1
Until her retirement in 2010, Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote a regular column for the Boston Globe,
where this article first appeared in May 1999, a few days after many newspapers had featured a news story about how
adolescent Fijian girls' self-image was affected by watching American TV. Goodman's column generally appeared on the op-ed
pages of newspapers across the country. As you read, consider how she uses a discussion of a scientific study and the evidence it
cites to make a claim about what she sees as a larger social problem. Keep in mind that Goodman wrote this article shortly after
the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two male students killed and wounded a number of other students and
teachers.
The Culture of Thin Bites Fiji
First of all, imagine a place women greet one another at the market with open arms, loving smiles, and a cheerful exchange of
ritual compliments:
"You look wonderful! You've put on weight!"
Does that sound like dialogue from Fat Fantasyland? Or a skit from fat-is-a-feminist-issue satire? Well, this Western fantasy was a
South Pacific fact of life. In Fiji, before 1995, big was beautiful and bigger was more beautiful—and people really did flatter one
another with exclamations about weight gain.
In this island paradise, food was not only love, it was a cultural imperative. Eating and overeating were rites of mutual
hospitality. Everyone worried about losing weight—but not the way we do. "Going thin" was considered to be a sign of some
social problem, a worrisome indication the person wasn't getting enough to eat. The Fijians were, to be sure, a bit obsessed
with food; they prescribed herbs to stimulate the appetite. They were a reverse image of our culture. And that turns out to be
the point.
Something happened in 1995. A Western mirror was shoved into the face of the Fijians. Television came to the island.
Suddenly, the girls of rural coastal villages were watching the girls of Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, not to mention
Seinfeld and E.R.
Within 38 months, the number of teenagers at risk for eating disorders more than doubled to 29 percent. The number of
high school girls who vomited for weight control went up five times to 15 percent. Worse yet, 74 percent of the Fiji teens in
the study said they felt "too big or fat" at least some of the time and 62 percent said they had dieted in the past month.
This before-and-after television portrait of a body image takeover was drawn by Anne Becker, an anthropologist and
psychiatrist who directs research at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center. She presented her research at the American
Psychiatric Association last week with all the usual caveats. No, you cannot prove a direct causal link between television and eating
disorders. Heather Locklear J doesn't cause anorexia. Nor does Tori Spelling^ cause bulimia.
Fiji is not just a Fat Paradise Lost. It's an economy in transition from subsistence agriculture to tourism and its entry into
the global economy has threatened many old values.
Nevertheless, you don't get a much 10 better lab experiment than this. In just 38 months, and with only one channel, a
television-free culture that defined a fat person as robust has become a television culture that sees robust as, well,
repulsive.
All that and these islanders didn't even get Ally McBeal; "Going thin" is no longer a social disease but the perceived
requirement for getting a good job, nice clothes, and fancy cars. As Becker says carefully, "The acute and constant bombardment of certain images in the media are apparently quite influential in how teens experience their bodies."
Speaking of Fiji teenagers in a way that sounds all too familiar, she adds, "We have a set of vulnerable teens consuming
television. There's a huge disparity between what they see on television and what they look like themselves—that goes not
only to clothing, hairstyles, and skin color, but size of bodies."
In short, the sum of Western culture, the big success story of our entertainment industry, is our ability to export
insecurity. We can make any woman anywhere feel perfectly rotten about her shape. At this rate, we owe the islanders at
least one year of the ample lawyer Camryn Manheim0 in The Practice for free.
I'm not surprised by research 15 showing that eating disorders are a cultural byproduct. We've watched the female
image shrink down to Calista Flockhart at the same time we've seen eating problems grow. But Hollywood hasn't been exactly
eager to acknowledge the connection between image and illness.
Over the past few weeks since the Columbine High massacre, we've broken through some denial about violence as a
teaching tool. It's pretty clear that boys are literally learning how to hate and harm others.
Maybe we ought to worry a little more about what girls learn: To hate and harm themselves.
The Obesity Epidemic: Who's to Blame? Don't Eat the Flan
Greg Critser
Greg Critser lives in Pasadena, California, and writes regularly for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times
on issues of nutrition, health, and medicine. An authority on the subject of food politics, Critser has been interviewed
by PBS and other media, and his writing on obesity earned him a James Beard nomination for best feature writing
2
in 1999. Embarrassed by a passing motorist who shouted "Watch it, fatso," Critser went on a diet and lost forty
pounds. In the process he discovered that in America, weight is a class issue—fat and poor often go together. In
exposing the heavy truths about American obesity, Critser gives our bloated nation a wake-up call. His books
include Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (2003) and Generation Rx: How
Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (2005;.
In the following essay, which first appeared in the February 3, 2003, issue of Forbes, Critser explains
that in doing the research for Fat Land he could not find any present-day connection between the sin of gluttony
and our national problem with obesity. He argues, therefore, that we should reintroduce moral authority in
fighting obesity, a tactic that has worked well in our fight against unsafe sex and smoking.
For Your Journal
Most health reports indicate that obesity continues to rise in America toward epidemic proportions.
What do you think has gone wrong? What do you think needs to be done? What incentives are needed to
encourage change?
By now you have likely seen nearly every imaginable headline about obesity in America.
You've seen the ominous statistical ones: "Nearly two-thirds of all Americans now overweight, study says." Or
the sensational ones: "Two N.Y. teens sue McDonald's for making them fat." Or the medical ones: "Adult-onset
diabetes now soars among children."
But one obesity headline you will not see is the one that deals with morality. Specifically, it is the one that
might read like this: "Sixth deadly sin at root of obesity epidemic, researchers say." This is because gluttony,1
perhaps alone among humanity's vices, has become the first media non-sin.
I first got a whiff of this transformation a few years ago while working on a book about obesity. Looking for a book
about food and morality, I asked a clerk in the religious bookstore at the Fuller Seminary in Pasadena where I might find one
on gluttony.
"Hmm," he pondered. "Maybe you'd want to look under eating disorders."
"But I'm not looking for a medical book. I'm looking for something about gluttony—you know, one of the seven deadly
sins." I was sure he'd point me to Aquinas, Dante or at least a nice long shelf on sin. But he didn't.
"Oh, why didn't you say so?" the young man said, now quite serious. "If we have anything like that, it'll be over in
self-help."
I then made inquiries about interviewing a professor who might be an expert on sin. 1 was told there was no one at
this conservative seminary who had anything to say on the subject.
What might be called the "therapization" of gluttony is hardly limited to the sphere of conventional religion. Of
much greater import is the legitimizing of gluttony in medicine and public health. For at least two decades any suggestion
that morality—or even parental admonition 2—be used to fight the curse of overeating has been greeted like Ted Bundy at
a Girl Scout convention. Behind this lies the notion, widely propounded' by parenting gurus, that food should never
become a dinner-table battle.
