Hickey: Fat shaming misguided

“You can’t hate people for their own good,” says fat acceptance activist Marilyn… “You can’t hate people for their own good,” says fat acceptance activist Marilyn Wann.

Wait a second, you’re thinking. Back up. You never said you hated fat people.

Of course, you think fat people should definitely try to lose weight, even though diets — even when they’re called “lifestyle changes” — don’t work. Multiple studies show that 95 to 98 percent of people who intentionally lose weight gain it back within five years. And other studies show that the weight fluctuations that accompany failed diets are worse for you than being overweight and just staying that way. But you still think fat people should lose weight for their health, even though losing weight makes them less healthy?

You don’t hate fat people, but of course you feel kind of judgmental when you see a fat person shoveling down high-calorie food. It’s like, totally disrespectful to their bodies. Interestingly, when you see someone thin put away three or four slices of pizza, you’re either indifferent or moved to congratulate, even though those four slices of pizza are wreaking the same havoc on their circulatory system they would on a fat person’s. You also don’t have the same gut reaction to people smoking, binge drinking or using energy drinks to pull all-nighters.

You — you the doctor, the school or the government agency — are only concerned about fat people’s health, which is why you evaluate their weight and risk factors based on Body Mass Index. BMI is a meaningless equation easily skewed by height, takes no account of body composition — many serious athletes are obese, according to BMI — and hasn’t been considered a legitimate health measurement in years.

But more reliable ways of determining whether a person is obese are just so much more expensive and time-consuming. Why spring for the latest technology when you’re evaluating whether to put a perfectly healthy person on a diet or deny him or her employment due to vague insurance concerns? It’s not like we’re talking about people’s lives and livelihoods here. Aren’t these all perfectly acceptable casualties in the very noble war on the Obesity Epidemic?

In 2006, the Guardian ran a feature — from which I pulled my opening quote — with the headline, “Is weight the new race?” Now obviously, weight is not the new race — different forms of discrimination are unique and not interchangeable, and racism is alive and well and has not been replaced by anything. But the tagline of the story — “Do we demonise the obese purely on health grounds or is it a gut reaction based on prejudice?” — is very telling. Bluntly: How in the hell do you demonize someone for their health? When has making people feel terrible ever been good for them or for society as a whole?

Weight might not be the new race, but fat people today do have a commonality with black people years ago in that they’re not allowed to play themselves in movies. While old-time minstrel shows hired white people to paint their faces black and personify buffoonish “black” caricatures, fat people in movies today are frequently played by thin actors in fat suits.

What does that have to do with health? Are studios afraid that fat actors will drop dead on the set or that if they hire them they’ll spend all their money on Twinkies? More likely, as suggested in Bitch Magazine’s “Are fat suits the new blackface?” fat characters are usually the butts of jokes on screen, and laughing at such a bald-faced mockery of a real person’s body would make audiences feel mean. Thin actors in fat suits assuage audience guilt.

That suggests — and in case you hadn’t noticed, I agree — that public derision of the overweight isn’t motivated by health concerns at all, but by something less straightforward — and uglier.

People who want to defend their disdain for the obese or their promotion of policies, such as employer discrimination and “fat taxes” that penalize the “overweight,” always talk about the societal costs of obesity. All the lost productivity from sick days! All the crippling insurance costs! Various anti-obesity “experts” have crafted scary calculations of how much each fat person is costing our nation. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Correlation does suggest that fat people are, on average, getting sick more often than thin people. But any analysis of that fact is confounded by the hate our society heaps on them. Fat people are strongly encouraged to diet, which does a lot of long-term health damage. Furthermore, researchers have found that overweight youth have the same risks for disordered eating behaviors like extreme dieting or “purging” as their thin counterparts and higher risks for binge eating disorder. Are fat people at higher risks for health issues down the line because they’re fat or because they’re disproportionately inclined to have eating disorders and weight-fluctuations?

Eating disorders and fad dieting among the obese are unequivocally linked to the way we harass and shame fat people, talk about them like they’re a public menace and defend denying them employment due to their size. Yet we do all those things, supposedly, because we’re so very concerned about their health. When are we going to stop kidding ourselves?

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu