I was sitting at the bar on 168th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue with my old buddy, Bobby. Bobby was a few years older than me, a suave Dominican guy who could salsa dance all night long. He pointed out a woman in the bar that he felt was very attractive, and made some sounds that Dominican guys occasionally make in her direction to let her know. Bobby then gave me the nudge as if seeking my confirmation.
I didn’t find her to be as “hot” as Bobby did. She had a pretty face, but she was fat. Not obese, but chubby. I told Bobby that I preferred thinner women, to which he explained the virtues of women who were more bass than treble.
And that’s what makes the world go round. So why all the angst?
My relationship with my body is, to put it mildly, fraught. I have not always, but I have usually, been fat. I have always hated that fact, although I have tried not to. I have been a so-called normal weight, by the standards of the draconian body mass index guidelines, only when I have been starving myself or eating a highly restrictive and often downright odd diet.
I’m not a thin guy. My joke is that I have six-pack abs, but you just can’t seem them under my gut. And when I indulge in carbs, I get larger. I know that when my pants are too tight or my suit jacket doesn’t button. But then, I know that I love donuts and that has consequences. It’s not a mystery. If I want my pants to fit, I deal with it.
I have long admired the work of fat activists — Marilyn Wann, Sonya Renee Taylor and Aubrey Gordon among them — and recognize that fat bodies can be not only healthy but also athletic, beautiful, sexy. I believe in the concepts of intuitive eating and health at every size — at least, for other people. I recognize that the vast majority of diets fail to make people any thinner or any healthier in the long term. I recognize that even if you are a fat person who would be healthier if you lost weight, you don’t owe it to anyone to do so; you don’t owe it to anyone to be healthy in general. And I know how much my internalized fatphobia owes to oppressive patriarchal forces — the forces that tell girls and women in particular to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet.
I recognize all of this in the abstract. In practice, however, I struggle.
There is such a thing as body dysmorphia, where one’s sense of their body is disconnected from reality. But there is another phenomenon, which is bizarrely characterized as “fatphobia,” since the phobic involved is the fat person. Or at least the person who perceives herself as too fat. Since it’s a woman in this op-ed, she naturally blames “oppressive partriarchal forces” because of course she does, and that’s obviously easier than blaming a pint of ice cream that no one forces her to put into her mouth.
Are fat people “not only healthy but also athletic, beautiful, sexy”? Healthy is an issue apart from the others. As for athletic, beautiful and sexy, to each his or her own. Bobby liked ’em large. Me, not so much. Attraction is what it is, and even the argument that it’s a social construct is pointless as you can’t argue that someone should find you sexy if you don’t.
But that’s not the argument being made.
And it has the superficially surprising implication that dieting inflicts real moral costs, real moral harms, ones we largely impose on ourselves (albeit under the influence of potent social forces)….
Is there a moral obligation to be fat, or at least not suffer to be thin? Is this subject to philosophical argument?
But while philosophy in its current form may fetishize thinness, it also has within it the power to challenge these ideas and even to reconfigure our moral relationship to them entirely.
Dieting may be hard, ineffective, medically unsound and the root of significant mental issues that can plague people. But is the alternative a moral duty to try to turn fat into a virtue?
But if dieting is a practice that causes a great deal of harm — in the form of pain, suffering, anxiety and sheer hunger — and rarely works to deliver the health or happiness it has long advertised, then it is a morally bad practice. It is plausibly not only permissible but obligatory for individuals to divest from it, to condemn it and not to teach it to our children, either explicitly or by example.
As a person for whom maple bacon donuts hold an exalted status, this sounds like a great idea, with the caveat that I might find it difficult to lift my heft out of my desk chair to make it to the fridge. It’s one thing to argue against dieting, but when we lose any sight of the benefits of not being obese, will we be happier? Will our children be healthier? Is there a moral imperative to be as fat as we wanna be? And do we have a moral right to demand that others find us attractive and sexy if they don’t share Bobby’s preference?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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Some folks like the six-pack and some prefer the full keg.
