firecat | Anti-omgbeeesity rhetoric take-down

Crossposts: http://firecat.livejournal.com/813930.html

Anti-omgbeeesity rhetoric take-down

Writer Barbara Kay is known for her controversial and conservative editorials. I found myself writing a take-down of her editorial saying that it's beneficial and right to negatively judge fat people, and commenting on the editorial is now closed, so I decided to post it here. I'm going to break the url to her post because I don't want a linkback.

http :// fullcomment nationalpost com/2013/09/11/barbara-kay-fat-acceptance-is-not-the-answer-to-obesity/

In a perfect world, body size wouldn’t matter. We’d be attracted to people for their character alone.

That's not my perfect world. My perfect world is where people are attracted to other people for all sorts of reasons, including their bodies, but people's attractions would be much more varied than they are in this world, and not everyone would focus only on the body and only on a particular body type.

Alack and alas, our world is far from perfect. Ours is not a cover-up world either. Flesh-baring, form-hugging clothes are the fashion norm. Great for thinnies, not so much for fatties.

This is a strange use of the word "world." Is it really true that all 8 billion people on the planet prefer flesh-baring and form-hugging clothes? Or is "world" being used to mean "middle-class Americans" or "what I see in fashion magazines" as too often occurs?

It also assumes that all thin people derive benefit from baring themselves and no fat people do.

People with a tendency to put on weight are doubly unlucky in our era. They’re pariahs in, on the one hand, a youth and fitness-obsessed culture that prizes bodily perfection, with unrealistic standards of slenderness, and at the same time are constantly tortured by a society fixated on food, much of it cheap, fattening, seductively marketed and readily available 24 hours a day.

This isn't really about "luck," it's about prejudice and oppression. And I'm kind of puzzled by the fantasy that people with a tendency to put on weight (I guess what is really meant is "adults who gain weight as they age"; if no one put on weight, we'd all weigh the same as a zygote) are "tortured" by society's advertising of food. Furthermore, I'm puzzled by the notion that only people who "put on weight" are tortured. It seems to me that in this culture, plenty of thin people are also tortured by the way food is marketed and fear of gaining weight.

We pay lip service to the notion that we shouldn’t be biased against people because of their size. But most of us are. Even some professionals tasked with helping them.

Many people are biased against people because of their size, including professionals. I find very little lip service to the contrary.

A study by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, published online in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, suggests that professionals who deal with the obese are often themselves biased. Researchers surveyed 329 mental health specialists, seeking their views on causes of obesity, as well as attitudes and compliance amongst their patients. They found that respondents felt many practitioners in the field hold negative stereotypes of fat people or feel uncomfortable treating them or lack confidence in obese patients’ ability to lose weight or comply with treatment.

This is true.

In addition, the study found that 16% of those surveyed think the obese have no willpower; 15% that they are self-indulgent; 24% that they are unattractive; and 50% that they are insecure.

Disgusting.

The researchers seem gloomy about these figures, but unless they were hoping for zero bias – which would be totally unrealistic – these figures are reassuringly low. Professionals are not immune from our culture’s near-religious worship of minimalist beauty.

Well. I disagree that the figures are "reassuringly low." It's true that professionals aren't immune to cultural bias. That's a good reason to try to reduce cultural bias.

Obesity is a class issue, like tobacco. People in every class used to smoke, rich and poor, educated and non-educated alike. But when tobacco was conclusively linked to disease, more and more educated people stopped, until the image of smokers reached a tipping point, and went from “cool” to “loser.”

Tobacco was not "linked to" disease, the way obesity is "linked to" disease. Smoking tobacco has been proven conclusively to cause disease. This is not true of obesity. Also, quitting smoking has been shown to reduce disease. Losing weight has not been proven to reduce disease permanently. Also most people can't permanently lose weight.

That said, the linkage between smoking and disease probably wasn't the reason that fewer middle-class people smoke than before. Most people don't really care whether an activity is linked to disease or not. The reason was that smoking was banned from most buildings, and that smoking smells bad to people who are not smoking.

