Tag Archives: dieting

Body Shaming Is Abuse

drawing of women with different bodies; banner says Health is SelfLove

Laurie and Debbie say:

Sarah Miller writes about her struggles with her body in a New York Times article called “The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me and It Will Never Let Me Go.” She doesn’t say how old she was when she dieted seriously for the first time, but she tells a very familiar story:

Every person I talked to was now two people, the one who was nice to me because I was thin, and the person who had been mean to me when I was fat. I was also two people: the fat person who felt like everyone was better than me, and who was so scared to walk across a room, or even stand up, and now, the thin person, who did not know how to manage the exhilaration of suddenly not feeling that way, and of sometimes even feeling superior to people.

All “successful” dieters know this feeling. Before even getting there, Miller recites a litany of ways people were cruel to her, and ways the cruelty continued even after she “felt thin.” The word she never uses, even when she is describing a long continuum of completely normalized viciousness is “abuse.” Yet, clearly, she not only was abused, she did what so many abused people do: she internalized the abuser.

Then the movement she calls “body positivity” came along:

Suddenly, about a decade ago, when I started to notice that fat women were a) calling themselves fat, with pride, and b) walking down the streets of our nation’s great cities nonchalantly wearing tight or revealing clothing with a general air of, “yeah I will wear this and I will wear whatever I want, and I am hot, too, I will be hot forever, long after you have all died,” I thought to myself, Oh my God WHAT? The solution is not … the diet?

I started seeing fat, beautiful models and actresses in catalogs, and on television shows. I would like to have seen more, but I was pleased to see them at all. I was and remain in awe of their confident beauty. I feel tenderness for them as well, for what they endured, and still endure, to achieve it. I sometimes choke up with love for them, and for the idea of how I could have lived if I had allowed myself to just weigh what I weighed.

So what kept her from doing just that, allowing herself to just weigh what she weighs? She certainly sounds like she is — extremely understandably — far less worried about how much she weighs than she is about being the target of mean people’s nasty comments. To weigh what she weighs, to stop going to Weight Watchers, to inhabit her own body, would be to say “I am fine as I am and if you are mean to me about how I am, the person who should be ashamed of themselves is you.”

But she has no support to go there, because “body positivity,” however admirable the original idea may have been, has been taken over by the advertising industry, the “beauty” industry and, to use her own words, the diet-industrial complex. Those groups, of course, cannot in any way encourage you to be fine as you are: you always need to be buying something, striving toward something, needing something. And since what she needs is reassurance, peace of mind, and real self-acceptance, she’s on a path that constantly moves her away from her real needs.

Worse, she has let the drumbeat of constant reiterative criticism convince her that she must stay on that path:

Even if by some miracle I were to accept being not thin, as I have many times — for five or 10 minutes or three whole days like when I finished Lindy West’s excellent memoir, “Shrill,” and naïvely thought I had finally been cured of my sickness — I would remain the sort of person destined for re-infection.

That person is always prepared for contempt from men who don’t find her physically attractive, and has been on high alert to general woman hatred since she was 4. (Honestly, I pity the women who are not.) At any rate, I’m 50 and I am way too scared of the world to stop dieting.

What is there to “pity” about women who are not on high alert to general woman hatred? Does she mean that it’s a bad thing to walk through the world without knowing who hates you? (If so, we agree.) Or does she mean that you have to spend your life trying to get them not to hate you, so you can feel okay about yourself? (If so, that’s really awful.)

She isn’t asking for advice, and she doesn’t seem to have any hope. She’s comfortable saying that her entire generation (she is 50) cannot be any happier in their bodies, or less attuned to outside virulence than they currently are. Even after having read Lindy West (and presumably others), she does not seem to realize that there are paths outside the mainstream narrative: there are therapists who will actually help you learn how to reduce the impact of haters in your life; there are support groups who will offer a corrective to the voices you avoid by repeating the things you need to hear; there are friends who not only can love you as you are, but can model blocking your ears to hatred.

Sarah Miller, you are not beyond hope. And don’t write off your age group.

Follow Debbie on Twitter.

 

Everything We Know About Obesity Is Still True

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copyright (c) Laurie Toby Edison

Debbie says:

When you’ve been doing the same activist work for thirty years and more, it’s hard not to be all “Oh, well, here we are again” when someone new comes out with a hard-hitting article that says all the things you’ve been saying for years.

