March 20, 2023
"An essay published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1897 refers to fatness as a 'crime' and a 'deformity'..."
"... and argues that a fat woman 'will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.' People have been pushing back against fat stigma since at least the nineteen-sixties, when activists staged a 'fat-in' at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But the desire to achieve thinness by any means necessary—amphetamines, grapefruit diets, SlimFast—remains an almost foundational tenet of female socialization. When I was a preteen, in the heroin-chic nineties, pro-anorexia Web sites proliferated on the Internet; in the early two-thousands, teen girls puked or did obsessive sit-ups or took Hydroxycut in pursuit of abs like Britney Spears’s. In the twenty-tens, even as the Kardashians ostentatiously displayed their curves, they sold Flat Tummy Co. teas—laxatives—and waist trainers...."
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Biology is a many selective thing. That said, most people have dysfunctional metabolisms and comorbidities by choice.
"metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices"
Consuming more calories than you spend is a choice.
Interesting how prog arguments shift: appetite is a biological fact, race a construction, gender in the mind.
Female emotions often become extreme and disconnected from needs when women are not engaged with care giving. Babies, schools, nurses, etc. Many decades ago the conventional wisdom was that poor female moods and poor functioning routinely improved when they had children. Similarly, men would 'settle down' and reduce their risky behaviors when married with children.
Focusing on babies surely can't be worse than obsessive dieting or cutting off one's own boobs to escape emotional pain. Fatness is an obvious medical issue per heart failure, joint failure, shorter lifespans, and the inability to fit in standard seats and vehicles. How far have we fallen?
As many a naturalist has observed before, when it occurs in nature obesity occurs for a reason, and that reason is usually temporary and healthy. For instance, bears fattening up fro winter.
I cannot and I don't think there is any animal on earth aside from humans that eats or gains weight excessively and damages their long-term health for reasons unrelated to survival. That is, if you don't count coping mechanisms as survival.
What you eat IS a moral choice. Unfortunately, if you grow up on French Fries and potato chips and being driven everywhere, there is a good chance you will be rotund and it will be very difficult to make the right eating choices. Your body will be fighting you every step of the way.
If "metabolism and appetite [leading to widespread obesity] are biological facts, not moral choices," it's for the first time in history. Which would tend to debunk the biological argument.
I'm just a year or so younger than our host here, and from nursery school through college, I don't remember more than a few people I'd call, at most, corpulent. Not till the '80s did I know someone generally regarded as fat.
If it's biology, why does every photo from history dating to the mid-19th century feature no one who's obese?
Whatever happened to self-control and personal responsibility?
Reading - well skimming - these Harper's Bazaar issues shows you a different world of "Women's Magazines". One is struck by how classy and well written everything is. As for being fat, its unhealthy and unattractive on men and women. That is the way of the world, and always will be.
Metabolism and appetite are indeed biological facts. How we choose to respond to them may arguably be a moral choice. Personally, I am lean, but I find it very difficult to condemn fat people for their choices because I know that they, for the most part, really wish they could make better choices and be thinner. We all have our weaknesses, and would do well to remember that before we condemn others. I'm by no means effortlessly thin. It takes a lot of work and a considerable amount of hunger. Thankfully, I am able to manage both. I know people who cannot seem to get it under control, and it is not a reflection of their worth.
The fact is we have way way way way way more fatties now than 40 years ago. Just look at photos or videos from that era. Obesity is directly associated with hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, joint pain, back pain, and a host of other objectively bad-for-you maladies. Facts. If a new drug is the only way for some to shed the pounds, then let them at it before they jostle for position at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
It's a tough reality, but stuffing carbs into your fat maw and sitting on your huge ass all day isn't healthy. And I say that as one who could stand to lose 25 pounds but it would be a real bitch to do, so I don't. But I should.
Appetite and metabolism are biological facts, but our weight is still almost entirely a function of choices we make. Whether one considers those choices "moral" or otherwise is, I suppose, dependent on one's moral framework (as someone who has ranged between overweight and obese since my late teens, I am not in a position to throw stones), but in other contexts, resisting one's appetites is exactly what one is expected to do. Most people don't excuse adultery just because it arises from natural biological appetites. Resisting biological urges (from fornication down to sleeping late on a work day) is part of the human struggle.
We were starting to get past all this in the 80's and 90's then the internet and social media came along...
No. (Answer to Q in article headline.) Not as long as there exists one formerly fat person who slimmed down.