Today, smokers are openly disdained amongst white-collar people; the relatively few smokers in that demographic meekly endure public contempt for their moral weakness.

True, and it's wrong to condemn smokers, although it's OK to ban the behavior of smoking from areas where other people might be exposed to second-hand smoke.

Only blue-collar smokers enjoy their vice without shame. Nobody blames health professionals for their negative attitudes to smokers.

[I hope someone will provide a class-based critique of that first sentence.]

If health professionals have a negative attitude toward smokers, I absolutely blame them for it. There's a difference between thinking that smoking causes disease and thinking that smokers suck. Health professionals are responsible for letting people know that smoking increases their health risks, and for helping people connect with ways of quitting smoking, since it is possible for many people to quit smoking. End of story.

Smokers are a burden to the health system, and doctors rightly resent spending time and expertise helping people whose health problems are self-inflicted and amenable to improvement with applied self-discipline.

Um, wow. So doctors only want to treat people who are deemed to have "self-discipline" and whose health problems have nothing to do with their behavior? And this is actually OK with you? I hope you never get a disease that has anything to do with your behavior, like knee problems for example. After all, if you just lay in bed 24 hours a day you wouldn't develop knee problems. You were probably out walking and using those knees. We have every right to resent treating you.

What does being "a burden to the health system" mean, anyway? Is the health system supposed to be reserved only for a particular subset of people? Today it's fat people who are a burden, and if you think fat people are icky and you're not fat, maybe you don't care about that. But if we go on believing that health care is only for the deserving, who's to say that tomorrow "the deserving" won't be deemed as "those under the age of 30" or "people with blue eyes"?

How about entertaining the notion that health care is for everyone?

So why should we expect health professionals who oversee obese people to be non-judgmental at heart?

Because we aren't paying health professionals to judge our characters, and we aren't paying health professionals to be resentful of people they are treating. If they resent it, they should go into a different profession.

Because obesity has not been proven to cause disease.

Because if obesity causes disease, it only causes disease in the person who is fat, not in people around that person.

Because obesity is not a behavior, and smoking is.

There is no such thing as Smokers Studies in the universities, but there is a “discipline” called Fat Studies, a spin-off from Women’s Studies. In Fat Studies, participants speak of “thin privilege” and “sizeism” and “fatism” as though the prejudice against fat people were a form of oppression tantamount to racism. They play down obesity as a health issue.

That's because smoking is a behavior and being fat is a trait, and Fat Studies / Women's Studies are about traits that are subject to prejudice, because those studying these things think such prejudice is wrong and want to figure out how to stop it.

If the best you can do against this notion is to put mockery quotes around some of the terms used, your argument that there's something wrong with it is weak.

As for playing down obesity as a health issue, you quoted a Rudd Center study, which is about how obesity makes it difficult to obtain nonprejudiced health care. That's in the field of Fat Studies. Guess they're tackling obesity as a health issue after all.

Our culture is obsessed with beauty, and shouldn’t be. It’s very tough to be genetically unlucky, desperate to meet the standards of elites that are impossible for certain body types. But fat acceptance is not the answer. Not everyone can be thin, but just about everybody can avoid being obese.

It's not true that just about everybody can avoid being obese. But given that a lot of people believe it's true, Fat Studies is helpful to trying to figure out how to disabuse people of this notion. Here's a start: Given that fatness is so reviled, and given that people generally want to be liked, if it were possible for everybody to avoid being obese, wouldn't a lot fewer people be obese? Sure, maybe a few misanthropes would stay fat, but most people would put out whatever minimal effort you imagine it is to maintain a lower weight, for the same reasons that they put out the minimal effort of getting their hair styled and bathing frequently.

Yet the majority of people in the US are labeled overweight or obese. If most people have no trouble bathing and getting their hair styled, but the majority of people are fat, perhaps it's not so easy to get thin if you aren't that way naturally.

