I Take Up Space

I hadn't really thought of weight as being an identity until I found FA/SA, but reading this reminds of something that I used to do years ago, and was my way of rebelling against the diet culture and reinforcing my fat identity. Every time someone would talk about dieting - whether it was a friend, an ad on television or the radio, or an ad in a magazine - I would get hungry. I'm not talking hungry - it's time to eat, I'm talking hungry - I need to devour the world stuff. And I would search the cupboards/refrigerator for whatever looked good and eat until I couldn't eat any more. The only thing that kept me from continuing on that path was the fact that I had WLS (that failed) and every time I ate too much (anything over 1/2 cup), I got sick. I hate getting sick (one of the reasons I never binged and purged), so when it got to the point where I couldn't eat without getting sick, I had to find other ways to cope with the diet culture and reinforce my fat identity. Blogging (and ranting at the ads on TV) worked for me, as did deciding to live my life fat at the world and let the world deal with it.
So, yeah, S4L is really on the way to setting up kids for the same kind of crap I went through, and I wasn't even a kid when I went through it, I was an adult (and still found it difficult to deal with).

I love the article, but it seems to me that there has been research before that has demonstrated that weight is a social identity. I don't have time to look it up, but others have found fat people as a group have many of the same personality traits as other oppressed minorities. And much of what she says also sounds a bit like labeling theory too. Not that this should minimize her work in any way, it is VERY important. And needs to be documented and brought to our attention as many times as necessary until we stop the emotional abuse surrounding weight!

Since I don't like people talking about how fat I am, I am going to make everyone else conform to a new set of rules. You will not mention my weight, not talk about my weight, not even look at me or talk about eating.

I am overweight and obese so now I will make the rules. I am the one in control not the other 7 billion people on the planet. I will eat as much as I want, indulge as much as I want and YOU are to say nothing, nadda, nil. If the State of Georgia sees a problem with my new rules, if the state has to pay out more money in medical costs, has to deal with the social fall-out from having an obese population then the residents of Georgia will just have to pay more taxes for the additional costs and quit complaining.

Everybody get it?

We are talking about the implications of talking, not the control of talking. There is a huge difference. There are consequences to what we say. You speak of behavior. Our speaking is behavior.

First let me say that the idea of fat people controlling the world amuses me because the reality of living with fat stigma is exactly the opposite. Our power is somewhat limited in this culture and this shows up in our ability to find work, healthcare and justice. However, I have this impression that some people are really so afraid of being fat that they make fat people into all-powerful super-beings whose words can threaten the fabric of society and make all people instantly unhealthy. Of course, the truth of Dr. Asbury's work is that all words change the world, one interaction at a time, within the context of social and institutional power.

Your take on this is exactly what we are talking about when we say that people judge us on the basis of how we look. You have decided that in spite of several studies that have shown that dieting fails that being fat is simply a matter of diet and exercise and that every single fat person has done neither in their entire lives. Do you also believe that every thin person you meet eats a restricted diet and exercises frequently? On what do you base this assessment? Show me data that demonstrates ALL fat people live one lifestyle and ALL thin people live another. If this is not empirical observation of these populations, then it starts to fall into the realm of stereotyping and bigotry.

As far as controlling my own behavior -- every single diet I ever went on was ended by a doctor who told me I was hurting my health. I have been a highly disciplined person my entire life and my reward for this has been disability. I do projects with total commitment and for about 30 years of my life, dieting was a full-time project. What I know from my own experience and from what I've seen when dieting has been studied, it rarely works and if hurts health. If you indeed want to know more, I would suggest you read the research I've outlined at the end of this comment. The bottom line is that if diets do not work for the majority of the people, then making moral judgements about fat people's lifestyles are unfounded. I didn't blame others for my "failure" to lose weight. I came to a logical and scientific conclusion that the evidence suggested my health would be better if I stopped trying and started eating well and exercising regularly. While I still fight the effects of 30 years of fighting my body, my health has generally improved by putting the focus on health NOT weight. For the life of me, I still can't figure out why that is so threatening to other people.

As far as controlling others is concern, I do not advocate controlling anyone. I am strong believer in freedom and I abhor social control in any form. I do advocate that those who hold power and authority (like the CHOA) use that power and authority in a way that is useful for the public good. I do advocate that within public discourses others have a right and responsibility to cry out against misuse of said power and authority (I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be an "American" thing). I do believe that public discourse not government or social control should be the mechanism by which the public good is achieved.

