I’m prejudiced and I know it. Faced with a line-up of suspects and a crime of theft, I’d direct my focus on the obese person. But only if the crime involved chocolate donuts or a freshly baked cherry pie. I imagine.
Wait. Maybe that’s profiling. Is it “rational” profiling? No. I have no evidence to back up my suspicions. It may be the case that skinny folk are actually more likely to steal donuts.
Prejudice runs deep. I’m fairly sure that on some level I hold lesser opinions of very heavy folk. I try not to. And I do use my conscious thoughts to counter-act potentially deep-seated biases.
One line of reasoning people will often give to justify their feelings about the circumferentially-challenged goes something like this:
How could they do that to themselves!? (I.e., eat to the point of obesity.)
There may be two assumptions contained in the above sentiment. 1. Obese individuals are “doing it to themselves:” they lack the will and/or self-control that we thinsters have, 2. By becoming and staying large they are hurting themselves.
Do the obese really lack self-control? I suspect not. I imagine that among a number of other of things, obese people may have a greater drive to eat, thus a normal/average amount of self-control may prove ineffective. They also may live in physical and social environments in which the readily available foods pack more calories than those in the environment of thin folk.
But those are only conjectures on my part. Semi-educated conjectures, but conjectures nonetheless.
As for hurting themselves, recent studies have begun to question the fat = poorer health equation. One I encountered recently had this heading: ‘Obese’ BMI does not harm current health of young adults, study says.
The lead paragraph said:
A study examining the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and illness suggests that a BMI of 30 or above, a signal of obesity according to federal health standards, does not translate into current illness among adults under age 40. [bolds mine]
Hmm.
In addition, researchers found that across all age groups studied, from 25 to 70 years, there was little difference in the current health status in normal-weight vs. overweight people based on the medications they took.
Okay, there may be a problem with “medication use” as an indicator of overall health. Maybe, maybe not. Another study I recall actually found better health in the very old for those who were overweight but not obese.
What the heck is going on? In the least I think we should conclude that the equation between weight and health is not a simple one.
And as for the missing cherry pie — I think my wife stole it. She’ll likely resort to the “entrapment” defense. With a warm, flaky crust like that, and the filling perfectly thick, but not too, packing a blissful balance between sweet and tart — what sane person could resist?
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