Oh! I’m glad you got that all sorted out, then.

“Curb your sugar, alcohol, white flour, white rice and potatoes.”

Surely, potatoes (the main source of vitamin C for much of North America) are of TEH DEVIL!!!

“Dismiss fake foods from boxes and cans.”

Yeah, man. All that oatmeal and those canned tomatoes are killing babies.

“Take some responsibility, and there’s not excuse for emotional eating. Not anymore. We’ve all had it rough.”

Clearly, NO ONE HAS AN EXCUSE FOR EATING IN WAYS OF WHICH YOU DISAPPROVE. Such compassion. I am…overwhelmed.

But seriously, Kasha, no one here is buying what you’re selling. Go live it up on your own website.

“Older people tend to be fatter than younger people. I easily weigh forty more pounds than I did in my twenties”

as if its a natural fact of life. It’s not. That your body is not effectively metabolising food is a function of how you have treated it over the years. Disease is cumulative. Insulin resistance and Metabolic Syndrome are largely responsible for most of the weight problems we see today – and they are the result of years of poor eating habits. Curb your sugar, alcohol, white flour, white rice and potatoes. Dismiss fake foods from boxes and cans. Take some responsibility, and there’s not excuse for emotional eating. Not anymore. We’ve all had it rough.

Congrats for your honorable mention in the NYT.

Ellis

As for income, that really depends on if you’re talking about male couples or female couples. Male couples have the income of two men and (often) no kids so they do pretty well, hence the massive efforts of many companies to target this niche market. Female couples have the income of two women and as such are less affluent than the men. I’d be interested to know if there are different health outcomes between lesbians and bi women versus gay and bi men. Then there’s the entire trans community which is a whole other level of marginalization.

PS: germany is reading you

I have to check into the sexual identity marginalization health link thing, but I would suspect that there is a link there, if not a well-publicized one.

Stress might be overused and misunderstood, for sure. It has become kind of a catch-all. But Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome at least gives a basic account of what people are trying to get at when they talk about “stress.”

Those other reasons you mention are spot-on, I think. There’s definitely more than one factor leading to the correlation.

As for not having willpower — yeah. That argument basically stems from what I see as a “pessimistic assumption about human nature.” Which is something I fundamentally disagree with. People can believe that all they want — doesn’t make it true. You’d think with the amount of desperation there is among the general population to lose weight, that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE would have come up with a better solution than we currently have. But, no.

To me this indicates that health has not much to do with what size you are, and more to do with the choice that comes with privilege.

EXACTLY. In lots of cases, this is totally true. And it’s often ignored, especially (it seems to me) by Americans, because of our whole “ruggest individualist” mindset. We like to believe that people have all-powerful free will, and hate to think there are societal forces limiting people’s free will. But turning a blind eye to those forces doesn’t make them go away — it just makes us blame people for shit that isn’t their fault, and allows us to feel comfortable in our privilege.

It’s essentially the Fundamental Attribution Error in disguise — if I’m doing well, it’s because of my own efforts. If someone else is less well off, well — that’s their fault, by virtue of being lazy, lacking willpower, etc.

I don’t think you’re digressing at all, but even if you were, I love digressions.

I think it’s all wrapped up in how highly we value physical appearance, and how closely we connect thinness with attractiveness. There is always that fantasy that if I were truly beautiful and men swooned at my feet, it would just be, AMAZING. And of course, if I were thin, then somehow I would be beautiful in every way and everyone would find me irresistible. I think many women share this wish, and perhaps many men as well. And I think THAT’s what spirals and “health concern” about weight (valid or not) out of control.

This is exactly what I suspect as well. And, in fact, I have been there. I once lost weight (though I was still considered overweight by the BMI) and even though I was obviously more traditionally attractive, and I did get more attention, I felt worse about myself. I hated my body. I felt more insecure than I ever had.

Which led me to think that the whole thing I was chasing was an illusion, like a mirage — my goal post kept moving farther and farther away. And the privilege that I thought would be the answer to all my problems once I’d gained it (as Kate Harding describes in The Fantasy of Being Thin) did jack-shit for my actual happiness and well-being. It really was a fantasy, which is to say, false.

Being thinner didn’t make me any happier. It actually made me feel worse, because I was conscious of having given in to societal pressures to meet an arbitrary beauty standard. And I was in bad faith — I’d lied to myself, and told myself I’d been doing it for the sake of my health. But it was really about gaining privilege, and feeling morally superior.

I’d argue that fat people are always more stressed due to discrimination too. If stressed people are effectively older than their year age, that would explain a lot of health problems too.

Yes. That’s pretty much the argument made by Peter Muennig in the last journal article I linked. I think it’s a provocative, and quite possible, hypothesis. There have been other studies on this phenomenon among other marginalized groups. I believe the term used is “oppression syndrome.” I need to read more about it.

I know slim people who wouldn’t know a vegetable if it smacked them in the face as they drive a block to the corner store for a microwave burrito.

I’m sorry to out him in this disgraceful way, but my husband is one of those slim people. Recently, I called him a “nutrition disaster” to his face, and he’s never forgiven me for it.

Yesterday, when we were buying groceries, I rounded the corner to the frozen aisle to find him holding a STACK of frozen dinners and a giant bottle of Pepsi. As he tossed them in the cart he said “NUTRITION DISASTER, WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

Then, as we were checking out, he was paying as I bagged stuff up. He started telling the cashier, “Oh, all that boxed meat and soda is for my wife. She doesn’t eat very healthy, you know. All these vegetables and stuff are for me.” The cashier and I were laughing hysterically.

NB: I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with eating frozen dinners and drinking pop. I just like to make fun of him.

for most of history everyone but the very rich has lived on the verge of malnutrition, and that situation only changed relatively recently. It’s entirely possible that we don’t know how much a healthy, adequately nourished human body ’should’ weigh.

I totally agree. This is the first time food systems (and there are of course political criticisms to be made of those systems, their ethical implications, and their impact on the environment) have been large and stable enough to provide good quality food to the majority of people living in rich countries. Along with better nutrition comes not only possibly higher weights, but a taller population. But, as Big Liberty pointed out in her post on the tall epidemic, the increase in height never gets the same alarmist media treatment that changes in weight have.

And, of course, life expectancy has continued to increase through this “epidemic” as well. So, you know…

Also, as far as I heard, the NHANES data (article here) analysis showed no increase in obesity among the US population since 2004 or so.

Except even that is wrong. It might apply to heart disease, but with diabetes, you really need to be genetically predisposed to it. Perhaps if you eat a lot of sugar and don’t exercise, you’ll get it a few years earlier than you normally would have.

Other than that, you’re absolutely right though.

I’m also reasonably sure that I was “supposed” to have been overweight (obese, probably), but yo-yo-dieting resulted in my weight being higher than it probably “should” be. (Note that it took me a lot time to see my behavior as yo-yo dieting. I always viewed it as lifestyle changes I didn’t have the willpower to maintain. I was able to maintain this fiction because I only used a commercial diet company once, and then briefly.)

There’s just too much vitriol over weight for it to be about health, I think it’s mostly about looks and behavior control, and has become a moral issue, which helps nobody (except the diet industry).