Obsession with Weight, Part 3

The Obesity Myth
by Paul Campos, J.D.

(Page 3 of 6)

To a shocking extent, much of the highest profile obesity research being done in America today turns out to be little more than propaganda masquerading as the results of disinterested scientific investigation: propaganda that has been bought and paid for by our nation's $50 billion per year weight loss industry. The book's first section illustrates the extent to which Americans have become as addicted to junk science as we are to junk food - and it lays the groundwork for exploring that addiction's profound cultural and political consequences.

As we will see in Part II, "Fat Culture," the war on fat ultimately has very little to do with science. The doctors and public health officials prosecuting that war would have us believe that who is or isn't fat is a scientific question that can be answered by consulting something as crude as a body mass index chart (the BMI is a simple mathematical formula that puts people of different heights and weights on a single integrated scale). This, like so many other claims at the heart of the case against fat, is false. "Fat" - or as our anti-fat warriors prefer to put it, "overweight" - is a cultural construct, not a scientific fact. For instance, according to the public health establishment's current BMI definitions, Brad Pitt, Michael Jordan, and Mel Gibson are all "overweight," while Russell Crowe, George Clooney, and baseball star Sammy Sosa are all "obese." (A common reaction to such absurdities is to object that the BMI definitions aren't meant to apply to people in "good shape." In fact, those who make claims about the supposed link between increasing body mass and ill health do not make exceptions for movie stars, athletes, or anyone else. According to America's fat police, if your BMI is over 25 then you are "overweight," period. Note also the radical difference between how our culture defines "fashionable" thinness for men and women. If Jennifer Aniston had the same BMI as her husband Brad Pitt, she would weigh approximately 55 pounds more than she does.)

The truth is that to be fat in America today means to weigh more than whatever a person's particular social milieu considers appropriate. As we shall see, this means it is perfectly possible - and in a certain twisted sense even "reasonable" - for a 130-pound white college student of average height to consider herself "fat," while a working-class African American woman who weighs 50 pounds more is not likely to think of herself as "overweight" (and she, too, will be correct in her self-assessment). In other words, fat in America is a state of mind, rather than some objective fact about our bodies.

Although race and class are topics that make most Americans nearly as uncomfortable as fat itself, any extensive discussion of weight-related issues must explore the many connections between these three subjects. "Fat Culture" outlines how such disparate topics as Gwyneth Paltrow's fat suit, Michael Jackson's attempts to become white, Elvis Presley's expanding waistline, the "food porn" of high-end restaurant menu prose, and the kidnapping of a three-year-old girl by the state of New Mexico because she was "too fat" are all fundamentally interconnected.

Americans love to moralize about fat because, among other reasons, fat has become a convenient stand-in for various characteristics that have been traditionally associated with the pariahs of the moment. "Fat Culture" explores how and why Americans who would never dream of consciously allowing themselves to be disgusted by someone's skin color, or religion, or social class, often feel no compunction about expressing the disgust elicited in them by the sight of people who weigh anything from a lot to a little more than our current absurdly restrictive cultural ideal.

Such reactions are ultimately political in the broadest sense; and Part III, "Fat Politics," traces the political consequences of an ideology that equates thinness with virtue and fat with vice. Indeed this ideology drives both the science and culture of our national obsession with weight and weight control. This part of the book describes how that obsession came to play a key role in the impeachment of the president of the United States; and it explores the powerful political meanings and messages that Americans have come to ascribe to the shape of peoples' bodies. The argument in these chapters suggests that, for upper-class Americans in particular, obsessing about weight can become a way of dealing with (or rather not dealing with) far more significant issues involving consumption and overconsumption.

In American culture, the urge to moralize and medicalize as many aspects of personal behavior as possible runs deep. Today epidemiological regression analyses have largely taken the place of the sorts of exhortations once represented by Jonathan Edwards' eighteenth-century sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Nevertheless, as Part III will make clear, the motivating impulses behind such apparently dissimilar texts turn out to have a number of things in common. At bottom, the obesity myth is both a cause and a consequence of what sociologists call a "moral panic." It is a particularly tenacious example of the same sort of impulse that fueled hysteria about demon rum, reefer madness, communists in the State Department, witches in Salem, and many other instances of our eternally recurring search for scapegoats, who can be blamed for the decadent state of American culture in general, and of the younger generation in particular.

Our anti-fat warriors are right about one thing: How we approach issues of weight, weight control, and body image tells us a great deal about what kind of people we really are. Much like their Calvinist spiritual ancestors, those who prosecute the war on fat treat the most extreme forms of intolerance as the surest signs of virtue. And, as we shall see, in their unwillingness to brook dissent, their eagerness to sniff out heresy, and their ultimately tragic devotion to a task that can neither be completed nor abandoned, those who have transformed the Protestant work ethic into the American diet ethic are worthy heirs to a tradition of life- warping fanaticism.

Anyone who writes a book challenging the conventional wisdom on a controversial topic knows in advance that his arguments will be misunderstood, caricatured, and generally distorted by those who have the most to lose from the possibility that the challenge might be effective. Although it is futile to attempt to avoid that fate by anticipating it, it still might be useful to state a few points as clearly as possible from the outset, for the benefit of skeptical readers willing to consider the merits of this particular challenge.

The obesity myth is based on three claims: that "excess" weight causes illness and early death; that losing weight improves health and extends life; and that we know how to make fat people thin. It is true that these claims are not completely false. After all, as every good propagandist knows, a social myth is much more effective when it is based on a grain of truth.

This book does not argue that there is no relationship between weight and health. It argues, rather, that the health risks associated with higher-than-average weight have been greatly exaggerated, while all sorts of related but far graver risks have been ignored. In particular, this book emphasizes that poverty, poor nutrition, and a culture that makes it easy for Americans to be sedentary are important public health issues in America today. We should be encouraging Americans to be physically active, to eat well, and to provide reasonable access to medical care for those among us who lack it. What we should not be doing is telling Americans that they will improve their health by trying to lose weight. As we shall see, there is very little evidence that attempts to achieve weight loss will improve the health of most people who undertake them, and a great deal of evidence that such attempts do more harm than good.

Nevertheless, it's important to be realistic about the actual motivations that lead people to try to lose weight. This book acknowledges that, given the enormous premium our culture places on thinness, Americans have all sorts of reasons for wanting to lose weight that have nothing to do with health. But it also points out that treating cosmetic weight loss as if it were a medical and moral issue tends to make people both considerably fatter and a good deal unhappier than they would otherwise be.

Finally, it would be unfair to the reader not to reveal from the beginning that this book has an autobiographical dimension of a rather ironic sort. I lost a great deal of weight while working on this book, thereby transforming myself, in the course of undertaking a comprehensive critique of America's obsession with weight loss, from an "obese" forty-year-old man into someone who currently maintains what our public health establishment mischaracterizes as an "ideal" weight. I will explore the significance of this peculiar fact in the book's final chapter. For now I merely note that, given the dismal history of diets in America, it would only be fitting if the first really effective diet book consisted of a wholesale denunciation of the very idea of diet books. Indeed in the course of this project I discovered that there were distinct advantages to being a fat person hiding inside a thin body. Who, after all, can describe a prison more accurately than one of its inmates?

Copyright © 2004 Paul Campos

About the Author

A professor of law at the University of Colorado and a nationally recognized expert on America's war on fat, Paul Campos is the author of a weekly opinion column that appears in more than forty newspapers nationwide. His articles have appeared in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.