It's been a good media week for the fat acceptance movement. The Guardian ran an extensive excerpt from Paul Campos's upcoming book The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous To Your Health. Campos essentially argues that the notion that being overweight is a health hazard is a construction of a moralistic health industry that stands to profit from imposing strict, unrealistic standards on consumers.
Salon gets into the act this week too, with a review of Wendy Shanker's book The Fat Girl's Guide to Life that also surveys some of the recent thinking on our attitudes toward fat. And a very fat-positive piece in the Times ran this weekend, quoting historian Peter Stearns:
19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. "I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations," he said in an interview. "Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence," Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism.
Here we see that the rise of anti-obesity attitudes roughly correspond to the temperance movements, themselves moralizing outgrowths of homegrown American puritanism. Throw in a dash of American consumer guilt, and you have a fresh recipe for inducing hysteric attempts at self-control. Campos:
For upper-class Americans in particular, it's easier to deal with anxiety about excessive consumption by obsessing about weight, rather than by actually confronting far more serious threats to our social and political health. We may drive environmentally insane SUVs that dump untold tonnes of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere... but at least we don't eat that extra cookie when it's offered to us.
So far, it sounds a lot like the addiction treatment industry, which stretches at every turn the sphere of behaviors it considers addictive, requiring expensive treatments and radical, moralizing interventions -- all while ducking essential questions about what it means to be human, to be an independent self. Mainstream addiction treatments throws a dependence-based solution -- submitting your life to the "steps" -- at a dependence-based problem, not coincidentally making the subject feel powerless and inadequate. In much the same way, weight-loss programs fail to break the cycle of consumerist frenzy that is the real problem -- indeed, they feed on the cycle itself, arguing that you must only become a better consumer of the latest diet pills/programs/exercises in order to become slim.
And in the process, your sense of self worth is destroyed. It's a nice way to make a quick buck.
Posted by Chris at May 3, 2004 12:01 PM