Like what you like. No need to apologize.
If someone doesn’t like how you look, there is someone else who does.
Eye of the beholder.
Twofer Tuesday.
How long do you plan to keep this up?
Regarding the claim dieting is ‘ineffective’, I call bullshit. Those that burn more calories than they consume will, without exception, lose weight.
Regarding your questions, one can only assume the ‘we’ referenced is society, as it would be impossible, due to the human condition, to say whether any given individual will feel one thing or another in a given, hypothetical situation.
Will society be happier if we pretend obesity isn’t a problem? Unlikely. Obesity is a public health problem with massive (no pun intended) costs to society.
Is it cool to make fun of people who struggle with their weight? No. Our bodies are not evolved to metabolize the number of carbohydrates modern civilization shoves down gaping maws. But it’s also not cool to pretend it’s not a problem.
“modern civilization”?…so what do you call your other hand?
Full disclosure, I’m resisting the urge to be mean to you. Philosophy SJ is always terrible and puts me in a mood. It’s not you. It’s me. I know that.
You think dieting is effective. That alone does not address the author’s point that dieting is harmful or at least causes “pain suffering, anxiety, and sheer hunger”. Is dieting worth the cost to the individual? Are you being immoral by claiming obesity is a disease and public health problem? Think of it as you wishing all that pain and hunger on those poor fat people. Is that what you want? Are you a monster? Are the ends even worth it?
I believe in you, Jake. You’re the coolest commenter around here. You can solve this.
I don’t ‘think’ dieting is effective. This is an indisputable, objective fact: If your body burns more calories than you consume, you will lose weight.
“Is dieting worth the cost to the individual?” PK- Is this a question worth asking? For each individual, if the pain associated with being overweight outweighs the pain of behavioral change, the answer is yes.
“Are you being immoral by claiming obesity is a disease and public health problem?” While it may be wildly unpopular to consider the collective price of obesity among strong Individualists and Capitalists, this is hardly my claim. But, on the contrary, I think it is immoral to pretend it is not a public health problem.
“Think of it as you wishing all that pain and hunger on those poor fat people. Is that what you want? Are you a monster? Are the ends even worth it?”
I’m not wishing pain on anyone. My personal opinion is -for each individual- if the pain of one thing outweighs the pain of another thing, the choice is clear. On the other hand, having some experience with giving up things that short-circuited my mesocorticolimbic circuit, my personal advice for those starting the journey is to sit down, shut up, and listen. It gets better.
For the purveyors of misinformation about food and those who profit from flooding our dinner plates with garbage, I’ve got other opinions. I’m guessing you can imagine what they might be.
Yes, yes. You believe dieting can be simplified to calories in v. calories out. I get it. I didn’t mean to question your faith. Nutrition is a bit more complicated than that and I know sailors weren’t given citrus fruit merely because of their caloric content, but I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to talk about this part.
I’d rather call you immoral and insist you are indeed wishing pain on your fellow man. You’re saying your fellow citizens are so fat and unhealthy as to constitute a “public health problem”. What’s the solution from Tsar Jake? I bet you it includes a dose of suffering for the obese. You monster. Sure you think you know better than the fat ass who can’t put the cookies down, but do you really? I bet you have a torture dungeon in your basement that’s not for consensual fun, weirdo.
You’re avoiding entirely what the author was saying and what this post is about. Stop.
PK, I’m beginning to think you are not really a member of the book club. Please, in closing, allow me to be clear: I would hazard a guess, and suspect you know, in the perennial, philosophical tension between the common good and individual liberty, I am more closely aligned to the former than most SJ commenters. I own this identity, and I am consistent, whether or not y’all agree with me.
If you fancy yourself a consistent collectivist, then be one and own the consequences of your position rather than say nothing or go off topic. Just come out and say fatsos should exercise more and eat less rather than be a drain on society, if that’s what you mean. That’d be way more fun than begging you to get on topic or say something affirmative.