Therefore, health professionals who judge their patients are doing them a favour.

This assumes that a health professional's judging a fat patient causes that person to lose weight. Health professionals have been judging fat patients since at least the turn of the 20th century, but there are more people labeled fat than there used to be. Compare this to other results in health care. There are fewer people dying of infectious diseases. People with conditions such as cancer and heart disease are living longer. Seems like the judging is not working as well as most health interventions. (In fact there are studies that show people who feel judged are more likely to gain weight, not lose it.)

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Whilst I do think that there's a range of "normal" weights, with people placing at different points within it, I also wonder how diet could perhaps skew more people toward being thin (by which I mean, preventing people from ever reaching their normal weight if it's at a heavier point). A typical diet in the US, for example, is really different from a typical diet in China, and I think that is one factor in play. I grew up pretty well-off in China, so I wasn't deprived of things food-wise, really, but I gained a ridiculous amount of weight after going to the US because of, for one, how much more meat I was eating. So something like the much cheaper price of meat in the US + not having an abundance of cheap protein alternatives like tofu and its many derivatives (right now I eat meat about once a week but eat tofu or a derivative pretty much every day; the latter is much much cheaper than the former) could be contributing to why more people in the US are fat comparatively. But I know that in both cases there's a class issue at work, too: being able to buy large amounts of meat is only possible for middle-class people here, whilst fresh vegetables are in abundance and much more accessible to poor people; the reverse is true in the US (with processed, non-nutrient-rich food added to the mix for poor people). Then there's also the issue of portion sizes being a lot smaller here, with sweets especially being tiny and also a lot less sweet/sugary than they are in the West. I'd like to see people harping on about ~the obesity epidemic~ recognize things like this more.

Why does it matter if more people in the US are fat comparatively?

It doesn't! I was just wondering about the effect of different diets on weight, especially since that forms a part of my personal experience. If what I said is offensive in any way, I sincerely apologize!

Edited 2013-09-14 12:04 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining. No offense taken.

I think this has been seen in native cultures that move to the US... the change in diet (due to different food availability) does cause them to put on more weight.

I confess, this is of interest to me because I'm not bothered by fat per se, but I do find alterations in body weight to be of interest, especially in the face of a person's feeling that nothing much has changed. A person who used to eat one way, and was stable at 145-165 who eats more or less the same way (same number of meals and snacks) is at 185, well, that's a difference. And I'd like to know why, especially if the person isn't stable at 185, after a long time of being stable in a 20 pound range.

I suppose in some ways this can make me part of the problem. But, for example, I saw a recent article that says lab animals have been gaining weight, which shouldn't be happening absent some fundamental change, and that also makes me twitch. I don't want to ignore the possibility of a pollutant causing weight gain due to something else that's actually harmful. An obvious example is if the change in weight is due to increased insulin resistance - insulin resistance is harmful, not because it increases weight, but because it increases blood sugar levels to potentially harmful levels (which can become self-sustaining by killing off insulin producing cells).

It would be very helpful to know all the things that cause weight to change and to be able to think clearly about such things without "fat=scary, fat people=monsters, epidemic=grant $$$" clouding our collective societal vision.

Yeah, part of the reason behind my original comment was that I don't see people crusading against the "obesity epidemic" ever address things like diet, availability of food, class differences in weight ranges, etc. Instead, it's fat people's fault that they are fat, because if some people can be skinny, then of course the system is flawless.

My perception is that there's a strong tie-in between the crusaders and the anti-Big-Food people arguing that corporate food makes people fat. But many of those people don't address the class issues or think that it's a simple matter of informing poor people that sweetened soda has a lot of sugar in it.

I forgot about the anti-Big-Food people, but yeah, they tend to address only the symptoms and not the structural causes (unsurprisingly, since iirc most of them are privileged middle class people).

Meat is cheap in the US (disclosure: I live there)? Oh. My. God. I'd hate to know what it must cost in China.

