So let me ask you this. Why do you think that advanced countries differ so much in how fat they are, even of similar ethnic backgrounds. Something cultural is going on. What is it? I don’t know. But just looking at Victoria’s Secret models doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the culture. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that in Europe being fat is less socially acceptable, but I don’t know if it’s true.
I think there’s definitely something cultural going on. I don’t have a theory I’m confident of but there are a few things I think might contribute:
1. Lack of traditional food culture - when I was in Germany I noticed how people were eating carbs for breakfast, drinking beer and not shying away from fatty meats yet were all “straight sized” or thin. I think there’s something to having a shared cultural pattern to how, what and how much you eat that gives people guardrails and a blueprint for diet. Having a blueprint might take out the guess work and cognitive burden many Americans experience around diet. In the US we’re all trying to figure out “how to eat” on our own, trying random diets and not necessarily having many models who eat normally and with portion control. This is a potential downside of one of the perks of diversity - which is how much variety we have in what we eat. Fun but maybe bad for weight maintenance.
2. City infrastructure favoring sedentary lifestyles. This one is brought up all the time but I think it’s true. American suburban lifestyle makes it extremely easy to be sedentary and means that moving your body has to be done in an intentional and effortful way. In New York you see way less obesity, I think partly because you have to walk a couple miles a day just to live here, you also have to carry groceries or other things you shop for home. Since there’s more wfh and online ordering post-covid this might be less true but on a relative basis it still helps.
3. This one isn’t cultural really but there might be something about the food itself. I’ve heard a women (on podcasts) talk about losing weight by eating pasta and drinking wine when spending time in Italy - even some who normally experience bloating and weight gain when they eat that way at home. And people say our produce is just the worst (east coast).
4. Not cultural but I think there’s probably a lot more to learn about metabolic dysfunction and how that affects both cravings and the way you process the food you eat. Also whether bad gut bacteria are passed from mother to baby. I’m interested to see more research on things like fecal transplant to treat obesity, especially for people who’ve been obese for a long time and have never had sustained success with diet. And also for people who just have a lot of pain and discomfort related to digestion. This one could also be related to food culture - traditional food cultures almost always incorporate some sort of fermented food as well as things that involve slow cooked broths. Maybe these help the body regulate hunger etc.
I don’t think model culture defines overall tolerance of fatness on its own, but for white middle class women my age our desire to be thin and willingness to work to achieve that goal was pretty overwhelming and ... some people still got fat. That said I think it’s probably true that being fat is more acceptable here in many ways, but might just be because we’re used to it and not sure how to change it rather than being causal itself
I think it's literally the culture around food. In Romania people do not eat the crap people eat in UK and I think in US it's even worse. Like, the way people make "tasty"food in UK is just throw a bunch of sugar and oil
As a European, it almost sounds like you think we don't have an obesity problem but we do. In the Netherlands for example ~50% of people are overweight and ~14% are Obese. Both have been increasing steadily for a few decades, similarly to the United States.
The reason that it's not as bad for us might very well be due to the difference in food quality, but clearly that can't be the only thing aiding the obesity problem, or else we in Europe would still be very skinny.
To me it seems that the main issue still comes down to people choosing to live sedentary lifestyles and not actually trying so hard to stick to a healthy diet.
It is undoubtedly the case that the acceptance of fatness and a sedentary lifestyle are more common now, and both should be done away with. If we had a society full of "Almond moms" I doubt people would keep being so fat.