I submit there has never been a time when heroin was “chic”.
I was fortunate to have a friend who was never afraid to speak bluntly and to think independently. When we were in our twenties, one day we met for lunch and I began to talk about my decision to order a cheesesteak for lunch and how I really needed to cut that out so I could lose twenty pounds. She asked me if I ever noticed how much women talked about diet and their weight and how incredibly BORING that all was. It was a beautiful epiphany---I recognized that, regardless of the merits or lack thereof for an individual woman to to make her personal weight-related decisions, it is a boring and mostly inappropriate topic for conversation.
I have a horror of being boring and repeating myself, so that realization instantly changed the way I speak about weight.
I do tend to think in extended, wordy ways so the struggle to be succinct and interesting goes on.
So if a 14 year old girl who is 5'6" tall and weighs 80 pounds looks in the mirror and thinks she is fat, should her doctor prescribe amphetamines to make her thinner?
Lap band surgery?
A 600 calorie per day diet?
If not, why not?
What a silly straw man. Who argues that appetite or metabolism is a moral choice? Denial of natural appetites (for inappropriate sex, for revenge, for what belongs to "my neighbor", for domination over another person) is the essence of most moral choices. Your appetites are not a moral choice; instead, morality largely consists of how you respond to your appetites. So being fat, particularly to an unhealthy degree, can be seen as a "moral" failing, hardly the worst one, but it does speak to one's character since if you are obese, you have at least one appetite that you have demonstrably failed to deny. Just like any other question of morals, people will disagree about what is and isn't right, but it's clearly a moral question, even an archetypal one.
"If love is a sin than beauty is a crime"
But it's also a biological fact that your appetite and metabolism are affected by your diet and lifestyle. So, where does this leave us?
While this is the new “ miracle” drug being pushed by our “ friends”, Big Pharma, it does have the effect of losing muscle, bone and connective tissues with the fat - which can be minimized by exercising with resistance training ( as if most of the users are going to do that). No question it does reduce the amount of fat you carry - by essentially shutting down your appetite ( like smoking used to do ?) but you also set yourself up for weight yo-yos if you get off it because your body will compensate for the reduction in calories by slowing down your metabolism ( which means if you eat “normal” - you gain more weight back, because your body sees it as as a chance to put back fat on.
Funny how instead of looking at what’s in the foods now that caused the epidemic of obesity ( look at pictures of people in the 60s and earlier - they are not fat) , we look for a way to cheat the system as to not upset the corn sugar additives and massive carbohydrate increase in the diet.
Well it is unhealthy.
The left wing fatties will be protesting in 3, 2, 1...
It would appear that writers were just as desperate for something to write about in 1897 as they are now.
I fail to see how articles about people with poor risk-assessment skills and poor impulse-management skills, making stupid choices in search of instant gratification proves anything. And “celebrity” means a person with those issues.
And, bad news coming, but a drug like Ozempic may make people skinnier but it’s not going to give them what they want. It won’t because people will still have body composition problems—they will have what bodybuilders call “skinny fat”. Having a fit body is hard work and nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change that.
My daughter-in-law is a big fat girl. I love my son dearly, but I can't imagine how he does THAT one. I shrivel up at the very thought.
My mom was a big fat lady, but she was brilliant: an electrical engineer and later in life, an attorney. A walking (waddling) encyclopedia.
- Krumhorn
A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices" (The New Yorker).
Had a lady who I worked with literally hated fat people. One day she showed me a photo she carried around and asked if I recognized anyone- it was 3 fat ladies. I didn't- one was her. She decided one day she was tired of being fat, watched her fat father and mother have heart attacks (her words to describe them) and decided she wasn't going to be fat anymore. And started dropping weight. How? Ate less, exercised more.
Another younger lady I worked with had done the same thing. Different motivations. And hated fat people.
Maybe disgust is a better word then hate. But the people I find with the strongest negative emotions towards the currently at and obese are the formerly fat and obese who did something aout it- and most of them I know have been women.
Yes, of course it's metabolism and appetite. Both of which you control. You increse your metabolism by exercise, even just getting up and walking. You control what you eat. Thirst is a reliable indicator you need water. "Gee, I'm hungry" is not a reliable indicator for if you need to eat. Pass by something baking and smell the aroma- you're hungry even if you just ate. Our bodies are built for feast or famine. In teh modern world- we don't need to prep the body for famine. It's a choice.
fatness as a 'crime' and a 'deformity'..."
um, ISN'T it???
