I have a
question. Call it the question of the day.
Why is
everyone so goddamn fat?
I’ve
been wondering about this for a long time now. Everyone’s read the statistics, though
as you may realize, I hate statistics and seldom quote them. But they do
reflect a certain trend.
People
are getting huge. I mean, HUGE. Sometimes I wonder where it’s all coming
from. In the past ten or twelve years, the population has ballooned to the
point where half of us are too damn fat, and a third of us are way WAY too
fat.
If it’s
only in the last ten years or so, what happened? As far as I can remember, back
then everybody was obsessed with their weight. Everybody wanted to be thinner.
There was diet book, after diet book, after diet book coming out and hitting
the top of the best-seller list.
I had to
ask myself: why keep buying these things, when you obviously can’t follow them?
Why the endless search for the Holy Grail of diets, the one that will take
weight off and keep it off forever and evermore?
Meanwhile,
in the midst of this best-sellerism – which still goes on today, only in a more
scientific, theory-oriented way (can’t eat carbs with protein, have to follow
your blood type, primordial cave man diet, What would Jesus Do diet –
presumably, consisting of loaves and fishes) – we’re getting so damn
fat, it’s shooting past the upper limits of the scale.
You see
this reflected in all those weight-oriented TV shows like Biggest Loser
and whatever-the-rest-of-them-are (I don’t watch them much, too painful). Shows
that are seemingly unrelated, like Hoarders, give us examples of
impoverished men and women who are somehow enormous, their bodies no longer in
any kind of recognizable shape. Usually it comes out that they can’t cook anything
because there’s no electricity – the rats have gnawed through the cables or
something – so they live on McDonalds and throw the leftovers and wrappers all over the floor (which is nice for the rats).
I
shouldn’t have watched this show at all, I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was
like a circus side show: once I fell into it, I couldn’t get out. It was called
Taboo and it explored the weird, weird, weird, weird things
people do (including having sex with the Berlin Wall), always with some expert
coming on to say “their behaviour falls within the realm of normal activity”.
One of these “normal” guys, somewhere in his 30s and living on disability, was
probably close to 400 pounds. His “thing” was to dress up and
act like an infant, goo-gooing, sucking things, toddling around in enormous
fuzzy sleepers and being fed glop.
Being
fed? His “caregiver”, whom at first I thought was his mother, was probably at
least 200 pounds heavier than the guy. Her body
was just not in a human shape, at all. It was like a misshapen cookie that had
melted in the oven, everything all over the place. When she stood, which was
difficult for her, her stomach touched the floor, and her breasts reached past
her knees. This was supermorbid obesity at its most shocking.
The
woman had no upper teeth, and maybe that’s a separate post because an awful lot
of people on reality TV have no teeth. It’s a related issue, maybe. Toothlessness
may explain why this guy lives on baby
food, but what about the adult diapers? Does she change them, and – no, we
won’t go there. It’s just too horrific.
But
let’s turn to the more mundane examples of hugeness that we see every day. I just
don’t remember seeing this level of obesity in the past. I don’t remember
someone lumbering on the bus who weighs maybe 400
pounds, I mean a young guy in his twenties. And I can’t help but think how
on earth he’s going to get to 40, or even 30.
There
are theories. The weirdest one I saw involved wheat: there’s a scientist
out there who says the new strains of wheat are designed to make you fat.
Supposedly, if you give up wheat, i.e. go gluten-free like many people do
anyway, the excess tonnage will just drop off and stay off.
(Original McDonalds hamburger)
There
are portion sizes: yes, my-oh-my! My husband and I like to go to
Denny’s, mainly because it’s relatively cheap and they know how to cook an
omelette. But every time we go to Denny’s, we seem to see a family who are all
of them huge: most heartbreakingly, even the small children who are encased in
soft, puffy fat.
Look at
the menu, and you’ll see why. The Grand Slam has been replaced by a sort of
grotesque Grand-Grand-Grand slam with four eggs and six sausages and God
knows how many pancakes. Reminds me a bit of their bacon extravaganza, in which
they offered such greasy delights as a bacon sundae.
If
you’re still hungry after being slammed, you can order deep-fried hush puppies
(presumably, not the shoes) with ice cream and syrup for dipping. And Denny’s
is hardly alone. McDonalds Quarter Pounder is now a Third Pounder. Most people
who go to McDonalds can’t do math, so maybe they don’t realize how much larger
it is. Wendy’s had a three-patty bacon cheeseburger which gave me chest pains
just looking at the menu board.
