{image source :: rudd center for food policy}

Our airwaves, our water coolers, and even dinner tables are full of discussion about this supposed massive threat to our collective health and wellbeing called obesity. In fact, we don’t often hear the term “obesity” without hearing “epidemic” jammed into the same sentence.

For all of the hollering going on, you would think that fat people were dropping like flies and infecting others are their way down. In fact, the director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Dr. Julie Guberding, warned us in 2002 that obesity would be comparable to the bubonic plague. I’m not sure if Dr. Gbererding needs a lesson in history, but the Black Death took the lives of almost 200 million Europeans, approximately 50% of the population, in a four year period.

Meanwhile, obesity is associated with an estimated 26,000 deaths per year, a number that has been drastically revised since the CDC initially claimed that obesity was the cause for 400,000 deaths per year. [Note too that many studies assert that the risk of death associated with obesity is the same for individuals in normal weight categories, and less than those in low weight categories, but we don’t hear those statistics.] Have our shaming treatments for obesity worked that quickly to reduce the number so dramatically? No, not at all. Instead, the obesity epidemic stakeholders were forced to more honestly report the findings.

So why all the fuss about obesity as an epidemic? Once you start to peel back the layers, you start to see just how many individuals and organizations stand to profit from treating obesity as the next SARS or cholera. Government entities gain funding and public approval. Politicians gain supporters who see a leader being “proactive” and “tough” on health issues. Doctors gain patients being more interested in their surgical interventions and medications. Pharmaceutical companies boom with business. And the diet and weight loss industries? Puh-lease…

Who doesn’t benefit from the myth of the obesity epidemic? Well, obese people for one (and all of us for two). Individuals of a large body size or weight are further stigmatized by labeling supposedly increasing waistlines an epidemic. Just like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the culture of panic that surrounds the condition leads to individuals being feared, reviled, and isolated. Large people in our society today are told they represent what is to be avoided. They are ascribed with labels of being “lazy,” “unmotivated,” “lacking willpower,” and assumed to eat much, move little, and be a drain on healthcare. Needless to say, all of these assumptions are incorrect.

With it clear that obesity and weight itself is not a crisis, it is important to acknowledge that we do have an issue on our hands. As a society, we have a distorted relationship with food and our bodies. I’d like to propose that what we have in our society is not an obesity epidemic, but a hunger crisis.

We hunger for the taste of real, non-processed food. We hunger for the days of our childhood when we were able to listen to and trust our bodies to tell us when to start and stop eating. We hunger for a connection with our bodies. We hunger for joyful movement that makes us feel alive and unencumbered. We hunger for sensibility and rationality among those who lead us and care for us. We hunger for honesty within and between ourselves. We hunger for food to be a part of celebration but not all of it. We hunger for time to spend with ourselves in quiet reflection. We hunger for peace in our bodies and minds.

Until we can recognize the hunger crisis, we’ll be forced to continue wandering the labyrinth of manipulated statistics, threatening claims, and fear mongering. Until we recognize that our cultural struggle is with our individual relationship with ourselves as embodied creatures, we get mired in the battle of the bulge that the weight loss industry and our government would have us believe to be true. From that place, the likely outcome is getting stuck in a vicious sequence of weight cycling and shame. However, if we can recognize what it is we are truly hungry for, we might just be able to satiate ourselves.

How has all of the media attention on the “obesity epidemic” impacted you? Do you think we have a hunger crisis going on?

{via pinterest; originally here}

This post is one that has been brewing in mind for a while. After I watched Brene Brown’s recent TED talk on approaching shame, I was settled on writing it. And then I read Gala Darling’s amazing post on whether she’s a radical self-love hypocrite for wearing five-inch heels.

What both of these inspiring women talk about is the concept of privilege. Brown claims that we cannot talk about race relations in this country without talking about shame, the link being the acknowledgement of white privilege. I whole-heartedly agree. To really address race, we have to address privilege, and we have to address shame.

Gala Darling points outs the fact that just as those of us who are white are granted certain privileges in our society, so are those of us who are attractive, or who ascribe to the norms laid out like inalienable laws in our culture.

Think about it. I’m sure that you’ve had the experience of being decked out in a pretty dress, high heels, and a face full of make-up, and been treated oh so slightly better than when you showed up in your hoodie and flannel shorts. One example that I can think of is running into a grocery store to pick something up before a party and being asked by several different staff if they could help me find what I was looking for. Wow, I thought, what service! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same experience when I walked in a week later after a sweaty run and no shower. Granted, the first time it could have been my hurried expression and the second time my smell to blame, but I’d put money on the beauty privilege idea.

