The big fat truth

Sofie Hagen is a young Danish comic I admire. I didn’t see her most recent show, Dead Baby Frog, but I saw her win the best newcomer award at Edinburgh in 2015 and I was happy for her. I liked her sweet face and her fury. The audience treated her as a benign oddity. Because Sofie is fat.

I say this with no judgment, for I am fat myself, but I am not as upset about it as she is. I make no attempt to spin my fat into a matter for universal sympathy and something to be admired. It is, as the adult self says, what it is. Even so, I used to write about being fat so often that other columnists told me to stop it, for fear I was monetising self-hatred. To which I say — what else are you supposed to do with it?

I used to think that my relationship with my fat was complex and confused with sexual and other anxieties (truthfully I wondered if I should blame men or, more specifically, Nazis) but now I am middle-aged I realise that I am simply greedy and lazy and I would rather eat too much than approve of my reflection. I made that choice and I must live with it. Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow used to eat nuts naked in front of a mirror to ensure she didn’t eat too many nuts, but I think that is, well, nuts.

I would conclude that my fat is a matter worthy of a brief burst of private shame, but nothing serious. But is it? Cancer Research UK has a new campaign. It is a series of posters that ask: what is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking? The answer is obesity but Cancer UK tactfully block out some of the letters so the answer is OB_S__Y.