- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Obese is not a picture-based assessment but a medical definition that coincides with actuary tables assessing risk of early death outside of 'norms'. Obsese is 30% or more over desirable weight. Buffie clearly fits this, and it has nothing to do with the relative dimensions of her bottom. She's not just fat - she's obese. It's not a personal judgement.
If you look at weight standards from 20, 40 and 60 years ago you will see that fatness and obesity are a recent and growing trend. When I was in grade school and high school in the late 70s early 80s, it was rare to see a fat kid. It was even rare to see a chubby one - chubby almost meant fat, since truly obese was extremely unusual in that age group, if not nearly nonexistent.
Now, chubby is the NORM. And just because size 13-15 is not uncommon does not make it healthy or good.
If you can't maintain a heart rate that is 50% of your maximum for 30 minutes 5 times per week, you are not using your body as it was meant to be used. Our bodies are machines, pure and simple; underuse and abuse through overeating erodes and destroys the machine. Carrying around extra pounds puts stress on the joints, especially the knees, the heart, lungs, and often other organs such as the gall bladder and liver. It puts stress on the skin and the central nervous system.
We aren't talking buff vs. non-buff - that's a choice. We're not talking subscribing to Hollywood standards of slenderness - that's a choice too, and mostly a stupid self-destructive one. We're talking fat, and it's not *normal* to be fat. If you eat only the calories your body needs for the energy you expend, you won't get fat. Your weight will vary relative to the next guy's by a bit, and it may be distributed differently (and more or less attractively) according to the genetic roll of the dice- but fat is 100% avoidable. And in many cases - though not all - it's not that great looking, as even fat people will tend to agree.
We are a nation in denial about our appetites and habits and the consequences of mindlessly giving into those things without balancing it out with exercise. The result is the fattest nation on earth, with a host of physical and mental and emotional illnesses to go along. It's a bad problem and getting worse; the burden on the healthcare system will be astronomical if the T2D (type 2 Diabetes) generation of kids doesn't change its ways - and with every year that passes of fat/obesity acceptance, that gets more and more unlikely.
I don't see Dickerson's article as prejudicial against fat; I see it as a reasonable attempt to call attention to a problem that is affecting millions, and disproportionately impacting a sub-group that has historically been marginalized and disenfranchised along socio-economic lines, with obesity acceptance a simple continuation of the destructive pattern.
