Fat has become the evil we avoid at all costs. In our collective world of fantasy, one of only good fortune, endless riches, eternally youth, fat is the source of the evil we avoid. The dream is that remaining thin and perfecting our diet and exercise plan will allow us to revel in what was once unattainable: immortality.
Society has tacitly agreed that fat is culprit of all our woes. Accordingly, we must avoid eating fat (except fats deemed healthy) and we all just avoid fat people. As bias against race, gender and religion decreases on all fronts, bias against fat people is on the rise. They are seen as lazy, ignorant and lacking in all willpower. They represent everything distasteful in the world and must be avoided at all costs. They deserve what they have brought upon themselves.
The diet industry rests largely upon the theory of self-advocacy. With any specific diet, a person will successfully lose weight for good and transform their lives. The data proves that 98% of diets fail, so why would any new diet be more successful than the last? Since diets work by supposedly empowering people, those who fail are to blame. Certainly the diet can not be the failure.
The exercise industry is the same way. New exercise plans promise a life transformation including weight loss, new confidence and personal transformation. Lack of success is always a personal failure. The exercise program cannot be held accountable for false promises.
The medical establishment reinforces the concept of fat as the source of all illness. As doctors arrogantly explain the dubious relationship between weight and health, they offer no solutions mostly because there are no reasonable solutions to be found. Diets don’t work. Weight loss medications won’t work. Doctors easily shirk off any responsibility by blaming the patient.
Inevitably, the demoralized patient believes they are to blame for their weight and that their weight will shorten their lives considerably. The only path left is Bariatric surgery. Medicine pushes these patients towards surgery, and the centers have become large money makers for hospitals struggling to survive financially.
Perhaps Bariatric surgery is barbaric. It’s a last ditch effort to transform a person’s body and life by cutting away most of their stomach and decreasing their physical ability to eat food. The result is forced prolonged starvation: anatomical anorexia. The only way to lose weight is to create an eating disorder by any means.
If thinness is the only key to success in this world and the promises mentioned above, is it any wonder droves of people have signed up for surgery?
Watching people gradually find a way to eat again around the surgery, I have wondered what the long term results will show. I see so many patients eventually eat more regularly or overeat again after their bodies adjust to the surgery.
And how will we reassess the long term effects on so many people undergoing this procedure as they age? Surgery isn’t a permanent solution but only delays our inevitable need to face the judgment and bias around weight. It is a scary view of what the fantasy of thinness has wrought in our world.
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