Body positivity is an important part of well-being because happiness – the source of both physical and mental well-being – depends on feeling good about ourselves. But at no time can this “good feel” be irrespective of physical health. Beyond the kneejerk political correctness of the moment, can chronically poor health be a path to mental happiness? Is it ethical to encourage body positivity where physical stances pose evident health risks and portend shortened lifespans?
We have heard about the young deaths of plus-size models like Elly Mayday, dead at 30, and Mia Amber, at 36), but what about the countless Americans whose feet can no longer carry their frames? Will body positivity without health affirmation do them any good?
As we explore the question, we can’t ignore the ethical implications. In general, it seems a breach of the social contract to effectively impose perpetual poor health as the only option to many who are already the victims of encouraged unhealthy ways of life. A deft focus on body positivity – making a health crisis tolerable and even sexy and desirable – without simultaneously challenging the food supply sources and lifestyle patterns that gave rise to obesity and body negativity in the first place is politically correct poison.
Whereas overall health and well-being should be the objective, another element that the singular focus on body positivity ignores is the so-called “the lean unhealthy” (about a quarter of the non-overweight people among us). I have a friend, “a junk-food vegetarian,” that figures in this group.
A 2016 study tracked participants for an average of 19 years and found that unfit slim people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people (see my observation of size and active lifestyles in Brazil below). So, attention should be on health rather than positivity of size – the focus of every failed diet plan since time immemorial.
Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room.
Writer Michael Hobbes (below) Highline
The major issue is that the sole focus on the vanity of body positivity stands to sacrifice a woman’s health and well-being by assuming that she is incapable of grasping a more healthy lifestyle if offered the tools — including healthy nutritious foods. It’s a downward adjustment — intellectually bankrupt, albeit politically correct. A life of reduced physical capacities buffeted by heavy pharmaceuticals starting in the early teens or twenties is a mountain of “self-worth” that is hardly worth climbing. While traditional forms of social animation — voting rights, social justice, and so forth focusses on the external, body positivity rightfully focuses on the internal but through a narrow pathway that might eventually lead to a dead-end.
Literary Note: Some of the pictures used here are screenshots from a Highline article by Michael Hobbes and photgrapher Finlay McKay. The men had this to say about the photographs they used. So I want to note it here:
So many images you see in articles about obesity strip fat people of their strength and personality. According to a recent study, only 11 percent of large people depicted in news reports were wearing professional clothing. Nearly 60 percent were headless torsos. So, we asked our interview subjects to take full creative control of the photos in this piece. This is how they want to present themselves to the world.
Michael Hobbes and photgrapher Finlay McKay
Body Positivity – The Liberation
Some years ago, one of my Facebook connections posted a picture of a young woman walking on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. As if just having won the lottery, she waved her hands with a deep sense of happiness and excitement, grinning from ear to ear. But most importantly, she was quite obese, almost naked except for her scantily clad bikini. The caption mentioned something to the effect that, “Today, I am no longer ashamed of my body.
It was the early (and innocent) days of Facebook when most of us lacked social media mindsight and actually engaged in futile conversations and debate. The comments poured in, congratulating the young woman on her “courage” in “liberating” herself. I commented that maybe waving her college degree might have been a better liberating prop than advocating obesity. The fact is that body positivity is about representation and normalizing the acceptance of obese Americans
So I thought that taking her bikini pics on the beach in Malibu would have been a better idea – normal conditions. But walking in the city half-naked like Time Square’s “Naked Cowboy” (a tourist attraction) is a form of self-objectification. It was hard to see liberation in objectifying oneself.
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The online debate continued. As expected, I was hammered. “Hater” was among the nicer invectives hurled at me. It was silly of me to comment, and I deserved the shellacking I received. Mental liberation is a feeling – an internal state of mind that can be totally disconnected from physical circumstances. It’s not what we can see, and it might not necessarily make sense to us. As Nietzsche once said, “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Her body positivity liberation might have been real at that moment – even if she were to drop dead of a heart attack a day later.
But my stance was not a body positivity one, but instead, a health-conscious one that affects my outlook and approach, shaped by my background. I am a lifelong jogger, cyclist, and an overall athletic person – a survival pattern developed after learning my family history early on.