From what I remember, yeah. At least I remember value packs of chicken wings and drumsticks for really cheap, though I haven't looked at those prices in a long time and prices have gone up since then. But I recall watching something that said meat (not like prime cuts, just meat in general) in the US is cheaper than in a lot of other countries, including European ones, and when I lived in the UK, a Chinese friend of mine told me that she bought chicken wings a lot because it was cheaper there than they are in China.

Hmm, actually, we bought half a chicken earlier this week for 14rmb and it was going for 24rmb per kilo. So that would be like paying $10.90 per pound for a whole chicken, which, if memory serves correctly, is something closer to the price of prime cuts in the US. And that was at the farmers' market, which is cheaper here than supermarkets.

Decent whole chicken (we also have hideous low-quality "fryers" here which are smaller and much cheaper) goes for $5-$7 per lb. where I live, so I guess we're not too far behind China. Meat and produce have been prohibitively expensive for the last 10 years or so, especially compared to the lower prices I was used to paying my whole life in NY (I live in mid-FL now, where for some reason decent food is not just harder to find but much more expensive when you do find it).

Edited 2013-09-15 02:26 (UTC)

Well, haha, the half-chicken we bought would be pretty small by US standards (though tbh idk if what we bought is a young chicken or not), but my experience has also been that even food in the US is huge. Like, I remember nectarines and peaches in the UK being really small compared to those in the US. There may have been bigger ones in places I didn't look, but I don't remember ever seeing ones that small in the US.

$5-$7 is still quite a bit cheaper, especially since meat is sold by weight!

A USAmerican friend of mine brought up the existence of food deserts when we were talking about this, so that may play a role in things, too. I don't think they really exist here.

Only blue-collar smokers enjoy their vice without shame.

Blue collar smokers do not "enjoy their vice without shame". Instead, they externalise whatever shame they feel for behaviours which have been deemed socially unacceptable in a highly class-related exercise of defiance, utilising middle-class reticence to effectively "shame" middle-class moralists into silence. The thinking is less an exercise of strong self-image than one of complying with negative class-based stereotypes.

Effectively, if you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, may as well "do" and enjoy it.

Thanks.

Only blue-collar smokers enjoy their vice without shame.

I'd love to know where the author gets her information from. Falling within or even under "blue-collar" income levels most of the time as I do, I can safely say I have never, ever enjoyed my vice "without shame". Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but maybe I'm not. I have a hard time believing the author actually knows more than I do on this topic (I've smoked for, uh, almost 30 years now, encompassing three whole decades, one of which was not per se such a "shameful" environment for smokers as the one we're in now, which started pushing us out of the way like the woeful miscreants we are back in the mid-90s or so).

I'd love to know where the author gets her information from.

Indeed, she seems to get most of her information from a place that isn't where people who live these experiences get most of theirs.

I don't want to break into a classist rant myself, but there is something to be said for someone from a different class (which I suspect she most definitely is) commenting on the lives of those in that "other" class as though they are knowledgeable of what our lives - and our *feelings* - are actually like. It's such bullshit.

You got it. She's all "Oh, those wild and free blue-collar people. So unlike educated and enlightened people who understand that policing other people's health is a beneficial activity."

I am in awe of you.

Thanks! That means a lot.

♥

♥ you

This is lovely, and something I should hand to my doctor. There are all kinds of studies about causes of obesity (bacteria, virus, genetics, etc.) but somehow that doesn't filter down to the annual physical checkup, which still preaches diet and willpower.

(And how did it escape that writer's attention that food is harder to avoid than drugs, as most people eat several times a day. Not to mention that unlike cigarettes, with their dire warnings and regulations, there is nothing to stop food manufacturers from loading foods with fat/sugar/high-fructose corn syrup/etc. and promoting them as "healthy".)

If you hand it to your doctor, I hope it helps.

Yeah, you can actually stop drinking any alcohol or stop smoking any cigarettes without dying.

