Fat Acceptance: Fab or Fad?

Depending on whether you read The New Yorker, or the New York Times, you would come to a different conclusion.

I read the NY Times Health page online just about every day, and I read The New Yorker (my sister’s subscription, mostly) with some regularity.

One of my pet peeves is how it’s seen as “cool” to distance oneself from fatness, in oneself or others, in liberal-intellectual-“hip” circles. I know that it’s certainly not the only instance of snobbery or bigotry in these circles, but it’s one that makes me feel on the outside of a groups that otherwise I might feels some affinity with (and hopefully, challenge the bigotry I might encounter). Readers of The New Yorker are maybe slightly less fat than the overall population, but certainly many readers are fat. While for the most part, there’s not much overt fatphobia in The New Yorker (fatness seems to be mostly ignored), and I would expect that there is more fat panic in the Times, but two articles have made me think that the tide at the Times is turning, while The New Yorker is stuck in a fatphobic past.

In a “Fitness and Health” feature called “Skin Deep,” writer Mandy Katz penned an article, “Throwing out the Diet and Embracing the Fat” with my favorite photo of the year so far. I think I actually want to purchase this photo and frame it. [edited to add, there is a sidebar I didn’t notice at first on Intuitive Eating – yay! – with a lovely photo of Kate Harding in it. And, frustratingly, comments are enabled on the article – argh!] While the article has one hateful (and oh so erroneous) quote in it from Walter Willett, it doesn’t come until the 10th paragraph into an 18 paragraph article. The article ends with a quote from clinical psychologist and HAES hero Deb Burgard, instead of the usual “but, but, but, but don’t actually BE fat.” Overwhelmingly, the article presents the HAES case extremely well. This isn’t the first article of the sort that the Times has published. And, Gina Kolata, of course, writes for the Times. I think that the message is finally getting through that you can’t continue to insult the public that reads your paper, and that this movement can’t be ignored.

But, The New Yorker chose a different path. Rather than ignoring, they chose to ridicule those of us who support fat acceptance with the multi-book review, XXXL. The subtitle, “Why are we so fat?” makes me ask, what do you mean “we?” as the photo of the author, Elizabeth Kolbert, shows a slender woman. Of course don’t know her past, or her struggles, and there are thin allies out there, but she is not currently fat, and doesn’t provide any sense of her subjectivity in the review. A better subtitle might have been, “Why is everyone else so fat?” There’s a link under the offensive image that says “Submit a question for Elizabeth Kolbert about obesity in America” – to which I wonder — what does she REALLY know about obesity? (If I were going to ask a slender science journalist anything about obesity in American, I would much rather submit a question to Gina Kolata.) If she were informed about the authors and experts quoted in the NY Times article, she, and the editors, would realized how biased and outdated her perspective is. Here’s the most offensive example, and really highlights the anti-fat bias I’ve observed among people who consider themselves  intellectuals:

But, just because size bias exists it doesn’t follow that putting on weight is a subversive act. In contrast to the field’s claims about itself, fat studies ends up taking some remarkably conservative positions. It effectively allies itself with McDonald’s and the rest of the processed-food industry, while opposing the sorts of groups that advocate better school-lunch programs and more public parks. To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.

Other bloggers have deconstructed this better than I can, and the idea that some people are just meant to be fat is very, very far from the idea that some people are just meant to be poor. I don’t believe that people choose to be fat, in most cases, any more than people choose to be poor, in most cases. This sentence reads as someone “otherizing” and conflating fatness and poverty. A person can choose to make peace with their particular combination of genetic inheritance and environmental exposure to fatness and live a full and complete life, and there is no cure for being fat. Kolbert believes that people are not meant to be poor or fat, but both fat people and poor people (and fat and poor people) exist, and the “cures” on an individual level for both are not well established, hard work and simply “choosing not to be” do not solve the “problem” and the U.S. certainly hasn’t eradicated poverty (although I personally believe there is much more that we, as a society, can do). I wish Kolbert, or her editors, had thought about this more deeply before publishing this piece in this format, or choosing to include the book “The Fat Studies Reader” in a review of books about fatness that had a lot more in common.

Fillyjonk at Shapely Prose and withoutscene at Big Fat Blog both wrote about Kolbert’s piece in greater depth than I have here.

I have been aware of and in and out of the Fat Acceptance movement since I discovered it while a student at UC Santa Cruz in the late 80s. I don’t believe that this is a fad, nor, as Kolbert writes, that “It effectively allies itself with McDonald’s and the rest of the processed-food industry, while opposing the sorts of groups that advocate better school-lunch programs and more public parks.” To the contrary, I know that most fat acceptance advocates would love more public parks and better school-lunch programs. She is setting up a false dichotomy, with “health advocates” on one side, and “fat advocates” on the other, while in reality, there are many advocates in fat acceptance and HAES movements who are just as opposed to the processed-food industry as their fatphobic adversaries. What the fat acceptance and HAES advocates realize is that it’s not only fat people consuming these foods, nor is fatness the only or worst outcome of the proliferation of processed foods. They distinguish between the industries and the individual consumers, while Kolbert does not. She writes “...just because size bias exists it doesn’t follow that putting on weight is a subversive act.” Her misunderstanding here is that fat acceptance advocates are not encouraging weight gain as a subversive act — the subversive act is simply being visible and advocating for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in a larger-than-expected body. The tone I get from Kolbert’s article is that it’s primal, animalistic to be fat, and those people who fail in their ability to be thin are not welcome in The New Yorker club.

Near the end of the article, Kolbert writes: “But, as anyone who has ever gone on a diet knows, weight that was easy to gain is hard to lose.” Had she, or her editors, been more thorough, that would have read “weight that was easy to gain is lost in the long run by no more than 5% of the population.” She glosses over decades of research that is rarely refuted (mostly it’s just ignored) that long term weight loss is nearly impossible to maintain for most people.

With Mandy Katz’s piece, you get these sense that The New York Times editors and writers have been reading their own journalists and articles and piecing together the big picture. Maybe Kolbert and The New Yorker editors might consider reading The New York Times’ coverage of fat acceptance (and fatness overall) to, you know, get a clue.