I’m going to pretend the book club comment didn’t happen rather than relive the trauma of being excluded from nearly every group I’ve tried to join my entire life. I can’t help being a contrarian. See you next meeting, comrade.
> Yes, yes. You believe dieting can be simplified to calories in v. calories out. I get it. I didn’t mean to question your faith. Nutrition is a bit more complicated than that and I know sailors weren’t given citrus fruit merely because of their caloric content, but I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to talk about this part.
You are conflating weight and dieting with overall health and nutrition. While the two are related, Jake’s claim wasn’t “health is simply a matter of how many calories you eat”, it’s that “you lose weight by eating fewer calories than you burn, and you gain weight by eating more than you burn”. The latter statement is true, the former statement is false, but also a claim that he never made.
The other end of this equation is the burning calories part. Lawyers tend to have sedentary work environments. This means burning calories at a very low rate at our jobs. Supplemental exercise is necessary to eat normally if we don’t want to become morbidly obese. If we eat like Roxanne Gay and loaf around like Roxanne Gay, we will become morbidly obese like Roxanne Gay.
Jake, you strike me as a guy that doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does … Wrong and strong is the term applied to that …. You can’t be an expert on everything.
I mean this with all sincerity.
Well Drew, thanks for sharing what’s in your imagination about a stranger on the internet with all sincerity.
“oppressive patriarchal forces” These evil faceless forces have a name. Beauty is mostly a marker for the ability to successfully conceive and rear children. Over millions of years of evolution, fatter people have been less successful at this than thinner people, thus thinner people are more likely to be considered beautiful by the average person. No matter how much they whine and cry, no matter how creatively or how stridently they proclaim that fat is beautiful, fat people will always be less attractive than thin people, to the vast majority of the population.
I’m confused (like normal). Do we now have to include ‘F’ in the BIPOCLGBQT+ alphabet soup of most favored minority groups?
You mean that wasn’t what the + meant?
Our species isn’t that old. Plump people have had their time as the attractive ones. I’m sad you can’t imagine that fat people could be seen as physically attractive when the majority are thin or starving. “Always” is always objectionable except when it isn’t. A heavy set shot put champion can be attractive despite not conforming to your narrow mold. And she can throw a heavy ball farther than you too.
Hats off PK. Given there is an entire aesthetic subcategory of Baroque art dedicated to the beauty of plump women, I felt this comment was too flagrantly ignorant to even try.
Jake’s a chubby chaser? Who knew?
Ah…Ruebens, the artist who painted pictures of “pleasingly plump”, well bosomed women. Hence the term “Ruebenesque” to describe such women in the real world. As they say, more cushion for the pushin’.
Just to clarify, Roxanne Gay is not pleasingly plump; she is morbidly obese.
All of which is true, though I am beginning to grow concerned with how much space Roxanne Grey takes up in the minds of SHG and many SJ commenters.
Who is Roxanne Grey?
Yes, I can easily look her up, but she occupies no space in my mind.
Myself, I prefer a few extra pounds.
From how much he posts about her, apparently she’s Scott’s secret crush.
I’m having some trouble following that logic: For most of the 250,000 year history of our species, malnutrition was probably a much greater threat than obesity. Therefore, having a moderate amount of fat reserves in one’s body should have had positive survival value, and hence positive reproductive value. A male caveman should have had a better chance of getting healthy offspring from a slightly chubby female than from an anorexic-looking one.
The bigger the cushion
the more evolution
I was looking in the mirror this morning, and thinking “Boy, you’ve gotten fat.”
But now I’m thinking, “That’s 20 lbs of pure virtue.”
I’m trying to remember where I hid those Christmas cookies, and going for 25.
I’m not naughty; I’m not nice; I’m virtuous. Me and Santa.
Show your sons to adore her and daughters to want to be her. Morality demands it.
This is your future on fat.
The use of “to divest” was jarring. Not a Boomer verb.
Being fat (or thin) is a choice. Each choice carries with it their own penalties; either being thought of having no self control (fat), or exerting an unnatural pressure on your mind to stay thin. Not to mention the medical and social costs. As long as the individual acknowledges the risks in either choice, it’s their business.
It’s not a one size fits all (ha) issue. Some people can easily restrict and lose weight. However, there are others who have different metabolic rates, genetic propensities, and or deficient satiety centers and it is far more challenging. A nutritionist, therapist and physician may be able to help uncover and overcome obstacles to healthy wt.
Furthermore, many psychotropic medications cause weight gain. (It’s one of the most common reasons people stop taking prescribed medication.) The basics everyone talks about, like exercise, and a Mediterranean diet (or other diet rich in veg and fruit) are important to be healthy.
The preference for thinness by well-educated, economically advantaged men is well-documented. Presumably, their (your) unconscious is aware of health issues and doesn’t associate thinness with lack of food and poverty as can occur in societies with food insecurity. That said, IDK the education level of your friend, but I think immigrants from the D.R. may have the propensity to unconsciously view heavier women as well-nourished/healthy as opposed to deprived.
Oh my, a racist white woman who assumes she knows the unconscious minds of us poor, dirty, ignorant third-world immigrant Hispanic’s preference for well-nourished fat women. We can’t just prefer women with some meat on them. Thanks for that insight, Karen.
I said “may have”, I didn’t make a definitive statement. If you look this up, there clearly can be cultural aspects regarding what is considered attractive in terms of body type. Regarding facial features symmetry is universally considered attractive, and it is also presumed to be tied to health. Associations are not evidence nor are the associations a perfect r=1. In the roaring 20’s the small busted/”flat” flapper girls were considered desirable. During the great depression the fashion changed to a rounder more well-fed look. IDK the socioeconomic background of Scott’s friend. I dated a guy in college who grew up in Puerto Rico. I happen to be very thin.
The best time to stop Karensplaining your racism is before you start. The second best time is now.
Or when you’re in a hole, stop digging.
Wow, the r-word is popular today. I remember when it meant something. Now it means “I disagree with you but can’t think of a good argument.
One important part of the puzzle that I think often gets short shrift is that for many obese people (full disclosure, including me), over-eating is an addiction. Unlike cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sex, etc., it’s pretty easy to tell when someone is struggling with food addiction. And since it’s obvious, it’s easy to cast the obese as the out-group, in a way that isn’t as simple or socially acceptable as it would be if it were functional alcoholics (for example) being targeted.
Like any addiction, effective treatment is not just about stopping consumption (especially difficult with food!), but in some cases replacing lifelong coping mechanisms. Do the same people who parrot the same “calories in, calories out”, or “more self-control” rhetoric hang around outside NA meetings telling people in recovery they just need to not take drugs?
There are obviously extreme cases where someone is genuinely addicted to eating, but it stretches the definition of “addiction” past the breaking point to include it in most situations where people habitually overeat due to stress, anxiety, depression, etc. It’s a psychological issue, to be sure, but “coping mechanisms” and obsessive-compulsive habits do not an “addiction” make; a reflexive “compulsion” is different than an “addiction.” Most treatments for such issues involve various forms of therapy, like CBT, that are aimed at changing the person’s way of thinking so that they do not immediately default to engaging in the compulsive behavior when faced with a stressor.
This is much different than truly addictive substances like heroin or alcohol, which cause the addict’s physiology to change to such an extent that they will have extreme physical reactions to withdrawal, and will feel the need to drink or shoot up without any external stressor, prompted simply by their own body.
Eating disorders do resemble addiction in that food is also used to alter mood, and there are physiological aspects, in addition to emotional aspects. High blood sugar, and certain foods can induce cravings. That’s why binge eating disorder, which was only recently added to the DSM often includes a consult with a nutritionist and people are often counseled to combine foods in such a way to minimize blood sugar spikes. One of the reasons why eating disorders are challenging to manage, is because abstinence from food is not a plan. You still have to have some of your substance, unlike with drugs and alcohol. However, sometimes people struggling with binge eating identify foods that trigger them to binge. They may eliminate those particular foods from their diet. You are correct that physical withdrawal from a trigger food is not life-threatening the way physical withdrawal from a substance can be. Dieting does not typically require a medically supervised detox. However, drug and alcohol detox does.