Also, and I realise the author probably hasn't actually considered this one, but we do need food to live. Giving up food abruptly (quitting "cold turkey") generally is recognised as an expression of the lack of will to live and a psychiatric illness. Cutting back on food excessively is also considered a psychiatric illness. In the same way, people tend to also consider attempting to cut back abruptly on one's intake of things like air as a sign of major psychiatric difficulty.

Cutting back on food excessively is also considered a psychiatric illness.

Unless you're fat. Then it's considered improving your health through enviable willpower. Seriously, a lot of people don't understand that a person can be fat and also anorexic or bulemic.

Wow, she sounds just like Margaret Wente (who has not written on fatness, far as I know, but if she did, it would sound like this).

-J

Good, I will avoid her.

Wait, so I'm supposed to believe that this culture that is obsessed with beauty in an unhealthy way is doing a good thing for themselves by shaming and strongly enforcing the unhealthy standard? Someone did not think through their argument.

Well said!

I think she thinks she thought it through perfectly. It's the rest of us who are misguided and just Don't Understand. -graymalkin

Clearly. Although I still have trouble fighting out a logic chain that says something is bad and shouldn't be done, but then concludes that the very bad thing decried in the opening is something that is in fact good for everyone to do.

This is absolutely brilliant. I would love to see it published in as many venues as possible. It would be great if you could circulate it somehow, like sending a copy to blogs and newspapers. I'll bet a lot of people would have an epiphany from reading this: "My perfect world is where people are attracted to other people for all sorts of reasons." And your riff on the word "world." And all the other points you make so succinctly.

"...People whose health problems are self-inflicted and amenable to improvement with applied self-discipline" -- I often see skiing used as an example. A lot of forms of exercise and sports -- so very healthy and helpful in maintaining a svelte figure! -- can cause medical problems large, small, and chronic. Those skiers should have applied some self-disciple and abstained.

I didn't know about Fat Studies. How gratifying that it exists!

"Therefore, health professionals who judge their patients are doing them a favour." The woman is ignorant, illogical, and sadistic. Her thought process reminds me of Nazi ideology ("euthanasia" for the mentally ill, for example), and you know I don't use that word lightly.

"Only blue-collar smokers enjoy their vice without shame." I have only anecdotal evidence, and my sample comes from another culture (British). He's had blue-, white-, and khaki-(military) collar jobs, and he's smoked since he was 14 without shame. He would like to quit and has tried twice, without success, not because of shame but because he knows I hate the smell and he doesn't enjoy having to go outside to smoke.

On the cost of meat and class issues around food: The notion that eating less meat helps people lose weight has proved entirely untrue in my experience, both with other fat people and with my own body. My consumption of meat has declined steadily over the last 15 years, but my weight has steadily risen. For the last few years, I've had meat once or twice a month at most, partly because my chronic illness deprives me of the energy to cook and partly because meat is out of reach financially. My husband has been unemployed since 2010; our income has plummeted, and meat is off the menu. Farmers' market prices here are just as high as supermarket prices. (Mobility issues make it difficult to get to the farmers' markets anyway.)

I live in one of the most affluent and expensive cities in the US, but in a mixed community that includes a large amount of low-income subsidized housing. In other parts of the city, there are Whole Foods and other good-quality supermarkets galore. In my neighborhood, there is exactly one supermarket, and its produce and meat are consistently substandard -- virtually inedible. Practically everything is past its expiration date, including things like dairy, canned foods, and OTC medications. The people who live here are fortunate in that there are a lot of small halal butcher and grocery shops; if they had to depend on the supermarket, they'd have very poor-quality food indeed. As for me, I'm fortunate enough to be able to get my food delivered for free from a decent supplier -- but their food is expensive, and I can't afford their meat.

-graymalkin

Thank you!

Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight goes into a lot of detail about the similarities between Nazi ideology and how people talk about fat people today. It's one of those things that you can't unsee.