The operative notion here is simple: Telling people to not eat too much food is counterproductive. Worse, it leads to
"stigmatization," which can lead to eating disorders, low self-esteem, and bad body image. Though the consequences of
being overweight, numerous and well documented, are dangerous, little if any evidence supports the notion that it is
dangerous to stigmatize unhealthy behavior. Nevertheless, suggest to an "obesity counselor" that people should be counseled
against gluttony and nine out of ten times you will be admonished as a veritable child abuser.
That's too bad, because it eliminates a fundamental—and proven— public health tactic. In the campaigns against
unsafe sex and smoking, stigmatizing unhealthy behaviors proved highly effective in reducing risk.
Worse, this absence of moral authority in the realm of food leaves children—everyone, really—vulnerable to the one
force in American life that has no problem making absolute claims: food advertisers, who spend billions teaching kids how
to bug their parents into feeding them high-fat, high-sugar foods. Combine that with the lingering (albeit debunked) 1980s
dogma—that "kids know when kids are full"—and you get, as one nutritionist-parent forcefully told me, the idea that "kids
have the right to make bad nutritional decisions."
You would have a hard time selling that to the one Western nation that apparently avoided the obesity epidemic:
France. The French intentionally created a culture of dietary restraint in the early 20th century, through a state-sponsored
program known as puericulture. Reacting to early cases of childhood obesity, health activists wrote parenting manuals,
conducted workshops and published books. Their advice: Parents must control the dinner table; all portions should be
moderate; desserts were for holidays. Eating too much food was a bad thing.
And therein lies at least part of the explanation for the legendary leanness of the very confident French: They
were taught as children not to overeat. And they didn't even have to look in the self-help section for the advice.
3
Supersize Me: It's Time to Stop Blaming Fat People for Their Size Alison Motluk
Alison Motluk was born in Hamilton, Ontario, where she went to public school before receiving her BA from
the University of Toronto. The creator of two radio documentaries, See, If You Can Hear This and Synaesthesia, Motluk
has written numerous articles for New Scientist magazine where she covers science policy.
In the following essay, first published in New Scientist on October 30, 2004, Motluk argues that instead of
blaming people for being overweight, health officials have turned their attention to what has been termed our
"obesogenic" environment, a new set of conditions that has made it much easier in the last few decades for people
to gain weight.
For Your Journal
What kind of physical activities were part of your childhood experience? In general, are you more, less, or
about as active as you were as a child? What, if anything, has changed about you, your interests, or your
environment to affect your activity as you have aged? Explain.
Whether it is undertakers introducing a new range of extra-large coffins or airlines planning to
charge passengers by the kilo, these days our expanding waistlines are rarely out of the news. It is hard to
ignore the fact that body shape has changed dramatically over the past few decades.
In 1992 about 13 percent of Americans were clinically obese. Only 10 years later that figure had rocketed to 22
percent, and in the three fattest states, Alabama,'Mississippi, and West Virginia, it was over 25 percent. As the UK,
Australia, and many other Western countries follow the U.S. lead, the epidemic of obesity is now seen as one of the developed
world's biggest public-health problems.
It is tempting to blame fat people for the state they're in. But health officials have recently begun to focus on a
different culprit: the so-called "obesogenic" environment. In the United States, goes the argument, the prevailing culture
actually promotes obesity, making an unhealthy lifestyle the default option.
Take diet. "Calorie-dense foods are far more readily available than ever before," says Martin Binks, a psychologist at
Duke University's Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina. Thanks to widespread affluence and agricultural
subsidies, food in the United States is cheap and plentiful. Because fewer households have a stay-at-home parent to prepare
meals from scratch, families increasingly turn to highly processed convenience foods, takeouts, or fast-food restaurants. Half
the average American food budget goes on food eaten outside the home, much of which is high-fat.
Another insidious2 influence on the American diet has been the gradual increase in portion sizes. "You eat more,"
says Judith Stern, a nutritionist and physician at the University of California at Davis, "even if you don't finish it." Restaurants
and processed-food manufacturers can boost their profits by ratcheting up portion size and charging a little more because the
price of food ingredients is so low relative to other costs such as packaging and transport. The original 1960s McDonald's
meal of a hamburger, fries, and a 12-ounce Coke contained about 590 calories. But today, a quarter-pounder with cheese and
supersized fries and Coke—a meal that some kids consider an after-school snack—racks up a whopping 1550 calories. That's
about three-quarters of the recommended daily calorie intake for an average woman.
The supersized diet is becoming the norm just as activity levels are dropping to an all-time low. "There's a great deal
less access to physical activity than ever before in history," says Binks. The problem starts young. One-third of U.S.
secondary-school students fail to get enough physical activity and over a tenth get none at all, according to recent figures
from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. "The average child doesn't have any physical activity in school
any more," says Binks. Many schools no longer even have breaks, let alone structured physical education, he says. "Physical
activity is put on the back burner in favor of test results."
And thanks to the way that most U.S. towns and cities are designed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get
anywhere without driving. "We have suburbs without sidewalks," laments Stern.
Ironically, the U.S.'s obesogenic environment is one that societies through the ages have dreamed of: tasty, cheap
food in abundance and barely a lick of hard work to be done. Who would have thought that it would one day hasten our
demise?
Shall we blame schools?
“Extra Large,” Please by Diane Urbina
Why are so many kids today overweight or even obese? According to Diane Urbina, the number-one culprit is junk food, which is
available anytime, anywhere—and in ever-increasing portion sizes. Urbina argues that schools, fast-food restaurants, and the
media have a responsibility to raise awareness about nutrition and save people of all ages from a public-health disaster.
4
School lunches have always come in for criticism. When I was a kid, we complained about "mystery meat" and "leftover
surprise casserole." Half a canned pear in a shaky nest of Jell-O didn't do much to excite our taste buds. I hid my share of limp
green beans under my napkin, the better to escape the eagle eye of lunchroom monitors who encouraged us to eat our soggy,
overcooked vegetables. But the cafeteria lunches were there, and so we ate them. (Most of them. OK, I hid the gooey tapioca
pudding, too.) I think we accepted the idea that being delicious was not the point. The meals were reasonably nutritious and
they fueled our young bodies for the mental and physical demands of the _dav. In my case, that demand included walking a
quarter-mile to and from school, enjoying three recesses a day, and taking part in gym class a couple of times a week. Afterschool hours, at least when the weather was good, were spent outdoors playing kickball or tag with neighbor kids.
