Q&A: How I keep my fabulous figure, and The Nature Argument.
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Here we have two new Q&As originally from Formspring. The first I answered on the Formspring site earlier this week. The second I’m answering here because I thought it deserved a wordier answer than I like to type into the tiny text-entry box the Formspring site affords me. So:
Q. You exercise and and are a veggie lover - What do you eat that keeps you plump?
Kittens, by the handful. And the souls of Jenny Craig “consultants”, since they don’t need them anymore after taking that job.
No. I’m joking, of course. See, nothing “keeps” me fat. Fat is just what I am.
This morning the local news covered a new study that found that moderate drinking helps women to “maintain” their weight. I noticed, as usual, that the concept of maintaining one’s weight, being slim, and avoiding weight gain were all used interchangeably, but these are not interchangeable concepts. This language implies that fat people must necessarily constantly gaining weight, that it is impossible for a fat person to reach a certain weight or size and just settle there. It creates a perception that all fat people must be recently fat, or getting fatter by the minute. The idea is that fat bodies are utterly out of control and wildly accumulating weight at all times.
This is, to put it scientifically, total bullshit. I’ve “maintained” my current weight for a decade. I get no fatter, I get no thinner. I go to the gym, I eat foods that folks who place moral values on such things would think of as positively virtuous. If I didn’t do these things — and there have been periods in my life when I didn’t — my weight still stays the same. It simply doesn’t change.
There is no thin version of me. There never has been. At my slimmest in my adult life (reached as a result of a period of depression and a total lack of self-care during my twentieth year), I still wore a size 20. This is it, yo. I am a fat person. I cannot conceive of a reality in which I am not a fat person. For me, staying fat does not demand effort or commitment or the eating of some special fat-making food at regular intervals. It just… is.
Q. In all other species, there is a range of normal sizes and body fat %, and if an animal is very much outside this range for its species it is an indication that something is wrong. Why do you think humans are the exception?
This is one of those questions that, for me, falls under the logical fallacy known as the appeal to nature. Broken down, the idea is that if something is deemed “unnatural” then it must be bad. I have a few criticisms of this approach. For one, “nature” itself is a culturally-constructed concept. Once you get past the obvious examples of trees and bunnies, what counts as nature? Who decides? Often “nature” is employed to distinguish things that are untainted by human efforts, but that sets up humans as somehow anti-nature, which seems counterintuitive. Are we not ourselves every bit as natural as the trees? Or is it only the objects and circumstances we create that are deemed unnatural?
More than that, “nature” is frequently deployed as a code word for “normal”, and used in this way, it places a value judgment on things that are unnatural/abnormal. For example, opponents of gay marriage (or gayness in general) will often argue that gay sex is “unnatural”, meaning abnormal, meaning something that ought not to be allowed to take place in the established order of things. You’ll note that this carries a very different weight than simply saying “gay sex is icky” or even “gay sex offends me” — calling it “unnatural” makes a global proclamation against the behavior based on some invented “natural order” that is defied by the existence of said behavior. Instead of merely being about personal opinion, this places it in a framework of perceived universal norms of existence.
This question also reminds me of an aspect of the “but isn’t it hard for fat people to run?” question from earlier that I neglected to identify, in my efforts at answering it thoughtfully. Specifically, my question is: how easy is it for anyone, of any size, to run, comparatively speaking? And when was the last time you really had to run, not simply to catch a bus or to beat the rain to your front porch, but in a life and death situation? I’d argue that for most of us living in technologically-advanced nations in the 21st century, running has become a bit of a luxury. Today, as a species, we no longer have to worry about outpacing a wooly mammoth, and I think that’s probably not a state of affairs any of us are eager to return to. It’s something we pay money for the privilege of doing in a gym during the winter; something we perform on a machine meant to simulate the ground we’d cover. Running is something we make time to do, not out of necessity nor as a matter of survival. I can infer from the question an unspoken suggestion that running is somehow of greater intrinsic or evolutionary value than… not running? Reading a book? Some other sedentary activity?