15% obesity is literally where the US was 50 years ago (we're near 40% now). So, I'm not saying it's "not a problem" in Europe but the scale of it is so massively different that I think focusing on the US in particular is justified. I think food quality is only one of probably many reasons that we see such a big difference vs. the US. But also I expect that the increase in Europe is probably driven by similar things as in the US. I just don't think "acceptance" is the main reason, again because the trend to increasing acceptance is very recent relative to the trend of increasing obesity. If anything I feel like people are way more into working out etc. now than they were in my parent's and certainly in my grandparents generation, but the way people live (in the US at least) leads to being more sedentary unless you're not explicitly trying to work out and I think that's a problem. We want to structure cities and have norms where it is easy and natural to move your body regularly and to eat appropriate portions. I've heard portion sizing in Japan for instance is way, way smaller, and the portion sizes in the US have gone up like 2x or something over the past 50 years. I also think that a society of "Almond moms" sounds pretty bad and that the downsides of shame and stress around diet are sometimes underappreciated. I think what we want is to have norms and city structures etc. where most people don't have to think so much about diet and fitness in order to maintain a healthy weight. I was personally super invested in diet culture more or less from ages 13-28 and it was very negative for me and wasted a lot of my time and energy. I spent so much energy on being literally 5 lbs lighter, because that 5 lb difference is just super hard for me to maintain. I had to sort of relearn how to eat without overthinking everything and how to naturally portion foods etc. rather than engage in restrictive diets to get to where I am now where I don't have to spend a lot of energy on weight maintenance and have lots more time for substacking ;)
I think a reasonable starting hypothesis is that it's the same thing that's changed over the past half-century or so to cause obesity rates to rise dramatically within populations whose genetics have stayed relatively constant: the food environment (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Obesity_in_the_United_States.svg). The degree to which traditional food cultures have been supplanted by a diet that can be sustained through convenience store purchases varies from place to place, with the US being a "leader" in that respect. How much the environment encourages or discourages physical activity is another factor that you'd want to look at. I haven't dug into international comparative obesity rates much but these seem like the obvious starting hypotheses, and ones that are prima facie more plausible than amount of ambient scorn driving rate differences. If changes in the food environment can increase obesity rates in the US from ~10% to ~35% in a few decades, I'd think they can account for the difference in obesity rates between Latvia and Lithuania (https://landgeist.com/2021/04/06/prevalence-of-obesity-in-europe/)
Didn’t read your comment before I responded to Richard but yes, agree with all of this. Plus I think higher rates of metabolic dysfunction (downstream of the food environment) may now be fueling this as well.
I totally agree that fat shaming causes more damage than good. But we live in an insensitive world. There will be people all around you ready to nudge you about your imperfections - that's a given. Being a victim of shaming - fat or otherwise - shatters your self confidence and even leads to an aggravation of concomitant disorders. I must state at the cost of sounding naive or cliched that it's upto the victim to deal with it. It's his or her choice to stand up to it , take remedial action or just simply ignore, live with the spite and move on.
I completely agree that "Being a victim of shaming - fat or otherwise - shatters your self confidence and even leads to an aggravation of concomitant disorders." The original idea of the Health at Every Size movement recognized this and encouraged a focus on self love as a motivator to care for your body and do things that nourish it and promote health from that standpoint (rather than one of self-judgement). However, I also agree that at the individual level we should all seek to be resilient to the unhelpful negative opinions of others. Taking personal responsibility for our mental state regardless of what others think/say is important to a healthy psychology. I'm always split on these sort of topics - at the political level I think it can be helpful to organize movements (in this case fat-activism) that work as a group to raise awareness for the negative effects of something that affects that group (in this case fat-shaming) but at the individual level think we should encourage personal resilience and responsibility.
Enjoyed the read and agree with almost all of this. But whether I buy your framing or Richard's does eventually come down to the margin we're talking about. If you think of incentives and disincentives on a spectrum from slight nudges to full-blown fat shaming (no pun intended), a rational, compassionate society should try the lower cost nudges and messaging before it tries shame (as you say, shame is not costless). It's unclear where we on this spectrum. Popular culture seems to have moved on from belittling and lampooning fat people to now sometimes glorifying fatness. I'm not super bothered by this even if it can sometimes be outright dishonest. But a corollary of this is the sensitivity around fatness. Friends will enthusiastically discuss how to get their friend to stop smoking but the same friends would think long and hard before even telling their friend they've been gaining weight. It's very plausible that it's the excessive shaming itself that bred this sensitivity, besides general PC culture. But whatever the cause, it's counterproductive. We need to start talking about obesity as something to either work on or take pills for or ideally both. It's not an identity, not something you need to be squeamish about and not something that makes you immune to your loved one's caring for you, and sometimes even giving you tough love. I'm willing to bet this will yield a world in which fat people are less isolated and alone in their struggles.
1. "a rational, compassionate society should try the lower cost nudges and messaging before it tries shame". I agree with this but feel you're missing the bigger picture. As Andras outlined in his comment, there are many reasons why we've seen increasing rates of obesity over the past 40-50 years, and focusing only on individual behavior misses the broader societal issues going on. My concern is that this individual behavior focus obscures the need for broader research into solutions (more medicinal treatments like Wegovy, maybe fecal transplant or other things that address gut issues that may be causing metabolic dysfunction, better understanding of the role of hormonal balance, issues with the overall food system etc.)