Meantime,
in spite of all the emphasis on fitness and going to the gym, people just
don’t, for the most part: they park as close to the mall as possible to avoid
walking for two minutes. I wish I could find the cartoon, one of the best ones
I’ve seen, in which a couple in a department store has the following
conversation:
“Now
let’s see, where’s that treadmill they have on sale?”
”It’s way over on the other side of the store.”
“Oh to
hell with it then, let’s forget it.”
Never
once seeing the irony.
We save
steps. I’m a walker – it’s the only consistent exercise I’ve ever done, but
I’ve been at it for more than 20 years – and people are constantly trying to
give me rides, even complete strangers. Needless to say, I tell them no. But
there’s something about walking. It’s stigmatized. It’s just not done. Even
cycling is better, but still seen as something of a fruitcake activity around
here, something they do in Stanley Park, not the suburbs where a car is
the only way of getting around.
I get
mowed down regularly, which says something about the car-oriented society that I
believe has evolved around malls. I have learned to look obsessively over my
left shoulder to avoid that dreaded, heedless right turn. They don’t see me, so
I have to see them to avoid ending up one inch thick on the pavement.
I get
despairing sometimes, I really do. For the statistics aren’t good. Fatness is
still escalating. This makes me wonder: where have all the fat people come
from? They must have been much thinner than this a decade ago.
God
didn’t just pull out a whole lot of enormous balloons and blow them up and launch
them out there. Surely people have done this to themselves.
If the
statistics have changed this alarmingly, it means that people who used to be
normal weight are now increasingly overweight, or even obese. Women’s clothing
reflects this change. It seems everything I try on is stretchy – not just a
little stretchy, but stretchy like chewing gum, so that it doesn’t snap back
and ends up like an exhausted rubber band
Not only
that: sizes have changed. I’ve been fighting weight swings all my life, and in
high school I often wore a Size 14 or 16.
Now I am
sure I am fatter than I was then, and can wear a 10 or 12.
So what
has happened? Can you guess? This is called “vanity sizing” , and it has been
done to keep women from committing suicide over their appearance.
It was
long ago that Oprah, having skinnied down alarmingly on some kind of powdered
protein, suddenly proclaimed, “Diets don’t work!”. She seesawed up and down
after that, then kind of settled where she is now, probably a good 200
pounds. She spent one show sitting in a chair and addressing her viewers
about her weight. No narcissism there! Her personal trainer came on and said
she had “unresolved issues”, but Oprah has always maintained that having people
like Dr. Phil on her show was just as good as therapy.
Be that
as it may.
I have
no doubt that the massively obese have “issues” beyond just trying to fit behind the wheel of a car.
There is a strong connection between obesity and sexual abuse (as there is with
any addictive behaviour). It’s burying yourself, really. Not to mention lugging a huge burden around.
The symbolism is very potent, and hands a clear victory to the abuser.
I’ve
seen people come on talk shows who represent the Fat Acceptance Movement, and
in every case they round up an expert (there must be a TV-related agency called
Rent-an-Expert) who says obesity has no significant negative effect on health.
Just as easily, one can find experts who tell us exactly the opposite. I’m sick
of experts, myself.
I’m
frightened of the escalation, because it hasn’t topped out yet, and I wonder
when it will. Obesity is fast becoming normalized, and we’ve learned to accept
it as never before.
When I
was a kid, we had a neighbour named Ruth. My mother didn’t have friends so much
as caseloads, so she befriended this woman along with the blind lady, the woman
who was “barren” and could not have kids, and the lady with the hydrocephalic
daughter. At my estimate, Ruth weighed somewhere between 250 and 300
pounds, but no more than that. She was considered huge, enormously obese,
to the point that she seldom left the house. On the rare times when she did,
people disapproved. They didn’t really think she should be showing herself, and
if she insisted on it, why didn’t she wear a corset or something? For that was
the age when even the thinnest women wore iron girdles to shape their bodies
and keep things from moving.
Doesn’t
happen any more. We don’t wear girdles, except for those awful Spanx things
that cover you from neck to ankles and are supposedly “comfortable”. And even
though they claim “anyone” can wear them, “anyone” does not include a woman who
weighs 400 pounds.
Will we
ALL be obese in twenty years? Will people start exploding from the internal
pressure (I have actually heard stories of skin splitting: and what happens
when someone who has had a massive tummy-tuck gets fat again)? Will gastric
bypasses, which often backfire (look at Carnie Wilson) become as routine as
tonsillectomies used to be? Will we require significant mutilation and the risk
of death to try to regain some semblance of a recognizable human shape?
