I’m not obese, but I do struggle with my weight and my body image, growing into a healthier acceptance of both as I grow older. And as I grow, I’ve become both interested in and repulsed by the fat hatred vitriolically displayed in this country, if not every country. Fat hatred like this:
In one now-classic study, Colleen Rand, an obesity researcher at the University of Florida, asked 47 formerly fat men and women whether they would rather be obese again or have some other disability. Every one of them said they would rather be deaf of have dyslexia, diabetes, bad acne or heart disease than be obese again. Ninety-one percent said they would rather have a leg amputated. Eighty-nine percent would rather be blind. One said, “When you’re blind, people want to help you. No one wants to help you when you’re fat.”
What Kolata goes on to prove quite convincingly is this fascinating book is that our hatred comes from the idea that fat can be controlled and managed, that obese individuals are just weak, undisciplined, lazy or have some other mental block or trauma that keeps them fat. They’re just not trying hard enough, right? Well, Kolata says, “Wrong.”
The data in study after study were consistent — obese people had no unique psychiatric abnormalities. Some had problems, such as anxiety, depression and mood disorders, but in every instance the psychiatric problems were just a prevalent in people of normal weight.
“Most obese people are no different than non-obese people,” Stunkard says. They are not eating because they are depressed or because they have a pathological relationship with food or to their parents. If all you had was their scores on psychological tests — if you could not actually see the people you were testing — you would not be able to decide who was fat and who was not.
Some scientists suggest an intriguing hypothesis. The origins of people’s recent weight gains may have little to do with willpower, or lack of it, or with today’s social customs to snack and eat on the run of with any other popular belief. Instead, they say, we may be a new, heavier human race and our weight may have been set by events that took place very early in life, maybe prenatally.
Scientists know that animals and people have a range of weights that they can comfortably sustain. Each person’s range is different, but any weight much above or below a person’s range is almost impossible to maintain. Scientists also know from animal studies that weight as an adult can be affected by early nutrition or infections. They even know that the brain circuits that control eating are modeled and remodeled in mice early in life and again in adolescence. Maybe, these researchers say, something happened early in life — better nutrition, vaccines to provide freedom from viral infections that plagued children of previous generations, antibiotics to cure infections like strep throat or pneumonia — that precipitated changes in the brain’s control over weight.
While she delves into some complex scientific material, Kolata manages to keep the book accessible. It’s both fascinating and heartbreaking to follow the journey of some of her interviewees, most of whom are either on or between some diet or another, their entire lives revolving around the number on the scale. It’s wonderful to see someone admit that those with a BMI considered obese are often healthier than their skinny counterparts, that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with some extra weight. And it’s depressing to learn that, at the end of the day, science has proven that diets are ultimately unsuccessful and extreme diets can actually change your body chemistry for the worse.
Maybe the lesson is that we’ve been looking for answers to the obesity epidemic in all the wrong places. At the very least, it does not help to tell people that they are fat, much too fat, and that they just have to eat less and exercise more. After all, as (other dieters in the book) mentioned, even Oprah gained her weight back, she with all her money and her personal chef and her personal trainer, and with the whole world watching.
I’d like to think also that as the population gets fatter, there might be a rethinking of the risks of a few extra pounds. When health data have not supported alarmist cries of a medical disaster in the making, could a society perhaps let up on the beleaguered fat people?
I hope so. They can start by putting aside their preconceived notions and picking up the book.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – Hardcover book club reading
Don’t look at me! It was a book club selection. No, I don’t have anything against Jodi Picoult or her passionate fans. I’m just not one of them. Picoult is first and foremost a storyteller — all about plot, plot, plot — and I’m one for the artistry of the words, so I’ve let her words go one way while my eyes roam another direction for reading material. Until this round of book club, when I read The Tenth Circle.
Like most readers, I was drawn into literature by fiction, and by and large, fiction is what I read. Non fiction often reeks of the classroom, lectures, homework or obsession with a certain subject (World War II anyone?). But it’s non-fiction books like Voluntary Madness that cause me to see the beauty of the form, how the truth creatively told can be more engrossing and entertaining than any made up tale. Of course this tale — of a writer with a history of depression who voluntarily has herself committed — was one of the most engrossing autobiographical works I’ve ever experienced.
I need a little dose of silly genre fiction sometimes. The description of this book?
I tend to intellectualize things. Things like life, culture, social interaction, language. I like to see what our words and actions really mean, see what makes the world tick, see it for the complex system of signs and symbols it is. I should have taken more sociology in school.
I love to cook, and so a friend lent me her copy of this book, which is the biography of the author’s great grandmother. While, yes, this books is a straight-forward biography — that means it’s not dramatized and obviously contains certain periods of boredom or inactivity — it was amazingly fascinating to me. I’m a history buff in addition to being a cook. I actually did my thesis on British history. And so when Lilla showed me a part of British history I’d never experienced before, well, I can only hope my life turns out as interesting to someone else as hers was to me.
