We are facing an obesity epidemic. As I wrote yesterday in a piece for Quillette:
According to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, in 1960–62, 13.4 percent of US adults were obese; by 2017–18, the proportion of obese adults had risen to 42.4 percent. A 2004 study by the American Centers for Disease Control estimated that the average man weighed 166.3 lbs. (75.4 kg) in 1960, but was up to 191 lbs. (86.6 kg) in 2002; the average woman weighed 140.2 lbs. (63.6 kg) in 1960, but 164.3 lbs. (74.5 kg) in 2002. (Though there was also a slight height increase over this period.) More than 20 percent of adults in every US state and territory were obese as of September 2022, according to data from the CDC. Almost a fifth of Americans aged 19 and under were deemed medically obese by the CDC in 2017–2020.
Theme parks have been forced to impose waistline limits on rides. At least one airline has revised its estimate of average passenger weight upward by 8 lbs. (3.6 kg). The US Air Force has revised its body fat percentage requirements upward: from 20 to 26 percent for male recruits, and from 28 to 36 percent for females. Despite this relaxation of standards, more than one in three Americans aged 17–24 is ineligible for military service on the basis of weight alone.
But the primary focus of my Quillette piece wasn’t on the obesity crisis. It was, rather, on two movements that deny there is a crisis at all. One, primarily lifestyle-based, emerges from the world of “body positivity.” Proponents take the sensible argument that body standards, especially (though not exclusively) for women have long been unrealistic and transform it into a case for not having standards about one’s bodily health at all. I saw it in full flowering at TheBodCon2023, a virtual conference “centered around all things body confidence, body positivity and self-love.” In practice, that self-love means relentless self-affirmation, and downplays self-discipline. As I wrote of the conference:
On the few occasions that the word “fat” was used, it was generally either part of the term “fatphobic”—intentional weight loss is “fatphobic,” claimed Mancuso, for example—or was used as a reclaimed slur, much as the word “fag” has been reappropriated by gay culture as a term of endearment. Speaker Lindsay Johnson, for example, calls herself a “fat joy activist,” who is “all about how do we learn to love our fat bodies and start taking up space.”
Such platitudes and affirmations abounded at the conference. “You are more than enough,” repeated life coach Raia Carey as part of BodCon’s opening meditation. “As a community of body positivity and body love, we just need to keep continuing to express, you are okay, you are valid,” stressed Stella Williams, a “social media powerhouse and accomplished actress” who “exploded in popularity in October 2020 after a meme went viral body shaming her.” The BodCon website puts it even more plainly: “You are worthy of loving your body (even if nobody told you so).”
The body-positivity movement exists in relation to the academic field of “fat studies,” a real — yes, really — academic discipline. Here is a sample of how its proponents describe it:
The discipline of fat studies is heavily influenced by critical theory and intersectionality. “Like feminist studies, queer studies, and disability studies, which consider gender, sexuality, or functional difference, fat studies can show us who we are via the lens of weight,” writes Marilyn Wann in her introduction to the 2009 Fat Studies Reader. It is a field that “can offer an analysis that is in solidarity with resistance to other forms of oppression by offering a new and unique view of alienation.” According to Wann, our “fat-hating culture” uses words like “overweight” and “obese,” as well as “seemingly well-meaning euphemisms like ‘heavy,’ ‘plump,’ ‘husky’” to stigmatize fat people. In the same volume, Sondra Solovay and Esther D. Rothblum describe fat studies as part of “the tradition of critical race studies, queer studies, and women’s studies … an interdisciplinary field of scholarship marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigma placed on fat and the fat body.” For contributor Elena Levy-Navarro, all this reifies “hegemonic power relations.” Fatness, in this view, is an immutable characteristic and thus the basis of an identity—like race or sex.
A notable contribution to the Journal of Fat Studies, the field’s primary academic outlet, is titled: “Trans/fat: an autoethnographic exploration of becoming at the intersection of trans and fat.”
For more on these movements, how they relate, and how to confront our obesity crisis, check out my piece in Quillette.