I come from a family with a long history of metabolic diseases and cardiovascular problems. My grandfather, aunt, and uncles died of a combination of heart attacks and strokes. One uncle died in his mid-40s on his way to work in his car, waiting at a traffic light for the green signal; another died waltzing on the dance floor with his wife as they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. My mother and aunts have taken blood pressure pills since their 20s. I have always viewed health as the departure point to a liberated life – to “liberation.”
So, after a period of intense middle-age stress, my doctor discovered my hypertension and prescribed blood pressure medications. I threw them in the toilet, cut salt and caffeine, tighten my diet (I was already a fruit and vegetable guy who doesn’t “willingly” kiss preservatives), and got back on my bicycle – this time taking up mountain biking. On successive visits, my Doc congratulated me for the pills’ effectiveness in bringing down my blood pressure. I kept my secret.
My interpretation of liberation was a resolve to a physically healthier lifestyle that brings lasting body positivity. The human heart and other vital organs are made to support humans within evolution’s framework. After all, I thought, what could be more liberating than to reduce the risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, stroke, mental illness, and other comorbidities?
And this is where I question the effectiveness of a narrow focus on body positivity without the heavy lifting of developing health awareness for overall durable well-being. The proponents conflate legitimate health concerns of those unwilling to jump on the bandwagon with “fat-shaming” or stigmatization.
Obesity – An American Epidemic
“Obesity is a complex health issue resulting from a combination of causes and individual factors such as behavior and genetics. Behaviors can include physical activity, inactivity, dietary patterns, medication use, and other exposures. Additional contributing factors include the food and physical activity environment, education and skills, and food marketing and promotion. Obesity is serious because it is associated with poorer mental health outcomes and reduced quality of life. Obesity is also associated with the leading causes of death in the United States and worldwide, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer.”
United States Centers For Disease Control (CDC)
The 1980s heralded the era of American obesity. Without a degree in research science, you can easily connect it to the timing of the industrialization of our food supply and other lifestyle changes that increased stress and eschewed nutrition and physical activities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and HIV put together.
Forty-five percent of adults are preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990, and almost half of 3- to 6- year old girls worry about being fat. The stigma is real. The depression is real. The child-bullying is real. And victims need help. Yet politicians ignore it. Educators have aggravated it – physical Education has all but disappeared from many schools’ curriculum.
While a small fraction of society may be genetically prone to obesity, obesity is really a function of food supply and dietary practices, lifestyles and social practices, and pharmaceutical consumption. Poor health is a societal choice, not necessarily individual deviance. It’s the nexus of a people and its government submitting to industry and gratuitous living rather than mandates of well-being and quality-of-life.
While obesity is equally an issue for Northern Europeans and Americans, one quality that distinguishes us from the rest of the world is girth size – an indication of unhealthiness. We tend to be of magnitudes bigger than other foreigners. Nothing brings home this relative madness of our way of life like a change of location – visiting other countries.
Sometimes back, I lived next to a major tour bus stop in a European capital that sees its fair share of tourism. One day, as I waited for my local city bus to go into town, a tour bus arrived. As two passengers got off, I noticed a sizable rise (non-hydraulic or driver activated) in the front of the bus off the ground. The passengers who got off were very nice and happy people with the usual local map seeking directions, so I helped them. But they moved with great discomfort.
But as they walked away, I was horrified at the obvious – the normalization and pride in unhealthy lifestyles in America. Why are we eating ourselves to death? I asked myself. And therein lies the issue: body positivity becomes a connivance tool that simply teaches people to feel good about themselves while working themselves into early graves.
In this sense, it might be no different from the dynamic that propels anti-vaxxers to feel safe without vaccines, “covidiots” to feel safe without masks, and gun-rights advocates to feel safest when everyone is armed.
Some History
At incept, the Department of Agriculture was a lobby charged with selling farm products, not securing your health and well-being. So, where it recommends doses of milk that come close to that given to baby calves, it is grooming people for adulthood as bovines, not human beings.
As for the FDA, it was around in some form or another since 1848. But it was Upton Sinclair’s publication of “The Jungle,” which described the deplorable conditions in the Chicago stockyards and caused public outrage that forced passage of 1906’s Pure Food and Drugs Act, through which the FDA emerged from the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry as a federal consumer protection agency. It was the culmination of about 100 bills over a quarter-century that aimed to rein in long-standing, serious abuses in the consumer product marketplace.
