Beating the scales with fishing

I went fishing last week, which is a big deal for me. I always squirmed at the sight of those bucketfuls of live bait, to say nothing of the thought of having to actually pick up the poor writhing shrimps and hook them from their butt onto the line.

Obesity is not about calories – people overeat for psychological reasons, not physical ones- Kristina Chetcuti

But now I’ve discovered there’s actually a mess-free kind of fishing: fly-fishing. As my fisher-friend explained to me in toddler-speak, with fly-fishing you forgo the wriggling worms for a €5 artificial fish (some use fake flies, hence the name). This is cast out to sea in all it’s glittery glory; the real fish out there think: ‘There’s a sexy one, let’s go’, and, all horny, they chase it till the end of the line, as it were.

Of course, it’s all about casting techniques, and as I had never even held a fishing rod in my life, I was hopelessly unsuccessful. The line did tug for one jubilant moment, only to pull up one turgid piece of moss. The fun ended when 20 minutes into the whole cast-reel-wait act, I lost my little impostor fish in the rocks below the sea at Ta’ Liesse.

It didn’t matter, for the whole activity triggered the happy hormones which of late had been on holiday, and I went back home rid of the black cloud which had threatened to take permanent residence over my head. It was then that I thought: perhaps, fly-fishing is the solution for the obesity crisis in Malta.

With our men topping the EU-27 scales, we have just won the gold award for the fat man of Europe. The life expectancy of approximately 77 years means most Maltese men spend at least half a century carrying a pregnant belly in front of them. So what’s fishing got to do with it? I know it’s odd, but bear with me.

Basically you’re standing there, doing nothing exercise-wise except toning the bicep muscles when casting the line. We’re therefore agreed that there’s not much calorie-burning going on.

But, here’s the clinch: obesity is not about calories. People overeat for psychological reasons, not physical ones. It’s to do with emotional states, unhappiness, anxiety and thinking about food as a friend and comforter rather than merely as useful fuel.

So what we really need is something which enhances our psychological state of mind.

I find it shocking that people commenting in vox pops last week clamoured for restaurants to put the calorie counts next to the items on the menu. God forbid the Health Ministry takes up these suggestions.

Eating out should be an enjoyable experience, not one which has ‘guilt’ written all over it under the guise of calorie figures. I suspect it’s the inner Catholic in us – we seem to think the only way we can improve any condition is by making sacrifices and feeling guilty forever and ever.

Let me here qualify what ‘eating out’ means. It certainly doesn’t mean parking your lardy bottom firmly on a seat at a McDonald’s table. Eating out has nothing to do with processed carbohydrates or pasti bil-krema washed down with fizzy drinks. These merely make us look like those fairytale wolves whose tummies get stitched up full of heavy round stones.

Sadly it’s not just the adults: have you noticed how many fat kids were waddling around the beaches this summer? They are not fat because their genes just made them that way – they’re fat because they are fed a great deal of fattening food which contains very little that is of any nutritional value: sugar-laden ‘juice’; batter-covered nuggets, and sweets doled out as treats.

Fatness – which is what we used to call ‘being overweight’ till we decided to go down the ‘politically correct’ road – is a problem found only in the prosperous, cake-guzzling carb-and-sugar-laden West. I never saw an obese Masai in Kenya.

Come to that, men with chafing thighs are quite rare in France too. Why? Because they know how to eat. They enjoy their rib-eye steak with a glass or two of wine and would never dream of guzzling down an unhealthy pint of cola with it.

Whatever mega-action plan the Health Ministry has in store for us, I hope it will be about making choices – not sacrifices – to start enjoying good food.

And I hope the importance of nurturing our emotional and psychological state will be factored in. Which brings me back to fishing, and my belief that it can help us tip the scales the other way round.

All we need is a rod and a toy fish; we take a brisk walk to reach the shore, and then unwind from life’s unsavoury moments. If we’re so lucky to catch a fish, then we can barbecue it and tuck in.

Sod the calories.

krischetcuti@gmail.com