Obesity: The Peppered Moth of the Mobile Age
Hey guys!
As you know, my opinions on “obesity” have gone through significant shifts in the past year. Some days I go out into the world and I’m intent on shaking things up. Depending on the circle in which I go to “shake,” the results vary. For instance, I recently responded to a vegan chef’s Facebook post where she shared the PCRM’s fat-shaming airplane ad with the snarky comment: “Having just gotten off a cramped airplane, I thought this was apropos!” I felt compelled to respond, noticing she had 4k friends, and I wanted her large vegan fan-base to know that not all vegans are fat-hating elitists. Of course, the author – who often writes about the need to be compassionate to animals – ripped my head off and nearly wished me dead, writing twice that a lack of sense of humor would kill me sooner than any diet would. I think she presumed because I was in contention with the ad that I must be unhealthy (and probably fat, eh?). Anyway, this is all to say – the world is rife with fat hate…even from people who extol compassion.
But this post isn’t about crying ourselves a river over the ignorance of other people. In fact, I hope you will find hope, as I have. I can see subtle shifts occurring in the medical community. While I bemoaned the UK’s creation of an obesity “fighting” group of doctors, I’ve also been happy to see quite a few studies published recently that contend with the issue that weight-loss should be the focus of obesity programs. There have also been many people getting vocal in the media about the bullshit that defines the parameters of “obesity.”
The more I think about our bodies and the hyper-focus placed upon them, the more I see added complexity. There has to be a reason we are all obsessed with “fighting” obesity – a “crisis” we created the second we defined the parameters and used a bogus tool, i.e. BMI, to determine them – rather than obsessed collectively about solving the economic “crisis” and focusing on the inequitable nature of health care in the U.S. or the disparities in access to health care. Or, god forbid, fighting for health. When I see the simplistic rhetoric often used towards fat people: “eat less, move more,” I liken it to someone advising a person to get a hold on her finances by “spending less, saving more.” This advice is so surface and doesn’t address the web of complexity dictating and affecting her ability to do so, or even her desire to do so.
From an overarching cerebral perspective – the preponderance of “fat” people should be regarded as a sign of the times and studied objectively. It has occurred to me that we should view fat much like we view the peppered moth – an evolutionary adaptation to industrialization and our heightened “mobility” (meaning our technical mobility, since, clearly we are less physically mobile as a whole, right? heh.).
With the advent of industry in England, the black moth – which had originally been scarce and seen as a genetic anomaly – thrived because it could avoid predation when landing on soot-covered trees. In pre-industrial England, grey moths thrived because the tree trunks were yet to be dirtied with industrial pollutants.
This is not something to “fight” or something to declare war against – this is something to observe, study and approach with an open-mind rather than fear and hate. I do realize the comparison between the peppered moth and obesity is not without problems, but I think it can spark a fruitful dialogue because it allows us to look outside the “symptom.” In other words, much like we now know that the thriving of the black moth in industrial age England, via genetic mutation, was due to the rise of industry, and its resultant pollutants, perhaps we can ask ourselves – how is industry affecting our bodies? Is the fact that we are larger now than ever before a result of this industry? And, what does that mean?
I am not alone in wondering if the preponderance of fat is an evolutionary adaptation – see “Obesity: a disease or a biological adaptation? An update” here [citation: Chaput, J.-P., Doucet, É. and Tremblay, A. (2012), Obesity: a disease or a biological adaptation? An update. Obesity Reviews. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-789X.2012.00992.x]. Thanks to reader, Sarah, for sending me the study. Here’s a quote I’ve culled to get your brains churning:
- “Our lack of success to reverse the trend in obesity prevalence has helped us in realizing that a focus on weight loss as an indicator of success is not only ineffective at producing thinner, healthier bodies, but also damaging, contributing to food and body preoccupation, repeated cycles of weight loss and regain, reduced self-esteem, eating disorders, and weight stigmatization and discrimination (2). Taken together, these findings strongly suggest that it is maybe time to shift the focus away from body weight and centre our efforts on the promotion of a healthy lifestyle.”
We have approached – and many of us continue to approach – obesity from the perspective of “how can we fix this?” rather than “what is this telling us?” We’ve assigned morals to our bodies: fat=bad, thin=good and created a collective pathos toward any body that does not fit a rigid archetype that is more illusion than possibility. The medical community has largely oversimplified and conflated “healthy” with “thin.” But instead of us rising to address this inequity, many of us have listened, internalized and turned a blind eye to what we know is the truth: it ain’t that simple or there would be no fat people. It’s time to drop the “crisis” talk and ask – is obesity the peppered moth of the mobile age?
