How the obsession with healthy weight is wrong – and why some people say you should rethink that January diet
- Body shaming and obsession with size fuel misperceptions about our body mass index, weight and health, experts say; not everyone needs to lose kilos
- 95 per cent of dieters gain back their weight; we should instead focus on what we can control – such as eating more vegetables and drinking more water
In most cultures it’s bad to be fat. Rarely is this more apparent than at the start of the new year, when diet culture, fatphobia and capitalism converge. Exploiting body shame and people’s desire for renewal, weight-loss companies ramp up ads, gyms reduce rates and diet companies promise to help people realise the elusive goal of lasting weight loss.
Sociologists and medical professionals say this yearly cycle underscores society’s obsession with thinness and fuels dangerous misperceptions about the relationship between weight and health.
January’s anti-fatness may be cloaked in wellness and body positivity, but its core message to potential customers is always the same: their body is not good enough and they have not been disciplined enough to lose weight.
“People are doing this to avoid the social stigma, the economic stigma, the moral stigma of being fat or just not being as thin as they could be,” said Natalie Boero, a sociology professor at San Jose State University in California and author of Killer Fat: Media, Medicine and Morals in the American Obesity Epidemic.
“If it were about health, we would be talking about access to health care. We would be talking about the toll of discrimination against fat people in medical settings, as well as in social settings … We certainly wouldn’t just be talking about people above or approaching a certain weight.”