At the same time, each of these new articles is fresh to the writer, and fresh to many of its readers, and makes a dent in the walls around your ideas. So after one deep sigh, I really welcome Michael Hobbes’ “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong,” published in the Huffington Post.

Hobbes starts with what he calls “scientific myopia,” a quick review of how hard it is to get scientists to step away from their dominant paradigm, and then goes on to make his key point: “Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.”

After that, the piece follows what fat activists will recognize as a familiar path: how much social prejudice against fat hurts people, how diets don’t work — I wish he had credited Gina Kolata’s 11-year-old landmark book, Rethinking Thin, which I reviewed as “old news” when it was published — and then gets to his first core point, which is that fat and health are not inextricably entwined. I see that every time I go to the doctor, and the medical tech is slightly surprised at my perfectly reasonable blood pressure, which goes hand in hand with my perfectly reasonable cholesterol numbers. However, Hobbes is good and clear on these points:

individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.

He doesn’t mention the famous “nurses’ study,” which demonstrated that “moderately obese” people live longer than people whose weight is “normal” or “appropriate.”

Next on the roadmap of this kind of article is the issue of medical misuse and abuse, beginning with a profile of a fat victim. Again, Hobbes is clear-eyed and thoughtful:

Doctors have shorter appointments with fat patients and show less emotional rapport in the minutes they do have. Negative words—“noncompliant,” “overindulgent,” “weak willed”—pop up in their medical histories with higher frequency. In one study, researchers presented doctors with case histories of patients suffering from migraines. With everything else being equal, the doctors reported that the patients who were also classified as fat had a worse attitude and were less likely to follow their advice. And that’s when they see fat patients at all: In 2011, the Sun-Sentinel polled OB-GYNs in South Florida and discovered that 14 percent had barred all new patients weighing more than 200 pounds.

Hobbes gives lots of examples of how doctors misuse fat patients, and how they are taught to do so. None of it is new, but all of it is useful fuel for the fire. Then he goes on to the mental, emotional, and social toll all of this takes on fat people, again with real-life stories and useful statistics, and the obligatory quotations from therapists who work with fat patients.

The only place he goes off the rails is in his — often true — argument that

perhaps the most unique aspect of weight stigma is how it isolates its victims from one another. For most minority groups, discrimination contributes to a sense of belongingness, a community in opposition to a majority. Gay people like other gay people; Mormons root for other Mormons. Surveys of higher-weight people, however, reveal that they hold many of the same biases as the people discriminating against them. In a 2005 study, the words obese participants used to classify other obese people included gluttonous, unclean and sluggish.

Of course, this happens. But I personally know so many groups in which fat women gather to discuss our experiences, and to fight the system together, so many blogs, so many websites, so many meetups. I’m sad that Hobbes didn’t find any counterexamples to his theory, and I don’t think he looked very hard. I’d be curious about whether that 2005 study (which, by the way, looked at only 46 people!) would be different in 2018.

Then, he goes to some of the real scientific roots of both increased obesity and increased health issues which don’t relate to weight: issues of the food system. The only thing in the article which surprised me was his claim that people who eat nuts four times a week have statistically significantly lower diabetes incidence and lower mortality. More nuts for me!

And finally,

Our shitty attitudes toward fat people. According to Patrick Corrigan, the editor of the journal Stigma and Health, even the most well-intentioned efforts to reduce stigma break down in the face of reality. In one study, researchers told 10- to 12-year-olds all the genetic and medical factors that contribute to obesity. Afterward, the kids could recite back the message they received—fat kids didn’t get that way by choice—but they still had the same negative attitudes about the bigger kids sitting next to them. A similar approach with fifth- and sixth-graders actually increased their intention of bullying their fat classmates.

And here he does get to fat activism, although he still doesn’t seem to see that fat activism requires that fat activists like each other and work together. His fat activism quotations are mostly from a journal editor; I’d love to know how many fat activists he spoke to. I’m right here, and I’m hardly alone!

I salute Michael Hobbes for researching and writing this article. I hope thousands of people see it and lots of people share it and discuss it. And I long for the day when the next one of these isn’t in the pipeline somewhere, because the point has been made.

Follow me on Twitter @spicejardebbie . Thanks to @ribbonknight for tweeting this link out.