I can imagine you wondering, "Who cares?" I don't blame you. My memories 3 of schooldays in northern Indiana thirtysome years ago aren't all that fascinating even to me. And yet I think you should care, because of one fact I haven't mentioned
yet. When I was a kid and looked around at other kids my age, I saw all kinds of differences. There were tall ones and short ones
and black and white and brown ones, rude ones and polite ones, popular ones and geeky ones, athletic ones and uncoordinated
ones. But you know what? There weren't many heavy ones. The few there were stood out because they were unusual. I
think that if you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that kids are just naturally skinny.
Flash forward to the present. Walk down any city street in America. Sit in a mall and watch the people stream by. You don't
need to be a rocket scientist to notice something's changed. Whether you call them big-boned, chubby, husky, or plus-sized,
kids are heavy, lots of them. If your own eyes don't convince you, here are the statistics: Since 1980, the number of American
kids who are dangerously overweight has tripled. More than 16 percent of our children—that's 1 in 6—qualify as “obese." Hordes
of them are developing diet-related diabetes, a disease that used to be seen almost always in adults. When California's students
grades 5 through 12 were given a basic fitness test, almost 8 out of 10 failed.
Part of the problem is that many kids don't have good opportunities to exercise. They live in neighborhoods without
sidewalks or paths where they can walk, bike, or skate safely. Drug activity and violent crime may make playing outside
dangerous. They can reach their schools only by car or bus. Many of those schools are so short of money they've scrapped their
physical-fitness classes. Too few communities have athletic programs in place.
Electronic entertainment also plays a role in the current state of affairs. Kids 6 used to go outside to play with other
kids because it was more fun than sitting around the house. Today, kids who sit around the house have access to dozens
of cable TV channels, the Internet, DVD players, and a dizzying assortment of video games.
Still another cause is the lack of parental supervision. When I was a kid, most 7 of us had a mom or an older sibling at
home telling us to get off our butts and go outside. (The alternative was often to stay inside and do chores. We chose to go out
and play.) Now, most American families have two working parents. For most of the daylight hours, those parents just aren't
around to encourage their kids to get some exercise. A related problem is that parents who can't be home much may feel guilty
about it. One way of relieving that guilt is to buy Junior the game system of his dreams and a nice wide-screen TV to play it on.
These are all complicated problems whose solutions are equally complicated. 8 But there is one cause of the fattening of
America's kids that can be dealt with more easily. And that cause is the enormous influence that fast-food restaurants and
other sources of calorie-laden junk have gained over America's kids.
I'm no health nut. I like an occasional Quarter Pounder as well as the next mom. There is no quicker way to my kids' hearts
than to bring home a newly released DVD, a large pepperoni pie and a bag of Chicken McNuggets. But in our home, an
evening featuring extra mozzarella and bottles of 7-Up is a once-in-a-while treat—sort of a guilty pleasure.
To many of today's kids fast food is not a treat—it's their daily diet. Their 10 normal dinnertime equals McDonald's, Pizza
Hut, Domino's, Burger King, Taco Bell or Kentucky Fried Chicken, all washed down with Pepsi. And increasingly, lunchtime at
school means those foods too. About 20 percent of our nation's schools have sold chain restaurants the right to put their food
items on the lunch line. Many schools also allow candy and soft-drink vending machines on their campuses. The National Soft
Drink Association reports that 60 percent of public and private middle schools and high schools make sodas available for
purchase.
Believe me, when I was a kid, if the lunchline had offered me a couple of slices 11 of double-crust stuffed pepperoni-sausage
pizza instead of a Turkey Submarine, I would have said yes before you could say the words "clogged arteries." And when I
needed a mid-afternoon pick-me-up, I would have gladly traded a handful of change for a Coke and a Snickers bar.
And then I would have gone back into algebra class and spent the hour bouncing between a sugar high and a fat-induced
coma.
Stopping off at Taco Bell for an occasional Seven-Layer Burrito is one thing. 13 But when fast foods become tip staple .of
young people's diets, it's the kids who become Whoppers. And it has become the staple for many. According to researchers at
Children's hospital Boston, during any given week, three out of four children eat a fast-food meal one or more times a day. The
beverages they chug clown are a problem, too. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that every day, the average
5
adolescent drinks enough soda and fruit beverages to equal the sugar content of 50 chocolate-chip cookies.
The problem isn't only that burgers, fries, and sodas aren't nutritious to begin 14 with—although they aren't. What has made the
situation much worse is the increasingly huge portions sold by fast-food restaurants. Back when McDonald's began business, its
standard meal consisted of a hamburger, two ounces of French fries, and a 12-ounce Coke. That meal provided 590 calories.
But today's customers don't have to be satisfied with such modest portions. For very little more money, diners can end up with
a quarter-pound burger, extra-large fries, and extra-large cup of Coke that add up to 1,550 calories. A whole generation of kids
is growing up believing that this massive shot of fat, sugar, and sodium equals a "normal portion." As a result, they're
becoming extra large themselves.
As kids sit down to watch the after-school and Saturday-morning shows 15 designed for them, they aren't just taking in
the programs themselves. They're seeing at least an hour of commercials for every five hours of programming. On Saturday
mornings, nine out of 10 of those commercials are for sugary cereals, fast foods, and other non-nutritious junk. Many of the
commercials are tied in with popular toys or beloved cartoon characters or movies aimed at children. Watching those commercial
makes the kids hungry—or at least they think they're hungry. (Thanks to all the factors mentioned here, many children can no
longer tell if they're genuinely hungry or not. They've been programmed to eat for many reasons other than hunger.) So they
snack as they sit in front of the TV set. Then at mealtime, they beg to go out for more junk food. And they get bigger, and bigger,
and bigger.
There is no overnight solution to the problem of American children's increasing 16 weight and decreasing level of physical fitness.
But can anything be done? To begin fast-food meals and junk-food vending machines should be banned from schools. Our
education system should be helping children acquire good nutritional habits, not assisting them in committing slow nutritional
suicide. In addition, commercials for 17 junk food should Fe banned from TV during children's viewing time, specifically
Saturday mornings. And finally, fast-food restaurants should be required to do what tobacco companies—another '
manufacturer of products known to harm people's health—have to do. They should display in their restaurants, and in their
TV and print ads as well, clear nutritional information about their products. For instance, a young woman at Burger King who
was considering ordering a Double Whopper with Cheese, a king-size order of fries and a king-size Dr. Pepper could read
something like this: Your meal will provide 2030 calories, 860 of those calories from fat.
Your recommended daily intake is 2000 calories, with no more than 600 of 20 those calories coming from fat.
