Over at Creek Running North, Timothy Burke (in comments) writes:
It’s the language of “public health panic” that worries me. Language like “epidemic”, which slips away from precision and proportionality just as the language of “addiction” does. Suddenly there’s a whole army of experts who have staked their claim and hung out their shingle on trying to advise people about their “addiction” to this and that. It becomes ok to spend millions, even billions, on pointless PSAs, on interventions of various kinds, on consultation contracts, and so on.
There are a great many “public health panics” of this kind in the past that have been more or less baseless or more commonly disproportionate.
In this case, I think the main problem, if you’ll excuse the unintended pun, is a proportionality problem. There’s no question that obesity is a public health issue and that it is occurring in more people and in more ways. But how big an issue is it, and how much should we worry about it? If life expectancies in the developed world are up to a very significant extent over the last century, and obesity curtails that slightly, so what? Why does that matter, how much does it matter, and how much effort should that occasion from us? How much does obesity negatively affect quality of life vs. efforts to curtail obesity negatively affect quality of life?
I particularly get frustrated with the language of efficiency in these kinds of “public health panic” discussions, about how much money is allegedly wasted on treatment, because they’re impoverished both as hard-nosed economics and as a kind of humanistic discourse. On the hard-nosed side, it’s the kind of thing that some economists are good at being playful at but do-gooder experts and suchlike make many bad assumptions about. For example, is it a net loss or gain if people die at earlier ages from smoking tobacco? You want to make a big deal out of this as a purely economic question, you have to run the numbers. How much does that affect productivity? How many people make their living out of selling the tobacco? How many people make their living out of treating the people who get sick from it? How much money in various costs do those people save by dying earlier? If you reject on principle those kinds of questions, don’t talk about how much money public health problems cost, just talk about the humanistic issue of quality and length of life. Which takes you back to having to make philosophical arguments that may limit or constrain the kinds of interventions or projects you entertain under this heading. If if turns out that obesity costs you three years on average, and has a relatively minimal effect on life satisfaction rates for the average person, then maybe you say it’s not a good thing, but you don’t lead a huge and expensive crusade with targeted interventions about it, you save your efforts for something else. The problem here is that people reason from themselves in really flawed ways and get to major projects that consume public resources and energy. I’ve personally been liberated by literacy and scholarly thought, but it’s not clear to me that literacy beyond basic competencies is equally liberating to all people. I would want to think about evidence for that, step back from my own satisfactions, and then think about cost/benefit ratios to making literacy a chief or driving objective of social policy.
That’s my issue: that there are a zillion people out there desperate to make a given issue a huge, prepossessing public priority, using the language of epidemic or crisis or disaster, without offering either hard cost/benefit analysis or thoughtfully situational humanism to explain why the issue at hand ought to be at the top of a list of concerns we all ought to share. I’d like to be thinner and in better shape myself, but I’m not at all certain why you or anyone else should really care that much if I’m not–or if you do, why you shouldn’t care equally about whether I drink, about whether I wear seatbelts, about whether I’m male, about whether I like to climb mountains, about whether I use my computer too much, and much else besides. If my employer should care about my weight because they don’t want me to croak or cost them too much in health insurance, every single one of those other issues is also potentially relevant. And frankly, maybe they want me to croak: a 27-year old version of me is a lot cheaper for them. My family and friends should care; should my society? If society should care because all people are valuable and full of potential, aren’t there issues which impede the value and potential of people far more pressing than whether a middle-class white professional is 50 lbs. overweight? Or even whether a working-class black man living in inner-city Philadelphia is 50 lbs. overweight?
My thanks to Timothy for the permission to quote him so extensively.
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I like the way this guy thinks. There are many things that aught to be other than the way they are. In the public media they are always presented as crises. They are presented in isolation, as if there are no other competing “crises” that should be addresses. The manner and effectiveness of methods of addressing them, the cost of doing this, the down sides and trade offs involved in addressing the “problem”, the psychic damage done to the victims of the crisis which occurs when well meaning helpers label them as victims, and the psychic damage done to all concerned people who must face more negative information in their daily diet of such are not factored in.
