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Mortification of the Fleshiest
August 06, 2007
I've been alternately fuming and tearing my hair about the latest round of "what are we going to do about the fat people?" articles. It was kicked off by an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that suggests that people who hang out with fat people tend to get fatter, or -- as the pop media would have it -- "obesity is contagious." My first assumption was, "Hey, cool -- people who hang out with fat people realize that fat people can be healthy, happy, and physicially fit, so they stop being freaked out by and believing all the stereotypes about fat." This, however, does not seem to be the first assumption of the medicos or the pop media people. They're tearing their hair over "what are we going to do about the fat people?"
Well. Rome wasn't built in a day, and things that "everyone knows" aren't disproved in a week. I've been working on this one for quite a while now, like nearly 25 years, so my immediate expectations or suggestions are modest. Here are a few points I wish more people would get through their fat -- no, make that "skinny and undernourished" heads.
In popular discourse, the distinction between "fat" and "obese" tends to get blurred. One result is that statistics derived from studies of people who are, say, 100 pounds "overweight" are widely assumed to apply to people who weigh 10 or 20 pounds more than the insurance company charts say they should weigh. (A) The assumption is false, and (B) Haven't we learned yet to be a little critical of the insurance companies and the health-care industry in general? When "fat" is equated with "unhealthy," please make clear what is meant by "fat."
As a (recovering) compulsive eater, I'm here to tell you that a distinction needs to be made between what you weigh and what (and how) you eat. I got fat because I ate compulsively. Other compulsive eaters don't get fat, maybe because they throw up, or they exercise as compulsively as they eat, or some other factors are at work. There are plenty of thin and otherwise not-fat individuals out here whose consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables is minimal. Cigarette smoking is a time-tested way of curbing the appetite and keeping the weight down. If someone is fat because s/he sits in front of the TV or the computer all day, exercise will almost certainly help. If someone is fat because s/he routinely devours a half-gallon of ice cream, a box of cookies, or a loaf of bread at a single sitting, chances are excellent that something else is going on, and if the person is a kid the parents may be part of the problem.
Anorexia and bulimia may not be cause-and-effect related to "obesity," but they are part of the same big picture -- which is hard to see as long as eating habits and weight keep getting conflated. Anorexia and bulimia are also related to habitual weight-loss dieting: they're ways of beating the body into submission. With anorexia and bulimia, the body abuse gets out of the individual's conscious control. Anorexia, bulimia, and habitual weight-loss dieting affect primarily, though not exclusively, women. No understanding of them can be complete without considering the society's expectations of women and how individuals deal with those expectations.
After many, many years of experience and observation, both as a fat woman and as one who is now within the local norm for her age (mid-fifties), I'm convinced that for many secular types, including many liberal and progressive secular types, "fat" serves the function that "sin" does in other quarters. In this view, fat people need to be shown the error of their ways. They need to be saved -- for their own good, of course. Instead of Jesus, the solution is fresh fruits and vegetables. As a lesbian, I can't help wondering if fat people are the new homosexuals. Remember all those studies in the Bad Old Days that found correlations between being gay (the studies were nearly all done on men) and depression, suicide, and various forms of pathological behavior? Now it's obvious that those studies rarely considered the social factors, and that often the researchers found what they expected to find. And some people still think homosexuality is contagious!
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