At a glance, then, the customer could see that in one fast-food meal, she was taking in more calories and fat than she
should consume in an entire day.
Overweight kids today become overweight adults tomorrow. Overweight adults are at increased risk for heart disease,
diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Schools, fast-food restaurants, and the media are contributing to a public-health disaster in the
maEng. Anything that can be done to decrease the role junk food plays in kids' lives needs to be done, and done quickly.
Government Interference
In the summer of 2012 Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City made a proposal to severely restrict the sale of
certain kinds of drinks. In September 2012 it was approved by the New York City Board of Health and scheduled to go into
effect in 2013. Here is the gist of Bloomberg's thinking:
Sugary drinks—here denned as those with twenty-five or more calories per eight-ounce serving—if consumed in
large quantities unquestionably contribute to obesity. It is therefore desirable to discourage the consumption of large
amounts of these drinks.
Ban the sale—in delis, fast-food franchises, and street stands — of bottles containing more than sixteen fluid ounces of
such drinks.
Larger bottles would be available at grocery stores and convenience stores. Other kinds of drinks, such as fruit drinks,
diet sodas, dairy-based drinks (e.g., milk shakes), and alcoholic beverages would not be restricted.
In short, this proposal was a ban only on selling large containers of certain kinds of drinks in certain kinds of places.
And even in the restricted places, consumers could buy any number of the smaller bottles, so the determined
consumer could indeed get more than sixteen ounces if he or she wanted to, though at the cost of some
inconvenience.
On March 11, 2013, the day before the law was to go into effect, Justice Milton A. Tingling Jr. of the New York State
Supreme Court struck down the ban, saying that it was "arbitrary and capricious." Examples of the alleged arbitrariness
were (1) the ban did not apply to dairy-based sugary drinks such as milk shakes and (2) it would be enforced in
restaurants, delicatessens, theaters, and food-carts but not in convenience stores and bodegas. Do these examples strike
you as "arbitrary"? A Ban Too Far
6
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done a lot to help improve the health of New York City residents. Smoking is outlawed in
workplaces, restaurants, and bars. Trans fat is banned in restaurants. Chain restaurants are required to post calorie counts,
allowing customers to make informed choices.
Mr. Bloomberg, however, is overreaching with his new plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than sixteen ounces.
He argues that prohibiting big drinks at restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and other food sellers can help combat
obesity. But as he admits, customers can get around the ban by purchasing two drinks.
The administration should be focusing its energies on programs that educate and encourage people to make
sound choices. For example, obesity rates have declined slightly among students in elementary and middle schools,
with the city's initiatives to make lunches healthier with salad bars, lower-calorie drinks, and water fountains in
cafeterias. Requiring students to get more exercise has also helped.
The city should keep up its tough anti-obesity advertising campaigns— one ad shows that it takes walking from Union
Square to Brooklyn to burn off the calories from a twenty-ounce soda. The mayor has also started adult exercise
programs and expanded the program for more fresh produce vendors around the city.
Promoting healthy lifestyles is important. In the case of sugary 5 drinks, a regular reminder that a sixty-fourounce cola has 780 calories should help. But too much nannying with a ban might well cause people to tune out.
Letters of Response by Gary Taustine and Brian Elbel
To the Editor:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to promote healthier life styles is commendable, but the government has no
right whatsoever to go beyond promotion to enforcement. You can't reduce obesity with smaller cups any more than
you can reduce gun violence with smaller bullets. Anonymous Editorial, New York Times
This editorial was published on June I, 2012. We follow it with two letters, both published on June 2, 2012.
A Ban Too Far
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done a lot to help improve the health of New York City residents. Smoking is outlawed in
workplaces, restaurants, and bars. Trans fat is banned in restaurants. Chain restaurants are required to post calorie counts,
allowing customers to make informed choices.
Mr. Bloomberg, however, is overreaching with his new plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than sixteen ounces.
He argues that prohibiting big drinks at restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and other food sellers can help combat
obesity. But as he admits, customers can get around the ban by purchasing two drinks.
The administration should be focusing its energies on programs that educate and encourage people to make
sound choices. For example, obesity rates have declined slightly among students in elementary and middle schools,
with the city's initiatives to make lunches healthier with salad bars, lower -calorie drinks, and water fountains in
cafeterias. Requiring students to get more exercise has also helped.
The city should keep up its tough anti-obesity advertising campaigns— one ad shows that it takes walking from Union
Square to Brooklyn to burn off the calories from a twenty-ounce soda. The mayor has also started adult exercise
programs and expanded the program for more fresh produce vendors around the city.
Promoting healthy lifestyles is important. In the case of sugary 5 drinks, a regular reminder that a sixty-fourounce cola has 780 calories should help. But too much nannying with a ban might well cause people to tune out.
Letters of Response by Gary Taustine and Brian Elbel
To the Editor:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to promote healthier life styles is commendable, but the government has no
right whatsoever to go beyond promotion to enforcement. You can't reduce obesity with smaller cups any more than
you can reduce gun violence with smaller bullets. This proposal sets a very bad, very dangerous precedent. Freedom
is rarely taken away in supersize amounts; more typically it is slowly siphoned off drop by drop so people don't even
notice until they've lost it entirely.
Mayor Bloomberg has spent his eleven years in office stripping away our freedoms one drop at a time. Minorities are
stopped and frisked, Muslims are watched, protesters are silenced, and smokers are taxed and harassed beyond
reason.
In their apathy, New Yorkers have given the mayor an inch and he has already taken a mile. If we permit him to
regulate portion control without a fight, then we don't deserve the few freedoms we have left.
GARY TAUSTINE New York, June 1,2012
To the Editor:
Re "A Ban Too Far" (editorial, June 1):
7
To focus on education when discussing solutions to obesity misunderstands the scientific evidence about what can alter
our staggering statistics and what manifestly cannot.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's proposal to restrict the sale of large sugar-sweetened beverages changes the food
environment—the places where foods and beverages are bought. The best science affirms that this is exactly the
approach that could curb obesity trends. This same science indicates that education-based approaches, which also have
their place, will do much less by comparison.
That sugary beverages contribute to obesity is clear. The science also tells us that changing the default beverage choice
to something smaller could induce people to consume just that smaller beverage rather than deal with the cost and
hassle of buying and carrying two or more.
Time and further research will tell. But the continued focus on simply informing and educating consumers is doomed to
failure and diminishes this important policy and the influence it could have on obesity.
BRIAN ELBEL New York, June 1, 2012
The writer is an assistant professor of population health and health policy at the New York University School of Medicine.
TOPIC FOR CRITICAL THINKING AND WRITING
Draft a letter to the newspaper expressing your support or disapproval -full or in part—of the position taken in the
editorial. In your letter you may, if you wish, include a comment about either or both of the published letters of response.
