Fat Is Phat, or, In Defense of Lard-Ass Americans

Nick Gillespie | September 13, 2005

From the always-interestin' Spiked, a piece by Daniel Ben-Ami that chews over why so many people hate fat Americans:

Overweight Americans represent, in caricatured form, the affluence of US society. They are the personification of a society in which scarcity, if not eliminated, has become marginalised. Yet we live in a world in which consumption is seen as a problem and the possibility of creating a better society is seen as unrealistic.

By focusing on fat Americans the critics of consumption are saying, implicitly at least, that people should consume less. They are arguing for a world in which Americans become more like those who live in the poorer countries of the world. From such a perspective equality means levelling everyone down rather than raising the living standards of the poor. It means giving up on the battle to resist hurricanes or to reclaim land from the sea.

Yet implementing such a viewpoint is a super-size mistake. Our aspiration for the world should be to give the poor the advantages of affluence enjoyed by those in the West. Living standards in countries such as Ethiopia and Niger should be, at the very least, as high as those in America today. In that sense we should all aim to be fat Americans.

Whole thing here.

Reason grokked chubsy-ubsyism here, here, and here.

Comments

The Anti-Puritan|9.13.05 @ 3:26PM|#

Proving once again that the libertarian's natural enemy is puritanism in all its forms. Read all about it at my blog.

Thank you, Mr. Gillespie, for giving me the opportunity for this shameless plug.

|9.13.05 @ 3:26PM|#

We should all hate fatness, especially when they make life uncomfortable on planes, buses, movie theaters, and sporting events because they spill over their seats onto people who are considerate enough to not gorge their faces. The problem though of course is people who use the government to try to achieve their goals of preventing fatness.

Another problem are the fat people who bitched when airlines tried to charge them for two seats. I would specifically choose an airline just for the peace of mind of not having a porker spilling over on to me. Buses and theaters should do the exact same thing. If they are so upset, then they should just fly an airline that is more sympathetic to their fatass cause or they should just lose weight so they stop being an externality into my business.

|9.13.05 @ 3:31PM|#

Damn.....where's The Twinkies?

|9.13.05 @ 3:32PM|#

There are countries all over the world, primarily in Africa, where weight control is not a social problem outside of the thieving elite. Some people just hate life and are not happy unless they are looking down their noses at people. I have idea, why don't we encourage the two proven ways to loose weight by legalizing medical anphetimines for overweight people, providing of course that patients can't sue the manufacturers when the drug ineveitably effects a few patient's hearts, and encourage smoking among the overweight as a substitute for snacking. I bet the country would be a lot skinnier for the effort.

|9.13.05 @ 3:33PM|#

"From such a perspective equality means levelling everyone down rather than raising the living standards of the poor." Becoming less fat, and more fit, is a movement downward? Only if you're defining consumption per se as a good with no diminishing returns. Ah, now I get it - it's a libertarian piece.

"It means giving up on the battle to resist hurricanes or to reclaim land from the sea." This makes absolutely no sense at all. Was it a cut and paste error from another article?

|9.13.05 @ 3:36PM|#

Becoming less fat, and more fit, is a movement downward? Only if you're defining consumption per se as a good with no diminishing returns. Ah, now I get it - it's a libertarian piece.


Joe,

Its only a movement upward assuming that its yours or anyone else's business how I or anyone else lives their life. How about leaving people the hell alone for once, or would that just be too hard?

|9.13.05 @ 3:41PM|#

Yawn. "Stop talking about stuff, it's my business!"

Zzzzzzttttt...

Shannon Love|9.13.05 @ 3:43PM|#

Does anybody else remember back in the late 80's when Europeans were bitching that American's exercised to much? Parisians were bent out of shape that American business people were always out jogging around the champs de elysee a 6am. Americans in visting Europe were criticized for not taking it easy and for following low-fat diets.

Can't please some people.

|9.13.05 @ 3:48PM|#

I think my primary problem with "fat" people is that it often points to a lack of self-control. And, in my view, self-control is paramount in a society committed to self-government.