This type of treatment isn’t relegated to grocery stores, unfortunately. Watching The Voice recently, my husband and I were commenting that the judges seem to place a value on physical attractiveness in selecting the winner of the “battle-round” (when two contestants face off in a singing duel). This is particularly ironic because the show is based around the idea that one should be advanced and selected based on the quality of their performance. In fact, it’s what makes the show so engaging is that individuals with non-stereotyped body sizes, physical appearances, or styles, are actually given a chance to shine. In the beginning, it eliminates beauty privilege. But as soon as the judges can use visual information to help them make a decision, we start to see the insidious pull of attraction. Just think of Susan Boyle’s rise to fame.

It’s not just the judges that are engaging in this. Just wait until the live shows when the American public can vote. I feel quite certain we’ll see more beauty bias at play. And to be honest, there’s good, biologically speaking, reason for this.

Back in the 1970’s, some social psychology researchers identified the “what is beautiful is good” bias. What they and subsequent researchers found was that attractive people are assumed to be better employees, smarter, happier, and have more positive personality traits. These same biases operate for lower versus higher weight individuals as well.

What’s interesting is that, while these ideas are not necessarily founded, when they are true it could also be due the cycle of privilege. When someone is born attractive, they are treated differently from the get-go. They are regarded well by peers and possibly interact more frequently, thereby developing more charisma and confidence. They are favored by teachers and might end up enjoying school more for this reason, so suddenly they are excelling in their courses.

The point is, the idea of beauty privilege is complex, and the solution is unfortunately complex as well. It’s not as easy as just stopping giving pretty people all the good stuff. Our evolution-driven wiring to seek out what is attractive is not going anywhere. So what we are left with is the task of recognizing and talking about the idea of beauty privilege.

Just as with any form of privilege, we hold back from discussing it because it can bring about shame. But we know that approaching shame and sitting with it in all its discomfort is part of the work of becoming more authentic and happier human beings. If we want to live in a world where our politicians are the best people to run the government, our singers are actually talented, and our children don’t feel they have to wear make-up in pre-school, then we have to acknowledge and start dialoguing about what is hard to talk about.

How have you seen beauty privilege? 

As the alarm bells have grown louder and more piercing over the last several years, warning us that Obesity kills! and Fat is the devil!, a quieter voice has been breaking through the noise. If we can allow ourselves to turn down the volume on the anti-fat rhetoric for a moment – and I recognize that’s asking a lot – we learn from this voice that, oh… maybe, it’s possible, perhaps… we got it all wrong?

It’s one thing to challenge the diet and weight-loss industry, but to also rock the entire medical community’s entrenched belief system about what healthy means… Well, that’s a big job. Fortunately for us, there is another, strong community fighting this battle. The movement is called Health at Every Size, which I’ve told you about before here, and it’s founded on the idea that fat does not equate to unhealthy.

Even those of us for whom this concept doesn’t sound totally bizarre sometimes find ourselves falling into fat stigmatization, even in subtle ways. We accept the fact that our workplaces are hosting a weight-loss competition among employees or we complement a friend who’s slimmed down, often without even knowing the circumstances.

To do the work required of us – which is to fight and defeat these untrue assumptions about weight – we need resources. That’s why I was so thrilled when the Association for Size Diversity and Health launched the Health at Every Size Blog.

Since it’s first post last June, the blog continues to grow in the complexity and richness of ideas. It offers a space for a thorough look at some of the issues that crop up when thinking about weight and health (which we all too often think about in these days of disgusting and shaming campaigns).

One of the strengths of the site is that it is a collaborative effort of some of the most talented and brilliant minds in the HAES field. Deb Burgard, PhD, Linda Bacon, PhD, Jon Robison, PhD, and Michelle May, M.D. are all on my totally nerdy idols list (the list is nerdy, not them!), and they have each contributed incredibly thought-provoking pieces to the site.

Some of my favorite have included whether BMI is a good measure of health, if it’s possible to love your body and still want to lose weight, and whether we have it all wrong when it comes to treating binge eating.

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look, I urge you to check out what HAES is all about. Just remember that I warned you that it might turn your current paradigm on it’s ear. If you’re cool with that, click here.

{image credit :: haescommunity.org}

With the race to the Republican presidential candidate nomination well under way, iPad apps and news broadcasts are blowing up with commentary on where the candidates stand on issues of the economy, national defense, and immigration. What often gets too little airtime are the issues that affect women so intimately.

It’s easy to think that politics can exist outside of our interest and awareness, that it’s the thing over there that lives only when we turn on the news. But the personal and political and inextricably linked. Women’s bodies, our choices, rights, and ability to care for them, are subject to the decisions made hundreds or thousands of miles away in Washington. Scary, huh?

