Fat Jaguar Versus Fat Elephant: FIGHT!
This morning I had an email asking me to respond to some (very common, but worthwhile nonetheless) questions. Excerpted below:
I used to be over 300 pounds, as many fatshionistas are. In principle, I believe in Health at Every Size. I thought I ate healthy and was not inactive, and my weight never went down. I know that crash diets are dangerous as well as ineffective, and that regimens like fasting were bad for your metabolism and counteractive to any sort of weight loss. I was sick of having a hard time sitting in “average” people seats and chub rub and strange boils and yeast infections. Even though I knew my cholesterol levels and blood pressure and everything else was fine, it seemed unnatural and unhealthy to have to deal with these obstacles. And you know, sometimes I had to admit - it’s really difficult to go about everyday activities with all this tush fat to carry around. It’s hard to think about this kind of stuff. I know it is.
[…]
I still think that big is beautiful and I love the way my fellow fatshionistas look. And I DEFINITELY believe society needs to stop berating people for being who they are and what they look like. But forgetting the issues of society, and leaving it to just the very large ones among us: Is it truly natural for us to be so fat? Not fat in any insulting way, but…fat as a descriptor sans connotations. I know this will stir some hard feelings but, biologically and nutrionally, should we really look like this? I’m not saying we should be skinny - that in itself implies no kind of health. But biologically, there is no evolutionary or scientific reason basis for we should be so large. A full-figured body, like the curves of the goddess Venus, is one that looks healthy, child-bearing (I’m not implying all women should have children, but again, biological basis), and yet, at the same time, probably does’t have to deal with too many yeast infections between the folds and under the breasts either.
As I’ve said before, and many times before that, I am of the opinion that bodies are really, really, really individual things.
Is fat natural? Well, sure, insofar as being a non-synthetic product. All bodies have some fat on them. Is it natural for some bodies to be fatter than others? I would argue that, as a concept, diversity is absolutely natural. Thus I’d expect that body size, like any other broad statistical measurement, tends to exist on a bell curve - there will be an average, “middle” size around which most folk fall, and then at either end there will be progressively smaller numbers of folks who are “naturally” fatter or slimmer (if we wanted to remove the value-laden weight issue from it, think of the same idea, but in the context of body height). My problem with proposing a carefully-defined “natural body size” is that it suggests that there is a narrow field of naturalness and that anything outside of that spectrum is abnormal and in need of assimilation or repair.
I have a really hard time believing that this is so. Now, I don’t suppose to speak for fat people as a monolithic group, not least because fat people are not a monolithic group. Ultimately I can only speak from my own experience, as someone who’s lived in a body weighing around 300 lbs for many years. And my personal experience, for one, is that skin problems like the ones the reader above mentions are genetically common (I would even hazard to say unusually so) amongst some of my immediate (and, notably, not-fat) family members, and yet I’ve never had a problem with them myself. My personal experience is also that, insofar as actual movement and daily life is concerned, I do not feel that everyday activities are more difficult for me because I have a bunch of fat. As I move through my daily tasks, I feel, well, normal. My normal, admittedly, but it’s the only one I know. Of course, there are aspects of life in general that are less fat-friendly than others, but I’ve yet to find one that I could honestly blame on my fatness exclusively, rather than on the situation at hand.
Here’s an example. I do occasionally meet with chairs or theater seats (Bank of America Pavilion on Boston’s waterfront, I AM LOOKING AT YOU) that are terrifically uncomfortable, but in that situation it ain’t my fat that’s causing discomfort - it’s the placement of the arms on the too-narrow seat. Because I am perfectly capable of sitting in wide-enough chairs (hell, I do it all the time; in fact, I am doing it RIGHT NOW) without any discomfort, and therefore my fat in isolation does not cause any sitting-related frustration, I cannot logically blame the fat on my ass for any trouble I have with certain seats. It is, rather, a failure on the part of the chair to be wide enough to fit me. Seat size is not a natural phenomenon. If seats were harvested (or line-caught?) in the wild, I might understand folks making a vague connection between not fitting my ass in a certain chair and some Great Omniscient Natural Plan for human body size. But the reality is that seats are built by people, and usually built to the smallest specifications the majority of people will stand, since seats are typically something that are sold (think of a concert, or an airplane) and thus more seats equals more money. They’re not built to be comfortable to a broad array of bodies. They’re built to be efficient. Sizeable (ha) difference, that.
