What a woman!

This morning I was walking along Fitzroy Street when I saw Alannah Hill and her small son. Alannah was wearing a pink chiffon frock, a navy linen coat (you understand these are the descriptions of a person not very interested in clothes) black lace footless tights, red stilettos and flowers in her hair. She was fully made up, and carrying a large pink and black bag. Suddenly, her son decided to turn around and walk backwards, and Alannah joined him. Together, they walked solemnly along Fitzroy St, ignoring the debris of last night's clubbers (smashed eggs, vomit, old pizza boxes, broken glass), backwards. She is an inspiration to us all. The smashed eggs are there because it is a sport for carloads of young men from other places to come to St Kilda on Friday and Saturday nights, sometimes in stretch limos, and to drive slowly along shouting abuse at the locals and throwing raw eggs. They particularly target women whom they assume to be prostitutes. Charming.

Every time I open a magazine or newspaper lately I read about the obesity epidemic which has hit the western world, including its children The story seems to go like this:

We no longer exercise

We eat too much junk food - regularly mentioned are McDonalds, chocolates and chips

Added elements are that poor people are worse than rich people (poverty apparently equals stupidity and the poor are therefore too stupid to feed themselves or their children properly) and that this added fat is an incredible health risk, causing diabetes, heart disease and all sorts of other horrors.

I have issues with quite a lot of this. First, as a school teacher, I saw no evidence whatsoever that my students were fatter in 2006 than in 1976. There have always been a few fat kids, just as there have always been a few very skinny kids. I know, there are statistics, and statistics must be right. I just didn't see it, and I knew thousands of kids.

Second, I worked in both poor and rich schools, and saw no difference - in both, there were a few skinny kids, a few fat kids, most about average. There was one difference. To thank teachers, parents in working class areas, who are often migrants, would sent gifts - a bag of homegrown tomatoes or capsicums, a jar of home bottled tomato sauce - while in the richer schools, it was chocolates and bottles of wine that appeared in the last week.

Third, I reckon girls, at least, exercise more than they used to. They all seem to go to the gym, which my generation certainly didn't. To us, the gym was a place you went once a week to do a class in, essentially, flexibility.

A surprising number of teenagers are vegetarians. Many still have the basic diet of their parents home countries, whether it be Lebanon, Greece, Italy, India or another country. Many observe various food taboos - no pork, or beef, or alcohol. They do go to "Maccas", but not daily. I have on occasion found myself defending McDonalds against some the wilder beliefs students have about them - I won't tell you what they believe to be the ingredients of the burgers, or the milk shake type drinks (I forget what they are called.)

Teachers get to do supervise the canteen once a week or so. This is all part of what you studied 6 years to be qualified to do. You see what kids order for lunch. Now, our canteen didn't sell fried food, so popular items were a chicken schnitzel in a roll, sausages in rolls, pies, pasties, sandwiches, containers of soup, pasta or fried rice. A particular fad for a while was a bread roll filled with grated cheese and tomato sauce. Not fabulous food, but OK, I would have thought. Judging by the apple cores and banana peel strewn around the playground in the afternoons, there was a fair bit of fruit being consumed too.

I am pretty fat. I do not go to McDonalds (or get someone to pick it up for me). I have never eaten a single mouthful from KFC, Pizza Hut, Hungry Jacks or any similar establishment. I eat very little meat, and lots of fruit and vegetables. I don't eat chips, hot or in a packet (crisps). I don't drink lemonade or coke or beer. I have Vegemite on my toast, never jam. My eggs are poached, not fried. I do sometimes eat pasta and rice, but not once a week. Nevertheless I am fat. I don't know my BMI index, but I'm sure it's disastrous.

I don't have a car, so I walk a lot. As well as the necessary walking, I try to walk or swim for an hour a day.

Every weekday for about a thousand years I sat in the staffroom at recess and lunchtime and watched people consume Kit Kats, Coke, chocolate milk, pies with sauce, and other fat laden goodies. They were almost all thin. Some very thin. Some exercised, some didn't.

One teacher did weights at the gym, swam daily and rode a bike to and from school. She was fat.

I have a diet on which I can lose about four kilos a month. This is it:

Breakfast: 2 slices toast with ricotta cheese and sliced tomatoes

Lunch: small container of salad (tomato, lettuce, cucumber) with ONE of a boiled egg, a small tin of tuna, a slice of cheese, half a grilled chicken breast.

Dinner: steamed vegetables (not potatoes), half a chicken breast.

Drinks: tea, coffee, water

Extras: fruit

Good eh? Makes it hard to eat out of course, and it means preparing two meals, one for me one for the family, every night. And the longest I've managed to sustain it was for about a year, in which I lost 35 kilos.

Perhaps, being fat, I have grown too stupid to see an obvious pattern here. Perhaps my sample size was too small to draw conclusions from. And perhaps the pattern is more complex than we think, and it's just too easy to just blame the fat, especially if they are from a social group that won't hit back.

I'm going to have my lunch now. A cheese sandwich, if you want to know. And a cup of coffee.