Speaking more directly to the question posed above: humans would be the exception in this scenario for the plain and simple reason that our lives are more complicated than those of non-human animals. Let’s say some random antelope, one in a herd of a hundred hanging out somewhere in Africa, gets very fat. How would an antelope accomplish this task? He gets his nutrition from the grass he eats. He gets his exercise by running like hell to escape lions, which is as good a motivation for exercise as I think anyone can get. His life is pretty straightforward, and is probably very nearly identical to the rest of the antelopes in his herd. If this one antelope gets fat, while the rest of his herd remains normal-sized, you’d have to assume it was likely the result of some biological problem unique to the individual antelope.
Now, let’s look at humans. Humans don’t travel in herds like the antelope, nor do we run everywhere; some of us walk to work, some take the bus. Some drive. Some take a train. Some do a combination of these. We interact with lots and lots of different other humans throughout the day, as opposed to the antelope, who mostly just sees the same other antelopes in his herd. Like the antelope, some of us work outdoors, and regularly use large muscle groups; but some work indoors, and spend hours and hours sitting almost immobile at a desk. Some of us bring our lunch from home; some go out. Some have steaks and martinis, some eat vegan, some Thai. Some go to McDonald’s. So far as I know, not many go out and graze on the grass for every meal. Some of us go to a gym for exercise, which antelopes do not; some of us go home and watch American Idol, which antelopes do not; and some of us watch American Idol while at the gym, which may well happen with cartoon antelopes in The New Yorker, but not in real life. We travel long distances, even across continents, frequently. We survive diseases and injuries that would have turned an antelope into lunch for the next lion that happened along.
We are very different from antelopes. Our lives are far more complex and diverse. The idea that fatness is a biological or evolutionary disadvantage is based on an assumption that the skills and strengths that enabled our ancestors to collaboratively stalk and kill wooly mammoths are equally as important to modern-day success in life, and this, frankly, just isn’t the case. Truth is, any collection of modern-day people would find reproducing an impressive mammoth-takedown hard going, as we (those of us living in places where blogs and reliable electricity are normal ways of life, anyway) simply don’t develop and value the same skills today as we did in the time when mammoths kept us alive.
The above is a bit of a tangent, but my broader point is that you can’t compare modern-day technologically-advanced humans with animals, because our environments and activities are so very different. The last time I attempted to answer the question of whether fat is “natural”, it came down to me asserting that fat people aren’t jaguars, which continues to be true. If you will forgive me for being so narcissistic as to quote myself:
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. […] 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.
…[A]t 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.
My feelings on this haven’t changed one jot. Because I don’t have to justify myself, or my right to live in my body how I see fit, to anyone. Neither do you. Is your body “natural” or “unnatural”? Who the hell cares? You’ll never know; not everyone will agree. And you still have to navigate this world. Why not focus on living your life today, without worrying about the semantics? As we are instructed by that great example of American filmmaking and font of boundless wisdom which I cited in my prior post on this subject: Whatever will be, will be.
Good takedown. The whole “natural” argument is truly bizarre. Um, know what else isn’t “natural,” as in not occurring in most other mammals? Menstruation. OHNOES, must be some horrible byproduct of our awful modern lifestyle!
In other species, if an animal is not interested in interacting in any way with another animal’s scat, it is an indication that something is wrong. Why do you think humans are the exception?
In other species, if an animal is going around spontaneously wearing clothes and shoes, it is an indication that something is wrong. Why do you think humans are the exception?
In other species, if an animal gets accepted to Brown, it is an indication that something is wrong with the Ivy League admissions process. Why do you think humans are the exception?
Wow, it’s getting to feel like Passover up in here!
Oh wait, wait, I have a good one: In other species, if an animal stops eating or starts eating in highly restrictive, ritualized ways, it is an indication that something is wrong. Why do you think humans are the exception?
I never thought about it that way. Why does it have to be natural, especially considering we’re in such “unnatural” settings? I’ll admit I still do have a bias towards what I consider natural, when it comes to things like looks, fibers, food, etc. but now I will think about it twice. Well put.
Also, is the range of fatness for animals really that narrow? I have heard lots of stories about people’s cats and dogs who eat exactly the same thing and get about the same amount of exercise and one is hugely fat and the other slim.