The facts as I know them are as follows: Fat is a highly metabolically active organ system that is good. You should no more hate fat than you hate your kidneys. It is impossible to define what is “normal.” This varies from person to person. Adiposity is a physiological variable like blood pressure or blood glucose level which is associated with statistically variable out come for some health outcomes, primarily cardiovascular. Knowledge of these is derived from population studies and theoretical associations with various physiological and biochemical findings. Generally the lower the weight, blood pressure and glucose level, the better the statistical outcome unless the change is caused by disease or injury. There is no known threshold. People do not respond the same to differences in these parameters. For example over weight may cause the metabolic syndrome, but not all over weight people have this syndrome. The more these parameters get away from the ideal, the more the chance that there will be statistical adverse effects. It is just about inevitable that most of these parameters are more difficult to control the older you get, so you have to do some sort of individual cost benefit analysis, get some medical care and live with the consequences. This may take some effort.
I agree with folks who question the panicked rhetoric declaring an obesity ‘epidemic,’ and who point out the fat hate that drives most of the discussion of this.
But I also think that there is a real problem with an agricultural and food distribution system that provides far more calories per day than needed and in which corn subsidies make processed staples like high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated corn oil ubiquitous. Are there blogs/books etc that address both of these problems?
This is the “There are OTHER important things, too, focus on them instead!” argument.
It comes up (all the time) in feminism, sexism, racism, ____ism. And it’s not a great defense any time, including here.
Whether or not there are other health issues doesn’t change obesity as a health issue. Whether or not there are other widespread epidemics doesn’t change the fact that obesity is ALSO becoming more widespread and problematic.
The language seems eerily similar: Aren’t there “more important ” things than feminism? Shouldn’t feminists be concentrating on ___ instead of “silly things” like Vogue ads? You all know you’ve seen it, and the parallel is obvious.
Yup. And if we DON’T want people to care about weight, I suppose we should also stop anti-alcohol and anti-smoking ads and reverse those pesky seatbelt laws. After all, it’s all or nothing, right? See how problematic this argument is when you look at it that way?
Uh, nope. I don’t see the problem. The author is complaining about a rightfully perceived obsession about the public’s weight. He is not saying that weight is not a health issue. He is saying that it’s telling that the shapers of public opinion are focussing on it, and using inflammatory language, that they simply don’t use when discussing other health issues if they discuss them at all. He is also questioning the sincerity of their appeals to human emotion.
Uh, the correct answer to this sort of complaint is that Vogue ads are both symptom and illness where sexism is concerned. You could just as easily use Vogue ads to claim that fat activists are too obsessed with trivia, but the same answer would readily apply.
Also, at no point did the author say that the pursuit of health was “silly.” The skepticism stems from where energies toward improving health are concentrated and what sort of language we use to discuss it.
Public health advocates (indeed, advocates of all types of public policy) often have to screech like Chicken Little to get any traction or money whatsoever. This has to be recognized to some degree, and if you like, you can call it the Y2K syndrome, in which near hysteria was probably necessary in order for that transition to end up being ho-hum.
Having said that, in the area of public health, as public health workers well know, hysteria can have really bad consequences for those in need of services — like HIV individuals, for instance. So “fat panic” cannot be justified by a need for funds alone.
And Sailorman, there is a real question about what exactly is an ideal or normal weight. There are a lot of things that are taken for granted that really have no empirical basis in fact at all — for instance, a normal temperature is 98.6F, a normal pregnancy is 40 weeks, and so on.
So yes, more research, for sure, on weight an health and the interplay between weight and weight related conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, but try to lose the sense of panic.
Also, I hate to go in the direction of “weight is no big deal” precisely because there is clearly a correlation between weight and access to things like safe communities, open spaces, grocery stores, physical education, and so on.
While in most areas of public health, the Chicken Little approach is necessary to get any attention, that dynamic just doesn’t exist when dealing with the issue of fat people. Rather, the media and public respond as if the sky actually is falling. Yet, the truth doesn’t remotely justify any of this. And yet, to be regarded as “serious”, one still needs to agree that the sky is falling and settle to only debate the quantity of sky that is falling. This is the greater problem, I think. Those who push the panic have gotten there message across so effectively that virtually no one is willing to challenge it at its most basic levels. The demand that any discussion of the issue begin with an acceptance that fat is bad. A genuine challenge to this all is simply not allowed. The data doesn’t remotely justify the level of fat hate that dominates the discourse. Indeed, the “risk” is so small as to beg the question of whether other factors contribute to that risk and perhaps are even the primary issue to begin with. Yet, that question doesn’t get raised, doesn’t get asked, and doesn’t get answered. Not only is the public hysteria over fatness totally out of proportion with even the most extreme risk assessments, those assessments themselves are very much in doubt. But having been enshrined as common sense, the panic rules the day. We need to ask serious questions about the role fitness plays into the equation and the damage done by weight loss efforts. That’s the other side of this all. We have a panic without purpose. No amount of condemnation of fat people is going to change the fact that there is no reliable or safe means for turning a fat person into a not fat person. Indeed, the prefered “treatment” merely makes people fatter. This all seems less an issue of Chicken Little to me than that of a chicken running around with its head cut off.
