From The New York Times. Found here

Demonizing Fat in the War on Weight
By DINITIA SMITH

Almost every day, it seems, there is another alarming study about the dangers of being fat or a new theory about its causes and cures. Just this week, VH1 announced a new reality show called "Flab to Fab," in which overweight women get a personal staff to whip them into shape.

But a growing group of historians and cultural critics who study fat say this obsession is based less on science than on morality. Insidious attitudes about politics, sex, race or class are at the heart of the frenzy over obesity, these scholars say, a frenzy they see as comparable to the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism and even the eugenics movement.

"We are in a moral panic about obesity," said Sander L. Gilman, distinguished professor of liberal arts, sciences and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of "Fat Boys: A Slim Book," published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. "People are saying, `Fat is the doom of Western civilization.' "

Now, says Peter Stearns, a leading historian in the field, the rising concern with obesity "is triggering a new burst of scholarship." These researchers don't condone morbid obesity, but they do focus on the ways the definition of obesity and its meaning have shifted, often arbitrarily, throughout history.

Mr. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, has written that plumpness was once associated with "good health in a time when many of the most troubling diseases were wasting diseases like tuberculosis." He traces the equation of obesity and moral deficiency to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In 1914, an article in the magazine Living Age, for example, stated, "Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime." Mr. Stearns cites it in an essay he wrote for the aptly named "Cultures of the Abdomen," a collection to be published by Palgrave Macmillan next November, edited by Christopher E. Forth, a senior lecturer at Australian National University, and Ana Carden-Coyne, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, in England. During World War I, Mr. Stearns writes, some popular magazines actually said that eating too much and gaining weight were unpatriotic, presumably because of concerns about food shortages.

In "Fat Boys," Mr. Gilman describes how plumpness used to be associated with affluence and the aristocracy, while today it is associated with the poor and their supposedly bad eating habits. Louis XIV padded his body to look more imposing. During the French Revolution, obesity inspired a rallying cry, "The People Against the Fat," he says. And whereas once the fat man was generally seen as hypersexual, like Falstaff, now he is seen as asexual, like Santa Claus.

The first popular modern diet book, "Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public," written by William Banting, an undertaker, appeared in 1863. Banting wrote that when he was fat he was regarded as a useless parasite. He went on a diet and lost 35 pounds. "I can honestly assert that I feel restored in health, `bodily and mentally,' " he wrote. Before long, Mr. Gilman points out, the word "banting" became a synonym for dieting.

In Mr. Stearns's view, 19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. "I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations," he said in an interview. "Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence," Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism.

Other contemporary scholars see a more dangerous underside to the current campaign against fat. Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, argues that obesity is used as a tool of discrimination, citing disturbing similarities to the eugenics movement, with its emphasis on "improving" the species. Obesity in America is "primarily a cultural and political issue," Mr. Campos writes in his new book, "The Obesity Myth" (Gotham), due out this month. "The war on fat," he argues, "is unique in American history in that it represents the first concerted attempt to transform the vast majority of the nation's citizens into social pariahs, to be pitied and scorned."

In what may turn out to be his most controversial claim, Mr. Campos writes: "Contrary to almost everything you have heard, weight is not a good predictor of health. In fact a moderately active larger person is likely to be far healthier than someone who is svelte but sedentary." To bolster his argument, he cites several studies, including one published by the Cooper Institute, a private research institution in Dallas.

Most medical experts warn of the dangers of fat, but Mr. Campos disagrees. "There is no good evidence," he writes, "that significant long-term weight loss is beneficial to health, and a great deal of evidence that short-term weight loss followed by weight regain (the pattern followed by almost all dieters) is medically harmful."

He said in a recent interview: "The current hysteria about body mass and supposedly devastating health effects is creating a stratification in the society of power and privilege based on a scientifically fallacious concept of health. What we are seeing with this moral panic over fat in many ways is comparable to what we saw with the eugenics movement in the 20's."

Kathleen LeBesco, associate professor of communication arts at Marymount Manhattan College, also asserts that at the root of the current slimness craze is an effort to stigmatize certain groups.

In a new book, "Revolting Bodies" (University of Massachusetts Press), Ms. LeBesco writes that African-American and Mexican-American women are particularly targeted as obese in contemporary culture. "All of the discourse about fatness is about pathologizing the individual," she said in an interview, also likening it to the eugenics movement.

She refers to a study by the Centers for Disease Control in which the highest proportions of overweight people are said to be African-American women and Mexican-American women. "Is it coincidence that representatives of these two stigmatized racial and ethnic groups, as well as women, are most likely to be obese?" Ms. LeBesco writes.

She also says that the diet industry is increasingly trying to concentrate on minorities. She disapprovingly cites a National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute study that concludes that full-figured African-American women have positive attitudes toward their bodies. Those self-confident feelings, the study said, "may be a barrier in attempting to work with overweight African-American women who — although they may want to weigh less and be healthier — do not necessarily consider themselves unattractive or overweight, and may value cosmetic aspects of body weight less."

Mr. Stearns has charted the way women in general gradually became the targets of obesity campaigns. The 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton was praised for her "mature figure," he says. "Feminist leaders who were more slender were reproved," Mr. Stearns writes, perhaps because of "the traditional linkage between thinness and discontent."