And in the case of antelopes, one fat antelope would be immediately killed by predators because predators single out antelope for any difference whatsoever. If you stick a little colored label on one antelope’s horns, the predators will hunt it down immediately because it looks different from the others. Antelopes have to be indistinguishable or they die.
Another factor is that animals are often starving or nearly starving in the wild, so they often don’t get to express the fatness they are capable of achieving. Also, they die young, and fatness tends to increase with age. A particularly fat animal in the wild is probably a pretty successful animal, because he has had a better-than-starvation level of nutrition and lived long enough to express it.
Brilliant as ever.
The “nature” argument doesn’t work when talking about some kinds of trees — not every giant sequoia becomes giant, for example, and we don’t define the largest of those trees as “abonormal” — even if they are. To expect a set of rules guiding all biology, human or otherwise, to work identically in every setting is far too reductionistic.
I love your answer to the first question. David Kessler was quoted as saying “People get fat because they eat more than people who are lean.” Uh, yeah, I eat more than all thin people — competitive athletes, people a foot taller than me, even women the exact same age and height as me, who do the same amount of physical activity may eat more than I do regularly. He’s also quoted as saying in this exasperating article (http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Many+wired+brain/2650869/story.html) “The difference between lean and fat people… is that lean people have learned to live with the inner torment, “and have set rules for themselves so that they can resist.”
Yeah, right.
Dr. Arya Sharma, who I find alternatingly reassuring and exasperating, has an interesting post about the “survival benefit” of “fat genes” (http://www.drsharma.ca/are-fatness-genes-the-fitness-genes.html) and states: “This study clearly demonstrates that (at least in rats), carrying the genes for obesity confers a huge survival advantage during severe food restriction and strenuous exercise. In fact, even under these “thrifty” conditions, the obesity prone animals were able to conserve their fat mass by being far more efficient (energetically) than their lean counterparts (same amount of work for fewer calories).”
Who’s “unnatural” now?
Brava! Exactly!
As a veteran of the “but it’s not *natural*!” argument, may I present a few other things not found in nature: eyeglasses, vaccination against childhood diseases, childbirth as a largely non-fatal activity. You get the idea.
If you haven’t come across it already, Sherry B Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female To Male as Nature is to Culture?” is worth checking out - a cool feminist professor made me read it as an undergrad and it’s pretty relevant, especially as a lot of fat-hate seems to be aimed at women.
http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/C.Knight/Is%20Female%20to%20Male%20as%20nature%20is%20to%20Culture.pdf
I have a tattoo.
This makes my body “unnatural”
And I love it.
I am going to go today and get another tattoo - and make my body EVEN MORE UNNATURAL!
I also color my hair - right now? Pink. UNNATURAL!!!!
Also - I wear clothes. This, I was not born with - UNNATURAL!!!
Now… I like nature, it’s great to visit and all… but no thanks, I don’t really want to have to live in it all the time. I fall well and truly on the side of living my life in the most UNNATURAL way possible.
Well, Lesley, I just have to say that in the time I’ve been visiting this blog, this is probably my favorite article EVAH.
Thank you for putting what I’ve been struggling for so long to put into words so succinctly and with humor.
I plan on using your arguments to battle the anti-fatties in my life. Thanks!
Sometimes I feel like the questions answered here aren’t the questions asked. Like the one about animals. The question wasn’t “Is natural good and unnatural bad?” but “Why is being significantly fatter or significantly thinner than the average of the species not considered a warning sign of some kind of health problem?”
And I’d ask another question: why are people in developed countries fatter than they were 100 years ago, on average? Why are Americans fatter than the French? Why are the British fatter than Italians? Why does fatness increase in countries as they adopt more Western methods of food production?
Even if you think a population being fatter is a net positive (indication of plentiful food, less starvation, progress towards a more intellectual and less manual labor based economy) there’s still a _cause_. It still comes from _somewhere_. And what is definitely NOT a positive is high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, which I think are NOT caused by fatness, but are caused by the same things that cause fatness. And it’s not calories. And it’s not lack of exercise. It’s the weird things we do to our food animals and the weird chemicals we have to inject them with to compensate for breeding out all their natural defenses, it’s the way we’ve engineered our fruits and vegetables to be bigger and fresher looking (but not taste as good) and it’s because we’ve lost a sense of connection to our food and where it comes from and how it’s supposed to make your body feel. And this is affecting all of us, fat or thin.