Sorry, but not good enough.
He’s accepted without challenge the idea that fat people are necessarily unhealthy or doomed, without question. He talks about being “in shape” as if that has anything to do with weight levels. Pretty darn naive. He’s structured this entire “analysis” with absolutely no contact whatsoever with real, live fat people. He probably has never even heard the phrase “health at every size.” He probably doesn’t even know a fat civil rights movement exists. He’s thinking in thin guy terms, and in his mind using the thin world view as the default is somehow legitimate. (And, that way he doesn’t have to challenge his access to thin privilege.) He’s refused to look at the impact of that assumption on fat people’s access to every opportunity in life, including merely that of being judged as individuals instead of filed under “always worse than.” He’s advocating for some “kinder, gentler” condemnation that is still inherently unacceptable.
We’re equal in every way, under any criterion, to any thinner person.
Most of us would be fat in any situation short of life-threatening starvation.
And, many, many of us will contribute more to society, under any criteria, and well outlive many thinner people, who are not similarly condemned, even in a “kinder, gentler” way.
The guy just doesn’t get it. The war against fat people was never about science or that “reason” he flatters himself as possessing (even though he does no research before coughing up theories), just as any other social “cleansing” program is never about race or religion. We’re hated and condemned because we’re convenient and because hating us is profitable and soothing for the privileged.
He’s structured this entire “analysis” with absolutely no contact whatsoever with real, live fat people. He probably has never even heard the phrase “health at every size.” He probably doesn’t even know a fat civil rights movement exists. He’s thinking in thin guy terms, and in his mind using the thin world view as the default is somehow legitimate.
Uh, what? Timothy Burke is a real life fat person.
And I think he’s got a pretty good take on the issue, though I also agree with Barbara’s comments.
My entire web schtick is built around trying to be reasonable, but: 1) can you read, kbrigan? You’re not talking back to me, but to some phantom of your imagination. and 2) I’m about 75 lbs. overweight. I don’t think as a thin guy and I’m not a thin guy. I have real contact with a live fat guy every minute of every day. His ass is sitting in my chair right now. Moreover, the distinction you draw between weight and fitness is, I think, a very sound one and is very much excluded by the terms of “public health panic”. It is, in fact, one of the key empirical facts about weight that virtually none of the people sounding the call to panic want to talk about, that there is a very significant difference in terms of health outcomes between people who are physically unfit (whatever their weight and shape) and people who are over the actuarial “ideal weights”. On that scale, I’d actually say that while I want to be in better shape, I’m reasonably physically fit for someone carrying the weight that I am where I tend to carry it (in my abdomen). But this distinction, which you’re right to draw, is not “missing” from my analysis. Indeed, it complements it quite well.
I get really tired of the number of itchy trigger fingers out here in Blogland, the people who are so angry all the time that they scarcely hesitate to read what’s been offered for their consideration, much less make unwarranted assumptions about the writer.
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On the question of whether a public health advocate is compelled to adopt the Chicken Little approach, I simply disagree, on two fronts. The first is a kind of prisoner’s dilemma objection. If all people who think they have a legitimate issue of public concern are “forced” (and therefore justified) to adopt the Chicken Little approach, then we end up with just as much noise and confusion at the end of a thousand people shouting as we had when there was relative silence. Since there are many people with essentially self-interested reasons to sound off as Chicken Littles (even when the issue in question is genuinely important), rewarding people who Chicken Little their way into the public arena seems to me to be a bad incentive. Second, I think issues that come into public awareness through Chicken Little shouting never lose their Chicken-Littleness even after there is broad public acceptance that the issue in question is important. So the policies that get adopted tend to have the same disproportionate character as the tactics used to get them adopted, and issues that need careful, surgical attention instead get public policy that is straight out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Amp, I love ya, I really do, but it’s like you don’t want to have any news about fat being unhealthy penetrate your thinking. Do you really believe that excess fat hasn’t been shown by the medical community to be healthy? That the *only reason fat gets demonized is that it’s not as attractive, but otherwise, fat or not-fat is no different from blue eyes / brown eyes in terms of what it means for health? Why can’t you cop to that being fat isn’t as healthy, generally speaking? It doesn’t make you a bad person if you’re fat, you know.
