Operation Cop On To Yourself

25th Jan 2012

With the dawn of a new year helplessly obese are back on our television screens hoping somebody can help them lose weight.

Ah sure look at him, isn’t he great because he’s thirty-two stone and after six weeks he has lost the equivalent weight of a small ball point pen and book of post-its. Woopy! Let’s all have a party and put him on a minor-celebrity circuit of RTE Dublin talk-shows.

This is the kind of soppy ah-sure-look-that’s-how-it-is excuse that plunged the Irish economy into freefall over the last few decades. The shrugging shoulders of apathy are about the only exercise we seem to be getting as a nation these days.

For extra humiliation your S&M microphone is attached to your naked body and then you have to stand next to a skinny half-flah from Carlow

The facts of the matter are that Ireland is smack bang in the throws of an obesity epidemic and typically we’re being “Irish” about yet another national crisis with the usual watery half-arsed vague attempt to do anything about the country now exhibiting some of the fattest people in Europe. If we don’t force the Corkonian patented ‘cop on to yourselves’ mindset we’re in big trouble.
 

Derek Davis has a lot to answer for.

Going on the latest statistics that pretty much calls Ireland a nation of hippos and brontosauruses, maybe we’ll see Failte Ireland taking advantage of our increasingly Jurassic Park demeanour by offering Americans theme park trips to the Fat Republic so they can laugh at the quadruple XL humans waddling around the country desperately trying to find the nearest chipper.

Yes, we have to be understanding that some fat people have issues in their personal life and sometimes their choice of remedy is to insert a half-inch pipe into their mouth with the other end tethered to an always-on blender sending liquidised quarter-pounders, banoffee pie and baked Alaskas thundering down their flabby windpipes.

But it seems we have come to the point where we are not allowed to express our outrage at what people are doing to themselves and to us as a nation.
 

This is what your license fee goes towards: filming people crying in a field because they ate too much.

Corkonians shouldn’t buy into this ‘personal choice’ or everyone’s-body-is-their-own-business tripe either. Like smoking, turning yourself into a human zeppelin will eventually cost the state money because you will end up in hospital. That’s money that would be better spent on looking after people with diseases they didn’t inflict on themselves and researching cures.

Why must the beauty of so many Corkonians be hidden under layers of cake? Single old dolls, how many feens have you seen in bars and clubs in town and thought ‘he’s cute and I would….but only if he gave up eating small cars for breakfast and ran a few marathons over the next couple of weeks’ ?

The skinny junkie look is back in for Dubs

One of the more sinister reasons we have to be all touchy-feely when it comes to people’s whale-like body shapes is that many large companies are making bags of money out of Irish people’s post-Celtic Tiger body ballooning.

It seems all Irish people who are overweight and want to do something about it must now sign up to a gym, take diet pills, eat expensive specially prepared salads in unnecessary fancy packaging, buy the ‘diet’ version of fat-inducing foods, join motivational websites, make a tool out of themselves on national TV and write diaries for magazines that have Jordan on the front.

Oh and now that the number of ‘morbidly obese’ people is soaring wheelbarrow-makers are surely eyeing a potential new market to allow the overweight to carry their blubber around with them.

It shouldn’t cost anything to lose weight if you have a bit of cop on.

The price of a bar of chocolate in your local Cork convenience store averages about a euro. A bunch of six decent size bananas in an average supermarket costs a little less than a euro. Vitamins, genuine energy and natural goodness versus synthetic sugar gank: there is no math to be done.

Kids, may choose the sweet option given free reign and everyone likes the odd treat but Cork adults need to cop on to themselves and ditch the fat for fruit.

When you see these people being rolled, literally, onto TV chat shows to talk about how they need to have three rest stops whilst going up a small stairs, of course we all want them to succeed if their intention is to lose weight but instead of lauding their intentions we should only applaud the successful. And by successful we mean reducing themselves to a healthy weight and not losing a few token pounds.

Morto

The People’s Republic of Cork loves all Corkonians equally (although Stephen Ireland regularly tests our patience) but we cannot allow each other to expand indefinitely or our county’s greatness is at risk.

The fatter mams and dads are the bigger their kids are likely to be. Fatter Corkonians means, not only massive health bills for taxpayers down the line as diabetes and heart problems soar, but less and less candidates for Cork sporting teams. The likes of Graham Canty, Rena Buckley, Donal Óg Cusack, Roy and Sonia didn’t get to where they are today by stuffing themselves with pizza and waiting for friend requests on Facebook.

If your exercise regime consists of things like remote control locating, guitar hero and texting then you need to get off your arse and out into the dark evenings for some sweat inducing exercise.

In Cork we don’t do poor excuses or blaming someone else for mistakes we’ve made ourselves. We call it ‘cop on’. Time to ditch this lazy Irish mindset along with the fat. Let’s get back to being being Cork.