Previous post on food & weight: The science-defying, middle-aged female body!
You might not be able to read this article called A call to action: your fat friend is going it alone. Medium.com is a membership website of curated articles written by people who have experienced what they’re writing about. “Your Fat Friend” is an author who regularly contributes articles on the subject of what it’s like to be fat in environments and relationships where few others understand what that’s like.
Because you might not be able to access that article, I’ll tell you that in it the author describes a fat man who was forced to get off a crowded flight because he required more room than they were ready to allow him. It’s infuriating that people are humiliated this way, and even more infuriating that no one speaks up in these moments. I imagine that it might not have cost someone much to stand up and say, “Could everyone please not stare? It’s rude to stare at people, although I don’t mind you looking at me right now because I’m talking to you and asking for your attention.” Then the person could stay on their feet and keep looking back at everyone on the plane until the person being escorted is off the plane. That’s called pulling focus and when someone is being humiliated, it’s good to draw the attention of people who are staring rudely.
Americans are terrible about thinking it’s okay to judge fat people. We think we have this fat thing all figured out, not knowing that the calories in/calories out theory of body weight has been disproved. We think fat people are fat because they’re lazy, self-indulgent, think they deserve more than others, and don’t care about inconveniencing people. We project our worst tendancies on people who are fat when there are actually reasons for fatness that have nothing to do with how much a person eats.
Here are some:
1. Hormonal imbalance. Have you heard that excess cortisol (the fight-or-flight hormone) will cause fat to accumulate in the gut area? That’s one way hormone problems cause fatness that has nothing to do with how much the person eats or moves. Fat is also affected by levels of estrogen and insulin.
2. Poor lymphatic drainage. The lymphatic system lies just beneath the skin and moves lymph fluid throughout the body, picking up toxins, waste and other unwanted materials. When it doesn’t flow well, it causes puffiness and can cause things like distended guts and double chins.
3. Trapped toxins. Our bodies take in toxic substances through breathing exhaust, taking showers in regular tap water, eating highly processed food, etc. From birth, our bodies work to expel such toxins, but not all of them can be released. When the body is unable to remove toxins (such as heavy metals), it stores them in — guess what? — fat. If a body is unable to safely release that fat and the toxins it contains, it won’t lose the fat no matter how little the person eats or how much they move. It’s too dangerous to release those toxins back into the body, so the fat stays. And stays.
4. Spiritual problems. I hate spirituality and try not to believe in it, but it’s possible that this can also be part of obesity. And I mean possible the way western medicine used to doubt the existence of germs, but some believed their existence was possible.
And, yes, there’s also being hooked on junk food and/or using food to manage our emotions. But if you’ve got food all mixed up with your emotions — as I have — that requires very specific help and it can take years to work through that problem. In the meantime, we stay fat, and assholes make us feel bad about being fat even though we are working as hard as we can to heal the very complicated pain of emotional eating.
Could we please hesitate just a little before judging and condemning each other? Could we consider for a few seconds what others might be going through? When you stare at a fat person and wonder how she let herself get that way, remember the causes for fatness I gave above. Also consider these answers:
1. She wanted to kill herself until a life-saving prescription improved her mood, but it had the side effect of causing weight gain. Now she hates herself again.
2. Her husband made it clear to her that he never wanted to have sex with her again, so she started eating to soothe herself and then got caught in middle age, unable to get the weight off no matter what she does.
3. Her whole family is obese and from infancy she learned to use food to celebrate, commiserate, and generally get through the day. Now she’s obese, too.
4. She was slim until the family members she was closest to died. In her grief, she started eating, and decided that becoming fat was less important than managing the rawness of her feelings of isolation, abandonment and terror.
5. She was raped as a teenager and uses her own body to keep a wall between her and anyone else who might violate her.
6. Most days it feels like food is the only reason to get up in the morning.
Fat people are often in a lot of pain, emotional and physical. No one wants to be the focus of negative attention. I suspect hatred of fat people is a lot of misogyny. Americans value the hardness of a hard-on, as evidenced in the way a good economy is hard, a bad one is soft. We similarly want hard reasons, hard facts, hard bodies, hard proof, hard talk. In business, hardball is better than softball. What’s the opposite of a hard-on? A pussy, one of the most popular insults among men and, sadly, many women.
Outside of a sexual context, Americans do not like the softness we associate with femininity. And what’s softer than pile upon pile of pudgy human flesh? There are cultures that have not only admired, but revered such piles of flesh, usually in feminine form. I don’t know what went wrong with American culture, but I believe misogyny drives the American loathing of fat.
Certainly we fat people don’t deserve the brunt of American hatred of the feminine. We don’t deserve to receive the judgement Americans love to give each other about all kinds of topics and lifestyles. So the next time you see someone being targeted because of their size, please speak up. Even if you can’t change the situation so they receive better treatment, you can let that person know someone is on their side and that’s worth a lot.
Classikal – I think that's good enough.
Excellent article. Good summary of many of the complex pieces. I especially liked the example of "pulling focus". As an introvert, I'm unsure if I could DO it, but I like knowing the option. Maybe I can mentally rehearse it enough to be able to put into action in the future.