2. "Friends will enthusiastically discuss how to get their friend to stop smoking but the same friends would think long and hard before even telling their friend they've been gaining weight." The reason friends don't tell friends they've gained weight (at least in the female context which I can speak to more confidently) is not just that we're being nice, it's that we're 100% sure the friend is aware. Also, while they may not explicitly tell them they should lose weight they will talk about the various diet and exercise regimes they're trying. Diet and fitness talk is a common water cooler conversation in offices for example in my experience - although I would agree that the fat-activism stuff has encouraged less of this at the margin.
I agree with you. Shame is almost only going to play a detrimental role in allowing people to change. Shame will often play a paradoxical role in terms of the psychological and emotional stress it offers, which will often be escaped through food. As you note, as long as there is an objective recognition of the health impacts of obesity, perpetuating further shame is not the impetus for change we want it to be.
I could envision a different world (e.g., in the ancestral environment), wherein eating was more of a straightforward behavioral activity and shame could be a helpful deterrent. But in the context of all the structural, societal, and psychological underpinnings to food and overconsumption, the strictly behavioralist account of obesity falls short.
To argue by analogy, change can be easy or hard. If someone is getting poor sleep, maybe they just need to limit blue light exposure or caffeine intake. If they weren't already aware of these and other interventions, this might work amazingly. However, if they're stressed by existential and psychological distress, have hormonal dysregulation, or doing shift work, the simple behavioral interventions won't offer very much efficacy. I'd argue weight loss is more akin to this latter example: as you've stated, most have tried innumerable diets and weight loss approaches, only to regain the weight. There is much more holding them back then a simple lack of knowledge or discipline.
Thanks, Andras, I love this comment! This is exactly right "in the context of all the structural, societal, and psychological underpinnings to food and overconsumption, the strictly behavioralist account of obesity falls short." And I also agree that feelings of shame can be counterproductive in that they can lead to a desire to self-soothe through food. My concern is that the strictly behavioralist account that Richard is promoting obscures the need for real research into solutions that go beyond simple CICO advice (medical, social etc.). I'll admit that the very extreme frontier of the HAES movement, where they claim there are no problems that arise as a result of obesity, are also obscuring the need for that research, but currently the opinion Richard represents is much more mainstream than the "obesity has no impact on health" opinion (I think).
Very good article. I started out inclined to agree with Richard, and you changed my mind. Not to say that obesity is good, and I am overweight myself, but shaming people probably won’t help. Going too far the other way and pretending that being obese is OK or even to be celebrated is obviously mistaken as well. This is a serious and increasing problem in America, and no doubt that there are multiple interacting factors in play. Understanding it and intervening in a productive way probably will only minimally involve making people more embarrassed about their appearance than they already are.
Thanks! Yes, I agree that the extreme of the fat activism movement is bad as well. My biggest concern is not exactly the glorification of obesity, but how some people *identify* with obesity as if it’s a core part of who they are (and encourage others to do so as well). And if you see obesity as an important identity characteristic with no health impacts… then being angry at Adele for losing weight makes sense. This clip is a perfect example of how twisted an identification with being obese can get:
The question would be whether such a middle ground can exist. With an obvious self-destructive and ugly behavior, which would naturally produce shame, is there any way to not produce shame except to actively anti-shame?
Fat shaming is a natural behaviour. Attempting to change it would require acts against nature… like calling it ‘beautiful’.
Feeling bad is not a cost. Feeling bad is merely a signal. A “bad” feeling’s signal serves a purpose, just like the signal of euphoria serves a purpose - they both signal something that the owner needs to know. But those signals are wasted when a person doesn’t have values to interpret them in a way that promotes life. If making people feel bad preserves life, then make people feel bad.
Jesus Christ affirmed this - sin leads to death. But He also revealed the Good News - that those who confess, repent, and declare Him Lord shall receive eternal life.
We have different utility functions. Mine is based on conscious experience and yours is based on life. In my world life is valuable because it can lead to positive conscious experiences. In your world conscious experience is valuable because it can preserve life.
