We're having a fat moment
Go ahead and have another slice of pumpkin pie. Thin's not so in any more
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 7:43PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 7:56PM EDT Sara Boseveld
Andrew Zansky is 15 years old and weighs 307 pounds. His pants are size 48 and he hates the tag on the outside of his jeans that announces it to the world.
But instead of dwelling on his doughy body and slinking further into social isolation, the protagonist in the recently released young adult novel Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have joins the football team – something author Allen Zadoff, a former fat kid, regrets never having done.
In C. Leigh Purtill's novel All About Vee , 217-pound teenager Veronica heads to Hollywood in pursuit of an acting career, and snags the guy and the dream without obsessing over her heavy frame.
The two fictitious characters are more than just role models for fat kids everywhere – they're part of a larger embrace of the plus-sized self taking shape in popular culture. From the reality TV series More to Love – a super-sized version of The Bachelor that features extra-large contestants vying for romance – to zaftig indie rocker Beth Ditto posing naked on the cover of the European fashion magazine LOVE, powerful cues abound that suggest it's okay to be fat.
How else to explain the draw to gratuitous grease pits such as The Heart Attack Grill, a hospital-themed diner in Chandler, Ariz., that has achieved international fame for its double bypass burgers and letting people over 350 pounds eat for free? Or food porn blogs such as This Is Why You're Fat, which made its debut in February, that cast fatty fare like Krispy Kreme bacon sandwiches in a favourable light?
The trend is happening as a backlash against a culture that has long perpetuated futile strict diets and impossible exercise regimes. People are finally tired of the yo-yo meal plans that help them melt off pounds but also pack them back on. And the media are making more efforts to reflect a public with ever-expanding waistlines, experts say.
“People are getting fatter and if you keep just throwing unrealistic, thin images at them, they're not going to be able to identify,” says Peter Stearns, author of Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West and provost of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
While Mr. Stearns doesn't see a seismic shift toward fat acceptance, he says that as media images suggest “a little more comfort” with plus-sized figures, that might give people who fret about their weight “further reassurance.”
Lizzie Miller, right, may not be big by everyone's standards, but this photo of the plus-sized model caused a stir when it ran inside the September issue of Glamour. Meanwhile, performer Beth Ditto appeared naked on the debut issue of the British fashion magazine LOVE.
Feeding off the positive response from readers, even fashion magazines – the staunchest defenders of the skinny ideal – are starting to embrace the plus-size figure. A photo of 20-year-old model Lizzie Miller in the September issue of Glamour that showed a decidedly real tummy pooch drew overwhelming public support and earned a vow from editor Cindi Leive to include more women who look like the size 12 model. Earlier this week, leading German magazine Brigitte said it will lose stick-thin models in favour of real women who reflect their curvy readers.
Fashion runways, though reticent, are also taking a cue. At London Fashion Week in late September, Canadian designer Mark Fast sent three models sized 12 to 14 marching down the catwalk (though the move prompted two members of his team to storm out three days before his show).
Fat-acceptance proponents say excess weight shouldn't be a person's biggest hang-up. Ditch the diet, eat what you want and exercise for enjoyment, they advise, instead of trying to drop 20 pounds and fit into a size 6. But the more moderate advocates are careful to stress that an embrace of fat is not an excuse to be lazy and neglect a person's physical well-being. The overall goal is to be body-confident, but free of health issues – an idea even obesity experts support to a certain point.
Last fall, Linda Bacon, a physiologist and nutritionist based in El Cerrito, Calif., published Healthy at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, which advises overweight people to forget about diets and eat intuitively, quit trying to mend emotional problems with food and exercise at a comfortable, casual pace. Through a series of experiments, she found that people who didn't follow strict diets but simply aimed to eat healthier and exercise didn't lose weight but achieved significant health improvements.
The trick is defining what healthy is.