Though I’ve edited the email above, I’d also like to address something else the author mentioned, which was that she (I am assuming she based on the included name) eventually decided to improve her diet by cutting out junk food, and to get more exercise. I am all in favor! I passionately hate junk food. I ain’t judging folks who love it, so long as they don’t force it on me. Truly, I often get a little resentful of (and occasionally miffed at) my junk-food-loving husband (as he will attest) for buying nutrition-free crap at the grocery store, or asking if we can run by a fast-food chain to get him something disgusting to eat, but I make valiant efforts not to be judgmental about it (I frequently fail, but I do try). When I do join him in junk-food hell, I inevitably feel gruesome the next day, since that stuff just doesn’t agree with me. I am happiest, inside and out, when I’m preparing and consuming whole foods, primarily stuff that grows in sunshine (though I haven’t been a true vegetarian in years, I generally only eat meat a couple times a week) and so that’s the normal routine I keep to. Similarly, I absolutely require a certain minimum amount of daily physical activity to be my preferred cheerful self. Regular physical movement keeps my stress down, and makes me feel centered and whole, to risk getting a bit woo-woo about it, and so I work hard to squeeze in as much exercise as possible, even on my busiest days. Now, I shouldn’t feel compelled to do these things just to justify my fatness, and I don’t - nor should any fat person feel like they have to be extra active or extra food-snobbish to validate their being fat. I do them because I dig them and they contribute to my overall, internal sense of well-being. I couldn’t give less of a shit about whether my personal choices impress other folks.
I still weigh 300 pounds.
The nature argument is sort of a pointless one to me; essentially it’s just using a very old ideology of Western culture, one that equates nature with pureness and virtue and truth, to try to validate or invalidate fatness. I remember years back, when Kirstie Alley was doing Fat Actress, she made a comment in some magazine arguing that you don’t see fat animals in the natural world. The quote went something like: You never see a fat jaguar in the wild. The mental picture this comment supplies is kind of funny, true, but the overall basis is actually really wrong, and the idea that because jaguars in particular tend not to be fat means humans shouldn’t either… well, that lost me. There are lots of animals - elephants and hippos spring to mind, both of which will mightily kick your ass and/or kill you really, really dead if so inclined - that “naturally” incline toward shapes that visually evoke fatness, at least when compared with a jaguar. Was Alley’s point that humans should be more like jaguars than elephants? I don’t even know where to begin with how random and nonsensical the whole idea is. Humans are humans. Elephants are elephants. Jaguars are jaguars. Never the twain shall meet.
So is it “natural” for me to weigh 300 lbs? I have no fucking idea. Maybe if I hadn’t lost and regained (and lost and regained, and lost and regained) so much weight as a kid and teenager, I would weigh less now. Maybe if I hadn’t started dieting at nine years of age and possibly affected what would have become a normal adult metabolism, I would weigh less now. I have no way of knowing. And I can’t travel back in time (….yet) to find out whether doing things differently would have led to a different result. And even if I could, I don’t know that I would bother.
Because at the end of the day, I don’t really care if this is my natural state, or the state I was destined to have at birth, or the state I’ve created through childhood decisions and past disordered eating… or not. There may be folks out there who worry about whether they’re existing as nature intended; I am not one of them. This is my body, right now, and after years of battling with self-hatred and self-doubt, I am truly, wholeheartedly, happy and satisfied with it. For those who feel differently, I don’t dismiss or belittle your discomfort or worries - in fact I sincerely hope you can work that out in some manner that enables you to feel similarly happy and satisfied with yourself. I just don’t share your concerns.
If that’s unnatural, then que sera, sera. I am okay with it.
Oh, Lesley- this is so wonderfully written. I don’t have anything particularly insightful to add, other than this really spoke to me. Impressive.
Awesome entry, as always. Not sure what it says about me that I first pictured a fat Jaguar, as in the car. How can a car be fat? I kind of like the idea, though.
Maybe if I hadn’t started dieting at nine years of age and possibly affected what would have become a normal adult metabolism, I would weigh less now.
My experience is that - never having dieted, despite being a fat kid - I’ve been holding steady at around 300-325 since I hit my full height at around age 16. Didn’t change when I gave away my car and started getting around mostly by foot and transit; didn’t change when I stopped drinking six cans of Coke a day; didn’t change when I stopped eating fast food for three meals a day.
Dunno if it’s where I’m “naturally” “supposed” to be…but it’s pretty solidly where I am, even without a history of weight cycling to potentially mess with my metabolism.