If I may speak to a question addressed to Amp, the answer is: Because it isn’t true. Being fat all by itself is not unhealthy. The medical community is using fat as a proxy for various other conditions that are unhealthy, but it is only roughly approximate. They use it, not because it is a good marker, but because it is instantly recognizable.
Furthermore, the ways currently available to lose weight are themselves unhealthy. Dieting is very bad. Stomach stapling is very bad. Weight loss pills vary from pretty bad to really bad. Exercise is good for people, but it doesn’t necessarily bring their weight down.
“”I’m about 75 lbs. overweight (sic.) I don’t think as a thin guy and I’m not a thin guy. I have real contact with a live fat guy every minute of every day. His ass is sitting in my chair right now.”
OK, there’s one, although extrapolating from 75 lbs over BMI to the experiences of the fattest of the fat, aka. those people who have been harmed most by repeated weight loss attempts, is not valid.
And, one whole “fat” (actually, average size) person is not adequate. Who in the movement have you read? Where’s your research into the fat civil rights library? We’ve already addressed ad nauseum some of the points you bring up, in some cases over twenty years ago. You’ve been writing as if your thoughts are unique or innovative.
I do not agree that this issue should just be ignored in favor of “more important” issues. People are dying directly as a result of being pressured to lose weight. The primary advantage of the “obesity epidemic” hysteria is that, finally, this war will come to a head and we may finally see some progress instead of just being stuck living in a deadly status quo where the daily oppression and ridicule and condemnation of fat people is seen as normal life. Sorry, but I’m not willing to settle for some diluted, half-humanity. Nothing but full equality will do.
Congratulations. You’ve achieved the ridiculousness of all extreme identity politics with very little trouble, and thus, full equality with your peers. In fact, your mimicry of other extreme identity-based arguments is perfect. When an extreme black activist assumes someone they’re criticizing is white, and finds out otherwise, then they just redefine the criticism: not black enough. When an extreme gender activist assumes someone they’re criticizing is a man, and finds out otherwise, redefine: not woman enough. Not gay enough. What have you. It’s no sillier in this case, but neither is it any more justified. You’re still part of the tyrannous Thin Nation until what? you’re 150 BMI? 250 BMI?
Because, of course, there is nothing so damaging as someone entitled to drape themselves in political victimology who refuses to do so; nothing so damaging as someone who is “of the identity” who is indifferent to the political claims made for the identity by some self-appointed messianic spokesman. The hilarious thing here is that my basic point (like Amp’s, I think) is that everyone should just relax about fat, that most of the extreme claims made about fat and health are flawed, that the hysteria is overwrought and likely to lead to policies far more damaging than the dangers it allegedly seeks to correct. This should be a position that you’d welcome, but instead, like most identity activists, you’ve got your eye on some phantasmagorical political objective and all who do not share it are enemies or traitors. You’ve even convinced yourself that hysteria about fat is good, in that it will somehow expose the evils of prejudice against fat people and then, mirable dictu, bells will ring out and true equality will reign from sea to shining sea.
Equality is already upon you: equality with many other people who have a range of vision that extends no further than their own nose. Have fun recapitulating the history of extreme identity politics, in all its failed gestures and initiatives. The nationalist phase of the movement should be especially interesting.
And If I may speak to a reponse to a… oh hell, here goes ;)
“Being fat is not unhealthy, it’s the _____ that hurts you” only works if the______ DOES NOT FOLLOW from “being fat”. Otherwise the argument is like saying “It’s not the fall from the building that hurt, it was the landing that did all the damage”.
Certainly most people agree that being very obese is unhealthy.
It is also clear that one must be less obese “en route” to morbid obesity.
It also seems to be at least somewhat the cases that fat loss or weight maintenance tactics which do NOT work for people who are morbidly obese (exercise is a simple example) often DO work for people who are not morbidly obese.
This suggests that if you can avoid becoming fat, you can ALSO entirely avoid the risk of becoming obese. You can continue to exercise. You can avoid the health risks of difficult diets. And so on.
Of course, that’s only one example of many.
Yes, that is true. Fat people are not altogether unhealthy in all cases. And it is instantly recognizeable. However, it’s a pretty decent marker, all told. Do you suggest a better marker?
Don’t equate “losing weight” with “maintaining weight”. And especially don’t equate “losing weight” with “not being fat”.