<3,
The Cranky One
Tags: identity politics, obesity politics, PCRM
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9 People have left comments on this post
A very thoughtful article. I agree, I don’t think declaring war on obesity and marginalizing obese people is the solution. And rather than focusing on everybody becoming impossibly skinny, we should focus on being healthy. And a healthy body can be a lot of different shapes
While I definitely giggled about the “Sit next to a vegan” commercial, I didn’t think it was entirely accurate. As a vegan, I take issue with the notion that we are all “fit and trim”. I’m fit, and for my build I think I’m fairly trim. That being said, I’m five foot eight and wear a size twelve in jeans. Frankly, I have hips. Vegans can have hips! Besides, the best part of the commercial is when they say for an additional fee you can NOT sit next to a vegan.
The campaign that really upset me was the “These are your abs on cheese” posters. They upset me, because again, while at a healthy weight, I don’t have terribly fit abs. No one would want to see my stomach on a poster. I have stretchmarks from having been obese, and I have a pouch from having been pregnant. Bodies are bodies, and none of them are perfect. To believe that veganism would produce the perfect body disgusts me. To believe that shaming a person into health is to deny the root causes of obesity in the first place.
Great post!
While certainly there are elements of personal responsibility involved in healthy living, we are all undoubtedly peppered moths living in an environment that gets sootier year by year.
Rather than ask moths to try to re-pepper their wings, I think we’d be much better off trying to deal with the soot, and part of dealing with it is calling out people who believe that it’s the moths’ problem to solve.
So to go along with you peppered moth analogy and the idea of natural selection would you contend that the people who remain and fight (and fight hard against internal demons to be responsible about what I put in my mouth, fight against stuffing my face because all the trees that are being cut down and the just plain meanness of people these days) to be thin are going to be eaten by birds and that because we are refusing to evolve to survive the the dictates of the corrupt food industry that by natural selection we should become extinct? I have been in the healthcare industry as a nurse and as a recovering sugar addict I think it is just as damaging to say it is ok to just be irresponsible and ignorant about what we eat.
There are consequences to our actions. I know that when I am overweight I FEEL lousy and I am cranky and that bleeds out to other people, this is not just a thing with ME. The most mean people I come in contact with on a daily basis are overweight. It is easy to say that the reason they are mean and cranky is because they are being made to feel bad about themselves, but what if it is because they are actively fighting dis-ease because they are overweight and they are overweight because they are reaping the consequences of their actions?
I can no longer be a nurse because the weight of patients on average is about 250. I am a very small person. I will no longer risk injury to lift, roll and push patients who almost, without exception, refuse to lift a finger to make themselves better. There is no time for teaching in a hospital setting and that is another topic for another time, but as a new nurse I worked many hours overtime trying to educate patients about nutrition and exercise including positive visualization and self love and acceptance, but those same patients would come back for another amputation and another until both feet and legs were gone because of their type II diabetes. It is not a conspiracy or something that companies (This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard since the food industry has everything to lose if people stop eating their crap) are trying to make money off of, if you lose 10% of your body weight and you have adult onset type II diabetes you can REVERSE the diabetes. But that isn’t the end of the story…
It IS eat less and exercise more. That is how you lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. The new there-is-nothing-wrong-with-obesity campaign is just the other swing of the pendulum. It is a convenient device used to make one’s self feel better about not just abdicating one’s control over one’s health but being an irresponsible consumer. In this age of information-at-the-click-of-a-mouse there is no excuse to be ignorant about what we all have a responsibility to change.
But the powers at be don’t want us to “rage against the dying of the light.”
Hi Kathleen, sounds like you have all the answers. Good luck with that!
I’m just going to be honest here…a peppered moth sounds delicious. I guess it’s the diet. WTF?
oh, how I hate the Bogus Mass Index! Thanks to that thing, at a rather trim build on which physical therapy has thrown a lot of muscle on, I have had to deal with a doctor giving me the “Oh, you’ve gained quite a bit of weight” schpiel—never mind the 34-30-36 I’ve been rocking like a boss (if comments on my lifestyle change are any indication). I’m 5′ some change, so 166 lbs does seem a bit much on paper—but that was no reason for the ‘Obese Speech,’ Doc.
Can we PLEASE retire the BMI as an indicator of individual “health?” Or would that ruin the industry’s precious data? :/
/irritated
Wow Kathleen you have some serious fat hate going on there! I have to admit ‘fat people are really mean and grumpy’ is a new one on me! Aren’t we all lovely jolly folk?
Seriously though why do people like you assume that a shift from weight to health, and lessening the social burden on people will lead them to sitting on their butt and eat pizza all day? Actually if society allowed people of size a bit more god damn human respect, the likelihood is they stop hating and fighting their bodies and begin to treat themselves with SELF respect. When we can truly love and appreciate our bodies, we can begin to nurture them properly. Teaching people that they are the scurge of the earth as you seem to think is not teaching them to engage in self care.
Have you ever considered that the severe depression and mental anguish caused by judgemental people is a huge part of the problem? Putting people into a horrible spiral of hate and rating disorders?
All of us can make steps towards improving our health and that focus yields positive results better than any ‘personal responsibility’ shameful, blaming diet.
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