Love Your Fat Self

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Paradoxically, we as a society make it a catastrophe to be fat, but we have little awareness of the pain of a woman like Gareth’s internal world. We dramatize fatness through news segments on the obesity epidemic, but our awareness of the emotional and psychological pain of fatness remains virtually nonexistent.

We are deathly afraid of fat. In some ways, we should be. According to the World Health Organization, there are 1 billion overweight and 300 million obese adults around the globe. Fatness is linked to an increased risk for heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and some forms of cancer. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), health care costs for treating diseases associated with obesity are estimated at more than $100 billion a year and rising, just within the United States (inexplicably, the NIH spends just 2 percent of its annual budget on obesity research). The physical, psychological, and economic implications of widespread obesity are undeniably frightening.

There is evidence, though, that our approach to fatness is as unhealthy as fatness itself. In an ELLEgirl poll of 10,000 readers, 30 percent said they would rather be thin than healthy. Dieting is ineffective 95 percent of the time. That means, in America alone, we pump some $40 billion a year into a crapshoot industry with only a 5 percent chance of payoff. Besides being hard on our pocketbooks, dieting is hard on our bodies and hard on our psyches. Many women are pushed to use diet pills that damage their organs; 23-year-old Janet admits, “Even after my friend had a ministroke from taking ephedra, I sometimes wonder if I can search the Internet and find some on the black market. Crazy, right?”

Political scientist J. Eric Oliver, an expert in obesity, argues in his 2005 book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic that the health risks of obesity have been grossly exaggerated. Being fat, he maintains, is not equivalent to being unfit. Fitness, not weight, is actually the most accurate measure of a person’s health and life expectancy. Even a group of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledge that “evidence that weight loss improves survival is limited.”

Thirty-five percent of those who diet go on to yo-yo diet, dragging their bodies through a cycle of weight gains and losses; 25 percent of those who diet develop partial- or full-syndrome eating disorders. As the mindfulness expert Susan Albers writes: “The dieting mind-set is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body’s only line of communication with your head.” There is little hope for long-term improvement in health when this vital line is severed.

In fact, studies show that prolonged weight loss is more often the result of psychological work. In a two-year study conducted by nutrition researchers at the University of California, Davis, behavior change and self-acceptance were far more effective in achieving long-term health improvements in obese women than America’s most lucrative scam: dieting.

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