April 27th, 2005
An Exercise in Critical Thinking
So, yesterday, in one of my sporadic attempts at self-improvement, I decided I ought to make more of an effort to keep up with current events. To that end, I paid a visit to Common Dreams, which I used to like, but aside from a very funny piece by Molly Ivins about some unbelievable Dubya-isms, it left me kinda cold. Then I remembered Women’s E-News. Hell, they’re women! I’m a woman! I thought to myself. Their stories can’t help but be more relevant, more from a woman’s perspective, right? Guess I forgot about the last time they pissed me off, but they were right there to remind me. Because one of the first articles that caught my eye started out like this:
Pass the double fudge. And hold the Sweet ‘N Low.
Next Tuesday, the Austin-based International Size Acceptance Association is urging Americans to drop their diets in honor of International Size Acceptance Day, now in its seventh year.
And it goes on to quote the “experts”:
Madelyn Fernstrom, director of the Weight Management Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, has a different response: “This event shouldn’t mask the dangers of our epidemic weight gain. For the sake of our health, we must start choosing the apple over the apple pie.”
Because of course fat people never eat apples, and if we did, we’d all instantly become thin. How dumb we must be not to figure that out, how self-destructive, masochistic even, to stubbornly insist on staying fat–and of course unhealthy–when the cure is so close at hand. And that’s not all. The article goes on with paragraph after paragraph of “statistics” about the “epidemic” of “obesity [sic],” continuing to conflate ill health with fat and healthy eating with thinness. There’s no mention of the substantial body of scientific evidence that shows diets don’t work, information about the proven negative health consequences of weight loss medications and surgery, or concern about the “rampant” eating disorders caused by this culture’s anorexic focus on thinness at any cost. The infuriating condescension and inane meaningless advice is tidily summed up in the article’s conclusion:
“Focusing on fitness and not on fat will work for some people,” says Morgan Downey, executive director of the American Obesity [sic] Association. “But others must lose weight because their lives depend on it. It’s one thing to agree we should all be considered worthy members of the human community. It’s another to overlook the health risks associated with rampant obesity [sic].”
As usual when I read this kind of crap, that dull roar started up in my head, my eyes crossed, and steam started coming out of my ears. Habitual readers of this blog will not need me to explain the reasons for this frustration, but in case of newbies, let me engage in a quick redirect:
1. Size acceptance does not equal eating “double fudge.” The writer puts her bias right there in the first line of the article–anyone who’s against dieting must be on one giant binge. Way to discredit an entire movement in two words!
2. There’s a sizeable body (ha ha) of literature now existing that fails to support the hypothesis that fat equals unhealthy–i.e., there are no reliably provable “health risks associated with rampant obesity [sic].”
3. Furthermore, there may be significant health risks associated with dieting; there are definitely health risks associated with weight loss drugs and surgery. At the very least, what has been proven is that diets don’t work, and in most cases, result in additional weight gain. So even if fat were a death sentence (which it isn’t, ’cause I’m still here), what’s a fat girl to do?
4. There’s really no excuse for anyone, especially journalists, to not know about this data; reputable independent researchers have been investigating this for over thirty years. And even if journalists don’t know about it, they could reasonably be expected to find it out and present it in an article that purports to be about women “weighing” weight loss advice.
5. The relationship between weight, food intake and health is not particularly well understood scientifically, but let me engage in a bit of oversimplification, Women’s-E-News style: If we eat enough healthy food and move around enough, we’ll be as healthy as we can be in a poisoned environment, regardless of body size.
Where I used to let articles like this make me all hamsterish with anxiety about my impending death (and my apparent inability to prevent it, after one million failed attempts at dieting–hence my complete worthlessness as a person for failing to follow such simple instructions), they now just make me fume. But in my fuming I remembered something someone said to me lately. A friend has been doing some reading from my myth-debunking reading list; she hadn’t initially believed my ranting, thinking that anything the media repeated over and over again must be true. Of course, she found out that there’s a whole lot of self-interest involved in what “experts” like the ones quoted above keep saying, and probably even believe. And so that’s when I decided to once again flog what can’t be anything more than an unfortunate equine carcass, at least where this blog is concerned.
So I thought of what my friend said, when I noticed that at the end of the Women’s E-News article they gave a link to the American Obesity [sic] Association. What a weird name, I thought. Certainly no self-help group that really cared about the well-being of fat people would call itself that. (In my opinion, the word “obese” is hate speech. Try saying it without a sneer. Can’t be done.) So while I normally would have ignored this link, instead I thought of my readers, took a deep breath, girded up my loins, and clicked on it. And guess what? Surprise, surprise. The “American Obesity [sic] Association,” employer of Morgan Downey, the undoubtedly smug thin woman quoted at the end of the article, is an industry front group. Gasp! Who’d have thought such a thing! Unfortunately, such groups are not exactly notorious for their disinterested, balanced, nuanced consideration of all sides of an issue, let alone concern for people or the environment over corporate interests. Take a look at the AOA members page. They’ve signed up no end of pharmaceutical companies, surgical instrument manufacturers, companies that run fat camps (for cryin’ out loud) and diet companies, including Jenny Craig, SlimFast, and Weight Watchers. With “members” like this, is it any surprise that the American Obesity [sic] Association wants to scare the shit out of you if you’re fat? Of course they want to make you think you’ll die of “rampant obesity [sic]” tomorrow–if you were content with yourself as you are, more often than not able to resist the omnipresent processed un-food being pushed on you at every turn (for the profit of other corporations, I might add), why would you buy their “members’” stupid vile-tasting products or attend their humiliating mindless meetings? Why would you submit to their mutilating surgeries or take their poison pills? Why would you send your kids to be tortured in their hellish “Healthy Living Academies”? Why, to paraphrase the flabulous Marilyn Wann, would you let your self-esteem be determined by a number on a scale?
So much for “fair and balanced” journalism. So much for relying on the media. I clued in to this
organization’s hidden agenda with two mouse clicks, and I’m not even a reporter–though, if this article is any indication of what passes for reporting these days, maybe I should be. Ms. Ginty, the author of the Women’s E-News article, probably believes she’s a paragon of journalistic integrity for presenting “both sides” of this controversial issue. What she’s really doing is buying into the image of the weight-loss industry shills as “respected weight control experts” and repeating misinterpretations of study data that the weight-loss industry paid for– while completely dismissing independent researchers and grassroots self-help and advocacy groups that are trying to help us stop hating ourselves and counteract the lies of corporations that foment and then profit from women’s body anxiety. Well, I know which side I’m on, and until Women’s E-News gets the clue that freaking women out about our health–that making fat women’s lives harder–isn’t responsible journalism, I’ll just have to get my news elsewhere.
