I think from a fitness/medical standpoint, we do promote healthy weight ranges. America’s obsession with fashion and beauty has a lot to do with thinner women, but thin (even “really” thin) ain’t anorexia. Eating disorders on either side of the spectrum have more to do with emotional issues and less to do with laziness or wanting to look thin like a runway model.
I guess to justify your first sentence, you’d have to define who ‘we’ are. Because I look at women’s magazines where an unflattering photo of a healthy weight woman gets plastered on the front page with a headline shrieking at the horror of her less-than-perfectly-slim body.
I do agree that both under and over weight issues are primarily caused by emotional issues.
By “we” I mean mainstream America (or any developed country, I suppose). I hear some people point and laugh at pictures of so-and-so looking “less than perfect”, but for the most part I don’t think it’s her weight as much as it is not fitting the image we usually have of that person. Because we’re bombarded with the perfect, air-brushed, coiffed, dressed-to-the-nines images, a dash through the grocery store makes them look out of character. I don’t think people’s true feelings are “what a fat pig she is!”
With all due respect, this is one of the most bizarre statements I’ve ever heard. I’d say that there is absolutely no doubt that obesity is becoming less socially acceptable, or at least I would have said so until reading your post. To cite one obvious fact, we’ve seen several lawsuits filed claiming that restaurants are causing obesity, an idea that would have seemed laughable a few years ago. On the whole, people used to associate fatness with a jolly, fun-loving lifestyle (think Santa Claus); that idea has vanished during the last few years.
Slight hijack, but the phrase “unrealistically thin” has been thrown around a few times in this thread, and I’m not sure what’s meant by it. Does it mean literally unrealistic, as in, the photo has been doctored to make the model look thinner than is physically possible? Or unrealistic as in, the photo is real but the model is physically abnormal, and most ‘average’ people would be unable to become that thin even if they tried?
Perhaps both? Models are, in fact, thinner than most normal people can hope to achieve. And then their images are manipulated to smooth out the flaws and bulges. No model, however beautiful and slim, actually looks like the image in the magazine. It’s not even possible.
So ordinary people are looking at doubly impossible images: they mostly couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be that thin, and the images have been manipulated to be even thinner, as well as smoother and more ‘perfect.’
You know kids these days, they’ll think nothing of walking right up to an adult smoker and telling them they’re disgusting, they’re going to die and they need to quit.
I see no reason not to glorify thin people and have kids walking up to overweight adults and telling them it’s gross and unhealthy, and they should definitely be nagging their parents to quit making them fat too. It’s only fair.
Obesity is an epidemic now, isn’t it?
Encourage anorexia? No. Encourage thinness, why not?
I think we encourage obesity more than enough. In my life experience, every time someone sees a thin person on a magazine they always say “oh, she’s anorexic. That’s unhealthy. Oh, he’s on steroids, and probably anorexic. So unhealthy, tsk, tsk.”
Most people are skilled enough at excusing their own obesity, and illegitimizing anyone is is actually healthy. Obese people are victims and sufferers, but at least they’re healthier than those skinny people who are just lucky and/or doing something unhealthy.
Obese people will say they’re obese because they don’t know better.
Are skinny people skinny because they don’t know better? What magic information and education did skinny people receive that obese people are somehow missing? I really don’t buy that excuse.
Every obese person I’ve ever known has been referred to a nutritionist or dietician and received all kinds of education and literature. Every kid who’s made it to sixth or seventh grade has received some block of instruction on nutrition, diet and health. Probably a lot sooner. Everyone single one of those magazines with skinny people on the cover also somewhere in it contains articles about diet, exercise, health & nutrition.
You can’t tell me people don’t know how to eat right and exercise.
Unfortunately, “eat right and exercise” rarely cuts it. I’ve never seen it. Not with anyone I’ve ever known who was significantly overweight. Not a single one. Every single overweight person I’ve ever known who has lost weight and kept it off did so by doing something technically “unhealthy.” Exercising too much. Not eating enough. Going on one of those - gasp - life-threatening low carb diets.
Should we encourage anorexia? No. Encourage other unhealthy weight loss methods? Well, technically no. At least no one in a position to get sued is going to. What’s left? Stick beautiful skinny people on magazine covers and make other people feel like shit, I guess.
