Obligatory Health: My body’s not your problem.
I am not especially talented at talking about The Health Issue, that is, the whole “but what if being fat is unhealthy?” question. There are a few reasons for this. For one, statistics bore me, and I lack the patience and interest to dutifully seek out medical studies to use to disprove other medical studies. I’d rather just settle to remove myself from that conversation altogether, since there’s lots of folks who do it better. Statistics don’t really speak to individuals anyway, and just because statistical data is making the case that, say, being fat means you’ll die X years sooner than a less fat person, that doesn’t actually translate to you, individually, dying X years sooner than your thinner friend as a sure thing. So I tend to shrug my shoulders unless something related to fat and health really grabs my attention, or, better yet, captures my imagination.
As of late, one thing I’ve read repeatedly in scattered and diverse places is the idea that it is impossible for a person to weigh 300 pounds and not have health issues as a result of their size.
Here’s the thing: much of the time, when it comes to human bodies, nothing is impossible.
The human body is more remarkable than the most remarkable thing you can imagine. It’s a miraculous self-contained machine. If you’ve spent even the tiniest bit of effort seeking out information on how the human body works, its efficiency and complexity has probably blown your mind. We’ve all heard crazy tales in which the body surprises us with what it can do, like the apocryphal story of a kid lifting a car off her trapped parents in a burst of adrenaline, or a hiker who managed to survive in the freezing wilderness for a week when even search and rescue efforts were losing steam (and hope).
The human body is not a simple machine. It’s an incredibly complicated one, and each individual unique body has its own quirks and subtleties and nuances. Some bodies are sickened by certain foods; some are not. Some bodies heal quickly from injury; some don’t. Some bodies have disabilities; some don’t. It’s hardly a stretch to argue that some bodies are fitter at certain weights and some bodies are fitter at other weights and both can be normal and “healthy” for the individual body in question. Sticking your elbow in your ear is a difficult bodily challenge. Weighing 300 pounds and being healthy is not so much an inconceiveable situation.
Because here’s the other thing: health, itself, is both private and subjective.
My health is none of your business. Your health is none of mine. The health of the barista who hands me my coffee in the morning? None of our business. The health of your postal carrier? None of our business. The health of a particular film star or professional athlete? None of our business. The health of a fat stranger walking down the street in front of you? None of our business.
A popular argument when discussing fat and health is “but obesity [sic] accounts for X% of healthcare costs and I don’t want to pay for fat people’s health!” Setting aside the fact that having this as a “problem” is a huge privilege, considering the numbers of people in the US with no health coverage at all right now, it’s also an academic point. In an insurance model, healthy folks will always wind up subsidizing the healthcare of those who are less healthy. Your premiums contribute funds to a company that then pays for other people’s chemotherapy, or their hip replacement surgery, or their smoking cessation plan, or their gallbladder surgery or their skin grafts or their physical therapy or their psychotherapy, and so on. And if you ever need any of these things, you can rest assured that your health insurance will be there to pay for your treatment too, and that it will consist of the dollars of fat people and smokers and the elderly and the disabled and promiscuous sex-havers and rugby-players and and anybody else you might resent for squandering your health insurance dollars by behaving or just existing in a way that may compromise their health and put them at risk for injuries (in other words, living a life). And if you never get sick or injured, and thus never get your hands on those precious insurance funds to which you’ve contributed so many dollars over your working life? Congratulations! You have managed to live a life never being sick or injured, which aside from being extraordinarily rare, ought to make you thoughtful and thankful enough to cheerily help those who’ve not had your experience.
Virtually no one can survive a reasonable lifespan and remain completely free of the need for medical attention. Even when your money is helping to pay the healthcare costs of others, their health is still none of your business.
Standards of health are always arbitrary and always mutable. If they are based on anecdata or individual experience, they may be too specific to apply to a larger group of people. If they are based on statistical analysis, they may have little to say to an individual person with a unique set of circumstances surrounding their body, their level of ability, and their particular experience. What if, for example, rates of elevated blood pressure amongst fat people are being influenced by the fact that many fat people are having their blood pressure checked with an incorrectly-sized cuff? What if medical research is occasionally biased in favor of supporting the result that the researcher (or whomever is funding the research) expects or desires, such as in the recent revelation from a former Harvard researcher that he falsified data on a sleep apnea study to make it look as though obesity was a contributing factor, because the real data was not supporting this hypothesis? What if there’s legitimate research that contradicts the stuff that everybody just knows but it simply isn’t gaining media attention because, well, it’s contradicting the stuff that everybody just knows about health and fitness and body size.