So, I'm definitely not a fan of fat people... call me mean-spirited but I just find them repulsive. Of course, I don't think the government should be remotely engaged in a "War on Obesity"... I just prefer not to associate with such people.

Larry's comments made me laugh because on a completely booked Lufthansa flight from Florence-Washington, I had what may have been the largest woman in the world sitting next to me. She expanded into about 25% of my seat and I ended up standing next to the bathroom with my book for the better part of a trans-Atlantic flight. And, I didn't even get a 25% discount on my flight... last time I fly that airline.

|9.13.05 @ 4:47PM|#

How is it that the problem of obesity is worse among the poorest Americans if fattness is nothing but a happy by-product of wealth? It's not just about consumption of calories, it's about the type and quality of the food consumed. You can be overweight and malnourished.

Which is to say, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. Logic and commonsense have to be used in decided what, when and how much to consume.

|9.13.05 @ 5:22PM|#

Why can't affluence and moderation exist in our society? Gluttony is merely hedonism as practiced by the stupid and weak. Regulate it? No. Celebrate it? Hell, no.

|9.13.05 @ 5:23PM|#

Why couldn't affluence and moderation exist in our society? Gluttony is merely hedonism as practiced by the stupid and weak. Regulate it? No. Celebrate it? Hell, no.

|9.13.05 @ 5:23PM|#

Some of the fattest people I've ever seen were buying food with food stamps. The store I shop at now provides electric scooters for customers. I once saw a guy with a cast on his leg using a scooter. Usually, it's just being used to cart around someone too heavy and unhealthy to walk through the store.

|9.13.05 @ 5:23PM|#

Why couldn't affluence and moderation exist in our society? Gluttony is merely hedonism as practiced by the stupid and weak. Regulate it? No. Celebrate it? Hell, no.

|9.13.05 @ 5:54PM|#

OK, SPD - we get it :-)

And I agree.

|9.13.05 @ 6:13PM|#

I approve! Fat women are hot.......no I am not just saying that to try and be funny I actually belive that.

Phil|9.13.05 @ 6:59PM|#

Becoming less fat, and more fit, is a movement downward?

joe, joe, joe . . . just because you didn't actually read it, don't assume we didn't either. You completely elided the sentence which is the antecedent of "this perspective" -- They are arguing for a world in which Americans become more like those who live in the poorer countries of the world. -- which has nothing to do with "becoming less fat and more fit." Unless you're now holding up the average Ethiopian or Nigerian as a model of physical fitness. You do understand that "malnutrition" and "starvation" are sort of the opposites of fitness, right? Play the ball, not the player, joe.

And if by chance you're actually one of the people who the piece is talking about -- those that feel that the US should lower its standard of living to be more like poorer countries -- can I ask why you aren't starting with your own family?

Kami, I promise you, fat people probably don't want to associate with you either, because you're probably a jerk. And before you ask, no, I'm not.

|9.13.05 @ 7:16PM|#

Hey, I'm fat and I used to do a lot of business travel. I laugh at your discomfort, because fat people are jolly. What used to *really* irritate me were all the thin people who'd drag their U-haul trailers on board claiming they were "carry-on" luggage, and fill the entire overhead bin. Oh, and you folks who travel with undisciplined children/screaming babies...you're scum, too.
Sorry, just thought I should help balance the discussion :)

|9.13.05 @ 9:08PM|#

Phil, Phil, Phil,

'"They are arguing for a world in which Americans become more like those who live in the poorer countries of the world." -- which has nothing to do with "becoming less fat and more fit."'

No, it doesn't. That's my point - Ben Ami's insistence on linking the desire to "slim down" America with a desire to make it weaker, less affluent, and more impoverished is indicative of a larger problem in his thinking, one related to my point about people being too fond of "consumption for its own good." An intellectual flaw you seem to share, if you believe the opposite of a fat American is a starving Ethiopian. It is not - the opposite is a slim American.

