The Nurse wonders what all the fuss is about. Dutch ferry boss director Pim de Lange allegedly (according to the UK press, so it’s probably bollocks) called British sailors ‘fat and tattooed’ this Tuesday, which caused a storm of derision and offence up and down the country.

But the truth is, most of Britain is fat and tattooed these days. From children to grannies,  teachers to SEO experts, builders, accountants and lawyers. We’re mostly fat. We’re almost all unfit. And a vast number of us have tattoed our visible and intimate bits ’til they’re totally unrecognisable as human flesh. Nasty.

The Nurse’s message to he RMT union, who seem to be making the biggest and silliest fuss? Get over it!

The first thing to report is that I have managed to shed around 10lbs since I embarked on my new weight-loss campaign back in September 2009. Before the Christmas holidays I’d managed to shed almost a stone (14lb) in weight but the festive period, combined with the recent snowy weather keeping me from getting outdoors for some much needed exercise, have resulted in a small amount of weight gain. But I am still enormously pleased with myself.

Christmas is a tough time when dieting. Too many tempting, tasty but fattening treats combined with cold weather and an inclination to indulge is a near fatal combination. I was lucky that Father Christmas brought me some new DJ equipment which acted as a distraction from the mince pies, Christmas cake and booze.

If you have read my previous posts you’ll know that myself and my DJ friend, Chemical Dave, met a hypnotherapist in a night club last year who offered to give me a free session that she promised would help with my weight loss objectives. Well Dave and I paid a visit to our new Harley Street Hypnotist friend and I have to report that it has worked for me.

I’ve always been skeptical about hypno-therapy and wondered if I would make a good subject. The session I had suggests that I am a good subject for hypnotism and that it works. Our therapist friend said that all she did was reinforce my own drive towards getting more exercise, eating healthily and steering clear of junk food. Since the session I’ve had no trouble resisting most temptations, even over the Christmas holidays.

So if you have been toying with the idea of trying hypnotism in your quest to lose weight and get into shape I’d strongly recommend that you give it a go.

Everything was going so well. I’d managed to avoid the liquid lunch crowd, instead choosing to nibble on some healthy vegetable based snacks and taking vigorous walks in a nearby park. I’d also teamed up with my old mate Chemical Dave to do help out at a few night-club DJ gigs. But it all went horribly wrong a couple of weeks ago when there were several birthdays at work.

Normally birthdays at work are celebrated with card signed by everyone in the office and maybe some cakes. But these two birthdays were a 40th and a 35th and both of those involved insisted that we all go to the pub for lunch, which we did. One of them was on a Friday so the lunch time session was followed by a post-work session that finished up in an Indian restaurant with a table full of irresistibly tasty Indian food.

This was followed, on Saturday, by a night out with Chemical Dave, DJing at a local nightclub. But this was followed by a late night visit to an all-night cafe and a huge plate full of fried food that they call the ‘gut buster’.

Inevitably, when I weighed myself the following week not only had I regained the pounds that I had lost over the previous weeks but I had managed to put on another 6 pounds of unwanted fat. Staring at the scales I plunged into a pit of despond which has previously prompted me to stuff even more fattening food into my flabby gob. But I resisted.

Chemical Dave gave me a call to tell me that he’d been telephoned by the woman he’d met at a gig some weeks previously, who he had called ‘Hypno Ho’. She had offered to give us both free Hypnosis sessions at here Harley Street clinic, but Dave had lost her number. Clearly she was quite keen on seeing Dave again, hence the telephone call. So Dave is now setting up an appointment for us both to pay her a visit and I am praying that a little hypnotism is what I need to get me back on track for the Winter.

I used to be a very active part-time amateur DJ, playing parties and the occasional club night here in Brighton. But I stopped when I was lucky enough to trap a poor unsuspecting girl into a long term relationship. Back in my DJing days I was slim. Hardly an ounce of excess flab anywhere. Lugging DJ equipment in and out of pubs and clubs at weekends, combined with frenetic dancing to high energy dance tunes, kept the fat at bay.

These days my girlfriend and I spend most evenings glued to the television while gobbling huge bars of chocolate, packets of crisps and lots of biscuits. And when we go out we no longer go clubbing. We go to restaurants and stuff our faces even more. This has now all stopped.

