Boseley - The shape we’re in : how junk food and diets are shortening our lives

In May 2012, fire engines, police and an ambulance were called to the family home of a teenager called Georgia Davis in Aberdare, south Wales, in order to get her out of it. Nobody could dream up a more horrifying and humiliating nightmare for a girl of her age. A team of over 40 people was involved in demolishing an upstairs wall of the semi-detached house and constructing a wooden bridge to get a specially reinforced stretcher into her bedroom. Georgia weighed 400kg (63 stone), said some tabloid newspaper reports, while others said 350kg (56 stone). Nobody really knew she was too heavy at that point to get on the scales. Her rescuers had the delicacy to put up tarpaulins to shield her from the camera lenses as they extracted her through a 10-foot square hole in the brickwork and took her to hospital. She was covered by a sheet, because she could no longer get into any of her clothes.

The 19-year-old was morbidly obese and her organs were failing. Her mother, Lesley, had called the ambulance because she could no longer stand up. For some months she had not moved from her bedroom, where she spent her days on her laptop and watching TV. Eventually, like Alice in Wonderland inside the little house after drinking something she shouldnt, she grew too big to get out of the door.

Unfortunately this was not one of Lewis Carrolls charming Victorian fantasies. It is a true and desperate story of our modern age. Georgia is the extreme marker of a massive problem that has its roots in the way we live today and that affects all of us. Two-thirds of us are overweight. A quarter of us are obese and in real danger of damaging our health and dying prematurely. But we are in denial. Obesity looks like Georgia, we think. It doesnt look like us.

Obesity is a life-shortening condition. Life expectancy, which has risen steadily since records began, may for the first time be about to fall. Moderate obesity cuts life expectancy by two to four years and severe obesity could wipe an entire decade off your life, said the Lancet in 2009. The costs to health services and to the worlds economies of vast numbers of people becoming sick and unable to work are already huge and increasing. The National Heath Service is spending 5 billion a year treating heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancers, liver failure, hip and knee joint problems and other consequences of obesity, and the bill is expected to reach 15 billion within a few decades. Every country has the same soaring costs.

But like an iceberg, only the tip of the problem is yet showing. Obesity began to take off in the 1980s. The full health impact is not yet apparent. The National Audit Office estimated that there were over 30,000 premature deaths and 18 million days of sickness absence caused by obesity in England per year back in 1998. Those numbers must have soared, but no further official count has been done.

With such costs and casualties, you might think we would be on a war-footing with the issue by now. But the reluctance of politicians, the affluent and those who have never had a weight issue to believe that it is about anything other than individual greed, sloth and personal responsibility means that obesity and its health and financial consequences continue to inflict more and more damage. There are a few sporadic initiatives, but no military-scale strategy to reverse it and no general in charge of the campaign.

Indeed, nobody wants ownership of the problem. The humiliation of Georgia tells us much about the reasons why. Most people today are overweight but, they say to themselves, they have nothing whatsoever in common with her. They believe a spell on a diet or a few months of hard work at the gym will sort out the surplus pounds and yet, somehow, it doesnt. Magazines and newspapers still feature thin women and muscled men as the norm, even though people who look like that are very much a minority. Fatness has become so ordinary that we cease to notice it in the people we meet and dont think of it as an issue for ourselves. When we do, we are divided about the causes and the solutions and those divisions are exploited by those who can make money out of our appetite, inactivity and eventual panicked attempts to lose weight. Meanwhile we turn our face away from extreme cases like Georgias. If she is what obesity looks like, then the rest of us dont have a problem.

Georgias troubles were served up as entertainment in the tabloids, which paid her for the story, as if she were part of a freak show. In photographs (and there are many), her face, above the mountain of flesh, is curiously passive. The expressionless look reminds me of a painting in the Wellcome Collection of a 36-year-old man called Daniel Lambert, painted in the early 1800s. He weighed 320kg (50 stone) and exhibited himself to the curious in an apartment in Piccadilly, London, for a shilling a time. Poor Georgia is not Alice, in a bit of a fix and unable to straighten her arm without putting it out of the window. She is the Elephant Man, whose appearance evokes pity and horror in this case, mixed with condemnation. The newspapers offer Georgias story as a sort of modern morality tale and the unspoken but implicit judgment on her is that she is the epitome of greed.

There is little sympathy either for Paul Mason from Ipswich, who is said to have once been the worlds fattest man. Mason lost 292kg (46 stone) of his 444kg (70 stone) after gastric-band surgery and posed for photographs with his skin hanging loose like so much empty sacking another exhibition piece from the fat freak show.

Neither young women like Georgia nor men like Mason are to be found at middle-class dinner parties where the influential gather the opinion-formers, be they lawyers, bankers, journalists or businesspeople, who set agendas with and for the politicians. They will be disgusted but unmoved by the naked photos that Mason posed for in the desperate hope of advancing his case for plastic surgery. The reaction to the pictures is most commonly not one of sympathy or understanding but revulsion, coupled with anger that he should propose to burden the NHS still further.

It is the same in the United States, where obesity itself is so prevalent and yet the word is applied only to the very extreme cases. These are people to gawp at. Take Michael Hebranko, dubbed the worlds biggest yo-yo dieter as if this was only about slimming. Hebranko, from Staten Island, New York, says he once had a good career in a pharmaceutical company as well as a happy marriage and a son so not such a loser. Yet he has twice weighed 500kg (80 stone). In 1990, he made the