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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: January 17, 2003
Latest Update: January 17, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Fat: Is It an Illness?

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, January 2003..
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Thursday, January 16, 203, Patricia Acone (CSUDH) wrote:

Last night I couldn't sleep and as I was flipping through the channels, I discovered that Oprah has a rebroadcast of her afternoon show and it just happened to be on "fat people" and how we gain weight. The principal speaker used to be so fat she had to be weighed, if at all, on a truck scale. Her opinion on how she became so fat was that she didn't really "love herself" and that "fatness" was an illness. First premise I somewhat agreed with her; however I disagreed with her premise that "fatness" was an illness. Remember when Thomas Szasz suggested in "The Myth of Mental Illness" that if people wished to identify mental illness as such then they had better put their "mental under a microscope" find your "mental". He made a further comment that pretty soon people would consider "gambling" a disease and sure enough they did. He suggests that it is a matter of our "will piower" and I do agree with this; however, what about the influences exerted by the media which is controlled by those who control the media "dominant discourse". What about our inner and outer "locus of control" and the influences from the social structure? The audience was composed of primarily overweight people who agreed with the speaker.

On Friday, January 17, 203, jeanne responded:

Pat, you know what I'm going to say. There's no one "right" answer. Metabolisms are different. Some people seem to gain as if by magic. While others of us can eat with barely a glimpse at the scale. Once we have gained more weight than is socially acceptable, though, we have emotional responses to our "fat" selves, and those are interdependent with the physical attributes that certainly affect the weight we each carry with or without emotional concerns.

Illness is a good excuse, in that, it gives us "something to blame." But it's denial to the extent that we let that label control us. Some of us are going to be "fatter" than others, no matter what. We can accept that without turning "fat" into an illness. Yes, it can become a real health problem, but not in the early stages when I think our self images have more to do with our responses than anything else. It's hard to lose weight. We should try to eat in a healthy way. But we mustn't let the labelling turn the eating into more of a problem than it should be.

The media to which you refer are a giant piece of the dominanat discourse. Especially the advertisements, which focus on the "sexy female," who, though she may have some meat on her, is generally enviably skinny. To the extent that the dominant discourse pays so much attention to obesity, it labels those whose bodies tend to hold onto fat, and damages the self images of those who gain beyond the "sexy" ideal. To that extent we need to look to the infrstructure as part of the problem. Consider, for example, the extent to which primarily "fat" foods are available in our schools.

jeanne

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