The point is that the lobby has always preceded the regulator.
Medical Malpractice
On Sep 19, 2019, Michael Hobbes, wrote a Highline article, “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.” This section is a direct quotation of Mr. Hobbes article, noting obesity’s dire impact on Americans, particularly women.
According to Mr. Hobbes, “The emotional costs are incalculable… I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families… where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names.
A medical technician I’ll call Sam (he asked me to change his name so his wife wouldn’t find out he spoke to me) said that one glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days. “I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,” he says. “It feels like the worst kind of weakness… Another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out, and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light.”
For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things… The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible.
As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.
The terrible irony is that for 60 years, we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we’ll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.
The second big lesson… is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people.”
Social Malpractice – Health is Optional
The first proof that America sees health as optional is the absence of universal healthcare. This is an issue of humanity, yet we have made it an issue of political ideology.
Relative to the rest of the world, life accelerates in America. The fast pace and long work hours induce stress levels that are almost nonexistent in other countries – levels that are likely incompatible with our human stage of evolution, hence the source of various early cell breakdowns and chronic maladies. Time once spent savoring a good meal is now used to “catch something to eat.” Today, if it’s not outright “junk food,” it’s processed food loaded with sugars, additives, and preservatives that excite our brain’s reward center while depleting our organs’ capacities for normal functioning.
We’re a society where on any given day, a person is more curious about his neighbors’ closed-door activities than about the contents of his food supply. In America, the average person is more obsessed with controlling (and restricting) her fellow citizens’ right to vote or express freedom of speech than with controlling and restricting pesticides, hormones, and other dangerous additives from her food supply.
It’s The Food Stupid!
The list of staples in the American food supply [Brominated vegetable oil (BVO), Genetically modified fruits and vegetables, rBGH or rBST growth hormone & Carrageenan used in dairy products, Potassium bromate in bread, Azodicarbonamide (ADA) in bread, Chlorine-washed poultry, Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and Olestra used in serials and chips, BPA used in plastics, and Propylparaben used in mixed snacks and baked products, and many more] that are banned in Europe and elsewhere, is exhaustive.
Nutrient-deficient foods from industrial farming of carbon-depleted soil are everywhere. So people eat more and more times to satisfy cravings. Our bodies now struggle to metabolize refined sugars, starch, junk, preservatives, and additives, so they yield to fat storage and artery-clogging.
Produce branded as “natural” or “whole” means little, as we care even less about verifying our food supply content and safety. A few years ago, my organic farmer, who sells produce at different locations in New York City, became exhausted at having to explain that he couldn’t label his organically-grown produce as “organic” because it was a matter of registration fees that were too expensive for him to pay.
Yet Whole Foods had advertised and sold organically grown products on its shelves that were neither locally grown nor “organic.” But they could pay to register and sell such products at premium prices. The upscale supermarket chain (now part of the Amazon family), which by name and branding had tapped into the need for healthy foods, was importing certain items from China that it was selling as organic. When an investigation revealed the truth, Whole Foods said it was the responsibility of its third-party vendor to verify the products’ content on arrival from China.
In Europe and many other countries, Whole Foods would have been seriously sanctioned by both regulatory bodies and damaged by a drop in customer confidence. But not in America.
Pharma’s Dominance
Advertisements for pharmaceuticals dominate American television. Big Pharma has turned the family doctor into sales agents who write prescriptions for everything but rarely refer patients to a nutritionist or give common sense advice on diet and exercise. The practices laid out in the allegations set forth against Purdue Pharma in the multi-state lawsuit in the final settlement stages are prime examples. In most European countries and even in the developing world, these medical and pharma-sales practices and pharmaceutical advertisements are prohibited.
At the same time, you rarely see health positivity public service announcements by the state or federal government that might guide the development of early body positivity and well-being through more healthy lifestyles. All across America, politicians and legislative bodies are flushed agri-industry and big pharma’s lobby and money. So, they are hard-pressed to enact required food safety standards that might slash the sugary, starchy, and preservative-heavy contents that make us an obese and overly sick nation.
And this is where the connivance and hypocrisy of body positivity movements come in. Social activists and other proponents rarely target the real sources of our societal malady. The focus is not on challenging big pharma and the food industry’s practices. It is about the vanity of feel-good bodies, even if unhealthy, which inevitably robs the capacity to live a durable life and to its fullest.
Fuel For Covid-19’s Fire
The coronavirus pandemic that obliterated America this past year has exposed the downside of our poor diet, unhealthy lifestyles, aversion to universal healthcare, and poor health care standards. Yes, poor political leadership, official blunders, and rank incompetence existed. That narrative is enough to retain television news ratings.
But at its core, this is a story of a smart and efficient biological agent that encountered a society that had long abandoned the science of nutrition and general duty of healthcare to the whims of agri-industrialization and natural living to the dictates of the pharmaceutical industry. Enters an evolutionary pathogen that thrives on societal’s physical weakness – weak immune systems and other comorbidities – and it obliterated us. What good purpose did body positivity serve to many of the internally unhealthy who were wiped out by Covid-19?
Yet, there has been no serious public discussion on America’s unfitness and the implications for future pandemics. Television stations will not touch it. Commentators will not mention it. And celebrities and public personalities will not put their names behind it, except as pitch persons for diet companies.
Let’s be clear; both men and women in society make up America’s high obesity rate, and the health risks are even larger for men. In a recent New York Times article, “What Are Sperm Telling Us,” writer Nicholas laments the degradation of male sperm count – among the many ills brought on by global contamination of food supplies. The list was exhaustive and highlighted the wider species as a whole, but certainly, we see some of the issues confronting the male species.
But as social standards neither judge nor penalize men’s weight or size (histories powerful, like Henry VIII, were grotesquely obese men), the stigma falls disproportionately on women. Fat men with money grow up to marry fashion models and become leading CEOs or politicians. Women in the same position are denied the benefit and are instead ridiculed for their weight – seen as untrustworthy because they cannot even control their diets.
So it is understandable that body positivity is largely aimed at women, particularly young women because they bear the social brunt of obesity. But there is a level of hypocrisy and connivance to move from stigmatizing bodies (including healthy ones) that fall outside of society’s slim to the actual glorification of obesity and unhealthy lifestyles – bodies that trap women (and men) in a cycle of euphoric health poverty.
Body Negativity – Glorification of Slimness
For generations, many of us came of age seeing decades-long magazine and public imagery of “beauty” and “sexiness” restricted to well-packaged slim and waif-framed runway models and cover girls. The modeling industry, magazines, and television told young women of ordinary physique that they were fat and unsexy. Today, that is done on an even wider scale through social media platforms where corporate concerns co-opt and reward so-called influencers who monetize their slim frames and animated rear-ends.
Celebrities and television personalities did the same over the years while obsessing and publicly fawning over the extra largesse they dumped from time to time. Many years ago, a famous television personality went as far as to provide visual imagery (in plastic bags) of the amount of caloric energy she had converted to sweat as she morphed into half her previous size. Diet companies sold the antidote, but in monetizing the problem, they aggravated it. All collectively defined beauty as something that ordinary young boys and girls and men and women of everyday lives were not – could not be.
On the upside, there was Jack Lalanne (an early pioneer), Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda, and others who saw the need and taught us to exercise. Nonetheless, the damage was done. Exercise alone would not do the trick in face of the bad food, stress, and unhealthy lifestyles.
Body Positivity Ignorance – Zero-Sum Spectrum
With a flip of a switch, political correctness transitioned the narrative from one extreme of the spectrum to another, heralding social hypocrisy and connivance across the spectrum. The narrow approach to body positivity then took center stage – steering down the ledge of decadence by vanquishing the individual’s social contract with self – health first. Ignorance took hold, and mental vanity replaced the physical one – to our detriment – with aggravated impact on communities of color. At the other end, the damage has been done.
It is now a zero-sum spectrum – one on which responsibility no longer extends to health considerations in the most unhealthy country of the “developed” western nations. We must recognize another person’s right to express her or his feeling of liberation in whatever form they may choose. We are forbidden to call attention to the hypocrisy and connivance of glorifying a culturally detrimental health crisis.