One of the best ways to lose fat is exercise coupled with a slight (or nonexistent) reductoin in caloric intake. If you want to argue that is “unhealthy” I’d love to hear it…
This is essentially true. Sort of.
Let’s start with stomach stapling. It is a dangerous procedure. However, being morbidly obese is ALSO dangerous, and even disabling. As a choice between options, stomach stapling can easily be justified in certain cases. (as a cosmetic procedure: almost never).
Now to exercise. Exercise makes you healthier (lowers your body fat percentage).
You may be–deliberately?–conflating “fat” as in “large”, and “fat” as in “lipid”. Avoiding “being fat” is NOT necessarily about weight reduction. If I weighed as much as I do now, but it was all muscle and bone, I would not be fat. Yes, the BMI would show me as fat; that is a widely acknowledged flaw in the BMI. Right now, I am plain old ordinary fat.
Exercising is not healthy BECAUSE it brings down your body fat percentage – exercise is healthy because it strengthens your heart and lungs. As a side effect, for SOME PEOPLE ONLY, it can lower one’s weight.
I have been classified as “obese” my entire adult life, yet I have low cholesterol, low blood pressure, exercise regularly, do not overeat, have no blood sugar problems, or any other problems associated with the oh-so-horrible “disease” of obesity. The only problems I have with being fat are people looking at me and making a large number of assumptions about my character and my eating habits, making unsolicited suggestions as to what I should eat or what diet I should try, insulting me in public without provocation, submitting their unsolicitied pop psych opinions about why I’m overweight, and so on.
I have quit torturing myself with severe caloric restriction diets for months at a time which result in little or no weight loss (and a resulting weight regain when I quit starving myself). When I tell people I have no interest in dieting anymore, you’d think I said “I’m going to slit my throat right now in front of you”. But at the absolute very worst, being fat may shorten my life by a small fraction. I feel that’s a good tradeoff for years of misery and guilt and the bitter anger and rage caused by the insane pracitce of measuring my dinner out on food scales or measuring cups and crying every day when I get on the scale because my 1200-1500 calorie starvation diet simply fails to push the numbers down at all after my body adjusts to it. Three years versus a lifetime of misery? I’ll take it, even if it’s true (which hasn’t even been proven.)
Plenty of fat people are vicious anti-fat, Timothy. Indeed, I would say many of the most insistant defenders of the “fat is bad” mindset are fat people who have completely internalized this idea and are purely focused on the almost always unachievable goal of becoming not-fat people. Most fat people feel this way. The fact that you are fat does not make you a better judge of why fat people are bad. It just makes you pretty redundent in the scheme of things. Its something all of us who advocate for fat people and for the health of fat people have heard a thousand times before.
And Sailorman, spare us the insulting pandering where you act like we don’t know the difference between fat and muscle. How effortlessly condesending of you to assume that if you don’t like our arguement that you can just assume we must have meant something else. When we say FAT, we know what we mean. When we say WEIGHT, we know what we mean. You aren’t argueing semantics, you’re inventing them.
Oh, and if you’d like to hear why disordered eating is bad, try this on… It has never been shown that fat people eat more than thin people. So how is a famine level diet supposed to be good? Oh, sure, it’ll induce temporary weight loss very effectivelly. But it is not sustainable for the vast majority of people and there is NO evidence to suggest that it is healthy when it can be sustained through culturally endorsed anorexia.
The worst studies, gaming the numbers to no end to disadvantage fat people, only show a life expectancy impact of a couple years or less. Organ amputation takes off a couple decades. And about 2% won’t survive a year. The cost/benefit there makes no sense, but the chicken little screams have so completely insultated fat hatred that doctors and patients alike will think it makes sense. It is cosmetic surgery with an alarmingly high death rate. It is an absolute tragedy.
Everyone:
Much of the discussion here needs to be toned down a couple of notches. Please try to respect “Alas'” moderation goals, which include treating even those you disagree with in a respectful manner.
* * *
And by the way, Bstu, implying that Timothy is saying “fat people are bad” is a deeply unfair reading of what he’s written.
It’s pretty much surreal: Bstu is saying what I wrote but then somehow backing into a space where I’m supposedly saying the opposite. It is fairly hard to be polite about that, and again, my whole web presence is about a sustained commitment to reasonableness. Bstu, the entire point of the initial post is that the cost/benefit analysis of the “crusade against fat” is way out of whack, and that most of the people engaging in the crusade have at the very least suspect motives; that there is no “social issue” in the issue of fat that justifies any of the rhetoric, policy or drastic action (including medical intervention) that most of the public health discourse seems to think necessary.
