A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates:
Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.
It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight.
Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.
High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.
Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated.
All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can
judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.
– Mod D
READ THIS.
Also, as a reminder, the reason that cycles of deprivation and overeating affect the body so much is because we evolved to survive those cycles. When someone goes through a period of deprivation, we have millions of years of evolution that go “OH SHIT WE COULD STARVE BETTER HANG ONTO THOSE CALORIES.” Hence weight gain.
In “How to SURVIVE the Hunger Games pt. 1,” MatPat points out that one of the best way to survive is to put on as much weight as possible–five pounds of fat is 17,500 calories, or enough calories to survive for 8.5 days with no food whatsoever. That’s the point of fat, after all, to have enough energy to live in periods of low- or no food.
Having to go through cycles of deprivation sets the body into survival mode. 10,000 years ago, having extra fat meant the literal difference between life and death when there simply was no food available. If I don’t have access to sufficient nutrition, my body automatically hangs on to every calorie available and turns it into fat. because it knows that there will be a time when I need that fat to survive. It doesn’t matter if it makes me look “ugly” or “unappealing” because my survival doesn’t hinge on me being pretty, it hinges on me being able to continue living.
While we don’t live in the exact same conditions–here in America, there is food, even if I can’t access it–we simply haven’t had enough time to evolve to change how the body responds to scarcity.
So saying that someone who lives in a constant state of food insecurity is lying because they’re fat? It’s a profoundly stupid, uninformed thing to think. If you want to worry about obesity, the best way to do it is guarantee that everyone–and I mean EVERYONE–has access to nutritious food. Not ramen, not cheap, shitty, high-calorie low-nutritious food, but good food.
(I live in the fucking future, in one of the richest countries in the world, and yet there are people who don’t have enough to eat. I cannot begin to tell you how infuriating this is to me.)
Access to healthier foods at a low cost would not solve the problem at hand without proper education, though. And there are plenty of nutritious foods that are at very low cost that most people who are worried about getting food on the table should be buying instead of the cheap, but unhealthy options.
Do you honestly think that if the solution to food insecurity was as simple as just buying rice and beans, that anyone would still be starving in the US or Canada? Do you really believe that poor parents are just choosing to let their children go hungry because they are too ignorant and uneducated to know better? Honestly, a person must hold some pretty prejudiced and condescending beliefs about poor people to justify this type of comment.
For the record: Poor people do not need “education” from wealthy people who have never experienced true food insecurity concerning the best ways to live and eat. Poor people are not poor and lacking food because they are ignorant, or uneducated, or lazy. Yes, even poor fat people! Poor people suffer from food insecurity because they experience legitimate social, economic, and physical barriers to accessing adequate food to survive. Period.
When I was 18, I moved into crack alley with my ex-husband. Like, 12-year-olds tried to sell us crack when we walked to Walmart. It was pretty jarring. So we walk to Walmart and he hands me $20 and said “Feed us for a week.”
I looked at him like he’d lost his mind. This was not a thing that was possible to do! See, I grew up solidly middle class. We were never hungry, and for that matter, my parents always made sure that we had good food–plenty of fruits and vegetables, balanced meals, everything a growing teenager would need. I never had to go without.
But that $20 was literally all we had. We were far, far below the poverty line. Being at the poverty line would have been awesome for us.
I fed us. I bought cheap balogna and white bread and maybe one other thing. Trust me, I did not want these things. I wanted apples and spinach and chicken. My sister and I did most of the cooking for the household as teenagers–I knew perfectly well how to structure a balanced, healthy meal. But I had $20 for a week so I bought what I had to.
That’s why I enlisted. Because I wanted to be able to afford butter. Because I missed being able to buy blueberries. Because I was hungry all the time. Because I couldn’t live like that and I was afraid if I didn’t get out, I never would. So I joined a job where I could die, that damaged me in some pretty profound ways, because I was hungry.
It’s interesting to me that someone can write a post about how broken the system is, the myriad ways that poverty hurts people, and someone will still find a way to say that poor people wouldn’t be hungry and fat if they weren’t so stupid.
I think this thread just gave me a deep realization about why, exactly, the “it’s just about education” argument has never sat well with me.