"... and argues that a fat woman 'will not be a social success
will she?
Keep in mind, that what they were calling "fatness" in 1897, we'd consider Skinny
people today are MORBIDLY Obese.. and are KILLING themselves.. AND, are UGLY
i'm saying this as someone that weighed 308 this morning.. And you know What? I'm Skinny compared to LOTS of people
The beautiful at any size movement is 100% bonafide feminist orthodoxy. It's mainlined directly from the very foundation of the original feminist complaint - being angry at nature.
Feminists dislike that men get a choice, actually they dislike that men have any sex-preferences at all. Biologically imperative health and fertility-related sexual preferences be damned, you will treat the twinkie-eating landwhale and the buxom hour-glassed supermodel as equally attractive...got it bigot? God forbid you actually tell women that not only do they not control sex entirely, but that they make just as many if not more boneheaded sexual choices as men.
Outside of prehistoric Europe and Benin, obesity is ugly. The Venus of Willendorf was beautiful 30,000 years ago, no one needs a diabetic wife with heart problems and high pressure who'll be dead in 20 years anyway and needs an army of doctors to solve pregnancy issues with even her firstborn. Hard. Pass.
If insurance covered GLPRA drugs (Ozempic et al) it would break their budgets. They won't even cover it for "prediabetes". Obesity will break the healthcare racket by 2050 is my prediction.
A certain percentage of fat people simply have screwed up metabolisms and need medical help. But the large majority of us obese humans just eat too much. You can prove that by looking at pictures of people back in 1920 or 1890. Its hard to find many obese people, let alone morbiditly obese.
The most you can few that would be called "hefty" or "chunky".
I would love to see the details of chris Christie's diet. This guy had stomach surgery & lost huge amounts of weight, and now its all back! Is it, he just cant stop tossing food down the pie hole, or is something else at work?
"Appetite and metabolism are biological facts, but our weight is still almost entirely a function of choices we make. Whether one considers those choices "moral" or otherwise is, I suppose, dependent on one's moral framework (as someone who has ranged between overweight and obese since my late teens, I am not in a position to throw stones), but in other contexts, resisting one's appetites is exactly what one is expected to do. Most people don't excuse adultery just because it arises from natural biological appetites. Resisting biological urges (from fornication down to sleeping late on a work day) is part of the human struggle."
Katharine Hepburn in "African Queen": "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."
Re: cassandra lite:
If it's biology, why does every photo from history dating to the mid-19th century feature no one who's obese?
"Mid-19th" is carrying a lot of weight there, because by the last quarter of the 19th century, Queen Victoria is looking pretty plump and Lord Salisbury is definitely obese (in his last years he sometimes used a tricycle to get around). In the United States, Grover Cleveland also looks like his BMI is solidly in the range for obesity.
Re Balfegor:
In the Grafton (MA) town common is a statue of one of the leading townsmen of the 19th Century. He looks like he literally swallowed a beach ball. At that time, it was hard to be poor and fat. For this man, fat meant "I can afford all the food I want, and I don't have to put in physical labor to make a living."
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"Appetite and metabolism are biological facts, but our weight is still almost entirely a function of choices we make.
That is true of 99% of the population. It does not apply to the morbidly obese, 100 or more pounds overweight. They have a problem with sensing satiety, when they have eaten enough. I did some obesity surgery and men who weight 700 pounds or women who weigh 500 are not making choices. One woman who came in weighed 700 pounds and her chief complaint was they could not get out of bed anymore and was afraid she would starve to death. She really thought that.
Do people find thinness attractive because they think it's moral? That would be surprising.
A certain percentage of fat people simply have screwed up metabolisms and need medical help.
And of this minority, there is likely a majority who have forced and can reverse this metabolic dysfunction through dietary changes and self-moderation.
The totalitarian's paradise is a world where biological facts can be asserted or denied according to taste.
Of the Mid-19th Century, consider the Tapeworm Treatment:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-horrifying-legacy-of-the-victorian-tapeworm-diet
“I cannot and I don't think there is any animal on earth aside from humans that eats or gains weight excessively and damages their long-term health for reasons unrelated to survival. That is, if you don't count coping mechanisms as survival.”