Personal anecdote. My eldest niece was getting fat, just like her mom and grandmom. Grandmom pulled her aside one day and told her she was fat, fat was ugly and she was going to never find happiness being fat. Niece was horrified, and started “starving” herself. She lost all the extra weight. When my sister (niece’s mom) found out why she lost all the weight, she was absolutely livid with grandmom. I was mad too frankly. What a bitch thing to tell a teenager. Then I went and visited and I changed my mind. This was not an anorexic teenager. This was a perfectly healthy, and far, far more attractive now, teenager. Did the method suck? Sure, but it worked. As far as I know, my niece still isn’t obese. It took someone telling her flat out “fat is ugly and you’ll never be happy” to get my niece to not become anorexic, but to simply drop the weight and start not eating so much junk. Is that really so bad? Gently encouraging obese people to eat healthfully apparently doesn’t work.
How about tapeworms.? I have read there was a time when people used them to stay thin.
The obesity problem may have another component. Many years a go magazines predicted we would get fatter due to the additives meat and other food prducers put in our food. It has happened. Is that part of the problem.?
Snopes has this as an undetermined legend. No idea if this has actually happened, though.
levdrakon–as a skinny person, I honestly never had to try. I do exercise a lot, although I’m really fond of chocolates…mmm…chocolate. However, once I’ve reached the point where I’m full, I stop eating–I’ll be unable to eat another bite, whether I’ve “cleaned my plate” or whether I’ve got lots of food I haven’t eaten. So while I don’t think I’ve ever consciously regulated my diet, I think as a result of that, I’ve never had to–it’s all been more of an unconscious process. That, and a metabolism that works at an ungodly rate…
Obesity is caused by a complex combination of factors including:
- food type and availability
- family body habitus
- other genetic predispositions i.e. appetite/satiety, set point weight
- decreased activity
Certainly social pressures contribute to the mix (albeit rather peripherally), but nothing short of the concentration camp lifestyle is going to make an entire population uniformly thin. And do I really have to ask “at what cost?”
Where intake habits and activity levels are healthy, weight/obesity on its own is not a reliable predictor of poor health.
Even if we treated the obese as greater pariahs than they are now – for instance, with the intensity of scorn that we treat smokers – that factor alone would do nothing to counteract the considerable biogenetic loading.
Putting more stress on people to lose weight is usually counter-productive. Many, many people are emotional eaters who comfort themselves with food when they are under stress.
I saw a bit on a news program the other night about experiments with rats of mice that have to do with how stress affects weight. In the experiment two rodents are fed the same amount of food exactly. One of them is put under a lot of stress. the other isn’t. The one under stress gains a lot of weight. The one with the cushy life doesn’t.
Another factor in weight gain is that when you have cut back on intake of food and lost weight, your body puts out a chemical that makes your metabolism slow. It goes into starvation mode. Very efficient bodies!
As I’ve mentioned several times, sometimes the compulsion to eat is triggered in the brain in the same areas that trigger seisures. Or at least some of the medicine that is used to treat seisures can create a definite loss of interest in eating. I take that medicine every day. It has worked for me for a long time.
For example: Today I had a cup of coffee and half a fried green tomato and bacon sandwich. This afternoon I had a pop-cycle made from strawberry juice. Tonight I had a few cashews. That’s not the healthiest eating, but I meant to do better. I forgot to eat. Considering that I used to eat compulsively all the time, that’s not bad. I just don’t think about eating.
I wonder if eating disorders (not obesity per se) are an expression of a relationship disorder. I personally know several people with serious eating disorders, and they also have pretty profound problems with relationships. My own history with eating disorders runs parallel with my relationship struggles. Or perhaps they share a root cause?
Food is the medium for our first relationship, our relationship with our mothers. Nurturing and feeding are completely intertwined with babies, they’re supposed to go together. There’s a woman in Canada who’s had a lot of success treating anorexics by mimicking early feeding behaviors - she literally cradles her patients, comforting and feeding them one bite at a time.
Or maybe relationship problems are just endemic to being human, I don’t know.
I also think that some aspects of bulimia and obesity are a food addiction, same as alcoholism. I wonder if it is simply a chemical imbalance? I wonder if it has to do with the relationship between glucose, insulin and serotonin?
It’s only just recently that people stopped looking at “fat” as a simple character flaw and lack of discipline; it will be interesting to see what the research finds in the next 20 years.
Oh, it still is. But where tort law is concerned, the laughter tends to be rendered inaudible by the cacophonous clangor of “CHA-CHING!”