Any time an activist has become so myopically trigger-happy that they spray fire indiscriminately at anyone walking into the room, it’s a pretty good hint that they’ve become ineffective in their activism.
When you walk into a room and say that there is no question that everyone therein is wrong, you ought to expect some negative responses. When you say that there is “no question” that fatness is a “public health issue”, you are setting boundries for a debate which excludes a very important arguement. When I see people do that, I suspect that they are trying to show how “serious” they are for the means of diminishing those who actively advocate for something. “We can all agree…” is just a means of pushing out those who don’t. Its saying that they don’t get a seat at the table. In this case, its saying that the entirity of the fat activism movement is unwelcome in discussing the issues that face them. You treated that line as a throwaway, but others saw something far more serious. Your response makes your intention crystal clear. Your derisive mocking of activsm as “identity politics” simply confirms that your intention is to put yourself above the “riff raff” who are actually working to advocate for change. You scream innocence at the same time you spout scorn. Well, I don’t accept the notion that what a civil rights movement really needs to succeed is to get rid of all the people who are working and advocating for it. Rather than respond to the substance of the complaint, you simply mocked the person issuing the complaint. You have STILL completely ignored the problem kbrigan had with your remarks. So, no, I don’t think its unfair of me at all to call you out for it.
And yes, sir, there are consequences for your pithy acceptance that fatness is a problem. I also don’t much admire the “Don’t hate the sinner, hate the sin” defense. Because you’ve still called people sinners, and that is a most serious concern. I won’t disassociate my body from myself. By saying fat is bad, you are saying fat people are bad. Perhaps you don’t think all of them are bad, but you’ve conceded that some are. That’s a concession I refuse to make. Because once made, the discussion quickly turns into defining that line of tolerance rather than advancing people’s rights. It becomes a question of how fat is “too fat”? When is it okay to accept your body, and when must you relent to the obviousness of your problem? Perhaps you think that your weight is okay, but someone with a higer weight cannot be tolerated. Some do the reverse, saying that acceptance is for other people, but they will not accept themselves. None of this is productive. Fat hatred has advanced to effect more and more people. As awful as this is, I won’t roll back that hatred a bit for the price of surrendering some of those affected by that hatred completely.
There IS a question of whether fat is a public health issue. And it is a question which must continue to be asked. Even if some allies wish we’d stop bringing it up and just go along with the status quo. Even if some don’t think its “serious” or “reasonable” to ask these questions. The question still remains.
You kill me, Btsu. Your last paragraph essentially echoes what Timothy said. At no point in his original post, so far as I can tell, did he equate the current prominence in the public view of obesity with any opinion on his own behalf that obese folks are suffocating public morality under some huge metaphoric crushing weight. It looks to me as if the acusations of being some kind of self-hating fat person are being projected upon him by you, because I don’t see that coming from his comments. Timothy is pretty much asking exactly what you are asking. Your acusations are way the hell out of left field.
So if I’m saying, “Hey, in some sense it’s ‘public health issue’, but basically a trivial one, and in general, ‘public health issues’ are to be ignored because they’re exaggerated and used as an excuse for specious action”, this is saying, “it’s a public health issue”.
Seriously, you guys have such a tunnel vision that everyone and anything that doesn’t toe your line exactly as you would like it is an enemy, even someone who basically is agreeing with you in almost every particular, and whose basic conclusion is the same as yours.
I seriously advise you to look up historically what happens to identity politics-type movements that get driven into zealotry and purist ideology. They end up mobilizing only the smallest possible constituency even among the people who fall into the identity category in question, and alienating virtually every possible ally and sympathizer. At which point the political options for that movement are slim and nil. That’s bad enough for groups whose possible membership is a major plurality or even slim majority of the population. It’s disastrous for small groups unless they happen to all be concentrated in geographic clusters, the way some Christian conservatives are. If you’re even in the least bit serious about advancing a cause, then don’t indiscriminately flail about at people and arguments which basically align with your own views simply because they fail to wholly conform to the purist chapter and verse of your own ideology.
A postscript: I mean, is the jist of your complaint, Btsu, is that Timothy, or me or Amp or whomever, must be suspect if we try to discuss weight-related issues because if we’re not as fat as you, we’re just not fat enough to have any credibility ? I didn’t want to believe that when you first went off in this thread, but the increasing hostility in your tone is really making me wonder.