Daniel E. Lieberman
Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, is the author o/The Evolution of the Human Head
(2011). His chief academic interest is why the human body looks the way it does—why, for instance, we have short necks
and why we do not have snouts. We reprint an op-ed piece that he published in the New York Times on June 6, 2012.
Evolution's Sweet Tooth
Of all the indignant responses to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's plan to ban the sale of giant servings of soft drinks in New York
City, libertarian objections seem the most worthy of serious attention. People have certain rights, this argument goes, including
the right to drink lots of soda, to eat junk food, to gain weight, and to avoid exercise. If Mr. Bloomberg can ban the sale of
sugar-laden soda of more than sixteen ounces, will he next ban triple scoops of ice cream and large portions of French fries and
limit sales of Big Macs to one per order? Why not ban obesity itself?
The obesity epidemic has many dimensions, but at heart it's a biological problem. An evolutionary perspective helps explain
why two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and what to do about it. Lessons from evolutionary biology support
the mayor's plan: when it comes to limiting sugar in our food, some kinds of coercive action are not only necessary but also
consistent with how we used to live.
Obesity's fundamental cause is long-term energy imbalance—ingesting more calories than you spend over weeks, months, and
years. Of the many contributors to energy imbalance today, plentiful sugar may be the worst.
Since sugar is a basic form of energy in food, a sweet tooth was adaptive in ancient times, when food was limited. However,
excessive sugar in the bloodstream is toxic, so our bodies also evolved to rapidly convert digested sugar in the bloodstream
into i'at. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed plenty of fat—more than other primates — to be active during periods of food
scarcity and still pay lor large, expensive brains and costly reproductive strategies (hunter-gatherer mothers could pump out
babies twice as fast as their chimpanzee cousins).
Simply put, humans evolved to crave sugar, store it, and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems
were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter -gatherer ancestors
ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn't until
very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.
The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age
world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can't
control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty, and once limited resource.
What should we do? One option is to do nothing, while hoping that scientists find better cures for obesity-related
diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. I'm not holding my breath for such cures, and the costs of inaction,
already staggering, would continue to mushroom.
A more popular option is to enhance public education to help us make better decisions about what to eat and how to
be active. This is crucial but has so far yielded only modest improvements.
The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all
8
humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat, and
salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of five to ten miles a day. Mr.
Bloomberg's paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of
our environment.
Though his big-soda ban would apply to all New Yorkers, I think we 10 should focus paternalistic laws on children.
Youngsters can't make rational, informed decisions about their bodies, and our society agrees that pare nts don't have
the right to make disastrous decisions on their behalf. Accordingly, we require parents to enroll their children in school,
have them immunized, and make them wear seat belts. We require physical education in school, and we don't let
children buy alcohol or cigarettes. If these are acceptable forms of coercion, how is restricting unhealthy doses of
sugary drinks that slowly contribute to disease any different?
Along these lines, we should ban all unhealthy food in school — soda, pizza, French fries — and insist that schools provide
adequate daily physical education, which many fail to do.
Adults need help, too, and we should do more to regulate companies that exploit our deeply rooted appetites for sugar
and other unhealthy foods. The mayor was right to ban trans fats, but we should also make the food industry honest about
portion sizes. Like cigarettes, mass-marketed junk food should come with prominent health warning labels. It should be
illegal to advertise highly fattening food as "fat free." People have the right to be unhealthy, but we should make that
choice more onerous and expensive by imposing taxes on soda and junk food.
We humans did not evolve to eat healthily and go to the gym; until recently, we didn't have to make such choices. But
we did evolve to cooperate to help one another survive and thrive. Circumstances have changed, but we still need
one another's help as much as we ever did. For this reason, we need government on our side, not on the side of
those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them. We have evolved to need coercion.
Mark Bittman
Mark Bittman, a food columnist for the New York Times and the author of several books about food and cooking, has
appeared on numerous TV programs, including a series called Kitchen Express. We reprint an essay first published in the
New York Times, July 24, 2011 —almost a year before the Bloomberg proposal.
Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables
What will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes,
and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it's SAD.)
Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is
quite the opposite, and there's little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of
lives.
And—not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not
hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs. Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods.
And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn't matter, because the fixes are not really their problem.
Their mission is not public health but profit, so they'll continue to sell the health-damaging food that's most profitable,
until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That "other force" should be the federal government, fulfilling its
role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.
Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we 5 should turn the tables and tax things like soda,
French fries, doughnuts, and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that
encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.
The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually. (Although that includes diet sodas, it does not
include noncarbon-ated sweetened beverages, which add up to at least seventeen gallons a person per year.)
Sweetened drinks could be taxed at two cents per ounce, so a six-pack of Pepsi would cost $1.44 more than it does
now. An equivalent tax on fries might be fifty cents per serving; a quarter extra for a doughnut. (We have experts who
can figure out how "bad" a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be; right now they're busy calculating
ethanol subsidies. Diet sodas would not be taxed.)
Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually. That money
could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes,
and fruit.
We could sell those staples cheap — let's say for fifty cents a pound — and almost everywhere: drugstores, street corners,
convenience stores, bodegas, supermarkets, liquor stores, even schools, libraries, and other community centers.
9
This program would, of course, upset the processed food industry. Oh well. It would also bug those who might resent
paying more for soda and chips and argue that their right to eat whatever they wanted was being breached. But public
health is the role of the government, and our diet is right up there with any other public responsibility you can name,
from water treatment to mass transit.
Some advocates for the poor say taxes like these are unfair because 10 low-income people pay a higher percentage of
their income for food and would find it more difficult to buy soda or junk. But since poor people suffer
disproportionately from the cost of high-quality, fresh foods, subsidizing those foods would be particularly beneficial to
them.
Right now it's harder for many people to buy fruit than Froot Loops; chips and Coke are a common breakfast. And
since the rate of diabetes continues to soar—one-third of all Americans either have diabetes or are prediabetic,
most with Type 2 diabetes, the kind associated with bad eating habits—and because our health care bills are on the
verge of becoming truly insurmountable, this is urgent for economic sanity as well as national health. JUSTIFYING A
TAX
At least thirty cities and states have considered taxes on soda or all sugar-sweetened beverages, and they're a logical
target: of the 278 additional calories Americans on average consumed per day between 1977 and 2001, more than 40
percent came from soda, "fruit" drinks, mixes like Kool-Aid and Crystal Light, and beverages like Red Bull, Gatorade, and
dubious offerings like Vitamin Water, which contains half as much sugar as Coke.
