This interests me because I’ve come to the conclusion that on some deep level all those people recommending diets KNOW that diets don’t work. I just sat down and thought, why would a doctor, who presumably is smart enough to get that a 95-98% failure rate doesn’t make for a good treatment say, “This doesn’t work. Do it anyway.” Then I got it, they don’t expect weight loss, they are going for a much deeper kind of compliance–self-abasement of a deviant body type.

I’ve just been writing an essay (coming soon to my web page) on The Care and Feeding of Your New Obesity Epidemic. I never know what I really think till I start writing and while writing it I realized, it’s not about changing the weight of fat people–it’s about mortifying the flesh in the grand old tradition of starving, self-flagellation and hair shirts.

So when people tell us to “do something about our weight problem” they don’t so much mean that they expect a weight loss–they mean they want us to assume the proper posture of abject abasement and suffer for our excessive flesh. The ideal is that while the suffering will not necessarily cause the flesh to go away, it will turn us into more acceptable citizens with the proper negative attitude toward our bodies.

Weight loss surgery is the heroic version of mortifying the flesh–a sort of mutilation/vision quest for our current body-hating culture.