IN A WEEK in which sober headlines dominated the news, “Snaps that stretch the truth” stood out like a beacon.
A digital camera has been launched with a “slimcam” setting. Flick a switch and it alters the image so that a woman drops as much as a dress size and men’s love handles are miraculously squished away.
A spokeswoman from the electrical chain store Comet claimed that the photography of self-delusion is set to become wildly popular.
Self-delusion about body size is nothing new. In fact, it’s second nature. Given a set of photos, which ones do we pick to send to our friends? The ones that present us at our slimmest and most attractive, of course. The negatives of those that present reality — er, those “taken at an unfortunate angle” — are destroyed.
We might laugh about this, but there’s a lot of evidence that our perceptions of body size are dangerously deluded and leading us to a future of chronic ill health.
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There is a substantial amount of research showing that overweight people are not able accurately to assess their size, protesting that they are the right weight. Second nature again? Only partly. If people are asked to judge whether others are a healthy weight, they consistently get that wrong as well, judging even those with a body mass index (BMI, the ratio of weight to height) which puts them in the obese category, as normal.
We do this because our perception of normality is out of whack where weight is concerned. We judge ourselves and others by what we see every day. And because we’ve all got so much heavier, bigger is the new normal.
This concept of what constitutes normality is something I’ve been exploring in a new series for Radio 4 called Am I Normal?, which starts next week. The first programme is on weight. I discovered that we are even worse at judging whether our children are fat or not. As one contributor told me: “If parents think that their children are overweight, you can be sure that they are actually obese.”
A curious fact is that mothers’ perception of obesity varies with gender. A study published in the Journal of Paediatrics, in 2003, showed that among mothers of overweight children, 14 per cent recognised their sons as too heavy, compared with 29 per cent recognition in daughters.
It’s not the camera that lies. Sadly, we’re the fibbers and slim-fast settings on cameras only encourage us.
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Am I Normal? BBC Radio 4, Tuesday, 8pm