The reality is that different bodies have different parameters of what it means to be healthy. People (of all sizes) with chronic ailments are going to have a wholly different concept of health for their bodies than I do for mine. And that ought to be okay. Because we should not feel obligated or responsible to each other - total strangers in particular! -to meet someone else’s standard of health if it doesn’t work for us.
This is why I am disturbed by movements such as Congress’ plan to incentivize health care by rewarding people for eating “healthy”, for exercising, and, of course, for losing weight. For one thing - eating well and exercising (or, at least, being active inasmuch as you are able) are their own rewards, as human bodies typically respond well to being used in the ways for which they were originally intended. Also, these programs essentially favor those with the financial wherewithal to engage in “healthy eating” AND people without long-term disabilities or chronic ailments that make exercise difficult or impossible (arguably, the latter group should merely give up, lie down and wait to die, when chronic health problems prevent their aspiring to the heights of health piety applied to those without these mitigating circumstances). Finally, good health is subjective. A person with chronic and uncurable back pain is going to define feeling healthy differently than a cross-country runner, just like a cancer survivor in her late 80s is going to define feeling healthy differently than a 20-year-old who’s never been hospitalized, and it makes total sense that this should be the case.
In a broader sense, there is something very troubling about the way we as a culture are moving toward a place where people’s bodies and their health are (sometimes literally) public property. I not opposed to people being healthy; I am rather opposed to a homogenized definition of health. Individual people should be both enabled and encouraged to be as healthy as is possible within the parameters their body has placed upon them - it is unfair to penalize someone and condemn them from “health” for the rest of their lives because they do not meet an inevitably arbitrary standard. I am also opposed to a world in which meeting said standard - which would change frequently anyway - is obligatory, and in which bodies of all sorts are colonized by a movement that claims to know what’s best for us, that our opinions no longer apply. Do we really, really want Health Police patrolling the supermarket aisles looking for health-criminals and health-deviants? Isn’t this a personal freedom issue? Oughtn’t we to be trusted with our own bodies?
In the end, some people weigh 300 pounds and are healthy. Some people weigh 300 pounds and are not. (Some people weigh 150 pounds, and ibid.) Both states are possible. Both states are legitimate. Both states are normal. And it’s still none of our business if they are or if they aren’t. The only bodies you really need to know are the bodies of anyone for whom you provide the bulk of their physical care - your kid, or your parent, for example - and your own. The body of that 300-pound stranger walking down the street in front of you? That could be me, and I am capable of managing my own damn self.
I am very bad at talking about The Health issue, too, mainly because I spend the first few seconds in shock that people/ friends/ relatives don’t get that it’s rude to offer an unsolicited negative opinion.
Therefore, I especially appreciate what you’ve written above because it reminds me of the counter-arguments, if I choose to respond. (I prefer to blink very fast and say “What?” a few times, a la Ms. Manners, but sometimes I forget and engage in rhetoric instead. Oh well.)
Seriously! We are adults, right? We make our own decisions? If someone’s gonna smoke, then I can ask them to please not do it near me or my kids. What I’m NOT going to do is lecture them on the health risks.
I’m not going to tell people not to play football ’cause it’s dangerous, or insist my husband give up rock climbing. I may as well chain myself and my family to the house and not go outside, because LIFE is risky! No one makes it out alive! (Plus, you never know, a meteor could hit the house , with all of us chained up inside!)
When someone makes a statement about another’s “health” because of their weight, I pretty much assume it has more to do with prejudice than genuine concern.
We need to learn to mind our own a little bit more. Whether it’s about weight, how we raise our kids (unless there is abuse going on), breastfeeding, whatever. We have become a nation of bullies.
Yes. I am tired of this drawn out and painfully ignorant conversation. Health is arbitrary - people arguing for the health of someone generally are arguing for a more attractive appearance. I want to stab people.
Wow, what a great post. It really is crazy how we think that other people’s health is our business in any way.
I think another issue is that often people aren’t even talking about health, but about mortality. It’s not even that they think a person, because they are fat, must be unhealthy at the moment, but that they think that they are going to be dying earlier than they would if they were thin. And, really, that’s such an insane thing to be concerned about. I mean, I could go up to every male I see and start harassing him about the dangers his sex poses to his health, but I’m obviously not going to do that. I don’t see why harassing a fat person about the danger their weight poses to their health is seen as perfectly acceptable and even necessary, while harassing a man about the danger his maleness poses to his health would be rightfully seen as insane and pointless.
