Paul Campos, Please Marry Me; Everyone Else, Please Bite Me
The headline: Most obese people don’t see themselves that way.
The point: Fat people are such fucking idiots they don’t know they’re fat.
The real story: Most “obsese” people know exactly how much they weigh and classify themselves as “overweight,” but don’t happen to know the arbitrary BMI cut-off that categorizes them as obese.
How many times do I have to tell you people to read Paul Campos? Read Paul Campos. No, really. READ PAUL CAMPOS. (From that last article: “I am probably overweight by government definitions right now because I had lunch, but I was not overweight this morning.” And that? Is why he’s my pretend boyfriend of the day.)
For starters, BMI is a ridiculously crude standard–it factors in your height, your weight, and not one damn other thing. Ergo, according to my 2004 hardcover of what was then called–for precisely this reason–The Obesity Myth, Russell Crowe, George Clooney, and Sammy Sosa are all technically “obese.” Is anyone going to call them out on a lack of self-awareness if they say they’re not?
Since most of my 4 readers have met me, I’ll ask you this: Would you categorize me as borderline obese? Because I am damn close, by the same definition. I am also, according to my last physical, perfectly fucking healthy (except for being a smoker). I’m over thirty, I’m nearly “obese,” I have a family history of heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension, and yet… nuthin’. Cholesterol’s good, blood pressure’s good, blood sugar’s good. Weird!
Those of you who have met me–or read my paeans to curvy jeans–also know I have a relatively tiny waist. According to Health Canada, among others, this means I probably don’t have a damn thing to worry about; I am clearly pear-shaped (well, more like peanut-shaped, if you factor in the boobs), and the waist on my nearly obese body is several inches smaller than the cut-off for health risks. Thigh fat, much as it may vex me, probably ain’t gonna kill me. BMI doesn’t factor that in.
Second: the lead author of this study admits that many of her fucking colleagues don’t know the cut-off for “obesity.”
Third: The article says nothing about who participated in the study, so we can all tell ourselves that a bunch of couch-bound fatties think they’re normal. If the “obese” people who participated were mostly just above the cut-off, then it’s not a fucking wonder they didn’t know. Also, we know nothing about the race or socioeconomic status of the participants, which can make a big difference. As Campos says:
The truth is that to be fat in America today means to weigh more than whatever a person’s particular social milieu considers appropriate…. [T]his means it is perfectly possible–and in a certain twisted sense even “reasonable”–for a 130-pound white college student of average height to consider herself “fat,” while a working-class African American woman who weighs 50 pounds more is not likely to think of herself as “overweight” (and she, too, will be correct in her self-assessment).
In my white, upper-middle-class social milieu, I’m chubby to fat. If I were a working-class African American, I’d more likely be regarded as completely normal. (Per Campos, black women, on average, weigh more than white women, have far more positive body images, and do not seem to be at risk for increased mortality even if they’re “morbidly obese,” according to researchers who have actually bothered to look at them. Go. Fucking. Figure.) Also, as overplayed as this card may be, the fact remains, if I were an early 17th-century European, I’d be goddamn Venus. Context counts for a lot.
5) See subject line.
