Weighing Reality

"Obesity," declares Charlotte Cooper, author of 1998's Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size, "is just a word used by people to medicalize fat."

Extra weight, once considered a genetic short straw, is increasingly characterized as a crisis threatening the physical, political, and moral health of our nation -- even as large bodies are becoming increasingly visible in popular culture.

Medical and public-health sources define obesity as weighing more than 20 percent over one's "ideal weight." However, the methods that are used to determine "normal" weight ranges are limited in their estimation of what constitutes obesity. And as the ranks of overweight and/or obese Americans swell, they challenge the very notion that fat is not "normal."

So what's making us so fat, and why? In the past, overweight Americans have had several tried-and-true explanations: genetics, an underactive thyroid, and that old favorite, big bones. But a quick review of studies and books on the plumping of the American populace shows that there is no consensus about the etiology of individual weight gain. Increasing rates of obesity have been attributed to a wide range of factors both personal (overwork, food obsession, yo-yo dieting, stress) and social (poverty, the rise of fast food, poor nutrition education). Now, a handful of scholars and psychologists are attempting a deeper evaluation of this hefty new body, while even the basest expression of popular culture -- that is, reality tv -- is revealing some intriguing things about American corpulence.

Linda Papadopoulos -- a British psychologist, author of the 2004 book Mirror Mirror: Dr. Linda's Body Image Revolution, and consultant on the U.S. television show "Celebrity Fit Club" (more on that later) -- says weight gain is "not as simple as 'people just eat.'"

Psychologists like Papadopoulos and psychoanalyst/writer Shari Thurer (author of 2005's The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy) find that individual weight gain can be attributed to causes as benign as eating when bored or as extreme as responding to sexual abuse by piling on pounds to make oneself unattractive. They also tend to link pathological eating disorders -- including anorexia and bulimia as well as compulsive eating -- to deeper issues around relationships and control, often rooted in childhood development.

In his early writings, Freud avoided arbitrary separations between psyche (mind) and soma (body), and in this approach Australian neurologist/psychologist Elizabeth A. Wilson sees fertile ground for new theories about eating and weight. She decries the progression of psychoanalytical investigation toward purely ideational theories of eating (what does it mean?) and away from biological explanations (what happens in the gut?).

In her 2004 book, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Wilson expands feminist theories of the body through the illustration of biology's dynamism. Intrigued by the positive effects of using antidepressants to treat bulimia, she points out that the majority of the body's serotonin is found not in the brain, but in the "complex neural networks that innervate the gut."

Whether fat is viewed as a medical problem or as an indication of a damaged psyche, the message that permeates pop culture is the same: Healthy people are not fat, and fat people are not healthy. This rhetoric ignores the fact that a thin person can be weaker or more prone to illness than his or her fat counterpart, and it coerces us into a constant vigilance against what could be an evolutionary preference for amassing energy reserves (fat) to sustain us in periods of famine. If it were so easy, natural, or normal for us to be our "ideal" weight, perhaps we wouldn't need to struggle so hard or become dependent on external supplements and medical intervention to maintain it.