Ben-Ami postulates that our fatness is perceived as part of our strength, and that people who disparage it are disparaging our strength. Well that's his problem right there - flab isn't strength, and people who complain about American flab don't all (or even most) want us to starve. More commonly, they want us to be fitter. Your false dichotomy betrays the mindset of a glutton.

|9.13.05 @ 10:03PM|#

How is it that the problem of obesity is worse among the poorest Americans if fattness is nothing but a happy by-product of wealth? It's not just about consumption of calories, it's about the type and quality of the food consumed.

I've lately been wondering if this may be a result of the heavy subsidization of farmers who grow stuff that's bad for you.

A couple of examples:
Evidently the production of corn syrup is heavily financed by the feds.

And it's no secret that foreign imports of sugar are so heavily taxed as to make them uncompetitive with the locally made and subsidized stuff.

Uncle Sugar indeed.

|9.13.05 @ 10:12PM|#

Such compassion today!

I suspect that what you call "lack of control", Kami, is what I'd call a large appetite -- a physical set-point individuals can't help, not a mental attitude needing adjustment. Even aside from the weight gain, it must suck to eat lots yet not feel full.

I further wonder if your and others' mean-spiritedness (to use your term) is due to evolutionary psych whispering retrograde suggestions to you that the fat people are consuming more than their allotted share of scarce nutritional resources.

FWA|9.13.05 @ 10:23PM|#

Pretty inane argument. As a fat person hater, I can tell you most of the fat people I see day to day are not affluent in any sense. In my mind, many are a product of a couch-potato culture that eats unhealthy foods in mountainous quantities while watching "Dancing with the Stars" or other ridiculous fare. That resentment from many is a disgust with sloth, not entrepreneurial spirit. If anything the class resentment around obesity slants the other way, Mr. Ben-Ami.

BTW, anyone wanna take odds on whether Mr. Ben-Ami looks svelt in a speedo? I say no.

|9.13.05 @ 10:29PM|#

It's really pathetic that so many of you believe that that there is virtue in being thin. Maybe that's the one thing you have done right in your life. I don't know. Maybe I am wrong and you are a bunch of Albert Einsteins.

But on the subject of self-control, it is very clear that many of you are unable to control how you speak and so I guess that makes us even (I being a fatty for about 1/4 of my life).

But consider this: A person can wolf down a pizza at age 21 and can remain as skinny as a rail, but that same person packs it on at age 50 if they exceed 2000 Calories a day (Try actually and **honestly** to stick to 2000 Cal a day for even a week, if you think this is a large quantity of food).

That person undergoes a huge, and poorly understood change in biochemistry--same body and same genes. Why in the world would you be surprised that genetic differences between different people might not be as large or larger? No one (with the apparent exception of some of the posters on this board) has a clue about what causes obesity. But, just as psychotherapy postulates disease to explain all sorts of differences in temprament, many of you seem to run that execrable logical practice in reverse and postulate will and virtue (or its deficiency) to explain an obvious physical change.

You come armed with a juvenile and 1st order understanding of the first law of thermodynamics as your only remotely scientific insight, and go on to trot out thinness as virtue or as a window on a person's soul, often neglecting to notice that your own words give a much clearer vision of what lies inside of you. The splinter and the board metaphor from the sermon on the mount jumps out of your postings.

I recently read a rather comprehensive article on obesity (I willl post the URL if I think of it tomorrow when I can retrieve it from my computer at school) which cites research of evidence of viral infection being present in the adipose tissue of overweight people, as it cites the almost mystifying tenacity of the human (and presumably other) organism in maintaining weight in the face of all countermeasures.

The fact is none of you have a clue about what causes obesity, any more than the folks who postulated that humours and essences lay at the bottom of disease.

Show me where any mainstream peer reviewed paper itentifies "will power" as the root cause of obesity. Give me a URL to a paper so that I (and others who care to) can read it critically. My guess is that (if you can come up even with one reference), it will likely turn out to be a muddleheaded crock, simply because of the inherent unapproachability and subjectivity of ideas like will power.

And don't give me any of this BS about how I am opening the door to making excuses for murder and theft. Fat is a thing. It has weight, it occuppies space and secretes all sorts of hormones and other chemicals whose actions on the body are only beginnning to be understood--it isn't a behavior; it's a lump of stuff. You can figure out a lump of stuff in a way that you can't with an action or a volition.