I don’t know, if I see a friend sniffling, I’m going to ask how they’re feeling. And, when a woman passed out in front of my home, I called 911 and went out to check on her. In those cases, concern for other people’s health was either acceptable or necessary. But I just cannot imagine assuming that somebody was in poor health because of their body size, and then feeling like it was my business to lecture them about it.
Oh, and I hadn’t seen the story about the health care “incentives” employers will be allowed to use. How scary. They can say it’s about eating “better” or exercising more, but it will end up all being about weight, since it’s hard to quantify “eating well” or “being active,” but weight is simple and easy to measure.
Just wanted to check in as someone who has weighed 300lbs (about 280 now). I just turned 36 and I have no weight-related health problems that I know of. In fact, I went to the doctor about 5 months ago my blood pressure and heart rate were described by the nurse as “perfect,” I don’t have diabetes or “pre-diabetes” and my cholesterol is normal. “How do I do it?” Well, I try to get the gym for weights and cardio about 3x a week, walk and laugh a lot and love myself. And, though I try to eat relatively healthfully, if I want to eat a bag of Doritos, I will eat it.
I don’t think it’s an anomaly.
Fantastic post. I think I want “Good Health is SUBJECTIVE” on a T-shirt! I’m angry about the incentives from congress. Not because better access to good food or safe places to get physical activity are bad; but because the overlying theme is that Health=Skinnier and rewards go to those who are naturally or harmful-diet-induced Thin Enough to get that Gold Star of “Insurance Company Approval”. For frick’s sake.
Right the hell on, Lesley.
Also, regarding these “incentive” programs, just who is it that gets to decide whether I’m “managing my health” well enough? Is it my own doctors, or a bunch of bean counters at the company I work for? Would they make me go off my psych meds, since they make me fat?
Also, there’s no evidence to suggest that tight-as-a-drum control of blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol leads to better health outcomes, and we all know weight is a red herring when it comes to health unless there’s been very rapid, dramatic loss or gain. (I don’t even want to think about how many fatasses who contract illnesses that have weight loss as a symptom will be told to “keep up the good work” instead of being investigated for cancer or liver failure or Crohn’s disease or whatever.) In fact, just as many women who are hospitalized for heart disease have “ideal” cholesterol levels as not. And would they ding my mom, or force her to take a statin? Yeah, her total cholesterol is higher than “ideal,” but she also has an HDL cholesterol of OVER 100, which is almost unheard-of. Her DOCTOR thinks that’s just fine. Do other people who don’t know her at all need to butt in and overrule him?
@lori, I just tweeted about the “health incentives” and, of course, got a well-meaning friend advising me on how to lose weight, ignoring my point about not having to change my physical appearance to meet someone else’s standard. It was a classic *headdesk* moment.
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Because I have a visible physical disability - that is, I wear braces and use crutches - people seem to have this idea that asking me what happened to me, or what’s wrong with me, or why I’m using .
Worse yet, when I have tried to discuss this with my mother, I was told that I had a ‘bad attitude’ (because when in a bad mood, I’ll tell people that my crutches are great for whacking stupid people) and that I should be grateful that people are asking about my medical history - after all, most of the people with disabilities SHE knows complain of being invisible. Yeah, I hate being ignored, but that doesn’t make people asking about my medical history any less inappropriate or downright rude.
And fwiw, my ‘morbidly obese’ grandfather is now the longest lived person on that side of the family by some 3 years - past his skinny as a rail brother, and his average sized father. Sure, he’s got some health problems…but most of them are related to being a chain smoker for decades.
~Kali
www.brilliantmindbrokenbody.wordpress.com
Absolutely! This is basically my line: It’s none of your business and it’s not your problem. I honestly don’t know why people think that my health and body is within their sphere of influence… what a waste of time and worry!
Bravo Lesley. I read that piece about congress pushing this crap about incentives for losing weight too and I found myself with no words…but you did and your words were beautiful, thoughtful and wikkid smaaat too! SO phew thanks…
I think you should send this as a letter to your representatives and also to the freaks in congress who are sponsoring this stupid idea…I will write one too — albeit far less cogent but a letter nonetheless…I think everyone should write letters. This could be mayhem if the politicos go making legislation of this. Seriously.