It certainly seemed to be kbrigan’s point: both “not fat enough” and the fat activist’s equivalent of crying “self-hating Jew!”.
Post-postscript: Suddenly I’m the calm, accommodating middle-of-the-roader and Btsu is the fire-breathing, uncompromising idelogue ?!
It could only happen on Amptoons… :D
Well, there goes that assumpsion. What makes you assume I’m any fatter than Timothy? I may well be considered acceptably fat by him, but that doesn’t mean I’m any more willing to let the discussion of fat rights turn into one that is more about when its okay to offer someone their civil rights and when its not. That is the result when the ground rules of the disucssion is accepting that fat is bad. That’s what Timothy did. He said….
No question? He may have just thought of this as a clever turn of phrase, but that is a profounded loaded statement. Saying that there is no question about this is a very intentional swipe at those of us who contend that there is a question about that. Now in my response, I pointed out my objection to that thinking. kbrigan followed with a pointed retort on this point. She was forceful, but hardly disrespectful. Timothy’s reply to her was outright insulting and it ignored the substance of her post. He was defensive and belittling. His mean spiritedness was uncalled for, and for me made it impossible to offer him any benefit of the doubt when he declared that there was “no question” about an important point of contention. Given his efforts to humiliate and insult kbrigran and to brand her as an extremist, I have to think that this remark had purpose. It had the purpose to set the bounds of what he considered acceptable discourse on this issue and to present himself as the intellectual superior to anyone who was not willing to agree that there was “no question.” It served to define anyone who asked that question as unreasonable, an extremist, or a fool. Well, I don’t appreciate that one bit. And it is the substance of that remark I object to, not the number on his scale. He was eager to mock and deride fat activism and to establish his views as superior. That’s uncalled for. I found his remarks to kbrigan to be personally insulting
Saying that obesity is a public health issue is not saying that fat is bad, so far as I’m concerned. The current guardians of public morality are certainly saying that fat is bad, no questions allowed– But that’s not what Timothy is sayng. He questions in considerable detail the priorities and motivations of the current public guardians. That’s hardly the same as someone yelling for unsightly obese people to get back in their homes with the blinds drawn so that decent people don’t have to suffer the trauma of looking at them.
If fear and loathing of fat people leads workplaces to discriminate against them, doctors to prescribe cures that are both harmful and not necessary, and so forth, that is clearly an issue of public health. Fat people, regardless of our relative size in relation to some insurance agency’s chart, are the public, and we certainly have a right to health, even if real health seems like a pipe dream because it’s so bound up in the notion that thin = healthy and healthy = thin.
Btsu, I remain bewildered at your obtuseness on this.
Sailorman,
The problem is that while increased exercise is beneficial, it can’t be expected to produce significant weight loss. Depending on what sort of exercise you are doing, you may end up losing 15-20 pounds (which many thinnish people find aesthetically significant, but has no noticeable health effect in and of itself – none) or you may end up gaining weight in the same range (unless you are doing massively muscle building exercise, in which case you may gain even more). If you combine exercise with a starvation diet (and maintaining the same weight stable diet while increasing exercise is a starvation diet, and not stable or healthy), then you may be able to lose a lot of weight for as long as you can keep up both the starvation diet and the exercise. As soon as you drop either, you are almost certain to gain back whatever weight you lost.
If you focus on weight or fat as a health problem, and pitch exercise as being good for you because it will cause you to lose weight and will therefore improve your long term health, then you are setting people up for failure (since healthy exercise will not produce substantial weight loss for most people) and you will actually prevent people from exercising and getting fit.
It isn’t that focusing on reducing weight by promoting exercise is wrong headed because losing weight doesn’t matter (maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, it definitely doesn’t matter a lot), but because it actively interferes with promoting exercise for the sake of fitness. Even if we accept that being extremely obese is as bad for you as being unfit, we don’t have any effective methods of making someone no longer obese that have any evidence of producing any health benefits (we can make you no longer obese by destroying your stomach, but the overall health effects are typically negative). On the other hand, we know perfectly well how to make people fit, and we know that we can do it without harming their health, and I believe (although I can’t cite a study for it off hand) that we know that becoming fit measurably improves your long term health (something that pretty much every study about weight and morbidity makes clear that we do not know for losing weight).