BTW I totally agree that the war on fat is often a thinly disguised war on pleasure.

|9.14.05 @ 12:14AM|#

After wading through jimmyboy's ranting and scientific self-justifications, two things spring to mind:

1) If your biochemistry changes between ages 20 and 50, the logical thing to do is adjust your eating and exercise patterns as you age, as indeed most of us do - I eat a lot less now at 47 than I did at 21. As for 2,000 cal/day seeming inadequate, most of the planet gets by on a lot less and seems to be able to function. That level of caloric intake allows for 3 reasonably-sized meals a day, or several smaller ones if preferred.

2) Obesity is affected by many factors, but overeatting is one that appears to be pretty universal - otherwise, dieting of any kind wouldn't work at all. There are certainly individuals who appear to be prone to obesity through genetic or other factors, but the vast majority of us (including myself) become overweight because we eat too damn much and exercise too damn little, and that's nothing to excuse or celebrate.

|9.14.05 @ 12:31AM|#

Perchance, have we confused what fat is a symbol of, with the actual reasons that we're fat?

It's the fact that so much food is so readily available here in the US that they're bitching about.

I do think there's an element of the world population that hates the US for having so much of everything. And part of that element lives right here in the US.

People will not be entirely at peace with one and other until everybody has their very own planet to run as they see fit. Except that soon after that dream comes true, each person will need more and more planets to run, as they see fit.

'k, I give up. Have at it everyone.

|9.14.05 @ 3:31AM|#

In a pre-industrial society, fat indicates wealth. In other words, an excess of what is neccesary for survival. Today in Amercia, anyone can be fat. Therefore, thin is the new fat. One can indicate fiscal fitness by showing off one's six-pack.
This seems quite rational. However, I am quite drunk, and may feel differently later.

RK Jones

|9.14.05 @ 3:51AM|#

Mark B.

I'm going to address your points in reverse order. I neither celebrate nor excuse being fat. There is nothing to celebrate, and I don't need to excuse this to anyone, nor to attempt to elicit an excuse from anyone for what they look like.

All obesity regardless of its its origin is, strictly speaking, caused by overeating if by this you mean taking in more calories per day than your body expends. This assertion however sheds absolutely no light on what the origins themselves are. It is at least possible that I extract more energy from a gram of glucose than does my next door neighbor. If this is the case, and my body's servo mechanisms (my appetite...but also chemnical processes over which I have no control) does not inform me of this appropriately then I put on weight. Between age 35 and 45 I gradually added 40 pouneds. That's 4 pounds per year or 38 Calories per day. That's 1/6 of a hershey bar too much...or 3 oz of pepsi, or an extra bite of pizza. I think it is an illusion that this small margin of error is under our conscious control. If our bodies screw up even a little, we put on weight.

But even if you reject this argument, the amounts of food involved do not even remotely approximate the popular picture of fat guys gorging on buckets of wings. The amounts involved are miniscule for the typical person who puts on weight.

Worse still, the scale is constantly sliding. If I establish an equilibrium at 45, the conditions change by the time I am 50. For example, my body temperature was 98.6 when I was 35, but it is now 97. This represents a decrease in the energy output of my body. You can argue that I should take this into account and reduce my food intake accordingly, and perhaps I should. Show me the calculation that tells me how much less to eat. Many of us can count on our bodies to handle this automatically, but many of us can't.

Third world people may indeed live on less than 2000 Calories per day, but so what? Like Ben-Ami, I wish that they had more. That the excess made available by our civilization may have had the unintended consequence of increasing obesity is not that important to me, because, without the attendant technological advances, I would never have lived a long enough life to confront my current problem. I would have died in agaony from peritonitis at age 9 resulting from a ruptured appendix. Or I would have died 12 other ways since then.

What I desire from our technological civilization is an answer to my currenrt difficulty that goes beyond moralistic aphorisms. If it turns out that it really is at bottom aa moral problem, then I guess life is tough. But I don't believe that, because, as I said, fat is a physical substance, and physical things have physical causes.