Then, around the 1890's, suddenly, women were being urged to diet. "Fat began to be obsessively discussed," Mr. Stearns writes. The Gibson girl was rendered as slender, and the weight of Miss America in relation to her height decreased from the 1920's on.

The emphasis on slenderness in women was no accident, Mr. Stearns says. At the same time women were being urged to lose weight, the ideal of motherhood was declining and women were able for the first time to express an appetite for sex. "Dieting was a way, again, to express virtue and self-control even in a changing sexual climate," he writes.

And while there are many causes for obesity — cheaper food, more aggressive marketing, bigger portions in restaurants and, of course, increasingly sedentary habits — Mr. Stearns says that gaining weight is still seen as a moral issue, "a sign you were lazy, lacked self-control."

He notes that the French have been more successful at weight loss than Americans, partly, he says, because weight loss in France is based on aesthetics, not morality.

Mr. Stearns insists he is not promoting obesity but rather arguing that making people feel guilty for being fat is a useless form of weight control. In describing the contemporary ethos, he said: "If you fail to lose weight you are demonstrating you're a bad person. It's a big burden. Faced with this additional pressure you are even more likely to end up by saying: `The hell with it! I'm going to get ice cream. I am such a bad person I need to solace myself.' "

I agree the "war on fat" is a moral issue. America is obsessed with productivity. Fat is seen as symbolic of complacency, it's seen as gluttony, squandering resources. Fat people are the personification of all these negative traits: lazy, worthless, useless. It's unfortunate, but true. The opportunistic diet industry reinforces these negative thoughts through their unscrupulous marketing of products which really only exacerbate weight disorders in the long run. They'll show a woman - fat, sullen, depressed, obviously feels worthless... then they show her after - she has everything she ever wanted and feels great. Then they promise you if you buy their 400 calorie liquid fasts, their ridiculously dangerous opperations, their unsatiating pre-packaged refined foods, or their pills that you too can have the same results. It's shameful, and unsustainable weight loss efforts do the body great harm.

They often say it is near impossible to lose weight, that only 5% are successful. Well duh. Sounds about right to me, considering about 95% of weight loss methods are the money-taking BS methods above.

However I have a hard time believing fat poses no health risk. Metabolic rate, which puts oxidative stress on the body, must be raised to support all that extra fat tissue. Fat also exacerbates endocrine disorders. Even if fat were a metabolically neutral tissue, it still certainly is indicative of metabolic disorder. Doesn't the state of hair or skin quality indicate good health as well? Self-acceptance shouldn't include accepting your health deteriorating if you can do something about it. They talk about how obesity is more common among blacks and mexicans, is it any wonder these groups also have very high rates of heart disease and diabetes? The anti-fat might say the fat caused them, and the pro-fat might say the fat is unrelated and the diseases were caused by sedentary lifestyle, but I know that the IRS is the catalyst causing all three. Our high carb diet disagrees with many people, and as we eat more and more sugar the problem is only going to get worse.

For a moment, there, I thought that you were blaming the Internal Revenue Service

There is no question that our (shared) North American culture is imposing certain standards of beauty -- just look at the emergence of television shows like "The Swan," in which women compete to be made over not only cosmetically and in terms of hairstyle, but also surgically . . . I do not consider myself a slave to fashion, and my primary motivation in losing weight is to improve my both my present and long-term prospects for good health, but I have to admit that I am not without motives stemming from vanity. If there is an attitude that fatness may be equated with moral inferiority, then it should surely follow (as it always does, in an atmosphere of disapproval and/or intolerance) that many people wish to stay off the radar, and diet themselves thin.

And yet, at the same time, we North Americans celebrate and worship excess, whether it be fame, chattels, money, success -- or food. No wonder we are so messed up, and that we jump at "easy" solutions to our problems offered to us through infomercials, magazine advertisements, and get-rich-quick schemes. There is no question that obesity is one of today's hot buttons, and that many unscrupulous vendors of "diet aids" and "magic exercise solutions" of dubious usefulness are the only ones profiting.

Makes me mad.

Has anyone else noticed that as fat becomes more and more demonized, and the obese are the "new smokers" as far as the Surgeon General is concerned (obesity causes public health problems and must be treated as an "epidemic"), we hear very little about eating disorders? Remember when anorexia and bulemia were discussed in every magazine and movie-of-the-week? Was that epidemic exaggerated, or did we cure it? And what effect will the current public loathing of fat have on youngsters as they develop?

Are Americans really demonizing fat more than they used to or are we simply medicalizing it more -- focusing on it more as a health issue and less openly as a cosmetic issue (although that is clearly underlying a lot of the concern)? When I was growing up in the 1960s, fat kids were taunted mercilessly and in my opinion, in that pre-feminist era, women were judged more by their looks and less by any other attribute they might have than they are now. My grandmother, who grew up in the early part of the 20th century (she's now in her 90s), has always been obsessed by weight -- probably the influence of the flapper era.

They are not demonizing fat. Fat has become the monster that lives in everyone's closet. People are calling it evil because of fear not because it is bad. It is funny that the body has fat cells. That tells me that it is suppose to have fat. There are no carb cells. The body processes fat but carbs add stress to the body. Yet, we keep fat in the closet