer in the country. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that obesity is responsible for 2.8 million deaths each year. But what if there were a simple way to stop us from eating ourselves to death?

Your business may have closed, your kids still aren’t in school, nana hasn’t had a hug in 18 months, and your uncle drank himself to death from the crippling isolation — but the real tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the luckless fats are feeling stigmatized again. Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times detailed the tearful struggle of being grotesquely obese in the age of COVID-19. ‘Chrystal Bougon cried after the needle went into her arm. Not because her first dose of the Moderna vaccine hurt. But because, finally, being fat actually paid off,’ the article begins. ‘Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight.