People who don’t know me well sometimes assume that it’s easy for me to keep my weight down. This is completely untrue. I constantly watch what I eat. I constantly force myself to exercise and I make myself get on the scale several times each week. If I don’t do these things I will gain 2 or 3 pounds per month. I’ve repeatedly and unwittingly run the experiment of not paying attention to my weight during my life. Each time I fall off the rails, I have had to call a stop to the nonsense and declare war on my fat. Over the past 30 years, this has led me to begin ever new rounds of weight loss boot camp (on my own, at home) where I’ve worked hard to lose 35, 20, and 20 pounds, as well as various smaller amounts of weight. I’m currently in yet another (minor) boot camp that will end when I lose 5 more pounds. This is my plight, my burden and my opportunity if I am going to maintain a body that feels good and fits my clothes. I also want to avoid risks of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, strokes and other illnesses associated with excess weight.
Whenever I find out that friends are trying to reduce their size, I encourage them and celebrate their successes with them. I silently applaud when I see obese people I don’t know exercising at the park Good for them! I hope they reach their goals!
Increasingly, however, the excesses of the “body positivity [1]” movement invade my thought process, occasionally making me do mental double-takes. Body positivity is a double-edged sword: [2]
On the one hand, body positivity—the attitude associated with the movement—aims to try to help overweight and obese people (especially women—see also, fat feminism—and sometimes, when intersectionally [3] analyzed, specifically black women) accept themselves and their overweight status as they are so that negative emotions are not tied up with it. This, of course, has the direct benefit of helping people not feel bad about themselves for a state of facts about the world (weight, BMI, body fat percentage, etc.), which can be demotivating and hinder weight loss attempts (or, which can just be mean and bullying—see also, fat shaming).
On the other hand, body positivity tends to rather aggressively deny any connection between weight status, including obesity, and health (see also, healthism [4]). It rejects such connections as a “medicalized [5] narrative [6]” (see also, regulatory fiction). This rejects mountains of medical evidence suggesting otherwise, that being overweight and especially obese correlates strongly with and causes a number of serious health issues. This view relies upon seeing body weight status and obesity ultimately as a social construction [7] that is used to create an unjust power dynamic [8] that discriminates against and oppresses [9] fat people. Activism in the body-positive movement often encourages overweight people not to want to lose weight (sometimes as a means of identity politics [10]—see also, identity-first), which is irresponsible, at best (e.g., a book in the movement is titled You Have the Right to Remain Fat).
I agree with the benefits of body positivity described above. Overweight people should not be shamed. They should not be shunned. Doing these things is cruel and destructive. We should recognize every other person to be a precious human being. It all starts with I and Thou, Martin Buber’s version of the golden rule. [11]
That said, how can it possibly be bigoted when I work hard to be healthy and look better by losing weight. How can I possibly be acting out of bigotry to the extent that I encourage others to reach their weight loss goals? It’s not. For background, see this article on Woke attitudes toward obesity at New Discourses [12]. This is shut-up (“Woke”) culture doing what it does best: halting important and necessary conversations under the guise of combating alleged discrimination. Today’s excess is an article by CBS [13] featuring a sociology professor who claims that concern with obesity is veiled racism.
Over the past few months, I’ve been commenting recently on many aspects of the Woke movement because I find it to be mostly a Manichean anti-factual culture that is intolerant of differing viewpoints, destructive of healthy conversation and thus dangerous to our ongoing democratic experiment. It is a virus that is taking us over. I’ve recently criticized various Woke claims (many of them embraced by schools, cultural institutions [14], businesses and governments [15]) that things such as sticking to a schedule, having a strong work ethic, planning for the future and even relying on statistics [16] (and see here [17]) math [18] and science [19] are “white” things, and that those of us who value these things are being “racist.”
Back to today’s story. What is CBS’s motive in covering a news story where a sociology professor (Sabrina Strings) begins her analysis by assuming that the history of disparaging attitudes obesity began in the United States in the 19th Century? I’m assuming that this CBS article features her best foot forward yet, in addition to her stilted timeline, she makes things up out of thin air to support her claim that today’s attitudes regarding obesity are rooted in racism. Did CBS publish such nonsense to promulgate it as worthy of discussion or to ridicule it? I suspect it is the former, based upon the following sentence, which appears as fact in the article:
While the medical community and public health officials continue to study the serious health risks associated with obesity [20], Strings’ research provides context around the social and cultural issues related to weight — and the legacy of racist and outdated ideals embedded in many of our common assumptions.
At the end of the article, Professor Strings doubles down:
We cannot deny the fact that fat-phobia is rooted in anti-Blackness. That’s simply an historical reality,” she said. “Today, when people talk about it, they often claim that they don’t intend to be anti-Black … they don’t intend all of these negative associations, and yet they exist already, so whenever people start trafficking in fat-phobia, they are inherently picking up on these historical forms of oppression.
Absent from Strings’ theorizing is any mention that concern with obesity is ancient and worldwide, as described by “A Brief History of Obesity,” [21] by Henry Buckwald, M.D., Ph.D:
The Old Testament, the New Testament, early Christian writings and the Talmud regard obesity negatively:
Judges 3:17: “And he presented the tribute to Eglon, King of Moab. Now Eglon was a very fat man.”
Proverbs 23:20: “Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat.”
Proverbs 28:7: “A companion of gluttons shames his father.”
Philippians 3:19: “Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and thy glory is their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
The Greeks weighed in too (pun intended): [21]
Hippocrates, the fourth- to fifth-century B.C. Greek physician, wrote:
All disease begins in the gut. Everything in excess is opposed by nature. If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess. The most famous doctors cure by changing the diet and lifestyle of their patient”(Hippocratic Corpus).
Eternal fat shaming makes its appearance in Dante’s Inferno, [22] written in 1320:
Dante awakens in the third circle of Hell, the circle of the Gluttons. A stinking slush falls from the sky and collects on the ground where naked shades howl and roll in the mire.
Cerberus, the three-headed monster, stands over those sunk deep in the slush. He barks furiously and claws and bites all within reach. These spirits howl in the rain and attempt to evade the monster. Seeing the two travelers, Cerberus turns on them and is silenced only when Virgil throws handfuls of the reeking dirt and slime into his three mouths.
The poets make their way across the swamp, walking occasionally on the shades, which seem to have no corporeal bodies. One Glutton sits up from the mire and addresses Dante. The shade is Ciacco, the Hog, and claims to be from Florence and to know Dante. The two speak, and Dante feels sorry for Ciacco’s fate.
But, again, history begins hundreds of years later than these writings for this cherry-picking professor who is working hard to find racism even in places where it doesn’t exist.
Going forward, I have decided to keep at my weight loss and fitness activities despite their purported racist roots, buffeted along by my post-racial mindset [23] (and see here [24]). We are all of the same family [25] and I will continue to criticize all Dividers where ever I find them.
Despite that I’m highly critical of the above article, I spotted a 25-minute video on the same webpage. [13] The title of this CBS video is “Fat Shaming.” This video is a first-rate discussion of obesity and fat-shaming from a wide variety of perspectives. An issue unflinchingly and repeatedly addressed by the video is whether the excesses of the body positivity movement are harming people by falsely convincing them that it is healthy to be overweight. The video is balanced and thoughtful. I highly recommend it.
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