That’s why it’s so crucially important to understand where the candidates stand on issues that matter, or should matter, to us. We have an opportunity now to make our voices heard, and for women to use their collective power to ensure that our interests are being addressed.

Here are some of the top issues that concern women today, and where some of the candidates stand:

[Please note that this is not my attempt to sway anyone in any particular political direction. While my biases are, I’m quite sure, evident, I hope that you will use this information as a starting point for looking deeper into the issues, the candidates, and your own values.]

Reproductive Issues

Contrary to popular belief, reproductive issues do not focus solely on the whether a woman should be legally allowed to have an abortion, which all of the GOP candidates uniformly oppose. While all of the candidates are against giving women the right to choose in all cases, some, like Mitt Romney, would grant women this right in the case of incest, rape, or severe risk to the mother’s life. Others, like Ron Paul, an obstetrician for thirty years, believe that abortion is murder in all cases and has no place in our society.

Apart from abortion, the politicians are also heavy-hitters when it comes to decisions about whether insurance plans cover birth control (which Ron Paul opposes), whether contraception should be discussed in schools (which Rick Santorum opposes), and whether pharmacists should be able to dispense emergency contraception to rape victims (which Mitt Romney opposes). As senator, Santorum voted for measures to financially penalize low-income women for having children and penalize states for children born out of wedlock. Further, the issues of reproduction come up when talking about fertility concerns as well. Newt Gingrich recently stated that he wants to more closely investigate and impose rules on clinics where in-vitro fertilization occurs, seemingly ignoring the fact that these facilities are closely monitored and regulated by state government and various health organizations.

Relationships

The right of individuals to love whom the wish is not a uniquely female issue, but it’s one that certainly touches women deeply. Despite the 2011 Gallup poll that reported 53% of Americans support the legalization of gay marriage, all of the current GOP candidates oppose this and want to narrow the definition of marriage. Some of the candidates, such as Romney, support domestic partnerships for gay couples, but do not support marriage or even civil unions, stating that marriage should be preserved for a union between a man and a woman. Santorum recently stated that even a father who “is in jail and has abandoned” his family is better at raising a child than two gay parents. Gingrich believes this is an issue of “dignity” and also supports marriage being a one man, one woman event.

Relatedly, some of the candidates believe that sexual identity should be a factor in military service, an issue that is particularly relevant to women, in fact. While female service members make up about one in five troops, they make up  almost half of those discharged for their sexual orientation. Romney is against the idea of letting gays and lesbians serve actively in the U.S. Military. And when an openly gay soldier was recently booed at a debate, none of the candidates stood up for the man in uniform.

Further, the idea of fidelity in relationships is an issue that is close to many women’s hearts. While we can never know the intimate details of the candidate’s romantic lives, we do have on record Gingrich’s multiple acts of infidelity during multiple marriages, which he openly acknowledges as mistakes. Some voters, however, feel that these acts indicate a lack of ability to make sound, ethical, and non-impulsive decisions and to respect an institution (marriage) that he proclaims to hold with such, well, dignity.

Jobs & Health Coverage

While the economic recession has hit us all hard, it’s actually hit women a little less hard, in some ways. Women are, in fact, 50 percent more likely to be employed than men, today. There are many women, however, who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. The current GOP candidates are all opposed to stimulus money, though they do support certain big corporate tax breaks. That’s interesting, as almost 100 percent of new (net) jobs created in this country are by small business. Part of Santorum’s solution to fix the economy is to drill for more oil. Okay. If you think that joining the military might be the answer to your financial woes, think again if you’re a woman. Santorum stated that he believes with women in combat, emotions could get in the way. Yes, you read that right.

With the cutbacks in jobs has come the loss of employer-provided health insurance for many Americans. Many women and families cannot afford COBRA or their company has stopped providing coverage because they can’t afford it either. In fact, working women are much less likely to have health benefits than working men, and they are more likely to be working for minimum wage (on which it’s nearly impossible to buy adequate health insurance).  As the surrogate doctors in most American homes, many women are faced with excruciating decisions when it comes to the health of themselves and their families. The GOP candidates all oppose Obama’s health care plan and want to cut both state and federal funds for Medicaid (of which poor women and children are the major recipients).

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This is certainly not an exhaustive list of issues. Other important ones to consider are things like the candidate’s take on education, social security, and immigration, issues that also tend disproportionately impact women. If you care about women – yourself, your mother, sister, daughter, or friends — educate yourself before going to the polls. This year, the personal is absolutely political.

Note: Lest you think that I believe President Obama does everything right, read this.

What is your take on the GOP candidates positions on these issues? Totally disagree with me? Tell us about it!

{image credit :: bdcoen}