Here is my all-new DJ weight-loss plan:

• No more fattening snack-grazing in the evenings
• More fresh fruit and vegetables in my diet (on doctors orders)
• More water to be drunk instead of sugar laden soft drinks and beer
• Walking to and from work each day
• Take a walk every day at lunch time (rather than go to the pub)
• Teaming up with an old DJ friend to help carry his gear to gigs, which he has most weeks
• Hopefully take an occasional turn on the decks and get back into a bit of DJingDo a lot more dancing!

I’m not going it alone with this plan. My long-suffering girlfriend also has a few pounds to shed so she’ll be working with me.

So I’m optimistic that very soon I’ll be able to fit back into some of my old clubbing clothes and my embarassing little problem will go away. Bring on the glow sticks!

I first began to notice dampness in my trousers some weeks ago, on a night out with fellow members of the ABS, but I put it down to spillage and too much cider inside me (memories of that night are a little hazy). But then I began to notice the same unpleasant dampness in my underwear when I was at work and became a little concerned.

I don’t yet consider myself to be an old man (I’m in my thirties) so the apparent early onset of incontinence was bound to cause me some concern. But I noticed that the problem only occurred when I whistled, which I often do. When I was whistling a happy tune a small amount of wee would escape from my bladder and dampen the front of my trousers. Not good.

I deduced that there were two key factors contributing to this unwanted leakage. The first being a full bladder and the second being my whistling. And I whistle a lot. I whistle while walking down the road, driving in my car and often when I’m on my way to the men’s room with a full bladder and that is really when the problem becomes apparent.

So I popped along to see my doctor and his advice was simply ‘Don’t whistle’. Not really very helpful. But he did give me a thorough medical check, including my prostate, which I’m happy to report is apparently healthy and the correct size. His conclusion was that it may be due to the fact that I have gained around 28 pounds in weight since giving up my morning runs and he thinks that my weight gain may be at the root of my incontinence.

So I’m now on a strict diet and trying to get a bit more exercise and I’ve almost stopped whistling, except when I know that my bladder is completely empty.

The 25 year old, who has never had a job, was receiving disability benefit due to her weight which had reached 38 stone (532 pounds) by the time she was 20. She had a gastric bypass operation on the National Health Service in 2007 and has managed to reduce her weight to 22 stone (308 pounds).

When she received the notification that her Disability Living Allowance had been cut she is quoted as saying:

“That was the money I used to pay for the gym, pay for healthy food and have my hair highlighted”.

The morning after reading the report in the Brighton Argus my colleagues and I listened to Laura being interviewed by Neil Pringle on BBC Radio Sussex. He had nothing but sympathy for Laura who told the story of how she began to comfort-eat as a child when she was bullied at school. Mr Pringle suggested that there would be many people who would be unsympathetic to Laura’s plight. Something of an understatement.

I and my colleagues at work are nothing less than incensed by this woman’s laziness. None of us can afford the time or the cost of gym membership although we all work full time. None of us would expect to receive hand-outs from the government in order to have our hair highlighted. And Laura’s claim that the cut in her benefits means that she can’t afford to buy healthy food is complete nonsense. She has said that instead of buying low-fat weight-watchers crisps she is now forced to buy a cheaper, more fattening variety. Why is she buying crisps at all and since when did crisps, low-fat or otherwise, become part of a healthy, balanced diet?

Laura appears to be someone who has learned to be disabled instead of learning to stand on her own two feet. This state is supported by inappropriately sympathetic ninnies like Neil Pringle who choose to reinforce Laura’s view that she should be entitled to the financial benefits that she has been receiving. The time has come for this fat, lazy waste of space to wake up to the facts that she is personally responsible for her supposed disability, that losing weight and finding a job doesn’t require benefit payments and that crisps, chocolate and coca cola aren’t part of any healthy diet (the Argus report showed a picture of Laura holding a bottle of coke with chocolate and crisps at her side.)

In conversations with my colleagues over coffee we were particularly struck by the sad fact that we now live in a society where people, like Laura, can relinquish all responsibility for looking after themselves. Did our parents and grand-parents fight and die in horrible conflicts in order for Laura to complain when she no longer receives a hand out to spend on hair highlights? If we had the choice none of us would allow our hard-earned tax to go towards supporting Laura or anyone like her.

