What Do You Think of Fat People?

As an openly gay man, I am blessed to live in a community of open-minded individuals who don’t view homosexuality as a problem that needs to be fixed.

As a country, we pride ourselves for the progress we’ve made against prejudices towards sexuality, race, gender and religion. And yet, we have transferred our prejudice to a new culture: the one we’ve named ‘fat people.’

Educated by the (extremely outdated) belief that weight loss is a simple matter of eating less and exercising more, we equate excess weight with a lack of willpower and laziness. We’ve turned weight into a moral issue. Our prejudice toward ‘fat people’ has us believe there is something not right with them and it needs fixing.

Weight has become an issue of ‘good vs. bad’ and those who carry it are unfortunately labeled as bad. Weight has become our symbol of weakness, immorality, or disconnect.

While the increasing percentage of obesity is definitely something that needs to be addressed, the shame and judgment we’ve attached to weight are only making matters worse.

An annual international obesity conference constantly reaches the same scientific conclusion: science is unable to conclude if excess weight is a contributor or factor of disease, a symptom, a non-factor to disease, a health benefit, a psychological matter, or a genetic problem.

Excess weight can be the result of many factors. Many Americans who try to follow a healthy diet unknowingly end up deficient in fat, protein, macronutrients, or calories.

Weight gain can also be the direct result of chronic low-level stress. Just the chemical reactions produced by our own internal self-deprecating dialog, are enough to impair fat burning and muscle building capabilities.

Culturally it has been become extremely difficult to love ourselves and truthfully accept others. As a culture that has little understanding of the wisdom of the heart and gut, we have long forgotten the language of the body.

Our individual weight and our cultural crisis can be a great blessing if we allow it to be. It mirrors our limited belief systems about self and others and nudges us in the direction of individual and communal maturity.

As a disembodied culture, we’ve engineered foods, advertising, and even medical procedures that promote nothing but intolerance. Hating our bodies into weight loss has produced far more emotional scarring than physical results. It is time to change our approach. If attacking weight had worked, we wouldn’t be grappling with the same symptoms for decades.

Attack can only result in more stress physiology, the same physiology that weakens metabolism. The path informs the destination. We must relax into a journey of self-acceptance. It is vital (and very possible) to love ourselves and others while still in a body we may not love as much.

Each time we allow the mind to settle in the narrow constraints of ‘good versus bad’, we eliminate any potential dialog that might actually lead to soulful growth.