You can’t separate the spirit (consciousness) from the body without rejecting the Good News of the Bible, which was that God (spirit) came into the world as a man Jesus (body), and made it possible for sin and brokenness to be conquered. For overweight people, it is necessary that they feel shame that “something is not right”, because that’s the prerequisite to doing anything about “the thing that is not right”. And if being overweight diminishes the life of the body, it ALSO diminishes the life of the spirit, which resides in the body. You can’t help people with only a partial view of the nature of human beings. You have to have a full view of humans. Otherwise you’ll just be hurting people to satisfy your own pride, and that is not good.
Well, I’m an atheist. Anyways, I’m not separating them, I’m explaining which one I value and which one I see as instrumental.
But to respond to the substantive point. My main argument in the post is that people already feel shame for being obese and that there’s no need to encourage people to actively make them feel additional shame. Shame is not always motivating.
Shame, that doesn’t lead to behavior change, is nothing, as I said before. It’s just a feeling. If a person is the target of shame, and they even feel shame, but their values tell them “there’s nothing wrong here”, then no harm has been done. Stop complaining about shame. What you really mean to argue is values. Make a value claim. Tell me shame is wrong and then tell me why.
I am Christian conservative in Seattle. People try to shame me routinely. I just brush it off when their “values” (more often their lack of values) are faulty. Why is it morally wrong to declare that people ought to work to be fit?
We’re completely talking past each other. Like I said before we have different utility functions. I don’t agree that suffering is nothing in the absence of behavior change, I think it’s actually the main thing. I’m also not “complaining about shame” no one is shaming me, I’m saying it’s not effective to add more shame to people for their weight who already feel a lot of shame. I don’t think it’s morally wrong to say you have to or should work out and eat healthy. I’m saying that most of the time fat people already know this and already know they’re fat and they want to and are trying to change that. Many people try and fail over and over again to lose weight and already feel terrible about it. After a certain point excessive shame can lead to self hatred and I don’t think that’s a productive place to be when you’re trying to change your habits to take care of yourself better.
An emotion is not suffering. It is merely a signal. Do not be reigned over by emotions. Instead, determine what is true (life-giving) and what is false (life-ending), then enact what is true and deny what is false, to the best of your ability.
I think there’s a lot right here, but also maybe a big hole. Yes, losing weight (long-term) once you’re obese is very hard and near impossible at the population level. But not getting obese in the first place is much, much easier!
If people experienced shame very quickly for “freshman 15” or “holiday weight”, I think it could make a big impact.
This is true. I didn't talk about this in the post but while I don't think we should use shame I do think there's a role for friends and family to show care and support to help someone lose weight, or if they haven't realized that their weight is becoming a problem to softly alert them to why it might be. I would, for example, likely tell my boyfriend (or someone else I'm close enough to) to maybe not have another snack before bed if they've been starting to struggle with weight and would support any diet they were choosing to take on to reverse that. I think the reason I didn't focus on that is that in my personal experience I and the people I'm close to have generally been very, very aware of any weight gain and are already doing what they can to manage it. And in that situation adding additional shame is not helpful. But I definitely believe that there are cases where a little more intervention can be appropriate.
It’s not scientific at all, but I can’t get the “Asian mother” out of my head, though. My wife’s mom is Korean, and I remember how readily she noted any weight gain my wife exhibited. “You’re getting kind of fat. Maybe don’t eat so much.” Literally. I’ve seen this dynamic in Japanese homes as well. Can’t help but wonder if that isn’t at least part of Asian resilience to obesity.
I get that, and I used to think that the family norms were a much bigger factor until I heard about the adoption and twin studies on obesity which show that adopted kids have a higher BMI correlation with their bio than with their adopted parents. It’s not that I think the family culture doesn’t matter but it’s definitely not the whole story.
“In a meta-analysis of these twin studies, we found that genetic factors had a strong effect on the variation of body mass index (BMI) at all ages. The common environmental factors showed a substantial effect in mid-childhood, but this effect disappeared at adolescence. Adoption studies supported the role of family environment in childhood obesity as correlations were found between adoptees and adoptive parents; however, correlations were substantially stronger between parents and their biological offspring, further supporting the importance of genetic factors.”
Fantastic post-woke debate here where Arby’s-Gray addresses Hanania’s arguments one by one in a way that enlightens, without anyone ever being called racist or ——phobic.
So let me ask you this. Why do you think that advanced countries differ so much in how fat they are, even of similar ethnic backgrounds. Something cultural is going on. What is it? I don’t know. But just looking at Victoria’s Secret models doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the culture. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that in Europe being fat is less socially acceptable, but I don’t know if it’s true.