> However, there are others who have different metabolic rates, genetic propensities, and or deficient satiety centers and it is far more challenging.
If you know someone’s weight, height, sex, and age, you can calculate a BMR value that for most people will be accurate to within ~10%. If you have an accurate picture of someone’s daily activity levels, the same is also true of their actual caloric burn for the day. There are a small number of conditions that seem to affect metabolism like PCOS, but the effect is minor, maybe up to 10% at most.
If you have two 40-year-old 5′ 5″ 160 lb sedentary women, the one with PCOS might burn 1600 calories per day, while the one without might burn 1700 calories per day. But they’re still both going to lose weight if they stick to a 1200 calorie diet.
Making lifestyle changes that require discipline are hard. People fail at dieting because dieting is hard, not because they burn radically fewer calories than the average person.
> Furthermore, many psychotropic medications cause weight gain
They can lead to changes in eating and exercise habits, which then leads to weight gain. They do not directly cause weight gain themselves.
“philosophy in its current form may fetishize thinness”
Awesome, I have finally found my ticket to the Freakers Ball.
https://youtu.be/uo9bKdIG_Yw
“the forces that tell girls and women in particular to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet.”
We had this battle in the 60s and they won, so why are they still whining?
Covid is solving their problems. Those who cannot be thin will not be at all.
At the same time, the advantage of masks gives ugly chicks an equal chance.
Each to their own, and I have no dog in this fight, having been skinny for no effort since my teens, now pushing 60. My ex wife used to go on a diet and I had to, too, until she got vexed that weight just dropped off me whilst she struggled to lose a few pounds. She never knew my secret, which was that I fancied my chances at getting songs written like this about me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1PnOmboDSk (SHG, it is Tuesday?)
I’m stunned that the Admiral went to Meghan Trainor and skipped right over the Postmodern Jukebox European Tour Version of “All About That Bass” with Morgan James. Sacrilege!
Evolution is a bitch.
Something has gone wrong with species homo sapiens sapiens in the last hundred years and it is steadily getting worse.
Most animals have homeostasis mechanisms that hold their weights constant but that for homo sapiens sapiens no longer works for a large and increasing proportion of the species.
The problem is overdetermined, there is not just one cause but many 5, 6 …..n working in parallel. If one did remedy but one or 2 but not all there is limited effect so some harp on “exercise you fat slob” others on control your calories in to match calories out, some advise diets but people who diet can’t maintain them and find that when they stop they put all the weight back on plus more. Homo sapiens does have a weight homeostasis system that does maintain it at a target value but not the target that one wants and things we do to control weight ratchet the target value up.
Living beings were not designed by an engineer who was careful to keep unrelated systems separate but by evolution driven by random mutation and natural selection which selects mechanisms that work for a life form in its natural environment and these systems have cross connections that are problematic when the life form is in an environment that deviates to far from its natural environment.
Since 1920 humans have moved further away from a natural environment in which their muscles burned enough energy per day to make their weight homeostasis work and have moved away from home cooking starting with raw ingredients to eating packaged factory produced food optimised for producer profit rather than consumer health. Too much sugar, too much salt, too much high fructose corn syrup too little fibre too high glycemic indexes (a measure of how quickly a food boosts blood glucose after consumption) too much fruit juice without the fibre in the raw fruit all do damage. Before the nineteenth century flour was ground between stone grinding wheels and the particles were large and took time to turn into glucose in the blood and raise blood sugar, since high speed roller mills were introduced in the 19th century the particles in flour have been much smaller and bread made from the flour boosts blood sugar much more quickly.
Our current lifestyle sucks in too many ways and the total effect leads to obesity, prediabetes and type II diabetes.
I’m a little late to the party, but couldn’t resist sharing this directly on point Louis Prima gem.
https://youtu.be/Edj_d5xGTCQ
NICE!….they call her, ‘snake hips’.