Representation is the start of progress for the disfavored and underrepresented. Body positivity activists seek to challenge and alter the social hierarchy of beauty standards to build positive body images and improve women’s self-confidence through acceptable representation. They see society’s treatment of obesity and its plus sizes as an extension of discrimination by race, sex, religion, origins, and gender.
But people are born black, Asian, Native, LGBTQ, and so forth. And while social conditions may result in discrimination by race, sex, religion, origins, and gender, being of a minority or disfavored group is not self-acculturation into poor health and reduced lifespan. Additionally, though, body positivity’s approach arms the unhealthily obese among us to fight the battle of internal self-confidence while disarming them from fighting the war of healthy living, well-being, and longevity.
No More “Hottentot Venus!”
As I mentioned above, this phenomenon has been particularly acute in the black community. Black women have struggled with self-image and stigmatization for as long as we can remember. One part of that has been hair – the issue of decades-long processing and chemicals to change form that has now spawned a multi-billion dollar weave history in recent years.
The origins of the black woman’s body-shaming go back to the time of the “Hottentot Venus.” In the late 18th-century, Europeans took the South African Khoikhoi Saartjie Baartman on a multi-country freak show as a circus clown. They monetized her objectification by putting her in a cage and collecting money from audiences who came to see her large rear-end. Then, the Europeans called the Khoi people Hottentots, so they cruelly marketed Baartman as a “Venus” of the Hottentots – the African goddess of love and fertility with a gigantic ass.
Over time, society objectified black women for similar reasons. Still, they were never atop America’s obese class because, ironically, the intensity of their work – domestic and in the fields – meant a more activity-driven, physical, and healthy life under oppression.
Even throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, the obesity health crisis that now plagues black America was nonexistent. Black men and women of the ’70s bear no resemblance to today’s population. But in the past few decades since the changes in the food supply and in lifestyles (more stressful work-family lives), black women joined middle America’s pathology of unhealthy lifestyles. It is no secret that, along with housing and healthcare, discrimination against blacks is most pronounced in the available food supplies. Fast food and junk food soon proliferated across communities of color -in and out of the supermarkets.
Black children became victims at a very early age. In “Toxic Psychiatry,” Doctor Peter Bregman focussed on psychiatry’s malpractice in rushing to brand our children with a variety of mental maladies and prescribing drugs to control them at a young age. This fell disproportionately on children of color in inner-city schools, whose parents lacked the means to dispute a school’s determination that their normal and vibrant son or daughter had ADHD or some other kinds of attention deficit disorder.
With drugs comes side effects, including chronic weight gain, developmental issues, chronic illness over time. Pharmaceuticals and other neuroleptic drugs, poor diet, little or no exercise, and overall unhealthy lifestyles triggered an epidemic of obesity in black America from an early age.
But like the fashionable Tignon women, who revolted after Louisiana’s Spanish Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró banned their headdress in 1786, weight and obesity became a cri de Guerre for young black women, entrenched in victimhood rejection. But there are times when you are a victim, whether or not you accept that. Obesity is just as big a health problem (or even bigger) for black men, but they seem to wear it as a badge of honor.
Today, the usual call to good health considerations has been shunned, with poor health habits and a level of sexed-up obesity-acceptance repackaged into a “sexiness” and “desirability” among black women. This, of course, has nothing to do with the evolutionary “Sex Selection” that they often imply as justification – The black man loves his woman with meat on the bones, with “junk in the trunk.”
The end result is that an obese black woman in any-city-USA now more likely to believe herself “thick & sexy” (desirable) than obese and at-risk (undesirable/unhealthy). The disparities in the availability of affordable healthcare in communities of color further compound her risks.
In 2020, as the coronavirus cut its treacherous path through America’s communities of color, social inequities, inadequate healthcare, poor health, and accepted ways of life – obesity, chronic diseases, and a plethora of comorbidities that have become tolerable, were fertile ground for the virus. According to the Centers For Disease Control’s (CDC) March 2021 update, Native Americans died at 2.4 times the rate of whites, Latino(a)s 2.3 times, and blacks 1.9 times.
Yet ignorance has taken hold in some communities to the point where a quiet health suggestion to a family member to change diet, eat healthily, and lose a few pounds will get you immediately thrown into the “fat-shaming” prison. The “equality” demagogues have taken control of the narrative – inventing provincial behavioral control language that further denies the “equality” and self-worth of those for whom they claim to advocate, and the victims have mimicked this.