Some states already have taxes on soda — mostly low, ineffective sales taxes paid at the register. The current talk is of
excise taxes, levied before purchase.
"Excise taxes have the benefit of being incorporated into the shelf price, and that's where consumers make their
purchasing decisions," says Lisa Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. "And, as per-unit taxes, they avoid volume discounts and are ultimately more effective in
raising prices, so they have greater impact."
Much of the research on beverage taxes conies from the Rudd Cert- 15 ter for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Its
projections indicate that taxes become significant at the equivalent of about a penny an ounce, a level at which three
very good things should begin to happen: the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages should decrease, as should
the incidence of disease and therefore public health costs; and money could be raised for other uses.
Even in the current antitax climate, we'll probably see new, significant soda taxes soon, somewhere; Philadelphia, New
York (city and state), and San Francisco all considered them last year, and the scenario for such a tax spreading could
be similar to that of legalized gambling: once the income stream becomes apparent, it will seem irresistible to cashstrapped governments.
Currently, instead of taxing sodas and other unhealthful food, we subsidize them (with, I might note, tax dollars!). Direct
subsidies to farmers for crops like corn (used, for example, to make now-ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup) and
soybeans (vegetable oil) keep the prices of many unhealthful foods and beverages artificially low. There are indirect
subsidies as well, because prices of junk foods don't reflect the costs of repairing our health and the environment.
Other countries are considering or have already started programs to tax foods with negative effects on health. Denmark's
saturated-fat tax is going into effect Oct. 1, and Romania passed (and then unpassed) something similar; earlier this month,
a French minister raised the idea of tripling the value-added tax on soda. Meanwhile, Hungary is proposing a new tax on
foods with "too much" sugar, salt, or fat, while increasing taxes on liquor and soft drinks, all to pay for state-financed health
care; and Brazil's Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program features subsidized produce markets and state-sponsored low-cost
restaurants. Putting all of those elements together could create a national program that would make progress on a halfdozen problems at once — disease, budget, health care, environment, food access, and more — while paying for itself.
The benefits are staggering, and though it would take a level of political will that's rarely seen, it's hardly a moonshot.
The need is dire: efforts to shift the national diet have failed, because 20 education alone is no match for marketing
dollars that push the very foods that are the worst for us. (The fast-food industry alone spent more than $4 billion on
marketing in 2009; the Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion is asking for about a third of
a percent of that in 2012: $13 million.) As a result, the percentage of obese adults has more than doubled over the last
thirty years; the percentage of obese children has tripled. We eat nearly 10 percent more animal products than we did
a generation or two ago, and though there may be value in eating at least some animal products, we could perhaps
live with reduced consumption of triple bacon cheeseburgers.
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Health-related obesity costs are projected to reach $344 billion by 2018 — with roughly 60 percent of that cost borne by
the federal government. For a precedent in attacking this problem, look at the action government took in the case of
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tobacco.
The historic 1998 tobacco settlement, in which the states settled health-related lawsuits against tobacco companies, and
the companies agreed to curtail marketing and finance antismoking efforts, was far from perfect, but consider the
results. More than half of all Americans who once smoked have quit and smoking rates are about half of what they
were in the 1960s.
It's true that you don't need to smoke and you do need to eat. But you don't need sugary beverages (or the
associated fries), which have been linked not only to Type 2 diabetes and increased obesity but also to cardiovascular
diseases and decreased intake of valuable nutrients like calcium. It also appears that liquid calories provide less feeling
of fullness; in other words, when you drink a soda it's probably in addition to your other calorie intake, not instead of it.
To counter arguments about their nutritional worthlessness, expect to see "fortified" sodas—a la Red Bull, whose
vitamins allegedly "support mental and physical performance"—and "improved" junk foods (Less Sugar! Higher Fiber!).
Indeed, there may be reasons to make nutritionally worthless foods less so, but it's better to decrease their consumption.
Forcing sales of junk food down through taxes isn't ideal. First off, 25 we'll have to listen to nanny-state arguments,
which can be countered by the acceptance of the antitobacco movement as well as a dozen other successful public
health measures. Then (here are the predictions of job loss at soda distributorships, but the same predictions were
made about the tobacco industry, and those were wrong. (For that matter, the same predictions were made around the
nickel deposit on bottles, which most shoppers don't even notice.) Ultimately, however, both consumers and government
will be more than reimbursed in the form of cheaper healthy staples, lowered health care costs, and better health. And
that's a big deal.
THE RESULTING BENEFITS
A study by Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, predicted that a penny tax
per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages in New York State would save $3 billion in health care costs over the course of a
decade, prevent something like 37,000 cases of diabetes, and bring in $1 billion annually. Another study shows that a two-cent
tax per ounce in Illinois would reduce obesity in youth by 18 percent, save nearly $350 million, and bring in over $800 million
in taxes annually.
Scaled nationally, as it should be, the projected benefits are even more impressive; one study suggests that a national
penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would generate at least $13 billion a year in income while cutting
consumption by 24 percent. And those numbers would swell dramatically if the tax were extended to more kinds of junk
or doubled to two cents an ounce. (The Rudd Center has a nifty revenue calculator online that lets you play with the
numbers yourself.)
A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption,
which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes,
saving about $30 billion.
It's fun — inspiring, even—to think about implementing a program like this. First off, though the reduced costs of healthy
foods obviously benefit the poor most, lower prices across the board keep things simpler and all of us, especially children
whose habits are just developing, could use help in eating differently. The program would also bring much -needed
encouragement to farmers, including subsidies, if necessary, to grow staples instead of commodity crops.
Other ideas: We could convert refrigerated soda machines to vend- 30 ing machines that dispense grapes and carrots,
as has already been done in Japan and Iowa. We could provide recipes, cooking lessons, even cook-ware for those who
can't afford it. Television public-service announcements could promote healthier eating. (Currently, 86 percent of food ads
now seen by children are for foods high in sugar, fat, or sodium.)
Money could be returned to communities for local spending on gyms, pools, jogging, and bike trails; and for other
activities at food distribution centers; for Meals on Wheels in those towns with a large elderly population, or for Head
Start for those with more children; for supermarkets and farmers' markets where needed. And more.
By profiting as a society from the foods that are making us sick and using those funds to make us healthy, the United
States would gain the same kind of prestige that we did by attacking smoking. We could institute a national,
comprehensive program that would make us a world leader in preventing chronic or "lifestyle" diseases, which for the
first time in history kill more people than communicable ones. By doing so, we'd not only repair some of the damage we
have caused by first inventing and then exporting the Standard American Diet, we'd also set a new standard for the rest
of the world to follow.
Letters of Response by Brown et al.
