Being fat is not a character flaw.
I sit through conversation after conversation with my fellow nutrition students where fat people are typified as lazy gluttons. I understand why it must make sense to think that if someone is fat that at some point in his/her life, this person sat around and stuffed his/her face, watching TV, to hell with exercise and eating right, and consequently blew up like a balloon. After all, we all know, if you stay in “energy balance”, that is, if your calories in are equal to your calories out, you can’t possibly get fat. So why are people fat? If must be because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough.
Aside from the fact that this reductionist approach doesn’t begin to address the complex metabolic picture of energy balance that exists in the human body, it also fails to tell us—if indeed fat people do just eat too much and move too little—why these people feel driven to eat and why they don’t want to be active. In fact, the answer seems to be implicit in their very fatness: fat people eat because they are pigs; they don’t exercise because they are lazy. Which, of course, explains nothing.
As a former fat person, I’m personally offended. I was a vegetarian for 16 years. I didn’t eat a lot of junk food, and I cooked what I thought were healthy, low-fat meals at home daily. And anyone who knows me would say that I have more of an issue with mania than with laziness. But it’s not just me I’m offended for.
At the clinic where I worked, virtually every single patient was overweight or obese. I can count one hand the number that I would consider lazy or gluttonous. Most of them had tried various weight loss approaches unsuccessfully. A remarkable number of them exercised regularly. Most of them were eating less food than I do.
I know, I know. In addition to being lazy pigs, they were also liars. And that offends me too. Maybe some of them were. But all of them?
As a group, this is how I would describe them: they were hungry; they were tired; they were frustrated and/or depressed. And yes, they were fat. But how did they get that way?
For me, and for most of these people, the weight gain was gradual enough to not be alarming, but steady enough to get out of hand pretty quickly, and typically began at middle age. If you gain 2-3 pounds a month over a couple of years, it’s easy to find your body 60-70 pounds overweight while your brain was doing something else—raising kids, going to school, starting a new career, taking care of sick parent. We got fat not by being lazy, but by being busy.
For some, the battle began at a much younger age and with more extreme consequences. Years of yo-yo dieting, losing and gaining back all the weight plus some extra, seemed to push people into the 100-150 pounds overweight category pretty quickly. Ironically, I think these people got fat by trying to lose weight, not by eating like pigs every chance they got.
And once overweight, the pounds stuck. Diets failed. Hunger, fatigue, and depression undermined every attempt to restore health and normal weight. Many of our patients developed blood sugar control issues, high blood pressure, poor lipid profiles, and clinical levels of depression. They were put on medications that exacerbated the weight gain, along with everything else.
And all the world could see was that we were all just big fat lazy pigs.
It hurts my heart that the blame keeps getting shoved right back at the people who are suffering the most from overweight and obesity. We are reminded not to “blame the victim” in all other circumstances, except this one. Fat people fight back by asserting that they can be “fit and fat” and that they have a “right” to be fat. But nobody wants to be unhealthy or unhappy—and if you are hungry, tired, and depressed, that’s what you are, no matter what your weight.
No one seems to consider that our food supply and dietary recommendations are specifically designed to create a metabolic environment perfectly suited to stimulating the appetite, replacing essential nutrients with inessential ones, encouraging body fat storage, and preventing access to stored energy in the body (i.e. burning fat). In other words, every thing we are told about food—from advertisements to government guidelines—is directed towards making the majority of our population hungry, tired, depressed—and fat.
Finally, it makes me especially crazy that the people who most adamantly refuse to acknowledge that there may be some upstream causes for weight gain aside from sheer caloric intake are—without exception—young and thin, without children or family obligations, who are careful about their food intake and exercise ALL THE TIME. They don’t understand why those fat lazy pigs can’t be more like them.
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