People have sometimes asked me this “naturalness” question in terms of me being all crippy and unable to exercise (and needing to eat lots of animal protein). The answer is I don’t know whether I’d be fat if I weren’t sick, but I also don’t CARE. Who cares? I am fat and disabled, and that *is* what is natural to me now, because it’s my life.
*runs off to begin a new career as a seat harvester*
hahaha to seat harvesting! Because if that’s so, then they need to talk to the folks who gave us square tomatoes and burpless cucumbers and get cracking on breeding up some larger seats. Cross them with a velvet padded chaise lounge and see what you get. Yay for hybrid vigor and fattie-friendly seating!
I know this will stir some hard feelings but, biologically and nutrionally, should we really look like this?
Two words in this really frost my cupcake: A) “Should.”
Biologically, most of us “should” be dead, if we didn’t live in a culture where medical care was available, because the world can’t sustain 6+ billion people on unfettered biology alone. Nutritionally, most of us “should” be dead from starvation, or at least very hungry and debilitated, if we didn’t live in a culture where food was cultivated, because there aren’t enough sources of wild nutrition in the world to sustain 6+ billion people.
What’s the point of hypothesizing some extra-cultural “should”? If you take away culture, you’ve got a very small group of hominids wandering the world trying to scratch a living out of it, with an average life expectancy of 30. I’m not seeing that as a moral imperative by which to live my life, and I find it odd that your correspondent does.
B): “We.”
To quote the old joke, “What you mean, ‘we’, kemosabe?”
Seriously, though, I hate reasoning from garbage sociobiology more than anything. Maybe we “shouldn’t” weigh 300 pounds, because we wouldn’t be likely to do so in an imaginary state of nature. And maybe we “shouldn’t” survive pneumonia, because the majority of us wouldn’t be likely to do so in said state of nature.
I’m not seeing that as a moral imperative by which to live my life, and I find it odd that your correspondent does.
Note: I should say that I don’t think your correspondent really does; I think she’s either being disingenous or hasn’t thought through her argument well, or both.
A bag of Cheetos isn’t “natural”, but neither is the apple you find in your supermarket. Both are the product of human intervention. So this kind of argument always strikes me as disingenous special pleading. The argument that “your can of Coca-Cola is a Violation of Nature’s Way; my Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is all-natural” is only valid if you ignore the hard work, machinery, and use of fossil fuel (both for transport and fertilizing) that go into getting the all-natural coffee out of Nature and into your cup.
I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but when I was reading the email that was sent to you Lesley I thought the things she was describing did sound really horrible. Boils and yeast infections in folds etc. ? hard to carry around tush ? I would say that if you feel so exhausted from what I can only assume is basic daily activity ( walking the dog, grocery shopping, laundry etc.) and your body is producing infections on itself, then you as an individual are not particularly healthly. The type of bacterial infections that are being mentioned are the body’s way of fighting off some kind of nastiness, it is not, as far as I know , natural to get random infections without underlaying causes. If there is uncontrolable yeast or staphylococcus aureus (which are the boils) growing in the folds of your fat then I would get thee to a doctor and fast. Either that or , and forgive me if this sounds offensive, improve your personal hygiene. Not to be graphic but, as fat people, we gotta LIFT THAT FAT when we wash, rinse it well, and make sure it’s good and dry afterwards. I have been between 240-260 pounds for most about 10 years now and I have never experienced the yeast growth etc. If the body is feeling so broken down as she makes hers seem, I would say that fat less the problem and more the symptom. Sorry for the long post but I guess I get a bit miffed when people blame thier fat for thier discomfort and bad health. I am fat and I jog 3 kms a day, I eat organic and i have to hesitation to say I feel great! If you genuinely feel unhealthy then chances are you are unhealthy and need to make changes to improve your well being, not your weight. I hope that all made sense.
correction to my above post : I have NO hesitation to say I feel great.
I also , clearly, have poor typing skills, ha ha
All I could think was that if not for our (OMG) modern culture, any and all yeast infections would be a darn sight harder to get rid of. Think women died from those before antibiotics? I don’t know and hate to imagine.
As I see it, and as I understand biology (and I was an English major, so take that for what it’s worth), we ARE designed to become fat when we are able to, and this is true throughout the animal world. This same mechanism allows animals to survive winter hibernation. The storage of fat is a survival mechanism for lean times, and those of us who can do it will survive times of food shortage better than those who cannot.