I think there’s definitely something cultural going on. I don’t have a theory I’m confident of but there are a few things I think might contribute:
1. Lack of traditional food culture - when I was in Germany I noticed how people were eating carbs for breakfast, drinking beer and not shying away from fatty meats yet were all “straight sized” or thin. I think there’s something to having a shared cultural pattern to how, what and how much you eat that gives people guardrails and a blueprint for diet. Having a blueprint might take out the guess work and cognitive burden many Americans experience around diet. In the US we’re all trying to figure out “how to eat” on our own, trying random diets and not necessarily having many models who eat normally and with portion control. This is a potential downside of one of the perks of diversity - which is how much variety we have in what we eat. Fun but maybe bad for weight maintenance.
2. City infrastructure favoring sedentary lifestyles. This one is brought up all the time but I think it’s true. American suburban lifestyle makes it extremely easy to be sedentary and means that moving your body has to be done in an intentional and effortful way. In New York you see way less obesity, I think partly because you have to walk a couple miles a day just to live here, you also have to carry groceries or other things you shop for home. Since there’s more wfh and online ordering post-covid this might be less true but on a relative basis it still helps.
3. This one isn’t cultural really but there might be something about the food itself. I’ve heard a women (on podcasts) talk about losing weight by eating pasta and drinking wine when spending time in Italy - even some who normally experience bloating and weight gain when they eat that way at home. And people say our produce is just the worst (east coast).
4. Not cultural but I think there’s probably a lot more to learn about metabolic dysfunction and how that affects both cravings and the way you process the food you eat. Also whether bad gut bacteria are passed from mother to baby. I’m interested to see more research on things like fecal transplant to treat obesity, especially for people who’ve been obese for a long time and have never had sustained success with diet. And also for people who just have a lot of pain and discomfort related to digestion. This one could also be related to food culture - traditional food cultures almost always incorporate some sort of fermented food as well as things that involve slow cooked broths. Maybe these help the body regulate hunger etc.
I don’t think model culture defines overall tolerance of fatness on its own, but for white middle class women my age our desire to be thin and willingness to work to achieve that goal was pretty overwhelming and ... some people still got fat. That said I think it’s probably true that being fat is more acceptable here in many ways, but might just be because we’re used to it and not sure how to change it rather than being causal itself
I think it's literally the culture around food. In Romania people do not eat the crap people eat in UK and I think in US it's even worse. Like, the way people make "tasty"food in UK is just throw a bunch of sugar and oil
As a European, it almost sounds like you think we don't have an obesity problem but we do. In the Netherlands for example ~50% of people are overweight and ~14% are Obese. Both have been increasing steadily for a few decades, similarly to the United States.
The reason that it's not as bad for us might very well be due to the difference in food quality, but clearly that can't be the only thing aiding the obesity problem, or else we in Europe would still be very skinny.
To me it seems that the main issue still comes down to people choosing to live sedentary lifestyles and not actually trying so hard to stick to a healthy diet.
It is undoubtedly the case that the acceptance of fatness and a sedentary lifestyle are more common now, and both should be done away with. If we had a society full of "Almond moms" I doubt people would keep being so fat.
15% obesity is literally where the US was 50 years ago (we're near 40% now). So, I'm not saying it's "not a problem" in Europe but the scale of it is so massively different that I think focusing on the US in particular is justified. I think food quality is only one of probably many reasons that we see such a big difference vs. the US. But also I expect that the increase in Europe is probably driven by similar things as in the US. I just don't think "acceptance" is the main reason, again because the trend to increasing acceptance is very recent relative to the trend of increasing obesity. If anything I feel like people are way more into working out etc. now than they were in my parent's and certainly in my grandparents generation, but the way people live (in the US at least) leads to being more sedentary unless you're not explicitly trying to work out and I think that's a problem. We want to structure cities and have norms where it is easy and natural to move your body regularly and to eat appropriate portions. I've heard portion sizing in Japan for instance is way, way smaller, and the portion sizes in the US have gone up like 2x or something over the past 50 years. I also think that a society of "Almond moms" sounds pretty bad and that the downsides of shame and stress around diet are sometimes underappreciated. I think what we want is to have norms and city structures etc. where most people don't have to think so much about diet and fitness in order to maintain a healthy weight. I was personally super invested in diet culture more or less from ages 13-28 and it was very negative for me and wasted a lot of my time and energy. I spent so much energy on being literally 5 lbs lighter, because that 5 lb difference is just super hard for me to maintain. I had to sort of relearn how to eat without overthinking everything and how to naturally portion foods etc. rather than engage in restrictive diets to get to where I am now where I don't have to spend a lot of energy on weight maintenance and have lots more time for substacking ;)
> Something cultural is going on. What is it?
