How an Obsession with Obesity Turned Fat into a Moral Failing
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January / February 2008
by Hannah Lobel
Short of burning obese people in effigy, it’s hard to imagine how we could stigmatize fat more in this culture. Body hatred is regarded as a feminine virtue. An estimated 8 million Americans—a million of them men—already wrestle with eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia nervosa, the country’s deadliest mental illness.
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Last fall, the Ad Council and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services skipped the shaming tack and took a more enlightened approach with their latest “Small Steps” campaign, which offered encouragement to be more active. The ads even had a sense of humor: Two kids poked at a belly shed by someone walking on the beach; a man coaxed his dog away from a butt lost by someone playing with his kids in the park.
The health police weren’t laughing. The Associated Press parroted the backlash, noting that, while antismoking ads featured tumor-ridden corpses and antidrug public service announcements portrayed users wallowing in loserdom at their parents’ houses, the fat ads offered no horror or villains. “For example,” the AP relayed, “none have offered a surgeon’s view of fat, or dramatized a death from type 2 diabetes, or shown a person complaining about how a fat neighbor’s medical bills are costing taxpayers.”
Righteous myopia has a pathology of its own; it stems from our unyielding faith in self-determination and our quickness to judge others’ moral shortcomings. “While talk of the obesity epidemic is everywhere, honest conversation about our knee-jerk disdain for fat people is nowhere,” writes Courtney Martin in Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (see excerpt, p. 38).
And that is the real shame, because our inability to see past our obsession with fat is making things worse. We’re sending people into prisons of self-loathing that have them seeking refuge in yo-yo diets that feed a multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry but do nothing to keep the pounds off and, in fact, often contribute to health problems later. Our narrow vision has other side effects, too. As the Ecologist reported in 2006, there are other culprits—endocrine disruption caused by pollution, increasing sleep deficits, the surge in prescription drugs—that may be contributing to obesity, and we desperately need to be researching them.
The plain truth is that fat people make easy targets in public policy and debate, just as they do on the playground. And until we are able to view our bodies as something more than never-ending renovation projects, we won’t be able to make sense of our weight, no matter what the science tells us.
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