Don’t say that there aren’t any other animals. Domestic dogs and cats have been known to get obese. We had a puddle growing up who had serious weight issues. She would eat the Husky’s food for year, until the latter all of a sudden, one day, realized that she was twice the Puddle’s size. And she would occasionally get to the cat’s food, that we ultimately had to put on top of the upright freezer in the garage. We would know when she had eaten the cat’s food, when half eaten dead birds started showing up in th back yard. Our current little dog is on a very strict feeding schedule. And we keep the cat food away from her. Luckily, she hasn’t really learned to climb - like the puddle could. In their defense, they are/were both spayed females, and the puddle had a couple litters first. Current dog maybe. We do watch what the cat eats too. He got a little heavy awhile back. Possibly, from the stress of sharing us and the house with that evil canine bitch. Enough Siamese in him, that he doesn’t share well.
Still, we, as a species, have a weird psychology, and that is part of it - the ability to put away excess calories as fat. Our nearest ape relatives don’t seem to have that ability. 7 1/2 years of evolution to develop that ability. But why?
Pound for pound, William Howard Taft was our greatest president and chief justice.
Or as Theodore Roosevelt said "Bill should give up horseback riding, it isn't doing him any good and is cruel to the horse."
I'm pretty sure obesity kills more people than guns. Obese people should need a special permit and a three day waiting period before being allowed in McDonald's or Popeye's. If it saves just one life wouldn't it be worth it?
"If insurance covered GLPRA drugs (Ozempic et al) it would break their budgets. They won't even cover it for "prediabetes". Obesity will break the healthcare racket by 2050 is my prediction."
Ozempic, in its various forms, will eventually be available as a generic medication (I looked at the patent history briefly- it appears to me that it runs out of patent protection by 2032, but take that with a grain of salt). Now, it's cost right now appears to be $1500/month, so that will fall some as generics become available, but it isn't an easy drug to manufacture and purify, so the cost might well still be prohibitive for widespread use.
I am a child of the 1970s and 1980s. In my class in grade school (there were about 60 of us altogether), there was only one kid who would be described as fat today. In my high school class (there were about 130 of us)- that one kid was no longer fat by the time he graduated, and scanning the high school year book just now, there were only a couple of my classmates who would be described as fat by today's standards.
So, what do teenagers look like these days? I haven't been in a classroom in 30 years now, and the teens I see are the ones out and about on the street or in stores when I shop- a too narrow sample to judge.
This is such garbage.
Stop eating so many carbs.
Red meat and whole eggs are the core of a healthy diet.
You can eat huge amounts of a high fat/protein diet and not get fat. It is the insulin that signals your body to store fat and puts you into an anabolic state.
No carbs no insulin. We were meant to be in Ketosis almost all of the time.
It really is that obvious and that easy.
rcocean said...
I would love to see the details of chris Christie's diet. This guy had stomach surgery & lost huge amounts of weight, and now its all back! Is it, he just cant stop tossing food down the pie hole, or is something else at work?
The biggest factor there will be Ghrelin. It is produced in fats cells. Ghrelin makes you hungry.
When you have more fat you get more Ghrelin.
The problem with all of the "science" surrounding nutrition is that it is bullshit survey science. They ask people what they ate and how much in a survey, then they apply that to the results.
You have to eat stupid amounts of food to remain fat. When they have actually locked fat people down and closely monitored how much food they actually ate instead of going off surveys they find out exactly why people are fat.
One of the key correlations with being fat is the ability to lie to yourself.
The other key correlation is the Standard American Diet. SAD.
Stop eating carbs and processed grains/wheat. You will be healthy.
If you had a camera follow Christie around all day I am betting he has food going in his mouth 16 hours a day.
a fat woman 'will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.'
Would I be alone in wondering if there was some racism involved there? I do have to confess that my first reaction to the article about the tonnage of wild animals on earth was "Who buys wild animals by the ton?"
But I wonder how accurate a portray of the Gilded Age this article gives. Fat men like Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft ran the country and maybe the world. Heft was a sign of solidity and reliability. Sturdy bulk could be a way of expressing, attaining, and making use of power.
It was a little different for women. You were squeezed into corsets, but also had your rears exaggerated by bustles. A voluptuous figure could be a sign of health and fertility. 19th century men were so excited by any glimpse of female flesh, that perhaps for them, more was better.
The world smiled upon the portly at a time when physical exercise was still for the proles. What the quote suggests is that Europeans going out into the world came to identify fatness in women with primitive cultures. Africa in particular was a mirror of European attitudes, and Europeans recoiled at seeing their own preferences reflected back at them in the African mirror. That's an interesting hypothesis, perhaps worthy of further study.