Teaching kids that their bodies deserve to be bullied is not useful. And, btw, if you think the only kids who are being taught this lesson are fat kids, you know little of child psychology. This message of hating one's body is going to hurt any kid who buys into it, no matter what their body size if right now. Fear of being fat is just as much a problem as actually being fat in this culture. These ads are bad for ALL kids. Even people who advocate the fat is bad like the Obesity Action Coalition, the Rudd Institute and Dan Savage sees these ads as teaching kids that it is okay to bully and that if you are bullied it is your fault. That is the issue.

Research tells us what happened when people did things. It is always past-tense with the hope that future action can be guided by better knowledge. That is the whole point of scientific study. Dr. Asbury's research suggests that our talk about weight is hurting women and girls, creating a social identity that limits their lives. Is weight so important that we should hold back the life chances of children "for their own good"? What would be wrong with teaching positive healthy habits in lieu of negative body-hating messages? How is advocating such a thing an example of blaming someone else? I've asked this before on this blog, but if the eat healthy foods and exercise more crowd really believes what they say, then why not teach ALL kids to eat healthy foods and exercise? Why does the shape of their bodies (which are growing and changing) have to be part of the equation? What purpose does it serve to call a kid "overweight" or "obese"?

Advocating for a more balanced way of talking about our bodies and relegating talk of weight to a minor status rather than a major life event would help in this balance. But that is up to each individual. There is a vast difference between public discourse with a power organization running an ad campaign and the personal worlds of parents making parenting choices. No one is advocating censorship, control or ignorance. Please give me a quote from this post that says otherwise.

======Further Reading on Dieting Failure=======

>>Stunkard's 1959 study (ARCHIVES OF INTERNAL MEDICINE 103(1):79-85 Stunkard AJ; MCLAREN-HUME M, The Results of Treatment For Obesity - A Review of the Literature and Report of a Series, 1959) which found that weight loss could not be achieved permanently simply through diet control (yes, we knew this in 1959!)

>>The 1992 NIH Consensus Statement on Methods of Voluntary Weight Loss and Control (http://consensus.nih.gov/1992/1992WeightLossta010html.htm) which reviewed the small body of studies of weight loss attempts and found there none of the current methods of dieting worked permanently, with almost all dieters regaining the weight they lost within 5 years (note that most "success" data is limited to one year studies).

>>Another 1992 report, from the Office of Prevention, Education, and Control National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/prof/heart/obesity/wtob.txt), which had this little nugget: "Dr. JoAnn Manson stated that the benefits of long-term weight loss cannot yet be fully addressed because not enough individuals have sustained long-term weight loss." Yes, we DO NOT KNOW if weight loss really has the benefits we believe. The data that is used to tell people they need to lose weight is based upon the comorbidities that are seen among higher BMIs and it is just postulation that actually losing weight and keeping it off will lead to long-term health benefits, but since few people can succeed at this task, it has not been studied.

>>Finally, Linda Bacon's study, which actually followed real dieters and non-dieters over a period of two years (something that has been rarely done outside of commercial interests, who most tellingly rarely publish their results in an unbiased fashion). Bacon, L, VanLoan M , Stern JS, Keim N. Size Acceptance and Intuitive Eating Improve Health for Obese Female Chronic Dieters. Journal of American Dietetic Association. 2005;105:929-936. Her study found, among other things, that healthy outcomes (improved metabolic numbers and mental health factors) could be achieved WITHOUT weight loss among women with fairly high BMIs.

I really miss the days when people were accepted as coming in all shapes and sizes and their weight wasn't really other people's territory. Fat people were just fat and it was only one thing about them, not considered a whole statement on how they were (obviously) living their selfish, lazy, ignorant, immoral lives as people seem to think now.

As a person who has been at both ends of the bmi chart, I most resent the implication that because I am fat now, I am too dumb to know how to eat or what I need to be healthy. However, I do realize that people tend to think in terms of black and white, and the vast majority of people don't deal well with complexity. As a highly educated professional, I also resent the fact that many people think being thin is totally a matter of eating next to nothing and exercising like a hamster on speed. The final thing I hate about the whole argument (because there is an implicit argument in most statements about body weight these days that goes something like "thin is better, no matter what you have to do to get there and all degrees of fat are unhealthy") is that the nation seems to be trying to indoctrinate a whole generation with the idea that if they are not perfectly thin, then there is something major wrong with them and with their family. Just a little critical thinking and reading of the recent research will show that the issue is not a simple one.

I agree completely with the premise that the current campaign to demonize fat families and fat kids will not alleviate the problem, but will have the opposite effect.

Dr. Asbury's dissertation, mentioned in the article, is available online (free, no login required) at http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/7694

Statistics show that obesity is often associated with lower incomes and less education. How can we make sense of that statement?