The tendency to put on weight as we age is widespread but not universal, and it is a fact of life. The fact that a single person can experience such changes in metabolism and biochemistry suggests that the variability in biochemistry from person to person is at least as large. If that is the case then all the moralistic arguments evaporate.

You and others who post here ought to ask yourself why you hold so steadfastly to moral arguments about fat, and whether or not there is at least the possibility that you might be wrong.

I am willing to bet that almost everyone adjusts their caloric input downwards as they age. I certainly did. But some folks don't get it right. There may be an easily correctible reason for this. And, yes, it may be a mortal sin. No one knows the answer.

In the absence of a certain answer, expressions of contempt, derision and moral superiority are imprudent and unwelcome.

Finally, try to modify your habits to 2000 Calories per day. Be brutally honest with yourself and count every swipe of mayonnaise and every pumpkin seed. For most people that I have known, the experience has been a shocker. It's why so many people put on weight as they age--and this phenomenon long predated the current "epidemic"

Phil|9.14.05 @ 9:51AM|#

As a fat person hater, I can tell you most of the fat people I see day to day are not affluent in any sense. In my mind, many are a product of a couch-potato culture that eats unhealthy foods in mountainous quantities while watching "Dancing with the Stars" or other ridiculous fare.

I know a lot of fat people, and don't know a single one of whom this is even close to true. But good try on the mind-reading, Karnak.

Your false dichotomy betrays the mindset of a glutton.

Another day, another ad hom from joe. Yawn. You can line up behind Karnak there for your mentalist award.

|9.14.05 @ 9:56AM|#

Daniel Ben-Ami, eh? Who is this guy dancing for?

|9.14.05 @ 10:11AM|#

"Another day, another ad hom from joe. Yawn. You can line up behind Karnak there for your mentalist award."

So, basically, you've got nothin'.

Phil|9.14.05 @ 10:38AM|#

No, it means I'm not going to interact with you when you behave like a prick. When you can act like a big boy, play nice, and avoid ad homs, I'll respond. Until then, that's all the response you're getting. But you can pretend you somehow won an argument if it makes you feel better.

|9.14.05 @ 5:53PM|#

So what about fat young people, of which there are (supposedly) ever more?

|9.14.05 @ 6:22PM|#

It isn't the causes of obesity I'm concerned with so much as the unwillingness to do anything about the hand you've been dealt. I don't hate fat people, but I do view the obese similarly to the way I view the unpleasant smelling. Everyone knows what to do to fix the problem, and it is a choice not to do anything about it. I certainly respect anyone's right to do as they will with their own bodies, but don't ask me not to draw character implications.

That big woman on the plane? That is a problem. I did CVG to Vegas next to that woman once. She should have paid for both seats, and I told the airline as much in a letter after the flight.

joe:

"Becoming less fat, and more fit, is a movement downward?" The argument being made is that fitness has little to do with the disdain. In the author's view, others see the obese American as representative of that which they despise - consumption. I'm in no position to know whether that argument has merit or not. The test would seem to be Paris Hilton. If other people like the skinny but extra hight consumption heiress more than the fat American, the argument would seem to be at least called into question.

|9.14.05 @ 7:24PM|#

Whenever I read Thinistas like Kami excusing their hatred of fat people by linking them to a lack of "self-control," I think of a point made by Paul Campos in his book, The Obesity Myth.

He's got a theory that intolerance and derision toward fat people is a projection of the intolerant's guilt for consuming too much in other areas. (i.e. the svelte soccer mom, driving the giant Ford Explosion crammed with her fertility-drug-induced quintuplets and several Costco pallets of goods, who looks with contempt on the overweight woman in the car parked next to hers).

Unless Kami lives like a goddamned monk and has forsaken all his/her worldly possessions, I'm thinking Campos has a point. Something tells me that an American-bound passenger on a flight from Florence can't really claim that s/he has total control over his/her own whims, and consumes the world's resources as gingerly as a cloistered nun.