The folks who think that "metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices" need to get with the Guardian writer who thinks there is too much human mass on the planet.
I blame our current fatness on the FDA, its extremely destructive food pyramid and the demonizing of dietary fat. Ancel Keys, the lunatic who was largely responsible for the fakakta food pyramid was so sure that higher intake of dietary fat led to higher blood lipid levels and more body fat that he convinced the whole health establishment of it, sans studies to prove it. Keys was wrong, though. Eating fat doesn't make you fat. (And realistically, no one sits around eating sticks of butter anyway.) Eating massive amounts of carbs, which people started doing to replace the fat their bodies wanted and needed, will seriously screw you. In my younger, fatter years, I could easily eat a whole box of wheat thins--full of sugar!--in one sitting. If you're looking for the demons in food-world, they're sugar and refined flour. And Ancel Keys.
"An essay published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1897 refers to fatness as a 'crime' and a 'deformity'..."
"... and argues that a fat woman 'will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.'
Hee. Politically incorrect on so many levels. I miss the days when people could write like that.
"Now, it's cost right now appears to be $1500/month, so that will fall some as generics become available, but it isn't an easy drug to manufacture and purify, so the cost might well still be prohibitive for widespread use."
People can already buy generic peptides like semaglutide for "lab use."
Bruce Hayden writes, "Domestic dogs and cats have been known to get obese."
The salient word is domestic. Drop Porky Puss or Fatty Fido into something like the natural world, as opposed to the hellhole of human misdirected reproductive imperatives, and their excess weight either vanishes or they're very shortly dead.
Mammalian predators live on the raw edge of survival. As a meat eater, your food doesn't want to be eaten, and it uses its natural gifts to evade your slavering maw. (Herbivores do not enjoy any appreciable advantage. Their prey is also unwilling to die in the service of a cow's expectations, but being largely immobile, they bite back with interesting chemistry rather than teeth.) The co-evolution of predator and prey ensures that successful hunts are outnumbered by failures by 80% or more depending on the details, and that's if you're a healthy carnivore. Any compromise of your peak athletic performance by disease or injury is usually a death sentence. It boils down to Calories in versus Calories out. The most successful hunters realize a small profit in the form of several days worth of fat reserves, but the average canid living without humans to exploit barely balances its books.
Now, if you're a poikilothermic reptile, a crocodile, for example, your metabolic economics aren't nearly so stark or unforgiving, yet evolution hasn't been very kind to your extended family for the last 200 million years, whittling down your genera to a mere handful of intrepid survivors. Evidently, being a harried and hard-working mammal has its evolutionary compensations.
Birds are endothermic reptiles, so what goes for Fatty Fido also goes for Rolly-Polly Polly.
Here's the thing: We're going to be able to "fix" whatever percentage of clinical obesity stemming from metabolic and biological causes, one of these days. Likely, real soon. Obesity that doesn't stem from either cause is a sign of mental derangement, just like the rest of the demonstrated issues we have running around on display, these days.
And, when it's fully curable? When we have the ability to control metabolism and the hunger reflex? Then, the remaining incidence of obesity will be seen as what it is: Mental illness made manifest in the body.
You won't get fat because of your biology. You get fat because of your mind. Otherwise, you'd recognize you were getting fat, and then do something about it, like reducing your food intake and getting more exercise. You don't do that? You're demonstrating mental illness; there's nothing at all stopping you from putting down the fork. Except your own damn mind.
And, mark me well: I'm not all that sure that there really is that much obesity stemming from purely metabolic or biological causation, even now. I think it's mostly mental illness. You have to make a choice to overeat, even if you have "metabolic issues".
in the early two-thousands, teen girls puked or did obsessive sit-ups or took Hydroxycut in pursuit of abs like Britney Spears’s
One of these things is not like the other.
But I do appreciate someone willing to out themselves as a moron and not worth listening to, for lining up "did obsessive sit-ups" with unhealthy things
I live in a rural Appalachian County. Lots of fat men and women live here. I can remember when many women complained about the "tyranny of the beauty industry". Well, it appears that most women around here have liberated themselves from that tyranny. Not only are they fat, they are slovenly. They seem not to care about themselves. It is impossible not to notice how much better looking the Mennonite women are.
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