There's both a medical definition and a personal definition, says Yoni Freedhoff, medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute of Ottawa. “People can indeed have significant amounts of weight and not have any medical problems,” he says. “Their blood work's pristine, they have no aches and pains, there's nothing a physician in his office would find, other than weight, to suggest that a person would have any kind of medical issues.”
But extra weight carries extra risk, he's quick to add. “The average person who has a significant amount of weight to lose – the 50-pound range – more often has medical problems. Where I see the movement having difficulties ... is a cognitive dissonance between the notion that there are no risks to overweight and obesity, which is what the extreme of this movement like to purport.”
Obese Canadians are four times as likely to have diabetes, for example, and three times as likely to have high blood pressure as their trim counterparts, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.
But there is already evidence that the public's negative views about fat are changing, he says, pointing to a recent study that suggests people are more likely to find a slightly heavy person more physically attractive. “It's a surprising turn of events, but if you think of it in context, that it is now abnormal in North America to have a healthy body weight, that perhaps makes a lot of sense.”
And these days, more and more people are carrying excess weight. One in four Canadians are now considered obese (with a body mass index of over 30) and more than 59 per cent of Canadians are deemed overweight (with a BMI of 25 to 29), the Public Health Agency of Canada reports. An historical analysis of the epidemic published in the July, 2002, issue of Obesity Research showed the rate of overweight Canadians increased to 50 per cent in 1998 from 40 per cent in 1970-72.
Still, some fat advocates point out that categorizations such as “overweight” and “obese” are often determined by shifting standards. In 2003, Canada elevated its BMI standards to match the World Health Organization's, changing the cut-off point for overweight Canadians to 25 from 27. The United States ramped up its BMI requirements in 1998, making millions of Americans obese overnight. Under the new definition, a 145-pound woman standing five feet, four inches entered the overweight category, CNN reported at the time.
Kate Harding, a Chicago-based blogger and fat advocate who has dubbed her country's bulge-battling efforts “the obesity epidemic booga booga booga,” has her own definition of health. At 5-foot-2 and 190 pounds, she considers herself to be “reasonably healthy.” She walks everywhere and does yoga a few times a week (if she has time). She eats “intuitively,” aiming for balance and variety, but doesn't deprive herself. Predisposed to depression, she says she is in a good place mentally, and isn't taking any drugs.
“Health is not a moral imperative and people make choices every day that are not necessarily things that are going to add up to optimum health,” she says. “It means feeling as good as you can feel."
Ms. Harding decided to stop dieting and accept her full figure in 2004 while working in Toronto's publishing industry. She had just lost 45 pounds on the latest Weight Watchers diet and picked up a copy of The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health by journalist Paul Campos.
“It made sense,” she says. “That was the first time I heard someone say, ‘You can be fat and healthy, you can exercise and eat a balanced diet without necessarily losing weight and still reap all the health benefits they tell you are only associated with losing weight.'
“People are sick of the aspirational thing, the idea that everyone in magazines, everyone in advertisements has to be the embodiment of the ideal and we're all supposed to look like that. ... I think people are over it, I think people are way too savvy about what that game is all about now.”
The risks associated with weight are a tension in the struggle to achieve both a healthy body and a healthy mind, says David Lau, president of Obesity Canada and chair of diabetes research at the University of Calgary.
“There's a huge disconnect about body image, feeling healthy and the ability to understand that being overweight is not necessarily what we are destined to become,” he says.
While he celebrates the new messages emerging about positive body image, they haven't stemmed the flow of teenagers that come to his office with fatty liver, he says, noting that the patients are perfectly healthy otherwise.
“We can predict that within a few years, or 10 or 15 years from now, these kids will no longer be healthy and they'll start to be plagued with all the health problems associated with having excess body weight,” he says.
Mr. Zadoff, the recently published novelist, offers an exception to this rule. By his late 20s, he had shed his excess weight in a bid to quit letting food control his life. “Staying fat was not an option for me,” says the 42-year-old Los Angeles-based writer. “But that's just me. I absolutely know people of all different sizes who are in the world and are quite comfortable and find peace with it.”
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