I think a reasonable starting hypothesis is that it's the same thing that's changed over the past half-century or so to cause obesity rates to rise dramatically within populations whose genetics have stayed relatively constant: the food environment (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Obesity_in_the_United_States.svg). The degree to which traditional food cultures have been supplanted by a diet that can be sustained through convenience store purchases varies from place to place, with the US being a "leader" in that respect. How much the environment encourages or discourages physical activity is another factor that you'd want to look at. I haven't dug into international comparative obesity rates much but these seem like the obvious starting hypotheses, and ones that are prima facie more plausible than amount of ambient scorn driving rate differences. If changes in the food environment can increase obesity rates in the US from ~10% to ~35% in a few decades, I'd think they can account for the difference in obesity rates between Latvia and Lithuania (https://landgeist.com/2021/04/06/prevalence-of-obesity-in-europe/)
Didn’t read your comment before I responded to Richard but yes, agree with all of this. Plus I think higher rates of metabolic dysfunction (downstream of the food environment) may now be fueling this as well.
I totally agree that fat shaming causes more damage than good. But we live in an insensitive world. There will be people all around you ready to nudge you about your imperfections - that's a given. Being a victim of shaming - fat or otherwise - shatters your self confidence and even leads to an aggravation of concomitant disorders. I must state at the cost of sounding naive or cliched that it's upto the victim to deal with it. It's his or her choice to stand up to it , take remedial action or just simply ignore, live with the spite and move on.
I completely agree that "Being a victim of shaming - fat or otherwise - shatters your self confidence and even leads to an aggravation of concomitant disorders." The original idea of the Health at Every Size movement recognized this and encouraged a focus on self love as a motivator to care for your body and do things that nourish it and promote health from that standpoint (rather than one of self-judgement). However, I also agree that at the individual level we should all seek to be resilient to the unhelpful negative opinions of others. Taking personal responsibility for our mental state regardless of what others think/say is important to a healthy psychology. I'm always split on these sort of topics - at the political level I think it can be helpful to organize movements (in this case fat-activism) that work as a group to raise awareness for the negative effects of something that affects that group (in this case fat-shaming) but at the individual level think we should encourage personal resilience and responsibility.
Enjoyed the read and agree with almost all of this. But whether I buy your framing or Richard's does eventually come down to the margin we're talking about. If you think of incentives and disincentives on a spectrum from slight nudges to full-blown fat shaming (no pun intended), a rational, compassionate society should try the lower cost nudges and messaging before it tries shame (as you say, shame is not costless). It's unclear where we on this spectrum. Popular culture seems to have moved on from belittling and lampooning fat people to now sometimes glorifying fatness. I'm not super bothered by this even if it can sometimes be outright dishonest. But a corollary of this is the sensitivity around fatness. Friends will enthusiastically discuss how to get their friend to stop smoking but the same friends would think long and hard before even telling their friend they've been gaining weight. It's very plausible that it's the excessive shaming itself that bred this sensitivity, besides general PC culture. But whatever the cause, it's counterproductive. We need to start talking about obesity as something to either work on or take pills for or ideally both. It's not an identity, not something you need to be squeamish about and not something that makes you immune to your loved one's caring for you, and sometimes even giving you tough love. I'm willing to bet this will yield a world in which fat people are less isolated and alone in their struggles.
A couple of things:
1. "a rational, compassionate society should try the lower cost nudges and messaging before it tries shame". I agree with this but feel you're missing the bigger picture. As Andras outlined in his comment, there are many reasons why we've seen increasing rates of obesity over the past 40-50 years, and focusing only on individual behavior misses the broader societal issues going on. My concern is that this individual behavior focus obscures the need for broader research into solutions (more medicinal treatments like Wegovy, maybe fecal transplant or other things that address gut issues that may be causing metabolic dysfunction, better understanding of the role of hormonal balance, issues with the overall food system etc.)
