Tag Archives: weight

The “Before” Person and the “After” Person

Lynne Murray says

“I wish I could have seen that when I was 16,” my friend said when I showed her this short clip of a photographer taking “before and after” shots on the same day.

It still might not have saved her from forty years of diet madness.

As of 2007, Reuters estimated fat-fighting scams to be the most common form of fraud.

But knowing that one con artist or a thousand snake-oil salesmen deliberately lie won’t protect someone from the documented truth that the mainstream “legitimate” weight-loss industry has the roughly the same failure rate at attaining long-term weight loss as the outright criminal fraudsters.

We breathe in fatphobia with every exposure to mass media and doctors sometimes even demand weight loss before or in the place of attempting any other diagnosis or medical treatment.

The “before/after” photo layout usually contains outright fraud of one kind or another. But the very before/after format itself damages our view of our bodies even when not perpetrated by pure scam artists using photo tricks and Photoshop effects.

The same damage is done by giant diet corporations who recruit celebrities for short term weight loss marathons and discard them when they regain the weight.

The before/after photos successfully demonstrate the fatphobic attitude they wish to reinforce. They install the buttons they will press to wring dollars out of their victims. They also set up a scenario for the viewer to follow. The mindset they try to create owes a lot to the religious conversion experience.

In the before photo, the (sinner or) before person shows a miserable expression, clearly a soul tortured and tainted by their unacceptable body.

In the after photo, the newly cleansed, streamlined, muscular after person smiles at the happy life now possible in an acceptably buff body, reaping all the admiration, rewards and happiness denied the before person.

There is also a before/after in the Health At Every Size mindset. I see it clearly in my own life. Before giving up dieting and obsession with my weight I lived with the belief that I could never be happy, loved, or accomplished until I lost weight. After learning how to accept myself and befriend and celebrate my body as it is, I am free to enjoy life and to love and be loved by those who accept and respect me. And about those accomplishments: I’ve had much more time and energy to get real work done once I eliminated the futile quest for weight loss from my schedule.

My own transition from before to after didn’t take place overnight or in a blinding flash of conversion. It took hard work over several years, but it was worth it.

Fattest Woman in the World: Looking Behind the News Story

Debbie says:

Donna Simpson has, to say the least, an odd ambition. She wants to become the fattest woman in the world, and she’s (please pardon the pun) busting her ass to get there.

Donna Simpson in underwear

A 42-year-old New Jersey mom is on track to weigh in as the world’s fattest woman. Donna Simpson is determined to double her size by eating piles of junk food, the Daily Mail reported yesterday.

Simpson is already in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the largest mom. It took 30 hospital staff to deliver her daughter in a high-risk cesarean in 2007. At the time she weighed about 530 pounds. (She has other children.)

These days, Simpson is eating 12,000 calories a day in an effort to weigh in at 1,000 pounds. “To fund the massive $750 weekly food shop, she runs a website where men pay her to watch her eat fast food,” the Daily Mail reported.

The question at issue in both the San Francisco and London papers is: should she be allowed to keep her children?

First, let’s separate a few things out: I don’t believe that what she’s doing is likely to be “healthy” (whatever that word means) for her, either physically or emotionally. I think that junk food is bad for almost everyone, except in moderation. I think it’s a bad idea to build your life around eating anything, and especially processed junk. At the same time, I don’t see any reason to demonize Donna Simpson, especially without examining the context.

As far as her kids are concerned, in effectively all nonabusive circumstances, mothers should be allowed to keep their children. The urge to take her kids away from her should not be about her weight. Neither article says anything about the children: how old are they? are they healthy? is she feeding them? does she hit them? do they go to school? is there another parent, and what does that person think? are any of the kids old enough to express an opinion, and if so, what do they say?

Important as the safety and health of her real children is, bringing them into the story is a classic diversion tactic: let’s look away from what’s really happening, and look at the mythical children instead. (By not telling us anything about her real children, and especially by not letting them speak for themselves, the newspapers are turning them into mythical, fetishized children.)

When we consider the possibility that this story may not be about weight, other issues jump off the screen:

Getting yourself into the Guinness Book of World Records–for anything–is a classic way to bring interest and attention into a “life of quiet desperation,” or even a life of boredom and mundane troubles. In our Warhol world, where nearly everyone either has been or wants to be famous for 15 minutes, the Book of World Records is tailor-made to fill that need. You don’t have to gain weight, you can try for “loudest burp” or “furthest eye popper,” “most pierced,” etc., etc. How about “most balloon sculptures made in an hour”?

What about the men who are supporting Simpson’s eating by paying to watch her eat on the Internet? What about the social context in which she has this goal? According to one story, she was making 2,000 pounds (about $3,000) a month in 2008 and $750/week would be about the same now: roughly what I take home for 35 hours of highly specialized office work a week–and I get no notoriety. If she has an “extreme–practically unbelievable–… relationship with food,” what do these men have? Could she even have this ambition if she didn’t live in a society that has an “extreme–practically unbelievable–relationship with food”? She didn’t come up with this idea in a vacuum.

Women who try to starve themselves–and succeed–are not news and have not been news for centuries. Also, we know with complete conviction and certainty that ceasing to eat will kill you and, despite our maniacal hatred of fat, we cannot be so sure about Simpson’s path. She could continue at her same level of health for decades, which cannot be said of committed anorexics. And no one pays to watch a woman, or a teenage girl, starve on the Internet.

This opens up more questions: would Simpson be doing this if it couldn’t get her into the Book of World Records, or some similar recognition? Would she be doing it if no one was paying her to do it?

When my friend Patti (who sent me the link) was discussing it with me, she asked what I thought Simpson would do if the junk-food money well ran dry. Would she find another source for so much food? My reaction was that I don’t know her, so I can’t say. The way I imagine her, she would find some other way to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, or to get webcam attention on the Internet. I don’t think it’s about the weight.

Oh, and one more thing about her and her children: if we aren’t up in arms about taking children away from severe anorexics (those who live long enough to have children) or the person with the largest collection of airplane sick bags, let’s leave Donna Simpson alone.