“Let Myself Go”

There are certain terms associated with weight gain and loss that I detest. One of them is “willpower”, as I have mentioned before. I view it as a simplistic term that has been created to make people feel there is a character quality that they lack when they cannot make some sort of behavioral change. People think they have willpower if they can resist something that you can't. Thinking that makes them feel smugly stronger and like they are better than you.

The truth is that resistance to temptation is highly individualized. I can resist a great many things, including alcohol, opening gifts that I am given until a specified time or date, spending money, and having sex with attractive people. I can resist these things effortlessly. Does that mean I have a better character than those who cannot? Since there is no way to acquire (or quantify) “willpower”, talking about it is absolutely useless. If you want to talk about something of value, talk about “delayed gratification”, not “willpower”. Delaying gratification can be learned; willpower cannot.

At any rate, one of the other things that people say that I loathe is “(someone) let themselves go.” Often, this is prefaced with “I can’t believe…” The statement implies that a person could have done something to prevent herself from gaining weight, but behaved in a willfully neglectful fashion. It carries the idea that one could have slammed on the brakes at some point, but just kept shoveling in the food and sitting on her ass.

The idea that one is in rational control during a period of weight gain is one that people hold because it allows them to judge overweight people and view them as lazy and indifferent to their appearance and health rather than incapable of stopping the process. No one gains weight if they have the capacity to stop it. Most people gain weight because something is wrong and out of their control. Sometimes it’s taking some medication. Sometimes it’s depression. Sometimes it’s simply being overwhelmed by stress. And sometimes it’s simply lifelong patterns of behavior that are so deeply ingrained that they can’t find the mental purchase to successfully change.

No one “let’s themselves go”. They are taken for an emotional or physical (or both) ride that they can’t get off of. Trying not to gain weight is like trying to disembark in the middle of a rollercoaster ride. There are only two ways to escape and that’s to step off in the middle and die or to wait until the ride is complete and you have control over the direction of your life once again.

Fattism and "Natural States"

Recently, I read an article on “fattism” in the U.K. An obese woman was riding a train and an average weight woman attacked her violently for no other reason than she was overweight. The article itself was scary, but the comments were of greater interest to me.

A comment that particularly caught my eye was one that said that being fat isn’t a normal or natural state. As “evidence” that this was the case, the commenter noted that people weren't grossly overweight or morbidly obese 22,000 years ago. Setting aside the fact that this person has no way of proving the presence or absence of people who were very overweight so long ago, the comment betrayed some interesting myopia.

The question really isn’t whether or not people were obese prior to the dawn of civilization. The important thing to consider is whether or not they would have been if they were exposed to the same circumstances that we are current living in. If people thousands of years ago had been given access to plentiful amounts of highly caloric food that could be acquired without physical effort, you can bet many of them would have been obese. In fact, there’s every likelihood that they would have seen being fat as a good thing as it would have ensured survival and been an indication of one being part of a tribe that had consistent access to food.

The thing that frustrates me about fattism is that people don’t seem to realize that evolution is what has lead so many people to be obese. Fattists act as though obesity is an unnatural state which is incomprehensible through any lens other than one of personal failure. The human brain developed as a result of the consumption of fat. In fact, the brain itself is composed of layers of specialized fatty tissue. Our intelligence and higher functioning would never have developed if our ancestors didn’t have a taste for the fattiest foods available.

Being overweight is not a natural state, but eating everything in sight is a natural act. The behavior that fattists find so reprehensible, a lack of ability to resist available food, is actually the most natural behavior of all. The part of our lives which is unnatural is not our actions in stuffing lots of food into our hungry maws, but the easily available food. It is actually far less natural to be surrounded by food and choose not to eat it than to choose to eat it all. If we approach obesity as the consequence of our biological nature (as it has been shaped by evolution) rather than an unnatural state which only people who have failed to develop habits that "normal" people have acquired, it might be easier to deal with and treat the problem.

Of course, fattists are not interested in logic, evidence, or science. They are only interested in blame and finding a way to feel smugly superior to people who are overweight.