2. "Friends will enthusiastically discuss how to get their friend to stop smoking but the same friends would think long and hard before even telling their friend they've been gaining weight." The reason friends don't tell friends they've gained weight (at least in the female context which I can speak to more confidently) is not just that we're being nice, it's that we're 100% sure the friend is aware. Also, while they may not explicitly tell them they should lose weight they will talk about the various diet and exercise regimes they're trying. Diet and fitness talk is a common water cooler conversation in offices for example in my experience - although I would agree that the fat-activism stuff has encouraged less of this at the margin.
3. I totally agree that seeing being obese as a part of your identity that you need to protect, as Aubrey Gordon does in this clip I tweeted, is very problematic. https://x.com/arntzgray1/status/1723020289099915445?s=20
I agree with you. Shame is almost only going to play a detrimental role in allowing people to change. Shame will often play a paradoxical role in terms of the psychological and emotional stress it offers, which will often be escaped through food. As you note, as long as there is an objective recognition of the health impacts of obesity, perpetuating further shame is not the impetus for change we want it to be.
I could envision a different world (e.g., in the ancestral environment), wherein eating was more of a straightforward behavioral activity and shame could be a helpful deterrent. But in the context of all the structural, societal, and psychological underpinnings to food and overconsumption, the strictly behavioralist account of obesity falls short.
To argue by analogy, change can be easy or hard. If someone is getting poor sleep, maybe they just need to limit blue light exposure or caffeine intake. If they weren't already aware of these and other interventions, this might work amazingly. However, if they're stressed by existential and psychological distress, have hormonal dysregulation, or doing shift work, the simple behavioral interventions won't offer very much efficacy. I'd argue weight loss is more akin to this latter example: as you've stated, most have tried innumerable diets and weight loss approaches, only to regain the weight. There is much more holding them back then a simple lack of knowledge or discipline.
Thanks, Andras, I love this comment! This is exactly right "in the context of all the structural, societal, and psychological underpinnings to food and overconsumption, the strictly behavioralist account of obesity falls short." And I also agree that feelings of shame can be counterproductive in that they can lead to a desire to self-soothe through food. My concern is that the strictly behavioralist account that Richard is promoting obscures the need for real research into solutions that go beyond simple CICO advice (medical, social etc.). I'll admit that the very extreme frontier of the HAES movement, where they claim there are no problems that arise as a result of obesity, are also obscuring the need for that research, but currently the opinion Richard represents is much more mainstream than the "obesity has no impact on health" opinion (I think).
Very good article. I started out inclined to agree with Richard, and you changed my mind. Not to say that obesity is good, and I am overweight myself, but shaming people probably won’t help. Going too far the other way and pretending that being obese is OK or even to be celebrated is obviously mistaken as well. This is a serious and increasing problem in America, and no doubt that there are multiple interacting factors in play. Understanding it and intervening in a productive way probably will only minimally involve making people more embarrassed about their appearance than they already are.
Thanks! Yes, I agree that the extreme of the fat activism movement is bad as well. My biggest concern is not exactly the glorification of obesity, but how some people *identify* with obesity as if it’s a core part of who they are (and encourage others to do so as well). And if you see obesity as an important identity characteristic with no health impacts… then being angry at Adele for losing weight makes sense. This clip is a perfect example of how twisted an identification with being obese can get:
https://x.com/arntzgray1/status/1723020289099915445?s=46&t=sExMpUEEN8nxtCtuJsgy1g
The question would be whether such a middle ground can exist. With an obvious self-destructive and ugly behavior, which would naturally produce shame, is there any way to not produce shame except to actively anti-shame?
Fat shaming is a natural behaviour. Attempting to change it would require acts against nature… like calling it ‘beautiful’.
Feeling bad is not a cost. Feeling bad is merely a signal. A “bad” feeling’s signal serves a purpose, just like the signal of euphoria serves a purpose - they both signal something that the owner needs to know. But those signals are wasted when a person doesn’t have values to interpret them in a way that promotes life. If making people feel bad preserves life, then make people feel bad.
Jesus Christ affirmed this - sin leads to death. But He also revealed the Good News - that those who confess, repent, and declare Him Lord shall receive eternal life.
We have different utility functions. Mine is based on conscious experience and yours is based on life. In my world life is valuable because it can lead to positive conscious experiences. In your world conscious experience is valuable because it can preserve life.
