ROLL UP, ROLL UP! COME AND WATCH THE FAT PEOPLE FIGHTING TO BE THIN!

July 18 2006: Reality Media is plunging new depths as the voyeuristic pornography of "Slimming Races" comes to television and newspapers. "Fit Clubs" and "Fat Clubs" - and the merely fatuous slimming clubs have increasingly joined the relatively harmless spectacles of amateur cooks, past their sell-by date singers and sealed-houses-full-of-exhibitionists shows. Just this week a couple of new series of public starvation spectacles have been announced in the UK.

Simultaneously, people in the U.S have been following the Slimming Race between two women sponsored by two newspapers, each following a different diet.

It doesn't matter so much about ethics - the mass media jettisoned these a long time ago in relation to all matters eating and dieting related. In a sense it is beyond ethics and into the area of plain stupidity. It is pretty well-established that crash weight-loss is as good as a written invitation for rapid weight-regain to take over thereafter.

Beyond the physiology is the psychology: weight-loss hysterics under the full glare of public prurience is guaranteed to imprint weight and eating obsessions ever deeper into those individuals' minds. It may sound oblique and a bit Master-Grasshopperish but by far the best way to move on from eating and dieting issues is to put them to one side of the mainstream of one's mind.

Any realistic and achievable weight control plan must be long termist, gentle and thoughtful. Slimming Races are brash, crass and simply a sprint to a painful self-image standstill.

Slimming Races are the new Dwarf Throwing. Don't dignify them by watching or reading - and certainly don't try competing because that way is heading for a heavy fall every time.