As humans, we need basically three conditions to make sure that we feel reasonably well and our needs are not substituted with feel-good-food or by emotional eating.

1. We need to understand what is going on in our own lives

2. We need to ability to shape and influence our own lives

3. We need to be able to feel that whatever happens around us makes sense and that we have found our place in our families and in society

These three key points are the foundation of what keeps us healthy, and, ultimately, at a normal weight.

Are these three components often lacking with poorer and less educated people?

Yes, as they no longer feel that they can shape anything to their desire due to the lack of funds or the lack of being needed or the feeling of not being able to make a difference. Even managers in corporations seem to break down, fall ill or end up with depressions when their creative freedom to shape events is somehow curtailed.

Most people who ended up at the edge of society due to unemployment or poverty rarely feel that they are needed anymore; they rarely feel that they are able to make a difference in anybody's life anymore. They also might have lost the sense of understanding on how to change their situations and what their life's purpose might be, even though as child they, like everybody else, were hopeful that they would find a place in this life in which they would be able to bring meaning to theirs and other people's lives. Lacking this kind of fulfillment is as if constantly living with some sort of craving and desire for something that cannot be satisfied or reached.

And this unfulfilled desire leads directly to overeating?

Especially for those who have learned as early as childhood that problems can be substituted with candy; children who fall down or cry get something sweet to ease the pain. Especially parents of poorer and lesser educated backgrounds are prime examples of customers who keep buying chocolate bars and other junk foods; they keep buying this stuff even though they actually have very little money available. But this audience is of course also very susceptible to advertising because they have had so many problems early on in their lives and have learned that they cannot really solve their problems, but rather only satisfy - and substitute - their desire for change and a better life.

So can this be considered a social problem?

Yes, in some ways these people are holding up a mirror in front of society and show where things are headed when people no longer care for one another; when people end up being labeled and stereotyped and are no longer given the room or the opportunity to make a real difference in theirs and other people's lives. From this point of view, then, being unemployed is not so much a problem because of the lack of funds, but it becomes a huge problem because of the lack of meaning; because one can no longer contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Is this the reason weight loss classes on healthy eating don't work so well?

To decide how to behave in certain life situations is based one's life experiences up until now. Anyone who has learned that sweet and fatty foods will help satisfy their desires has developed an attitude like "If I am a little fat, what does it not matter?" or "The main thing to me is that it tastes good." These attitudes are not purely cognitive, (i.e. we're not always thinking about it), but stem from experience and conditioning. And every experience is distinguished by something that gets under one's skin; something that is linked with a powerful feeling or emotion. Both components, the emotional and the cognitive link combined, will eventually lead to a conviction that a particular behavior is good for us, even if it is overeating bad foods.

So lecturing alone won't help?

Exactly, because this approach won't reach the emotional components. You cannot change an attitude by convincing people because you only reach the cognitive component; and you can not achieve change by punishing or hugging them all the time because you only reach the emotional components that way.

So what will help?

You should invite such people to encourage and inspire a new and different experience with themselves. For example, moving their bodies so that they can feel and get in touch and experience their own bodies again; or in relationships with other people, where they realize that they can actually talk with others without feeling bad or ashamed and where they feel that they can talk about problems and solutions as well. And, of course, in relationship to their role in this world and in society, where they realize that they are able to partake in shaping it and making a difference. For these steps to work, nutritional counseling alone is far from being enough. It sometimes takes the help of a psychotherapists or a life coach.

Some might ask: Why won't big people achieve this by themselves? They only need to get their act together.

This is the talk of the educated middle class, which itself had enough opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives and have thus learned that they can make it. But for those who are are used to not being able to succeed in anything and those who didn't have any positive experience in changing themselves and those who were ridiculed at their whole life – how can they possibly have an experience of taking on self-responsibility? For these people the cognitive and emotional reasoning is so strongly developed and intertwined that breaking through and letting go of their substitute behavior of overeating is rather difficult.

So we need a new approach towards helping people lose weight?

What we need is another relationship culture at home, at school, at work and in our communities. If our living together becomes so empowered that everybody can find their place in society and recognizes themselves as valuable to other people, we wouldn't have many obesity problems. I am firmly convinced of this.

Thanks for this excellent article and interview. I find it incredibly ironic and depressing that all of the AdChoice ads to the right of the article are advocating weightloss, having weightloss goals, diet pills, and bariatric surgery. I'm not sure that it's possible to illustrate more clearly the nature of the weightloss-at-all-costs culture we swim in on a daily basis.