If you mean Peggy Claude-Pierre of the Montreux “clinic,” the thing she’s had a lot of success with is self-promotion. I will vigorously restrain myself from saying more, and will link instead to a well-known eating disorders support site for their comments, which are far more coolheaded than mine would be on the subject.
The most successful treatment outcomes for eating disorders are highly dependent on one crucial factor – time. Almost (but not quite) regardless of what you do to try and treat sufferers, the longer you keep people in treatment, the better. At their worst, the nature of these disorders is chronic and relapsing, and unfortunately there are few medical-model infrastructures that support truly chronic, relapsing disorders humanely. Peggy Claude-Pierre had the luxury of housing people for long periods of time – at least as long as distraught parents and Oprah gawkers were footing the bills.
Twelve-step programs such as Overeaters Anonymous and its related chapters (like Anorexia and Bulimia Anonymous) would endorse this view. They target “toxic” foods that they believe will cause people to binge uncontrollably, and encourage “sober” eating. The American Psychiatric Association refutes this view, and specifically discourages the use of twelve-step methods to treat bulimia. I have seen it be workable for some – especially those who have substance abuse issues alongside their bulimia, and can work the program to tackle both.
If this is the case, then I can’t help but think that it is something to do with the way that we currently treat the obese as victims, as “addicts”, etc.
If we could be more honest and say that it is actually damn easy to lose weight, it just requires willpower - and while it is only human to err occassionally, you are a failure if you cannot consistently be losing every month then I’m sure people’s mentalities would change.
I have a similar viewpoint on mental addictions* to drugs too. Fundamentally, people are addicted because they have a mental deficiency, not because they are victims. Although as a would be libertarian I cannot support their illegality.
*Physical addiction being something quite different, but it’s easily remedied.
Small British Shop Owner, are you an expert on addiction? Do you have degrees in medicine or psychology? Why should we believe you when you claim that it’s obvious that people can lose weight or kick a drug habit with just a little bit of will power? We keep pointing out studies that show that simply putting pressure on people doesn’t help and you keep ignoring what we say, so what’s the point of even trying to persuade you of anything?
Because it is obvious. What else could one need?
Saying that it’s easy to lose weight isn’t breaking down some barrier of political correctness out there that’s enabling fatties; it’s simply inaccurate.
Some excess weight is relatively easy to lose. If you have “forced” your body to gain weight past your normal genetic set point by overeating and avoiding activity (or through something like steroid intake), that weight will be shed by maintaining a more reasonable caloric intake and getting off your duff. It will go slowly, months and years rather than weeks, but if you’re not meant to have it you can lose it with only minor discomfort.
It’s important to get a good idea of the genetic set point, though, before we say that someone could readily shed weight. For someone whose family history, body type, and developmental history points to high weight tendencies, weight can be very difficult to shed. The body strenuously defends its genetic set point, wherever that is, by slowing the metabolic rate where calories are restricted, and by sending the dieter constant signals to find food, catch food, and eat food. The body has no way of knowing that you aren’t in the midst of a famine, and it is relentless in its demands, sleeping and waking, until you return to that genetic set point and stop being “underweight” as far as your body is concerned. Sure, you can offset the metabolic effects with hyperexercise and quell the other demands with chemicals and preoccupations, but once you stop the offsetting behaviours, the demands will be right there in your face again. This is also the terrible dilemma that defines the day to day life of underweight people with eating disorders.
Is lifelong vigilance a fair price to pay, or is it better to eat in a nutritionally balanced way, get reasonable amounts of activity, and let the weight be where the body says it should be?
Lifelong vigilance – and lifelong vigilance without a grand payoff, just to be “normal” – is much tougher than most of us think it is, because we’ve never had to look it in the eye. Clean and sober addicts know how it is. To some extent, we say that the vigilance gets easier, gets to be more ingrained and habitual over time and with repetition. But that’s over a long long time, resisting a lot of powerful, insistent, visceral impulses.
But where are our genetic set points?
If you are generally healthy, hormonally unaltered, eating a balanced diet comprised of (for the vast majority of adults) 2400-3000 kcal/d, and engaging in an active lifestyle, you will maintain weight at your biologically predetermined set point. In females, the emergence of a dominant ovarian follicle can be a good indicator of biologically acceptable weight. For most people, it’s common-sensically evident by looking at your familial and personal developmental history (given the presence of normal eating throughout).
Like so many things pertaining to human anatomy, it’s unique to you, and it’s not always what you want or what the rest of the world sees as desirable – much as the texture or colour of your skin or hair, or your height.