Child obesity is no laughing matter. Which is why it seems odd for the Change4Life campaign to make it one .
I’ll never forget the afternoon I burst into my 13-year-old brother’s room without knocking. He and his friends were in a messy semi-circle around the TV, watching a woman heavy-breathe her way through what appeared to be the final stages of some kind of orgasmic delirium. Her spine was arched and her head thrown back as the hand-held camera panned in on a bead of sweat glistening in the hollows of her clavicle.
Exercise videos were popular with my big brothers – but somehow Cindy Crawford’s Shape Your Body maintained its allure long after Elle Macpherson’s Your Personal Best and Supermodel Butt and Thighs were dispatched to the Sue Ryder shop. They’re probably still there, beneath a pile of commemorative royal mugs, should any of today’s obese teens fancy using them for anything other than titillation.
But it’s the under-12s we’re most worried about these days: the exercise-averse kids like the 15-stone, 11-year-old boy (touchingly nicknamed “wee chubby” by his family), whose parents were arrested for “neglect” earlier this month.
Luckily, the Government has come up with a new plan to tackle child obesity. Under a deal with Disney, characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse – along with the clan from Monsters, Inc. – will lead their own exercise videos, designed to get children moving for an hour a day. They don’t call those public health officials mad geniuses for no reason, do they?
Actually, I’m pretty sure they don’t call them geniuses at all. Which is unfair, because this new incentive is nothing short of it. Forget the nation’s obese children: I’ll be the first to hunker down with Monsters, Inc.’s Sulley as he deadlifts his way – in thonged Spandex – to the blue furry body of his dreams. I’ll be there on the mat with Goofy – who with his long, lean physique has always struck me as the ultimate yoga buff – attempting a perfect downward dog, and lunging along with the snowman from Frozen as he sweats it out to Let It Go.
Of course, the slight anatomical discrepancies between your average primary-schooler and, say, Mickey Mouse, could be an issue, but they’re probably no less disparate in body shape than Cindy and her aspirational female devotees. And with our biology results slipping down the world’s league tables, who’s going to tell the difference between their own physique and that of a lederhosen-wearing cartoon mouse anyway?
With one in three of Britain’s children overweight by the end of primary school, child obesity is – I realise – no laughing matter. Which is why it seems rather odd to make it one.
“Imaginative solutions” is what the government’s Change4Life campaign likes to call it. But it’s when people start getting imaginative – food manufacturers with their ingredients, parents with their children’s physical activities – that the problems start. There’s nothing imaginative about broccoli or kicking a ball around a park. But lace your child’s broccoli with Coca-Cola and settle him in front of a TV set on which a Disney character can be seen kicking a ball around a park, and it’s full marks for creative thinking – no matter what the outcome.
Thanks to the creative thinking from Change4Life, we may well suddenly be seeing fleets of overweight British children bending it like Baloo all over the country – but there are other concerns. For one thing, the endorsement conflicts. Will Mickey have to resign as the face of Pez Candy, and will Disney Junior’s Doc McStuffins relinquish her lucrative ice-cream cake sideline? More importantly: will the disclaimers at the start of these exercise videos be clear enough? Because Cindy’s side crunches didn’t half mess up my left hip.
ARYAN'S BLOG 