You can’t separate the spirit (consciousness) from the body without rejecting the Good News of the Bible, which was that God (spirit) came into the world as a man Jesus (body), and made it possible for sin and brokenness to be conquered. For overweight people, it is necessary that they feel shame that “something is not right”, because that’s the prerequisite to doing anything about “the thing that is not right”. And if being overweight diminishes the life of the body, it ALSO diminishes the life of the spirit, which resides in the body. You can’t help people with only a partial view of the nature of human beings. You have to have a full view of humans. Otherwise you’ll just be hurting people to satisfy your own pride, and that is not good.
Well, I’m an atheist. Anyways, I’m not separating them, I’m explaining which one I value and which one I see as instrumental.
But to respond to the substantive point. My main argument in the post is that people already feel shame for being obese and that there’s no need to encourage people to actively make them feel additional shame. Shame is not always motivating.
Shame, that doesn’t lead to behavior change, is nothing, as I said before. It’s just a feeling. If a person is the target of shame, and they even feel shame, but their values tell them “there’s nothing wrong here”, then no harm has been done. Stop complaining about shame. What you really mean to argue is values. Make a value claim. Tell me shame is wrong and then tell me why.
I am Christian conservative in Seattle. People try to shame me routinely. I just brush it off when their “values” (more often their lack of values) are faulty. Why is it morally wrong to declare that people ought to work to be fit?
We’re completely talking past each other. Like I said before we have different utility functions. I don’t agree that suffering is nothing in the absence of behavior change, I think it’s actually the main thing. I’m also not “complaining about shame” no one is shaming me, I’m saying it’s not effective to add more shame to people for their weight who already feel a lot of shame. I don’t think it’s morally wrong to say you have to or should work out and eat healthy. I’m saying that most of the time fat people already know this and already know they’re fat and they want to and are trying to change that. Many people try and fail over and over again to lose weight and already feel terrible about it. After a certain point excessive shame can lead to self hatred and I don’t think that’s a productive place to be when you’re trying to change your habits to take care of yourself better.
An emotion is not suffering. It is merely a signal. Do not be reigned over by emotions. Instead, determine what is true (life-giving) and what is false (life-ending), then enact what is true and deny what is false, to the best of your ability.
I think there’s a lot right here, but also maybe a big hole. Yes, losing weight (long-term) once you’re obese is very hard and near impossible at the population level. But not getting obese in the first place is much, much easier!
If people experienced shame very quickly for “freshman 15” or “holiday weight”, I think it could make a big impact.
This is true. I didn't talk about this in the post but while I don't think we should use shame I do think there's a role for friends and family to show care and support to help someone lose weight, or if they haven't realized that their weight is becoming a problem to softly alert them to why it might be. I would, for example, likely tell my boyfriend (or someone else I'm close enough to) to maybe not have another snack before bed if they've been starting to struggle with weight and would support any diet they were choosing to take on to reverse that. I think the reason I didn't focus on that is that in my personal experience I and the people I'm close to have generally been very, very aware of any weight gain and are already doing what they can to manage it. And in that situation adding additional shame is not helpful. But I definitely believe that there are cases where a little more intervention can be appropriate.
This is certainly possible.
It’s not scientific at all, but I can’t get the “Asian mother” out of my head, though. My wife’s mom is Korean, and I remember how readily she noted any weight gain my wife exhibited. “You’re getting kind of fat. Maybe don’t eat so much.” Literally. I’ve seen this dynamic in Japanese homes as well. Can’t help but wonder if that isn’t at least part of Asian resilience to obesity.
I get that, and I used to think that the family norms were a much bigger factor until I heard about the adoption and twin studies on obesity which show that adopted kids have a higher BMI correlation with their bio than with their adopted parents. It’s not that I think the family culture doesn’t matter but it’s definitely not the whole story.
“In a meta-analysis of these twin studies, we found that genetic factors had a strong effect on the variation of body mass index (BMI) at all ages. The common environmental factors showed a substantial effect in mid-childhood, but this effect disappeared at adolescence. Adoption studies supported the role of family environment in childhood obesity as correlations were found between adoptees and adoptive parents; however, correlations were substantially stronger between parents and their biological offspring, further supporting the importance of genetic factors.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19752881/
Fantastic post-woke debate here where Arby’s-Gray addresses Hanania’s arguments one by one in a way that enlightens, without anyone ever being called racist or ——phobic.