Hush!!

...already! Every Sunday I like to set aside a little post breakky time to read the paper. I especially love to skip the doom and gloom and head straight the the lifestyle bits. You know, the important bits about fashion, homes, wellbeing and food?
Well this Sunday a straw broke the camels back and I've got the grumps. Usually when I have the grumps I struggle to articulate without ranting and contradicting myself in every second sentence. However, I shall press on...
Can someone please explain to me how the following regular features can possibly sit comfortably alongside each other in our popular media? How they can ever be interpreted in a way that results in a healthy message being delivered?
The Biggest Loser. A very popular show appealing to the voyeur in us all with an element of circus freak appreciation of people with very damaged self worth. It feels so wrong to set these folk up amongst skinny people coaxing out every miserable emotion for all the world to see in the name of competition (and ratings).
The Masterchef 'phenomenon' which conveniently and puzzlingly enters our lives by directly following up The Biggest Loser Finale. Episode after episode we see Gary Mehigan bunging in another wad of butter at every turn and rapturously extolling the virtues of his subsequent delicious dish. I love Masterchef. I love food. I think appreciating good food and allowing it to be a pleasurable element in our lives is fabulous and we are incredibly lucky to have the wealth and availability to do it. But how does the message of more is more sit with an audience who have just emerged from a less is best, Biggest Loser mantra?
Now the paper. The health section this weekend featured a full page photograph of an average sized lady with a heading asking us if we thought she was overweight. Now, if she was sitting beside me amongst a group of my nearest and dearest, I'd say she was a comfortable, normal size. Having just flicked through many pages of models, celebrities and healthy living aficionados (hello, Michelle Bridges, you get paid to be ridiculously healthy) I started to question my perception. In fact her image, so very similar to my own post shower reflection, has been playing on my mind ever since, and I don't have a weight issue (or do I?). Turns out she sits on the borderline of the unhealthy weight range. I don't do the acronym thing generally, but, WTF?? Nothing like splitting some hairs to mess with people's heads.
Then comes the whole gamut of diet advice with ridiculous studies having shown things like, eating an apple daily at noon will help you to lose weight, while eating one at five past midday, while riding a rhinoceros and wearing fluffy pink slippers will see you gain weight. That's right, remember that tubby. What about those tenuous links drawn between blood type and protein intake? or hair colour and carbohydrate absorption? Clearly, I'm winging it on the facts, because I can't make sense of this rot. It always leaves me feeling slightly insecure with a feint echo of 'huh?' lingering in the back of my mind.
Ok, so we've had our fill of this information let's flick open the Sunday magazine and why, hello! Donna Hay! Delicious, decadent winter food. Creamy mash with hearty casseroles and self saucing, sugary, baked icky yum, yums photographed in such a way as to evoke a drool response in the best of us. I love Donna Hay. Her latest issue is sitting beside me unopened, urging me in all it's foodie beauty to tear off the plastic and settle down with a cup of tea for a lengthy read. Her food is beautiful. It is delicious. It is very often full of butter, sugar and fat. So how do we interpret this after perusing the latest Michelle Bridges column?
How can we not fall into a world akin to that gondola scene in the original Willy Wonka movie? Where images of obesity collide with images of super skinny airbrushed perfection.
A world where we exercise frantically with a sweaty sense of guilt hovering, or lay idly on the couch beating ourselves up about being so lazy, and fat. It's all about being fat. But hang on, no one says 'fat' anymore. We are talking constantly about it but no one ever says it.
We lay on the couch indulging ourselves (because we've earned it) with some chocolate or fancy cheese while we watch others sweating to vomiting point in an effort to lose weight, then we mentally throw our hands in the air at never being prepared to go that far.
We watch gorgeous decadent food being prepared, then prepare it ourselves before stuffing it in quickly so the guilt at having put it in our mouths subsides more quickly, but it never does. Because then there's the image in the bathroom mirror of our real selves. So very different from the images we are fed, and yet probably not all that bad in reality. Hang on, what is reality?
It's actually all very simple once we disregard all the drivel. Eat everything in moderation and move around a bit. I bake an awful lot and friends question why I'm not the size of a house. I don't know. I think it's probably genetic and I think science has a lot of questions to answer about it. Size is definitely not a reliable indicator of good health. I do know that my 'enough' alarm and my 'get off your arse' buzzer are both very loud. I listen. That probably helps. It's really about balance and doing things you know are healthy, regardless of how you look in your polka dot bikini.
So, media, as I said, HUSH! We need to get off this damned gondola, before we all get very sick.