PS Thank you for reading at the fat-o-shere talk! You were awesome. I didn’t get your authograph for the book :( Booo!…long uninteresting story. But yeah for seeing you!
@lori - Totally. My first thought was, what happens if somebody changes their diet and exercise habits but doesn’t lose weight? How would this be measured and quantified? Grocery receipts showing the purchase of vegetables? Video evidence of a person sweating through a spin class?
@meowser - Good point! I’m wondering who decides these things as well.
@lilpeadot - Excellent idea. Folks can find info on contacting their Senators here:
http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_senators.htm
And their House Representatives here:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
RE: government incentives for companies to promote “wellness” programs… I just had a barrage of lab work done and it all shows that I am super-healthy. The only detriments to my health come from the stress of doing the work of two-and-a-half people, worrying about week-long unpaid furloughs every quarter and stressing whether I will still have a job come year’s end. If my company really wanted to improve my health, they’d start to do something about that!
Did you see this article in today’s New York Telegraph? It is about a story that women are more concerned with their weight than about their actual health, proving yet again the being fat doesn’t necessarily make you unhealthy.
http://story.newyorktelegraph.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/5a8b8c26522de7fd/id/501017/cs/1/
I am 331 lbs. I do not have diabetes. I do not have pre-diabetes. My blood pressure is 108 over 70. My resting heart rate is 68. My cholesterol, thyroid, iron are all fantastic. I do not have sleep apnea. I do not have joint problems. I do have the occasional bad back, but that is more from my non coordination and falling down stairs about once every 2 years. Litterally, I just have always been klutzy. My eyes are perfect. My teeth are fine. I do not have stomach problems. I do not have any health issuses other than the occassional boil, which I can thank my native American ness for….
A few days ago, I was kinda lectured by a slightly thinner than average person about my weight. She brought up that she was paying for the “obesity epidemic”. Thats when i remined her that I wasnt the one in the conversation, that was on blood pressure meds, metformin, anti depressants, pain pills, wore glasses, had ulcers that she took meds for and had asthma. And that i wanted my premiums back.
Isn’t it funny how “stuff everybody just knows” just so happens to be backed up by major societal institutions (coughcapitalismcough) that would come crashing down if everybody suddenly didn’t just know it? How big is the dieting industry again? And that’s just for starters.
Funny, too, how this all plays out in so many intersectional ways. My husband was diagnosed with high blood pressure how many times? And put on drugs which caused side effects that needed other drugs to remedy them, etc., etc. When it turned out his arm was far too big (muscle-wise, in this case) for a regular blood pressure cuff to give an accurate reading. How come nobody ever caught that? Couldn’t be because he’s Asian American. No. No one has ever infantilized him, called him a “little guy,” etc., despite the fact that he used to be a bodybuilder. Never happened.
@meowser: RE point about fatties and their doctors ignoring significant weight loss because “Yay! Weight Loss: That is EXACTLY what happened to my mother. Like me and her mother, she has always been fat (except for when she’s dieted herself down to size whatever). Anyway she started losing significant amounts of weight and found she was losing her appetite somewhat. She was THRILLED and the doctor didn’t seriously seem concerned about the weight loss - even though she was thinner than she had ever been in her adult life even including several extremely hard core diets.
It turned out she had stage 4 cancer.
Now she’s doing much better and is on meds, and her appetite has come back and with it, some of her weight. (Of course she’s worried about ‘getting fat again’ - AAARGH!)
Anyway all I know is if I ever lose a huge amount of weight without trying, I will not be thrilled. I will be very very worried.
I was just thinking about how New York City’s over zealous anti-smoking campaign is creating a certain bais that fat people have been fighting for awhile. Now, I understand that 2nd hand smoke affects other people but the looks a person gets when they light up reminds me of how one must look at me or other big people when I decide to eat a large french fries order.
Why, when the languages are of “incentives” and “rewards” do these policiest always come across as punitive. There could be better access for fresh food, cycle and walking trails, swimming pools etc. without singling out anyone. Or there could be a real push for access to health by tackling overwork and underpay.
The best improvement to my family’s health would be if my thin husband could work less than a 60 hour week, and have time for sleep, let alone exercise. I may be the fat one, but its him who is worn down and gets sick all the time.
I honestly think my 8 hour (paid work) days are too long for proper health - we should be able to share employment around a bit more by now. Maybe not as easy as telling individuals they eat too much.