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Another nutri-totalitarian heard from. What's next, a telescreen in every room to make sure we're all eating our
broccoli?
It's none of this author's business what my diet is. It's not any bu-reacrat's business. It's not any politician's business If
anybody in power pretends to dislike "spending federal dollars" on my health care, fine: stop spending them. Get the
government out of the health care industry. Repeal Obamacare and privatize all the rest of it. And if I want to eat a
candy bar, I'm happy to eat it at the unsubsidized, untaxed market price.
Why do nutri-totalitarians suppose that only vegetables can be objectively relevant to human survival and the good life,
but freedom to make our own choices can't be? We are human beings, not slaves to be remade in the image of their
Puritan prejudices.
DAVID M. BROWN
I spend hundreds of dollars a month buying healthy food for my family. A variety of fruits, vegetables, organic soy
milk, you name it. And yet when we go out with friends, my 20-month-old son will only eat french fries off of someone
else's plate. Just tonight he completely shunned fresh broccoli, cucumber, rice, even banana. He is not exposed to junk
food advertising and he has every opportunity to eat healthy foods.
Unless you burn off every American's taste buds at birth, you are not going to get people to stop eating junk foods.
More big-government taxes and subsidies won't change that.
TONY, CHICAGO
We can start with restricting the type of food people can buy with food stamps. I get sick just watching the type of food
that I see being purchased with food stamps. Then I get sicker when I realize the government is then paying for the health
care of the same people they are paying to poison themselves.
Are we nuts? SALLY, GREENWICH VILLAGE
FAT AND HAPPY: IN DEFENSE OF FAT ACCEPTANCE
Mary Ray Worley
Mary Ray Worley is a member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She wrote this essay as an open letter to
fat people, and it was later published in Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum (8th edition).
Prereading Prompt: Describe your feelings about obesity
If you've grown up in twentieth-century American society, you probably believe that being fat is a serious personal, social, and
medical liability. Many Americans would rather die or cut off a limb than be fat, many believe that fatness is a serious health risk,
and many are convinced that it is a simple matter to reduce one's body size and are so offended by body fat that they believe it is
acceptable to shun fat people and make them the butt of cruel jokes. Those who are fat quickly learn to be deeply ashamed of
their bodies and spend their lives trying to become what they are not and hide what cannot be hidden. Our society believes that
thinness signals self-discipline and self-respect, whereas fatness signals self-contempt and lack of resolve. We're so
accustomed to this way of thinking that many of us have never considered that there might be an alternative.
Nevertheless, a growing number of people believe it's possible to be happy with your body even if it happens to be fat. In
August 2000 I attended the annual convention of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in San Diego, and
it was like visiting another planet altogether. I hadn't realized how deeply my body shame affected my life until I spent a glorious
week without it. I'll never be the same again.
The first time I had that "different planet" feeling was at the pool party on the first night of the convention. Here were all these fat
people in stylish swimsuits and cover-ups, and whereas on my home planet a fat person was expected to feel apologetic and
embarrassed about her body—especially in a swimsuit—here were a hundred or so fat people who were enjoying being in their
bodies without a shred of self-consciousness. They were having so much fun it was infectious. I felt light-headed and giddy. I
kept noticing how great everyone looked. They were confident and radiant and happy—and all sizes of fat. Definitely not my
planet.
One of the features of NAAFA's conventions is that they invite vendors who sell stylish large-size clothing. So whereas on my
home planet, you're lucky if you can find a swimsuit that fits at all, on this planet you have choices and can find a swimsuit that's
made from beautiful fabric and looks absolutely smashing on you. Where I come from, you're grateful if you can find clothes that
you can actually get on, and forget finding clothes that really fit you. But on this planet there were play clothes, dress-up clothes,
you name it. Choices galore. Beautiful 'panache: Spirited style fabrics with an elegant drape and a certain panache.1 I'd never before
had so many choices. The clothes I tried on (and bought) not only fit me but looked terrific. As the week wore on- and everyone
had visited the vendors' booths, we all looked snazzier and snazzier, and the ones who had been to past conventions looked
snazzy from the get-go.
and selfconfidence.
12
The next night at the talent show those of us who didn't get a part in the high school musical because we were too fat had a chance
to play the lead for five minutes. (I sang a snappy little number by Stephen Sondheim called "The Ladies Who Lunch," from
Company, and hammed it up big time. I had a blast!) Top billing was given to a troupe of belly dancers called the Fatimas. Now, I
had read about this attraction in the literature I received about the convention, and I have to admit that I thought it would be
some kind of a spoof or a joke. I just couldn't conceive of a group of fat women doing serious belly dancing, but it was no joke.
These women were indeed serious—and excellent—belly dancers. They wore the full belly-dancing regalia—that is, gauze and
bangles and beads and not much else. When they first looped and bobbed their way out into the middle of the room, I think my
chin must have dropped through the floor. They were exquisitely beautiful and voluptuous and graceful and serene. I thought that
anyone, no matter how acculturated to my home planet, would have to be just about dead not to recognize how beautiful they
were. And they were all so different from each other. We are accustomed to seeing mostly thin bodies that look more or less the
same, but these bodies showed an amazing degree of delightful diversity. Body fat does not distribute itself on every fat person
in the same way, so there's lots of variety. Plus they weren't all young. A couple of them had to have been past fifty, and they were
so beautiful. And exotic, and mesmerizing.1 I had always assumed that as a fat woman I could never do that, and especially not
as a fat woman past fifty. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I felt a jolt as my old assumptions were jettisoned2 out into space. Bag that old
paradigm.3 This one is definitely a lot more fun. One of the featured speakers at the convention was Dr. Diane Budd, who spoke
about the medical and scientific communities' take on fatness. Although the data gathered for most current studies indicate that
body size is primarily determined by one's genetic makeup, most researchers conclude—in spite of their own findings—that fat
individuals should try to lose weight anyway. There are no data that indicate (a) that such efforts are likely to be effective (in fact,
more than 90 percent of those who lose weight gain it back), (b) that a person's overall health would be improved by losing
weight, or (c) that the effort to lose weight won't in fact turn out to have lasting harmful effects on one's appetite, metabolism,
and self-esteem. Our assumptions about the desirability of thinness are so deeply ingrained that scientists find it next to
impossible to align their recommendations with their findings; apparently they cannot bring themselves to say that since body
size is largely a result of one's genetic makeup it's best to get on with the business of learning to live in the body you have,
whatever its size. Moreover, none of the studies take into account the physical implications of the social ostracism4 and body hate
that are a regular part of most fat people's lives. Fat people are often taunted in public and are pressured by family members to
lose weight. Complete strangers feel they are not out of line to criticize the contents of a fat person's grocery cart, and family
members may evaluate everything a fat person puts on her plate. Fat people need to be active and strong enough to carry their
body weight comfortably, but they may feel ill at ease exercising in public because of unkind stares and comments. They may
feel that they can't wear shorts or sleeveless t-shirts or swimsuits for fear of offending the delicate sensibilities of others and
inviting rude comments, and so they will be too hot and too embarrassed and will give up on regular exercise because they don't
have the support they need to continue. Now that is a health risk.
