Reply to Do attitudes about obesity cause more harm than obesity itself?

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Reply to "Do attitudes about obesity cause more harm than obesity itself?"

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[quote=Anonymous]I was struck by[url=https://medium.com/@JJRodV/my-fat-body-is-more-than-a-ticking-time-bomb-1f83ec7d307c] this article [/url]by Jorge Rodriguez entitled, "My Fat Body is More Than A Ticking Time Bomb."
(URL in case my link didn't work: https://medium.com/@JJRodV/my-fat-body-is-more-than-a-ticking-time-bomb-1f83ec7d307c)

He describes a visit to a new doctor where the first words out of the doctor's mouth were "you should consider weight loss surgery."

[quote]He didn’t ask my name, where I’m from, my challenges, my struggles, my opportunities, my environment, my hopes, and my dreams. Frankly, he didn’t even ask me about my health or what brought me to his office.[/quote]

He also goes into how attitudes about obesity are especially pernicious when coupled with the issues surrounding race relations. I'm a white man with no particular weight issues, so I'm not well equipped to grapple with any of this. But my wife has always struggled with her weight and has lately opened up to me about what a mind-f**k the culture around weight and dieting can be. The article talks about how poorly sourced the connection between obesity and health outcomes seems to be, and even where those connections are sound, how the weight loss and diet industry along with popular media stretch the good science well beyond its limits. Also, the medical and other treatment recommendations have pretty low success rates and are all bound up with moral judgments about weight not to mention, according to the author, racial stereotypes. (He says the historical focus on thinness cropped up particularly as an anti-Black, anti-immigrant sentiment where the ideal of the white, Protestant patrician was to be thin.)

In any event, it seems that the treatment might be worse than the disease in some respects. The intense focus on exercise and diet seems not to be very sustainable and very often has a low success rate that is often offset by the stress and shame caused by the failure rate and reduction in perceived self-worth. If it were a pill, we probably wouldn't prescribe it with such a low success rate and such a high harm rate. If nothing else, I think the article is worth a read. [/quote]

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