The narrow focus on the vanity of body positivity is at the sacrifice of human health and well-being. A life of reduced physical capacities buffeted by heavy pharmaceuticals starting in the early teens or twenties is a hard mountain of “self-worth” to climb. While traditional forms of animation – voting rights, social justice, and so forth focus on the external, body positivity rightfully focuses on the internal but through a narrow pathway that might not only lead to a dead-end but eventually lead over a cliff.
I have seen women in places like Brazil’s Salvador Bahia region who were much bigger than the average American woman, sitting at a beach bar having a beer. Body cavity searches would be required to find ten percent fat on these women. They were evidently healthy as racehorses, and I could see why. In addition to a variety of fresh food, fruits, and vegetables consumed as staples, there are various exercise machines every 500-yard right there on the beach. Casual exercise is an effortless part of the lifestyle. Body positivity is not an issue of size and mental comfort in poor health. It’s an issue of healthy livelihoods.
And this is backed up by NIH studies here in America that find anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese as metabolically healthy, with no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance, or high cholesterol – even though still at high risk.
Again, the narrow vanity focus of body positivity misses the point. It would better serve society as a health affirmation movement.
Belief and Behavior Drivers
At the heart of human manifestation are conditions and motives. Conditions include genetic programming – the physical and mental aspects to which we are subjected, the mimetic impulses (cultural), neural firings-misfirings, and neurally-transmitted and trauma-induced chemical imbalances that propel us to particular beliefs and actions. Hence, a good therapist begins by exploring the drivers of his patients’ issues in order to provide the appropriate therapy.
In the United States, many contemporary movements and social ideologies are born of social oppression – race, gender, sex, religion, and underrepresentation that fosters stigma, discrimination, and overall mental repression. Kneejerk in nature, they are politically correct placebos that do little to address the real issues. “Defunding the Police,” for example, is one such idea (in the most criminal country on land) that makes as much sense as cutting off my right hand and learning to write with the left (or vice-versa). But as social philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, these high falutin movements often degenerate into outright rackets.
While body positivity is an admirable goal, without a focus on reorienting people to good health, it has the potential to become engendered decadence. Grassroots support is needed from the bottom up to challenge the food and pharmaceutical industries for better practices. The same is needed to force politicians to legislate healthy nutrition and safety standards – albeit a difficult task in a society where many still believe climate change is a “hoax” despite once-in-500 years storms revisiting some regions in the space of a few years. The point is that body positivity without health affirmation might prove dangerous decadence in the long run.
But there is also another question to be asked.
Cui bono? Who Benefits From My Obesity?
The provincial pride-in-body (sans health concerns) celebration by both the obese and its fabulously slim writers, newspapers & magazine editors, and television cheerleaders is at times dumbfounding. So, as this glorification of obesity has been one of the most profound and dangerous hypocrisies of quotidian American life in recent years, it’s worth looking at who stands to gain. Cui bono?
Atop the list is weight-loss and diet supplement companies. As long as I am concerned with body positivity and not health, they keep getting new customers. The obesity epidemic has created a multi-trillion-dollar dieting industry that sells fancy ice that melts once you stop licking it. Rather than evaluating our unhealthy lifestyles’ relative inferiority, the diet industry commoditizes it with fancy names like the “Mediterranean Diet” – conveniently omitting to mention that Americans do not live in the Mediterranean, do not live Mediterranean lifestyles.
Though they are a beneficiary, gyms offer a beneficial service in return since they provide the means to be active and keep oneself fit. But as I have repeated above, the real beneficiaries are the food and pharmaceutical industries. As long as my focus is on feeling good about my body, I will never take the time to demand better food or to resist the prescriptions in favor of exercise and a better diet.
Finally, let’s not forget the body positivity activists. They are the new missionaries of my existence. They gain fame and fortune in my advocacy. When I close my eyes, I leave with the good feeling of Jesus, and they get to keep the land. In this case, the obese shall not inherit the earth.
External Sources: Highline, "Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong," Sep 19, 2019, By Michael Hobbes United States Centers For Disease Control (CDC) United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, MD