@Fillyjonk: I especially like your last question up there. Nicely put.
Also: it occurred to me right after publishing this last night that right this very second, someone out there is probably writing a book entitled The Mammoth in the Boardroom: How the Skills and Strengths That Enabled Our Ancestors to Collaboratively Stalk and Kill Wooly Mammoths are Equally as Important to Modern-Day Success in Life and will totally try to prove me wrong.
@meerkat: Tis true! Our recent cat additions are a good example: two cats, eating the same food in the same environment, both active, yet one weighs twenty-three pounds and the other twelve. Go figure.
I am now tempted to start saying “I am a successful animal” as a response to queries about my size or eating habits.
@wellroundedtype2: The Kessler quote is fascinating to me as a classic example of assuming one individual’s experience is universal, and I’d expect more from a supposed scientist. I’m sure there are thin people out there living in a constant state of denial — for example, I’ve no doubt that MeMe Roth eats as little as she says she does — but there are also a great many thin people who don’t, who just eat normally and maintain the weight that’s normal for them. The assertion that all non-fat people ON EARTH have this innate inclination toward denial and discomfort (and “INNER TORMENT”! seriously?) is… weird as hell. I know a lot of non-fat people and the vast majority of them don’t have inner torment.
Okay, be warned. “Inner torment” is going to become a new favorite expression of mine.
@GR: Ooh, thank you. I look forward to reading that.
@Luna: To be clear, the question sought to compare humans with animals, by asking, straight up, “how can you argue it’s normal/natural for humans to be fat but not animals?” I chose to address the subtext of these sorts of questions — which are super common — by taking apart the theoretical underpinning, which is the assumption that fatness in the animal kingdom is evidence of some “unnatural” or abnormal biological impairment. It’s true that the question doesn’t explicitly state that such an impairment is “bad”, though the phrase “something is wrong” implies this, but I made that leap given the usual context of these questions. My argument above is that this is not a comparison that can be made, thus the original question has no answer.
And for the record, I don’t think of increasing fatness as a “net positive”, nor do I think of it as negative. I frankly don’t think it demands or deserves that kind of validation. It’s true that I also don’t think it’s necessarily a problem, certainly not one that justifies the OMG SO FAT hysteria we see so often, but not thinking it’s a problem is not the same thing as calling it a “positive” development.
Your follow-up question isn’t something I have a ready answer to; I don’t think anyone does. Certainly lots of folks have suggested it’s related to methods of food production, specifically the addition of growth hormones in meat and milk-producing animals. I do agree that the our modern means of food production are seriously troubling and are doubtless going to result in health consequences down the road that we can’t even predict now, and that’s pretty scary.
(Edited like a hundred times because I misquoted, etc.)
Love, love, love your nature answer. I would also add that just maybe the “natural” human variation in body size is a lot wider than that person (and most of the rest of society) would like to believe. Sure, the average American is slightly heavier now than the average fifty years ago, but there have always been fat people and there always will be, no matter how much the nature enthusiasts dislike the idea. If people can’t handle that, they should go live with the antelopes (or jaguars).
I am innerly tormented by the fact that I am not a Jaguar.
Lesley and I argue about the concept of “naturalness” in humans quite frequently. Inasmuch as humans are animals of the species homo sapiens, I do believe that there are “normative” states for human beings. Note that I specifically said “normative” and not “normal,” as in “that -which is- more often than -is not-.”
However, I suspect that this list of “normative” states is going to be about as short as a potential list of moral truths. Rape is wrong, for example. Moral truth. I should work on the list more…
One thing I am surprised you did not mention, my love, is the role of fatness in human survival throughout the millennia. Why do heterosexual men like large breasts and curvy hips almost to a man? Why was fatness once seen as a sign of wealth?
If there’s a sudden climate change and food goes sparse for a little while, who do you think are going to be some of the first people to go, depending on the specific circumstances? Sometimes us fat people, but sometimes those skinny people. They have no reserves to draw from. *grin*
I feel a need to point out that there IS a lot of variation in appearance within some species of animals, dogs for example and, actually, Jaguars as well. Some are spotted and some are black, aren’t they?