And I definitely think it's more complicated than less meat = less weight for everyone. However much PETA would like to convince us otherwise.

Excellent take-down.

There's the whole thing about how the comments in any article about feminism justify the existence of feminism. I'd argue that the articles about fat acceptance justify the existence of fat acceptance.

The fatties-are-expensive line of argument in particular bothers me, as it leads to a eugenics-style approach to who lives and who dies. I happen to have cost the health care system a lot of money for absolutely no lifestyle reason whatsoever; I rolled all 1s and got eaten by an angry gazebo. Some people I know are fat and have cost the system a lot of money. Some other people I know are thin and incredibly fit and engage in high-risk athletics and cost the system a lot of money. And we all deserve to be treated without prejudice. To argue otherwise separates the Worthy Sick from the Unworthy Sick and we might as well be back in the Victorian era.

Absolutely.

LOL, gazebo

I run the risk of costing the health care system a great deal of money because I lost a lot of weight and exercised.

Eep! What's going on?

Well, my boosting my health care regimen uncovered my fatigue issues, and that's led to a long adventure where it's looking - I hope! - like they'll do a cardiac cath and find something. Just that's a good bit of money right there.

If I'd just stayed miserable and failed to exercise, my heart might not be quite so strong, and I admit this is hypothetical, but it's likely that I would have been one of those statistics that read as "massive coronary in his 40s". Those tend to be surprisingly cheap, even if an autopsy is required.

I hope that the fatigue issues turn out to be easily treatable and affordable to you.

Yeah, I don't get how people can simultaneously believe "fatness costs the health care system so much money" and "fat people all die young."

Good post! I'm always amazed at how few articles or rants about overweight people being a burden on the health system take into account the affect of stress and other health issues on weight - it's quite often caused by other factors, not the cause of them!

I started life as a scrawny kid, a slender young adult, and later ... well, later I've gained quite a bit. After having some jobs and life situations that stressed me a great deal. I've had doctors tell me to join Weight Watchers (that was their only advice), at a time when I didn't live near a group and didn't have time for one because I was working and commuting long hours. I've had one send me to a nutritionist, and at that appointment wound up doing most of the talking with the nutritionist nodding her head. I know quite a bit about nutrition, my mild obesity is not a result of being ignorant about food. The last doctor who bugged me about my weight got fired - by me. I never went back. In fact now I take care of myself, without doctors, thank you.

I would think, since I still pay insurance premiums, that this constitutes the health system being a burden on me, not the other way around.

I would rather not deal with them, and their attitude about my weight is not the only reason I quit going. But it just all became futile. Them looking for problems caused BY weight, instead of focusing on what caused me to put on weight. As far as I'm concerned, outside of bypass surgery, doctors are pretty much useless when it comes to conquering weight. And I understand even bypass surgery (which I wouldn't want and I'm sure wouldn't qualify for, as I'm not that overweight) doesn't work permanently.

I find that when I can forget about food as a problem, and I can unstress for a while and just be myself, weight starts to come off entirely on its own. If a new stressor comes along? Oops, I go back up again. I see it as pretty simple and straightforward, and not even having that much to do with food. It's chemistry, and environment. Food and I are friends. No problem there, no addiction.

Smoking is an addiction, though, and I'm so grateful that my spouse, who has tried to quit over and over again for many years, has finally gone 1 month without a cigarette. I just hope it's not too late for him, health wise. But I feel very positive about that! :)

If you ever do need a doctor, you might be able to find one here: http://fatfriendlydocs.com

Not only does bypass surgery weight loss often come back after a few years, but bypass surgery causes malnutrition (that cannot be fixed by taking vitamins) and a host of other very serious side effects in a large percentage of patients.

I hope your spouse is able to continue without cigarettes!

Thank you! For the well wishes for my spouse and for the link! :)

good post. sometimes you just have to smack down the idiots.

Thanks, yeah...

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Anti-omgbeeesity rhetoric take-down

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