World Obesity Day: Dissolving Beliefs and 'Double Burdens'

Grandma’s tales

When I was around 5 years old, I had a hard time understanding something my grandmother used to tell me. If I didn’t finish my food, she’d say, ‘Look, there are so many people dying without food, you must finish yours.’ To my little child brain, this line of reasoning made no sense. ‘Wait, what? If other people are hungry, shouldn’t I share my food with them?’ I’d think. And I’d promptly go and put the food into the sink. I genuinely believed the sink connected to a magic pipeline which would somehow transport that food into the stomachs of the hungry. Only much later did I understand what my grandmother meant. (Around the same time as I understood how plumbing and blocked drains work, and that there was no magic food pipeline at the bottom of the sink).

Many of us have grown up with this kind of conditioning. Dare I say all of us, who may be reading this; especially if we grew up in India, where there is no escaping the poverty and hunger all around us? This had always given me a vague sense of guilt, as an obese child and a morbidly obese adult. Didn’t being fat mean that I was abusing my privilege of access to food, by eating too much of it??

So, when I heard that March 4 is ‘World Obesity Day,’ I was intrigued. Has this problem reached such large proportions that it needs its own World Day, I wondered. I decided to check it out. The World Obesity Day website opens with a mind-boggling statistic. There are nearly 1 billion people living with the disease of obesity worldwide today.

I decided to find out more, and ploughed through statistics from various sources, including the World Health Organisation. There are now more obese people than underweight people in the world in every region except sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In India, 1 out of every 4 persons is obese.

As I read, I had to keep stopping to re-orient my closely held beliefs around obesity being something to feel vaguely guilty about. The WHO itself classifies obesity as a disease, with complex causes at its source. It is not simply a function of overeating (although overeating of course is a part of it). When I was younger, being fat was never a ‘disease’ concern for me, it was more a function of how I looked, and other social / societal factors. (I still remember a swimming competition I did when I was that obese child. As I waited to dive in, the volunteer timekeeper sitting behind me, a national swimmer himself, was joking with the other timekeepers that they better brace themselves to get out of the way, there wouldn’t be enough space for both me and the water in the pool! How sharply that stung then!)

The double burden

There was still something that didn’t make sense to me, though. I knew that India has some of the most severely affected undernourished, underweight, and hungry people in the world. Isn’t obesity then mainly a first-world problem? How can it be such a pressing problem for us in India?

Turns out, there is a technical term for this.?It’s called the ‘double burden of malnutrition,’ being faced by many low/middle income countries, including India. Essentially, what it means is while we continue to struggle with undernutrition, we are also seeing a sharp rise in obesity and the chronic diseases that tag along, such as diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol issues, endocrine issues - the list is long. Particularly in urban settings. The WHO says, ‘It is not uncommon to find undernutrition and obesity co-existing within the same country, the same community and the same household.’

Children, especially, are vulnerable, exposed as they are ‘to high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, energy-dense, and micronutrient-poor foods, which tend to be lower in cost but also lower in nutrient quality. These dietary patterns, in conjunction with lower levels of physical activity, result in sharp increases in childhood obesity while undernutrition issues remain unsolved.’

I had to let all this sink in for a few days, because I had to rearrange my own closely held beliefs, entrenched over my lifetime, to even begin to process this. And yet, I intuitively, anecdotally, observationally, already knew this. My eye would note that the chubby, cute toddler of the security guard next door would always be clutching a bag of chips or a bottle of juice. How many times have I lectured my own morbidly obese housemaid about good eating habits?

Learning about how huge a problem obesity has become led me to look up the complex causes of obesity, including ‘obesogenic environments’ (new word of the day.) Remember how, growing up, we used to eat banana leaf meals on the floor? We still enjoy those meals, of course. Only, they are served at the table now. Did we lose our ability to sit cross-legged on the floor first because we got fat, or was it the other way around?

There is plenty of material out there on the complex causes of obesity, and I don’t want to dwell on them here. Instead, there are just two points I wanted to make in this edition of my newsletter. First, the global obesity crisis has reached such proportions that many of us are at risk. More than we know. We need to be aware of what lies ahead if we don’t act. For me personally, it was the day that I found that climbing stairs while holding my infant was agony for my flat feet and my knees, that a lightbulb went off. I knew I couldn’t live like this anymore. If I couldn’t carry his 4-kg infant weight, how was I going to run with him in a park? If I couldn’t inhabit my body comfortably, how would I give my best in life, at work, in my relationships? ?

Second, our beliefs are a cause of our obesity. What you believe is who you become. The journey back from morbid obesity involved, for me, letting go of closely held beliefs. That is when the weight started to dissolve, as those limiting beliefs dissolved. For example, the belief that I must ‘finish my food,’ drilled into me by my conscientious grandmother. ?

Grandma’s wisdom for the times we live in

I imagine talking about everything I’ve learned about obesity, with my grandmother. I can just see her puzzling over the concept of a ‘World Obesity Day.’ She’d be thinking, what has the world come to? She’d need to rearrange her own closely held beliefs to accommodate the Double Burden concept.

Putting it all together, here’s what I think my grandmother’s re-framed words to me would be. ?

“Don’t waste food, Neela.

Help yourself to a small portion. Sit down to eat without any gadgets or screens around you. Chew your food well. Stop eating when you are full. ?

Don’t continue eating beyond the point of fullness, because that’s how you will get fat, Neela.

There are many people suffering from the double burden in our country, Neela, what are you doing to help them?”

#WorldObesityDay

#LetsTalkAboutObesity

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