The “in nature” argument is just so problematic on so many levels, not the least of which is that it focuses on the size of our fat bodies without also looking at the size of our enormous brains.
Our brains–and all that they bring with them–set us apart from most other animals. And one of the ways they do that is by allowing us to circumvent and subvert most of the natural selection processes that occur in the wild, allowing humans a relatively greater level of heterogeneity and allowing us to pass on that diversity to future generations.
I can’t help see those who bring up the “but nature” argument as being just a few steps away from eugenics in their thinking, at which point I feel myself backing away (not very slowly).
@Fillyjonk - Brian, the dog from Family Guy, got into Brown. Although in fairness, he did drop out one credit short of graduating.
Miriam Heddy responded:
Our brains–and all that they bring with them–set us apart from most other animals. And one of the ways they do that is by allowing us to circumvent and subvert most of the natural selection processes that occur in the wild, allowing humans a relatively greater level of heterogeneity and allowing us to pass on that diversity to future generations.
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Thank you. I thought the original question was intriguing, and many of the other responses actually . . . didn’t respond very well, imo. What you say makes sense scientifically.
And personally I find eugenics abhorrent, and I actually don’t see that connection to the “but nature” discussion. I think we have changed our environment way faster than our bodies can possibly adapt, and that is causing a whole bunch of physical, mental, and emotional problems. Saying that we are naturally adapted to Environment A, and instead we have created and now live in Environment B, and there are consequences to that, does not have anything to do with eugenics.
I actually tend to think of humans along the lines of the animal argument. However, I think of them as the spectrum of breeds of dogs or horses. Think of the diversity of body shapes and sizes of dogs - chihuahua, pit bulls, whippets, great danes, sharpeis, St. Bernards, etc.
Within a breed, you get a range of sizes - from very small, thin chihuahua to a fat one. But a chihuahua is still a chihuahua and no matter how much it eats and how round it gets, it will never have the body shape of a St. Bernard. Likewise, you can starve a St. Bernard, but it will never look like a chihuahua.
Instead of thinking all humans need to be a greyhound or chihuahua, people need to realize that the spectrum of human body sizes and shapes could run a whole range, like dog breeds. Some of us are just naturally labs, St. Bernards, samoyeds, etc. We might be at the fatter or thinner end of the spectrum for our type, but we are what we are. No amount of dieting or exercise will turn us into a greyhound or chihuahua.
@ Luna
why are people in developed countries fatter than they were 100 years ago, on average? Why are Americans fatter than the French? Why are the British fatter than Italians? Why does fatness increase in countries as they adopt more Western methods of food production?
I’d suggest Tom Standage’s An edible history of humanity for more concrete answers to this question that is backed up by more than speculation and novice google (respectfully, to anyone else that has responded to or posted this question). He talks significantly about the changes brought about physically by the changes in food culture (for example, nutritional deficiencies caused by the widening embrace of farming caused certain people (particularly Greeks) to loose height and be generally smaller than their immediate forebearers (a sign of poor health historically) and these deficiencies are just being made up today, and could be seen as a result of the Westernization of the Greek diet, for example) he also talks a great deal about efficiencies of food (localvorism, genetic modification and other pertinent food related queries)
I deal a lot with monitor lizards in captivity. No species of monitor lizard is domesticated. Each species is defined in the scientific and popular literature with a relatively normalized range of attributes such as size, weight, color, behavior, scale counts, and so on.
Very few specimens that I have dealt with myself fit within all of the ‘normal’ ranges for their species, and a great number of them fit into only a few of the ‘normal’ ranges at all. This is one reason that the study of monitor speciation is moving steadily towards a strictly genetic basis — the phenotypes are too varied.
Turns out, that’s not all that uncommon in nature.
Luna wrote: And I’d ask another question: why are people in developed countries fatter than they were 100 years ago, on average?
Oo! Questions are fun! Let me ask some: Why are people in developed countries taller than they were 100 years ago, on average? Why do they live longer than they did 100 years ago, on average?
