I MAKE MISTAKES, BEAUTIFUL MISTAKES...

If you think about it, the problem of “obesity” is a marketer’s dream. Despite the rhetoric, it doesn’t actually kill anybody, so the diet industry has a lifelong customer. There’s no cure for it, and the supposed cure (dieting or weight loss surgery) causes a variety of problems, including weight gain, which just keeps the customer hooked in. Plus, lots of folks who aren’t fat are convinced that they’re fat or going to become fat, so they buy the product as well. This is marketing heaven!

Both the diet scam artists and their enablers in the public-health establishment keep selling, with great success, the following utterly incredible message: Americans are fat because they aren’t trying hard enough to be thin.

This claim is about as plausible as the hypothesis that Americans are poor because they don’t care enough about being rich. Imagine the absurdity of an argument that the reason there are 50 million poor people in America is because our culture is insufficiently materialistic.

Yet this, in effect, is the claim of our anti-fat warriors: Americans are fat because they don’t care enough to make the sacrifices necessary to be thin. Interestingly, it’s somewhat difficult to find people of even moderate intelligence and education who can maintain the level of self-satisfied ignorance necessary to believe that poor people “choose” to be poor, yet it’s very easy to find such people who accept as self-evident the notion that fat people “choose” to be fat.

This inspires me to point something out to my more liberal readers. Remember that particularly clueless right-wing acquaintance of yours? The one who believes that anybody in America can become rich, because he thinks about poverty in a completely unscientific, anecdotal way, which allows him to treat the exceptional case as typical? The one who can’t seem to understand the simplest structural arguments about the nature of social inequality?

The next time you see some fat people and get disgusted by their failure to “take care of themselves,” think about your clueless friend.

I don’t want to be rude. I just wish you would cease discussing your no-carb, no-fat, gluten-free, low-salt, no-fun diet. Nor do I want to hear about the “snob” diet, or the one where you eat certain foods only during certain times of the day, or the raw diet, or how you get all your slimming meals delivered. Do not speak to me of Weight Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous, Jenny Craig or the Dr. Perricone salmon skin cult. Mention not the regime where you don’t consume anything until you’re about to pass out, and then you eat a single cube of cheese. I really don’t want to hear about your cleanse, your juice fast, or how much energy you have now that you disdain all solid food. Do your skinny jeans fit? Is your skin glowing? Are you retaining water? I didn’t just ask that, because I don’t give a crap. Don’t tell me your goal, current, or ideal weight, your set point, how much you have lost or gained or that you’ve reached a plateau. You’re worse than boring me. You’re torturing me.