Moreover, fat people are often reluctant to seek medical attention because health professionals are among the most prejudiced
people around. Regardless of the ailment you are seeking treatment for, if you are fat, your doctor may put you on a diet before
she treats your cough, and attribute whatever complaint you have to your weight. Pressures like these must certainly contribute
to the shortening of many fat people's lives, quite apart from any physical risk resulting from a preponderance5 of body fat. The
upshot is that it's very likely that the health risks of being fat have been highly overestimated. In combination with other risk factors,
being fat may occasionally contribute to compromised health, but not nearly to the degree that many people think. When a fat
person goes to a weight-loss clinic, the goal is usually to lose weight as quickly as possible, as though to snatch the poor fat soul
out of the jaws of imminent death. And often the harsh methods used to effect that weight loss are in and of themselves much
more harmful than being fat is. In fact, it is my understanding that statistically a person is much less likely to regain weight that is
lost very slowly. So what's the big rush? The big rush is that we hate fat and want to put as much distance between ourselves
and it as quickly as possible. Quick and dramatic weight loss sells; slow and gradual weight loss does not. There's nothing
compassionate, rational, or scientific about it. We just hate fat.
Many fat people have made numerous efforts and spent thousands of dollars throughout their lives to lose weight and each
time regained the lost pounds plus a few more. Have this happen to you enough times and you will be apprehensive at the
prospect of losing weight for fear of gaining back more than you lose. On my own account, there's no way I want to diet
again, because it will just make me fatter in the long run. Help like that I don't need, and I sure as spitfire don't need to pay
through the nose for it.
After years and years of dieting it slowly dawned on me that my body rebelled when I tried to restrict my food intake. All those years
I figured that it was me who was failing, and then I began to realize that it was the method that was failing. I began to wonder whether
the problem itself was being incorrectly defined. I began raising new questions just about the time that researchers were discovering
that, rather than being a simple intake-outtake equation, body weight resulted from a complex interplay of set point (the body's
tendency to stay within a certain narrow weight range), appetite and satiety cues, metabolism, and genes. Moreover, our bodies
are designed to protect us from starvation and have some powerful defenses against it. They react to dieting just as they do to
13
starving. They don't know there is a McDonald's around every corner. For all they know, we're still living in the Ice Age, when the next
meal may be hours or days or miles away. So when we decrease the amount of food we eat, our bodies slow the metabolic rate to
fend off possible starvation. It's a great system, really. In my case I'm convinced that as determined as I have been to become thin, my
body has always been more determined to save me from starvation. My body is more stubborn than I am. Amazing.
So I stopped dieting and began to make peace with food and with my body. I slowly stopped being afraid of food. In 19991 became
a vegetarian, and somehow that change—and the culture that seems to go with it—put food in a new light for me. Food was no
longer the enemy; it was a gift and a source of joy. I began to slow down and relish my meals, to enjoy food and be grateful for all
the ways that it nourishes me. Over the last fifteen years or so I've made many attempts to become more active on a regular
basis with varying degrees of success. I often would go swimming three or four times a week for two, three, or four months
followed by a hiatus1 of several weeks or months. About two years ago, I realized that I always felt better when I was being
active. So why the long hiatuses? Because I was exercising in hopes of losing weight. After months of dogged discipline with
what I considered to be meager results at best, I would naturally become discouraged and stop. Within a few weeks I would stop
feeling the surge of energy and well-being that comes with regular exercise. So what would happen if I just exercised because I
felt better when I did? How about moving just for the fun of it? So I gave up the notion of losing weight and consequently gave up
feeling hopeless, and as a result the hiatuses have become fewer and shorter in duration. I began to vary my workouts
more, so that I got less bored and enjoyed myself more. Who knew that moving, even in a large body, could be this much fun?
I'd never allowed myself to have this kind of fun in my body before. I discovered to my delight that the more physically competent I
became, the better I felt about my body. My husband, Tom, and I go for long hikes in the woods, and some of those hikes have been
challenging for me—not too challenging, but just enough. Two years ago we visited Yosemite National Park, and we hiked partway
up to the top of Vernal Fall. It was a demanding hike, and pretty much every body was huffing and puffing. We made it up to the
bridge that's just shy of halfway to the top. It was good to know when to stop, but it rankled2 me that I didn't have the energy or stamina
to make it all the way. So I decided that next time I will. Next spring we're planning another trip to Yosemite, and I'm going to make it
to the top of Vernal Fall. I don't care how long it takes me or how much I have to huff and puff. My only stipulation is that I have to be
strong enough to have fun doing it. I don't want it to be a torture session. I've been training with that goal in mind for months now.
Instead of avoiding stairs, I look for them. I'm no longer ashamed of huffing and puffing—I'm proud. I'm pushing myself just
enough so that I'm becoming stronger and have more endurance all the time. This summer I discovered that I can hike all day
long. What a thrill! In July, Tom and I hiked in Copper Falls State Park from 12 noon until 8 p.m. (we stopped to rest three
times). And in August I traipsed3 around the San Diego Wild Animal Park from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. (again with three rests). How
wonderful to have a body that will carry me through an entire day of fun! I never realized before what a miracle my body is, its
glorious ability to build muscle and save me from starvation. I'm only beginning to discover what a marvelous gift it is.
After years of fighting our set points, our metabolism, our genes, and our hunger, after decades of being ashamed, hating our
bodies, and trying to manipulate them into being something they're not, after spending mountains of money and energy
trying to conform to someone else's ideal, it isn't surprising that some of us question whether this is the best way for us to live. A
few of us brave adventurers have found another way, and it involves much less agony, costs much less money, and is much more
fun.
We're not giving up, and we're not letting ourselves go. Rather we're forging a new relationship with our bodies, one that
doesn't involve self-loathing, one that appreciates the miraculous bodies we have, one that brings joy. There's plenty of room
on this new planet, and here you needn't apologize for your size. You're entitled to the space you take up. You can find clothes
that show off the gorgeous person you are, you can play and dance without self-consciousness, you can be proud of yourself
and never dread unwanted attention, you can be a brave pioneer and a friend to those who have suffered on planets less kind
and less joyous than this one.