Are you seriously saying that OMG PEOPLE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE 100 YEARS AGO when they are, as a group, taller, stronger, faster, and longer-lived than they were 100 years ago? Just because they also weigh more?
JupiterPluvius responded:
Luna wrote: And I’d ask another question: why are people in developed countries fatter than they were 100 years ago, on average?
Oo! Questions are fun! Let me ask some: Why are people in developed countries taller than they were 100 years ago, on average? Why do they live longer than they did 100 years ago, on average?
Are you seriously saying that OMG PEOPLE IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE 100 YEARS AGO
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This is exactly what I was talking about when I said a lot of responses on here don’t actually respond to what was asked.
You’re assuming I said that fat was unhealthy. Never said that. Even acknowledged that some people view the fattening of a society as a sign of POSITIVE health. And I never said WEIGH more either, I said FATTER. As in higher percentage of body fat. Which is found in both bigger people and smaller people.
Have you never heard of “skinny fat” or weight lifters? Skinny fats are thin, but have very little muscle mass and a high body fat percentage, and often the fat that is considered most dangerous which is around the organs inside the body. Whereas weight lifters are often heavy but have a low body fat percentage. So, no, I was not even talking about WEIGHT nor was I assuming that FAT is UNHEALTHY.
I do not think people are overall less healthy now than in the past. But I think we have traded old health problems for new ones. We’ve cured many diseases, but now we get more heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, autism, depression, and cancer.
Some of these things happen more in old age, and we live longer now because we’ve cured a lot of the things that used to kill young people before they had a chance to get cancer or heart disease.
Some of these things happen more often now because we eat food that is laced with hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals. Or because of pollution. Or because we watch too much tv, and not just because it makes us sedentary, but it actually affects brain development. Or because we have stultifying, stressful jobs where we don’t feel like we’re actually contributing anything to our communities. Or because we live much more isolated lives where we don’t feel connected to a community at all.
I think all of these things affect our mental, emotional, and physical health. I think for SOME people, NOT ALL please! But for SOME, their body responds to emotional or physical or mental health issues by getting fatter. People will even TELL you they eat more when they’re sad or stressed out! Are we supposed to say “No you don’t! You’re not sad or stressed, you’re just fine! Your weight gain is not a sign of stress at all! I don’t care if you say it is, you’re wrong!”
Not necessary to publish this, just a cat note: just heard something possibly relevant to your sweet gigundo boy kitty - might be worth checking him for stomach worms, which can require several dewormings and make him plumper than normal. Just fyi.
Luna, when you ask a question that sounds (reads) exactly like a tendentious rhetorical question, do not be surprised when people respond to the tendentious rhetorical question, even if it was not the question you meant to ask.
And I love that you’re accusing me of misrepresenting your point, when you imply that I’m suggesting Are we supposed to say “No you don’t! You’re not sad or stressed, you’re just fine! Your weight gain is not a sign of stress at all! I don’t care if you say it is, you’re wrong!”
Of course every person is the ultimate authority on their own body and their own behaviors, and I know that there are people who lose weight as a response to stress and people who gain weight as a response to stress and people who do both and people who do neither.
But the idea that there was no pollution, no adulteration in food, no stultifying, stressful jobs, or no isolated lives in the developed world 100 years ago doesn’t make sense, either.
Yes, there were no antibiotics or hormones in cattle feed, and there was no TV, but let me suggest that the idea that watching TV is somehow more stressful for people than, say, working 12-hour shifts in a factory or on a farm (as the ancestors of most people in the developed world did 100 years ago) may not stand up to careful examination. As for the pollution of air and water in the developed world 100 years ago, I think you would be surprised. You know those famous London “pea-soupers”? Smog.
Lesley, your article is possibly the most eloquent and lucid I have seen on the topic of fatness being natural or unnatural. We live in a world crammed with unanturalness - the make-up we put on our faces, the artificial light in our homes and workplaces, the public transport and cars we use to get around, the processed and frozen food we buy from supermarkets, the drugs women take during the course of IVF in order to fall pregnant.
