Hey guys!

I caught wind (via BFD) of a Nightline debate airing this past Tuesday night called “Is it Ok to be Fat?” with MeMe Roth, Crystal Renn, Marianne Kirby, and Kim Bensen making up the panel.

You can watch the entire episode here. I’d also recommend checking out the comments here.

Quick info. on the panel:

• MeMe Roth — President and Founder of the National Action Against Obesity, whose mission is to ”eradicat[e] Secondhand Obesity™ (obesity handed down from one generation to the next, as well as from citizen to citizen).” Read the research compiled on her here by the F-Word.
• Marianna Kirby – Author of Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere and writer at The Rotund.
• Crystal Renn – Plus-sized model (the only plus-sized model to ever get a cover in Harper’s Bazaar), author of Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves
• Kim Bensen – Author of Finally Thin! She lost over 200 pounds and helps others lose weight, too.

First thing to note is that the panel is totally not as diverse as it should be. By “diverse” I simply mean having someone on there who is an expert on health issues from the medical field with actual credentials. MeMe Roth is just an opinionated and privileged mom. Crystal, Marianne and Kim are all weighing in (tee-hee) from the side of personal experience. What we needed was someone who could really interpret the “facts” and give a medical perspective on the diversity of personal experience on the panel. We missed out on what could have been a more serious debate instead of a sensational battle that sounded like “wa wa wa,” “i’m crazy” and “in my experience.” C’mon, guys! It’s journalism 101 — get people with legit cred on each side of the debate!

I spent a lot of time thinking about and then writing out my thoughts on the issues and how the panel presented them. Then, I realized I could sum up my feelings in a much simpler way:

The second we realize that we should be fighting for health, not against obesity, we’ll stop paying attention to people like MeMe Roth who romanticize thinness and falsely correlate thinness with health as an absolute. We all know skinny is not an indication of health, at least not in and of itself. In 2005, there were 10 million people suffering from eating disorders [source]. We could just as easily talk about an “obesity crisis” as we could a “skinny crisis.” Let’s be real. And, folks, it’s not just teen girls suffering from eating disorders (see here, for instance).

Once we start fighting for health, we’ll realize that people can be healthy at a variety of weights and sizes (and the inverse is too, as well!). We need a more holistic way to determine, gauge and measure health.

But, slow your roll, before we break out a new set of rulers and prods to haphazardly determine where to draw the line on who is too fat to be healthy, let’s give everyone a fighting chance to be healthy! Fighting forhealth means changing the way our government subsidizes corn! It means eradicating food deserts and giving everyone fair access to healthy foods and health/nutrition education. It means limiting if not eradicating advertising crap food to children. It means changing the meals served in school cafeterias (our govt. subsidizes corn and then also subsidizes some school lunches. Can you guess what type of school lunches they typically subsidize? Crap food!). Can anyone else imagine what a crock of s— it is for MeMe Roth to talk about the price of obesity on thin people and not the price of corporate interests on impoverished children?

And, because my class on ecocriticism seems full of endless fodder for my interest in health issues, I’d like to share this quote from Sarah Blaffer Hyder in her book Mother Nature that sums up why focusing on things like “eradicating second-hand obesity” and trying to place blame on nature or nurture when it comes to “fatness” is antiquated and lame:  ”instead of old dichotomies about nature versus nature, attention needs to be focused on the complicated interactions among genes, tissues, glands, past experiences, and environmental cues” (174). Thank you Hrdy!

Well, guys, that’s all I have in me to share at this point! The issue, of course, is so much more than I’ve represented. I’ve barely touched on the discrimination, and the imposed (im)morality of fatness, etc., but I’m sure if you hit up the comments on the Nightline page, you’ll get an idea of how intricate these issues get.

Happy reading!

Did any of you catch this debate or have an opinion on any of these topics?

Relevant News:

• “Michelle Obama take on Food Deserts,” Huffington Post, 2/24/10 here

<3,

The Cranky One

Tags: Crystal Renn, fat discrimination, kim bensen, marianne kirby, meme roth, nightline