Love Your Fat Self

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Conflating obesity with laziness or stupidity is an inaccurate habit of linking a physical trait, in this case fatness, with personality. This is equivalent to believing that all smokers or anorexics are incompetent. Just the fact that someone is genetically predisposed to fatness and struggles with the complex psychological implications of food and body image does not disqualify her from being brilliant, talented, and effective. As obvious as this sounds, many of the health professionals I spoke to about this issue aired an unmistakable tone of disdain for fat patients. While they were able to empathize with women who undereat, the idea of over­eating sent them into a dispassionate laundry list of how to decrease input and increase output—as if people were machines.

As a society, we seek answers: black-and-white declarations, either-or cures. Fatness is not so simple. Gareth is fat because she has a genetic predisposition to fat, because she grew up with a father who sells chocolate for a living and often showed his affection through tarts and candy bars, because her mother—however well-intentioned she was—restricted Gareth’s food and, as a result, made love feel conditional. She is fat because she is fascinated by food, generously cooks for others, and enjoys a good hamburger. She is fat because she refuses to live a watered-down life—cutting out carbs or sugars or meat, becoming one of those difficult dinner guests or boring picnic companions—so that she can be thin. She is fat because, like so many of the rest of us, she sometimes uses food to fill an emotional void. She is fat because she lives in an age when advertising preys on every potential craving, insecurity, and discomfort.

Most programs designed to curb obesity neglect the complicated causes of fat. Janell Lynn Mensinger, a psychology professor and expert on both eating disorders and obesity in women, has been continually frustrated by medical doctors’ culturally ignorant, gender-blind, and usually unsuccessful interventions to reduce obesity. “There is such an emphasis on the body as this biological organism that must be controlled in a completely medical way,” she explains. “Emotions get completely pushed aside because most physicians have very little psychological training.”

At a recent conference on pediatric obesity, Mensinger sat next to a tiny black exercise physiologist who was lamenting the low success rate of programs meant to teach children to maintain a healthy weight. Mensinger recalls that “she segued right into talking about how she used to be a size nine and now she is a size five, thanks to two hours a day of rigorous exercise. She acted like size nine was an atrocity! And this is [a person with whom] obese children from poor backgrounds are supposed to identify?”

There is only one rational reason to fear fatness: health risks. The other reasons, which play unconscious and insidious roles in our negative perception of fat people, are profoundly American. Obesity is rampant in the heartland of America, in the sprawling suburbs of the Midwest and the South, the farm towns of Texas. But it is rarely admitted that our struggle over the meaning of fat is at the heart of our national identity.

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