The accusation of ‘unnaturalness’ is actually one of ‘unattractiveness’, in much the same way that calling a fat person ‘unhealthy’ is actually just a way of calling them ‘unattractive’. Most of the people who level the claim of ‘unnaturalness’ at fat people live inordinantely unnatural lives, it’s just that they aren’t fat. They almost certainly smoke, drink alcohol, take drugs, eat fast food, don’t exercise, don’t have good posture, don’t look after their skin and don’t drink enough water. I personally don’t care if people do any of these - but they can’t point the finger at others.
The overarching question is what is natural? Is voting in an election natural? Is having a job natural? Is using a computer natural? Is cooking food in a kitchen natural? The inference is that thin is natural and fat is unnatural, in much the same way that thin is healthy and fat is unhealthy.
I’m in Australia, and we are the masters of fat hatred. We have people on a daily basis writing letters to the editors of our national newspapers unashamedly calling for fat people to be barred from receiving treatment in public hospitals (bearing in mind we have a health system funded by governments). There are also as many people advocating for fat people to be weighed publicly at airports and booted off planes if they are over a certain weight, or at the very least penalised financially for being fat.
I despair for the future a bit. In an age where it is both unacceptable and illegal to discriminate against just about everybody, fat people are still copping it and will continue to cop it. The ‘obesity epidemic’ as it’s being termed here, is being portrayed as health issue, when in fact it’s an image issue. Society doesn’t find fat people attractive and thinks it’s okay to actively discriminate and ridicule those who are fat. And because it’s a so-called health issue, fat people who fight back, like yourself, are accused of ‘promoting an unhealthy lifestyle’.
I think the perspective I’m coming from is that fatness can be a symptom of something being out of whack, and the prevailing medical opinion seems to be that it is a major cause of things becoming out of whack. So when I ask on boards like these if anyone else thinks like I do, they assume I’m thinking the second thing, and attack me based on that.
Granted, a lot of this is based on my own anecdotal experience. I know that I gain weight when I am stressed and tired and sad. I am not assuming that my experience is universal, but I am also not assuming I’m unique. Wouldn’t it be logical for me to look at the statistics which say that people in my country are getting fatter, and conjecture that this may be a sign that the overall level of stress, sadness, and tiredness is going up?
And when people say no, that is not true for me, they say that means I must be wrong, I must be the only one who eats more when I am stressed, and our lifestyles are exactly the same way they have always been and there is no cause for increase in weight or increase in other health problems, it’s just random. Ok then, fine, it’s just random, no one can control anything in their lives at all or do anything to try to be happier and healthier, we are all just pawns of fate.
Here is a random fact I always like to use when faced with the “natural vs. un-natural arguement.”
In a class about human sexuality and all of the debates about what is normal, natural, innate, etc. my professor made the point that the only thing that is universal to the human species is that we don’t poop where we “live” eat, sleep, etc…everything else is negotiable. I have never exhausted this argument, so there may be more things, maybe some people poop where they live. However, it does raise the point that so much of how we see the world is a result of the interpretation our specific cultures decide upon. Fat is no exception, s’all I’m saying.
Not sure if this ties in with the discussion, just that what you wrote made me think of it.
By the way, Hello, I have never commented before, I love how you discuss things and you raise very valid and thought provoking points. Thanks for doing what you do :) I don’t think I could be half as accepting of my deathfattiness without you. Lots of love.
I’d like to throw an idea in on why a range of fatness in humans might be evolutionary.
We get sick more.
We domesticated animals and started moving around meeting other tribes - and in so doing exposed ourselves to more viral activity than your typical gazelle.
I’ve said it before so maybe people are sick of it, but my grandfather quite literally was protected from death at a young age during a disease outbreak that killed his slimmer peers. My MIL recently survived a badly misdiagnosed illness because she was a larger woman - she’s already had her babies, but research into developing communities shows the presence of a grandmother helps lower child mortality. So in my small family tree, I have two places where fat has given an evolutionary advantage.
And hell, 9 month pregnant women or small toddler don’t outrun predators, either, but I’d say a pregnant gazelle or young gazelle has less of a disadvantage. This is why humans have tribes and specialization.
Farming, more than anything, has been a huge environmental, cultural, and epidemiological influence on human history. And fat can help in farming communities, where there are warriors, farmers, pregnant women, children … ie: not gazelles, running moments after birth and designed for all individuals to have similar adaptation.