Our solution to Laura’s situation would be this: Firstly, provide her with some intense guidance in how to eat healthily and get plenty exercise on a budget. It can be done without the need for gym membership, low fat crisps or hair highlighting. Secondly, we would have Laura live alongside a normal, working 25 year old woman who she would shadow for as long as was needed. She would be required to get up in the morning at the same time, eat the same breakfast, go to work, take normal lunch breaks and manage her finances just the same as everyone else. It would be interesting to see if she complains about not attending the gym when she has been exhausted by a week at work.

Hopefully Laura will see that she is currently nothing but a burden on society and that she has not made enough of a contribution to feel that she should be entitled to the hand outs that she has been receiving. The time for her to wake up and take responsibility for what she puts into her mouth is long overdue.

Is it child abuse to feed a child until he or she is obese? Of course it is. Being a parent is a responsibility which many do not appear to have fully grasped. Perhaps imprisoning a few for setting their kids on a path towards heart disease, type 2 diabetes, premature death and a massive burden on the health service would make it more clear.

Example Setting
The problem is not the children, it is the fat, lazy parents. If the most significant person in a child’s life cannot display adequate self-control, if they persist in stuffing their fat faces with nothing but unhealthy food, slobbing out on the settee and never taking any exercise it’s not surprising that their offspring will follow their disgraceful example.

It is these examples set by parents that are the most influential in a child’s development. It’s no good if a parent tells a child that they mustn’t eat too much tempting but unhealthy food and then giving in to that temptation themselves.

Managing Temptation
We are all subject to the temptation presented by fast food, cakes, crisps and ice cream. Yet some manage to resist these temptations. It’s a parent’s responsibility to demonstrate self-control thereby encouraging their children to do the same. Children need to be taught that establishing good eating habits will help them to lead healthy, happy and complete lives, and parents who are not capable of doing this shouldn’t be parents.

Are you a child abuser?

I was prompted to carry out a small, unscientific survey of my students in class this afternoon. Of the 12 students who actually turned up today only 5 were actually brought up in the U.K. I asked them all if they had grown up with adequate outdoor play facilities and what they thought were the causes of todays obesity problems. Their responses were as follows:

• All of them stated that they had seen council run parks and play areas become run down and underused
• They all indicated that they would love make use of facilities if they were readily accessible
• They pretty much agreed that urban planning did make a significant difference to the amount of exercise and outdoor play that they experienced as children
• There was agreement that other technological and social factors are also contributing towards the currently expanding waist lines of our younger generation.

When asked ‘What would have encouraged you to play outdoors more’ they all said that safe, available space was the biggest and most significant factor. Several had grown up in flats with no gardens to themselves. They were reliant upon communal outdoor space and if their parents (or single parent) were anxious about them ‘playing out’ they would be kept indoors.

Providing an environment in which young people can grow, learn, interact and develop lifelong healthy habits is a responsibility that the older, decision-making, urban planning generation need to take very seriously.

We here at Amateur Brain Surgery think that the visual warning system should be extended even further. Food packaging has been required to tell us how much fat, salt, lead and heavy-metals are in our foods for some time. But who actually reads these labels? In fact, who actually reads at all? Some supermarkets have been trying a simple traffic light indicator system to tell shoppers which food products are the most healthy. The supermarket accurately recognised that it is only the Guardian reading middle classes who can actually read and therefore everyone else needs simple stop or go instructions presented pictorially. Why not take a few snapshots of the ‘typical’ consumers of various foods and present these images on the packaging. Those shoppers who aspire to become (or already are) obese, crisp-noshing burdens on the national health system would quickly be able to recognise the foods that would best support their aim.

And what about alcohol? A few choice images on the back of various alcopop bottles accurately reflecting the state that some people get into after over-consumption may go some way towards dissuading the ever-so-slightly more sensible from over-imbibing. The image of a young girl getting shagged up against the wall of a rancid toilet cubicle whilst puking down the back of her young casanova would be one picture that I would use. Another would be of a young man getting his face stitched back on after being glassed in a booze fuelled punch-up at a club. Forewarned is forearmed. But would anyone actually take any notice?