Why Weight Watchers doesn’t deserve taxpayers’ money

Porky, flabby, lardy? Obese — and morbidly so? Yup. That’s us. We knew already that two out of three of us weigh more than is healthy, and last week the scales of shame revealed further cause for dismay: Britain has more obese girls under 20 than anywhere else in the West. Something, as the hand-wringers say, must be done.

And so the scene was set for the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) to bring out some advice. All of the guilty, they say — yes, two thirds of the population — should be sent to classes like Weight Watchers or Slimming World, with the tab of some £50 a head picked up by the NHS. Gob-smacked? Somebody should be.

Even if it worked, we couldn’t afford it; and such a scheme would not and could not work. The aim, says Nice, is for people to lose 3 per cent of their my body weight and keep it off; it seems not to trouble the advisers that if a morbidly obese woman of 18 stone were to lose 3 per cent of her body weight she would end up… morbidly obese.