Which leads to an interesting hypothesis: specialization within a social structure in animal groups will lead to higher morphological variation in a similar region/environment than single/independent animals that are each generally adapted to their region/environment.
Of course, what pack animals really specialize? … Bees? *g*
“In all other species, there is a range of normal sizes and body fat %, and if an animal is very much outside this range for its species it is an indication that something is wrong. Why do you think humans are the exception?”
I’m not convinced that the overwhelming majority of fat people are outside this range. Or even what that range may or may not be. Given how long it’s taken for us to (mostly) eradicate abject hunger in modern industrial capitalist countries, it’s possible that the real aberrant range was prior to this point.
IOW plump/fat people could actually more “natural”, given that poverty, hunger and lack count as “unnatural” interventions.
“Ok then, fine, it’s just random, no one can control anything in their lives at all or do anything to try to be happier and healthier, we are all just pawns of fate.”
Basically, yes. Or as I like to call it, genetics. Trying to force your body to become a size it was not meant to be in the name of being happy? I call that willful stupidity. As for those higher rates of disease, it’s a combination of genetics and environment. Not all those who indulge in 21st century food suffer ill effect from it. Thanks to all the advances made in food and medicine, we now live longer and we don’t suffer from diseases that killed off entire populations a mere 100 years ago. You can live a good life with high blood pressure and diabetes - most importantly, we can TREAT these things very easily.
Your presence on this Earth was random, and so is your existence. Therefore, I feel we leave it up to the individual to decide what makes them happier and healthier. What’s even more random is your eventual death - which you have no choice over, no matter how much you fight against it.
Arwen, good points about disease and specialization.
Also: populations of animals are generally limited by a combination of predation and starvation. With the ability to limit family size, food is not currently a big limiting factor on populations in first-world nations.
Luna, maybe the overall weight gain in the Western world is caused by the factors you mentioned. But that would be affecting the people in the middle of the bell curve; it’s not what’s making the outlier-fatties fat (just fatTER), which is what the original question was about.
RE: the original question–sure, it can be a sign that something’s wrong, in humans as well as animals. But that just means that it’s the symptom, not the cause, of the problem, and in order to cure a disease, you treat the cause, not the symptom.
Great apes menstruate (we are great apes); some, specifically chimpanzees, also occasionally die in childbirth. Gorillas rarely die in childbirth, as several-hundred-pound mothers give birth to 7 lb infants; size is an evolutionary advantage in this case, whereas our evolutionary advantage is technological (in terms of preventing death from childbirth).
We currently keep records that tell us our present average weight as compared to our average weight a few years/decades ago, but this does not mean in any way that we are fatter than we ever have been, period. Nobody knows how fat we were 1,000 years ago; try looking that up in the census. We also have a larger population, which means greater diversity across the weight spectrum, which could, depending on how you look at the numbers, translate to a higher average weight. Suppose you just look at Europe (hypothetical) in terms of average weight; one population is not indicative of all of humanity.
So what I’m getting at, in simple reasoning (by no means entirely unflawed), is that we are working with a very small sample size, and just because Europeans are fatter than 50 years ago doesn’t mean the human race as a whole is at its fattest ever.
Also: domesticated grains = bad for our health. Period. I don’t care how fat or thin you are, domesticated grains have messed us up, notably in terms of our teeth. Agriculture also gave us the “civilization” of enormous cities jam-packed with people, which gave us delights like increased disease and rigidly stratified class systems (farming was mentioned already in the context of the Greeks losing height, I believe).
Funnily enough, advocates of the raw food diet are directly going against our “natural” biological developments; when we began cooking our food, we lost size in our teeth, as well as in our jaw muscles and subsequently the bone attachment sites on our skulls. Our anatomy is no longer adapted for eating vast quantities of uncooked food — test this out by eating a ton of raw carrots, and seeing how much your jaw hurts afterwards. I’m not an expert in internal organs (nor am I an expert in any of this, just a student), but it stands to reason that if our teeth and jaws changed so much with the advent of cooked food, our digestive tracts should have as well. I mean, I notice a difference between the result of eating raw carrots vs. cooked carrots.