If the food apocalypse happens because of genetic engineering or drought or global warming catastrophe, those folks who cannot gain weight no matter how hard they try will be the hardest hit, will we fats will be able to hold out awhile longer. That’s about as natural as it gets, isn’t it? The physical ability to store fat has always been with our species; we see more fat people nowadays not through any great virtue of past generations, but rather that those generations frequently went hungry to some degree. Nobody questions that starvation will make you thinner, but people seem to forget that that’s what was happening, and that it’s not a good thing, and that we send money overseas to try to mitigate it. It is our recent affluence and the modern increased production of food that have allowed us to grow larger (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing). There are whole nations of people who have no opportunity to even reach normal weight, let alone overweight. And in such nations, in the world currently, or in our own past, when people die of starvation or malnutrition, who remains to breed?
Why, that’d be fat people like me, coming from other fat people like me. As I see it, natural selection gives fat a big thumbs up.
Interesting that they should use Venus as proof that, possibly, people are not meant to be larger … did we forget about the Venus of Willendorf?
this is a response to ms jinx above. My health issues are similar to the letter’s author and I suffer from hidradenitis suppurativa. I can tell you from experience these boils stem from poor hygiene but rather symptomatic of an autoimmune disorder like insulin resistance. They are not staph infections! I do wash and dry every little crevice throughly but this isn’t always enough and still can get outbreaks, especially when I feel run down or don’t watch my sugar/simple carb intakes. The same goes for yeast infections.
1. Fat walruses! The other day I got into a friendly conversation with a new acquaintance, and the subject of that Animal Planet show, ‘Growing Up Walrus’ came up. I was telling her about the baby walrus - how cute he was, how he had red-blonde whiskers and a big soft pink freckled tummy, and how he would greet the other walruses by snuzzling faces. And she said, ‘That’s interesting. Because walruses are so obese you don’t usually think of them as cute.’ And I surprised myself by telling her (having opted not to go into the part where obesity is a dubious medical condition that walruses don’t have just because they have fat) without a trace of offense or anxiety that this was exactly why I *did* so love the baby walrus. Because everyone loves a baby deer, but as a fat person myself, I don’t share a lot of physical properties in common with the baby deer. I told her I enjoyed the cuteness of the walrus in part because I identified with his physical appearance. Totally fat animal in nature, and he has a belleh just like mine!
2. The part about fishing for seats in the wild reminds me of the bit from Douglas Adams on the swamp planet where all the mattresses are named Zem.
3. You are fast becoming my very favorite FA blogger.
JupiterPluvius, whenever you say something, I always find myself vigorously nodding. In other words, your writing is very good for my neck muscles, as well as my brain.
This constant invocation of the natural just drives me up the *wall*. Because I expect that this person who wrote to Lesley did so on a computer, which is of course *very* natural. After emailing, I expect she went about her daily life moving through the world on very *natural* forms of public and private transportation. That morning, she probably used an entirely natural bath or shower which transported wholly natural water from a natural water source to her natural house.
/end sarcasm.
There’s a lot of interesting intellectual work to be done in analyzing the ways that women, especially, are held to a standard of “be natural, but not” and how fat figures into that rubric. I don’t have the time or energy for that right now, except to say that it’s all bollocks designed to lock us into an unwinnable discourse war written out on our bodies, and it’s not a game I’m willing to play anymore.
So thank you Lesley and JupiterPluvious for speaking out against it.
You know, there’s really no obvious evolutionary advantage to my eyes being green, either. Well, I’m off to buy brown contacts!
but, biologically and nutrionally, should we really look like this? I’m not saying we should be skinny - that in itself implies no kind of health. But biologically, there is no evolutionary or scientific reason basis for we should be so large.
Wow…I think I know what she was trying to say, but she managed to expose the essential meaninglessness of the question pretty well. If there’s no scientific reason why we should be so fat, does that mean there’s a…supernatural reason?
I’ve said before (although not here, of course) that it makes sense that most people whose ancestors went through periods of famine or–come to think of it–lived in cold places would evolve the tendency to preserve and gain fat following a period of hunger, and that this would explain why so many rich people are thin. Their ancestors are likely to have been rich enough to survive without the ability/propensity to gain and maintain fat. And once fat became a marker of low class status, they further solidified their thin genes by marrying thin people from outside their gene pool.
That said, I’m not ruling out some extremely complicated fat-producing interaction involving cortisol, sugar, and environmental estrogens. I’m sure that’s not what that email was trying to imply, though.