Also, weight cycling in people categorized as overweight is a major path (probably the major path) to obesity. If you believe that obesity is unhealthy, then the absolute last thing you want to promote is weight loss schemes (not just fad diets) for over weight people. You might reasonably promote weight stabilization, but you’d be better off doing that under a “Health at any size” concept than to do it under a “The thinner you are, the healthier you are” concept (even if being thinner is actually healthier for some range of weight). Focusing on weight loss is bad public health policy (even if there might be some people who would benefit from losing weight).
Btsu, kbrigan not only got the substance of what I wrote wrong (as you have) based on what seemed and still seems to me to be a determination to take offense that is independent of what is actually being said, she accused me of doing so because I was a thin person who was prejudiced towards fat people. Informed that I am in fact by most people’s standards “fat”, she didn’t even blink.
When I say, “There is no question”, I’m trying to not construct a position on obesity that is compelled to aggressively discredit every single finding, every single study, every single bit of biomedical knowledge, because it has decided in advance, by definition, that there can be no legitimate biomedical finding on obesity, fat, fitness. There are comparable declarations in other identity-based movements. For example, extreme positions on deafness have decided, in advance, that all therapeutic approaches to ameliorating deafness are by definition wrong. Extreme positions on race would maintain that there is no genetic variation between human populations which has any meaningful correspondence to the social constructions of racial identity, and there never can be. Extreme positions on gender difference declare that by definition, there can be no biomedical research finding of use for understanding gender difference. And so on.
This is a very tall tree to climb up. Not that many activists choose to climb up it, in fact, maintaining a notional open-mindedness to scientific work while properly remaining deeply skeptical about both any given study and more importantly, the public uses of such studies to occasion policy. In the case of research on fat, I don’t think it costs (or you) anything to say, “Obesity, by a variety of biomedical definitions, is increasing in the American population”. I’m reasonably satisfied that the research which makes this claim is, in a broad way, sound. So there’s no point to setting yourself against everything and anything said in the name of biomedical knowledge on this subject.
What you can do is what a number of posters here have done: question the way that weight, obesity, and fitness are problematically conflated in both biomedical research findings and in public discourse. (And I think there’s a fair point to be made that my initial post does a bit of that, which is partly a consequence of the fact that it was initially in a comments thread at another blog, replying to another person’s original post.) You can do what Ampersand does very well here at this blog: take any given study as it comes and break it down skeptically. You can observe that even in strictly biomedical terms, many of the (increasingly hysterically mandated) therapies and approaches to obesity carry health risks that outweigh the risks which they are meant to alleviate.
But I see no point to seeting myself in such a position of permanent, predetermined skepticism that I challenge the finding that obesity by several definitions is increasing, and that obesity, depending on how you define it, carries health risks of some kind. That is not where the discourse of public health goes wrong. Where it goes badly wrong–and helps to support a kind of thoughtless stigma or prejudice towards many people–is when those findings are used as a stepping stone by ambitious, entrepreneurial “experts” who try to mobilize public institutions and public discourse on behalf of much more tentative, dubious, or simply incorrect findings, in favor of policies and therapies of little or marginal worth, without bothering to do any of the heavy political or philosophical lifting that such public policy should require. When they Chicken Little, in short.
What I suspect rankles kbrigan and BStu most is the first sentence of my comment reposted here, in which I dismiss a central pillar of identity politics preemptively, that the main reason to care about any given issue is whether or not people feel offended, hurt or the object of prejudice. I’m not surprised that identity-based activists would react first to that, and thus ignore or actively misconstrue the meaning of anything said elsewhere, because it is in fact a dismissal of their basic paradigm. For which I do not apologize. Arguing that it doesn’t so much matter whether people feel offended, or even feel that they are the targets of prejudice, may give offense, but given where I start my approach to this issue, it would be strange to expect me to be much concerned about whether offense is taken at my insistence that it doesn’t matter whether people feel offended. I think it’s simply the wrong way to come at these kinds of issues, both as a practical matter of political mobilization, and as a philosophical understanding of oppression or discrimination. It turns a critique of discrimination into a personal, inward-turning, question of emotional experience–and it forces people seeking a remedy to discrimination to adopt a unitary, rigid performance of “identity” in order to belong to the movement. Discrimination as an issue doesn’t “belong” to the people who experience it, nor is its primary harm how it makes you feel inside or how it affects your self-esteem. It’s an issue that matters in how it affects wealth and poverty, opportunity and fairness, equality before the law. When it’s really just about whether some person or some group feels bad, or feels offended, the entire concept of discrimination is both trivialized and held hostage to the variable temperment and questionable perception of the most sensitive person in the room.