Of all Johannesburg’s perils, the one they don’t warn you about is chubbiness. There are alarms, sensors and panic buttons for the house, the car, the office, the garden, but nothing, no siren, no flashing lights, to signal your expanding self.
The trouser tightening can be explained away at first — the washing machine set at too high a temperature? — but as the months pass you move down one hole on the belt, then another, and another, until the scales are summoned to confirm that the pounds have indeed piled.
You might expect it in New York, home of Godzilla portions, or Belfast, capital of post-pub fry-ups, but Johannesburg, surely, should be slim city. All those parks and balmy days, tennis courts, swimming pools, fresh fruit and vegetables, a lifestyle amounting to one long health kick.
Fat chance.
Expatriates lament the havoc wreaked on waistlines after just a few months. Where, they ask jiggling their spare tyres, did these come from?
For the affluent, a South African diet is not meagre; shun dessert and you get scolded, ask for an iced coffee and you get a pint milkshake.
One of the main reasons for turning lumpy seems to be a fear of crime.
Two friends who went out for a bike ride ended up in a shootout with four alleged muggers, one of whom died, landing the cyclists in court yesterday on a murder charge.
Hear enough stories like that and you see why activities that burn up calories, such as cycling or putting one foot in front of the other, become a memory.
It may be a beautiful day, jacaranda blooming, birdsong in the air, the shops a 10-minute stroll. No matter: to the shops you will drive. Visit a friend in the neighbourhood, pop to the post office, go anywhere in fact, you will drive.
Your car’s air-conditioning may be broken, the exhaust trailing on the ground, the windscreen smashed, flames leaping from the engine, a black mamba on the passenger seat, and you will drive.
At least this has been my explanation for the chubbiness.
It has been endorsed by a physiotherapist friend, Lorraine, an Afrikaner woman with a unique way of viewing the evolution of post-apartheid South Africa.
Before 1994 children tended to be fit and active, she said. They ran in the streets and the parks, they cycled, they walked to school.
”But when the crime started getting really bad the whites got frightened and wouldn’t allow their kids to play outside the house. The kids were driven everywhere.”
And so bloomed a new market for Lorraine’s skills: fat children, uncoordinated children, weak and underdeveloped children, all in need of physiotherapy.
A three-year study conducted by clothing chains and the Universities of Stellenbosch and Potchefstroom confirmed that South African children were getting bigger, and that stoutness was particularly common among the affluent.
For the first time Lorraine is now treating significant numbers of black children. ”Not the township ones, they’re still exercising and don’t need the likes of me. It’s the children of the elite, ferried around in BMWs, never walking anywhere, who need me.”
If children’s speedy metabolisms cannot cope with the lifestyle it is no wonder so many adults lose the battle of the bulge.
Those who win tend to be the fanatics endlessly ”spinning” on a stationary bike or ploughing through a pool.
For this challenge, as for so many others, South Africans find inspiration in Nelson Mandela. In his tiny cell on Robben Island he stayed fit by jogging on the spot every morning. – Guardian Unlimited Â