A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates:
Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.
It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight.
Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.
High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.
Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated.
All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can
judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.
- Mod D
READ THIS.
Also, as a reminder, the reason that cycles of deprivation and overeating affect the body so much is because we evolved to survive those cycles. When someone goes through a period of deprivation, we have millions of years of evolution that go “OH SHIT WE COULD STARVE BETTER HANG ONTO THOSE CALORIES.” Hence weight gain.
In “How to SURVIVE the Hunger Games pt. 1,” MatPat points out that one of the best way to survive is to put on as much weight as possible–five pounds of fat is 17,500 calories, or enough calories to survive for 8.5 days with no food whatsoever. That’s the point of fat, after all, to have enough energy to live in periods of low- or no food.
Having to go through cycles of deprivation sets the body into survival mode. 10,000 years ago, having extra fat meant the literal difference between life and death when there simply was no food available. If I don’t have access to sufficient nutrition, my body automatically hangs on to every calorie available and turns it into fat. because it knows that there will be a time when I need that fat to survive. It doesn’t matter if it makes me look “ugly” or “unappealing” because my survival doesn’t hinge on me being pretty, it hinges on me being able to continue living.
While we don’t live in the exact same conditions–here in America, there is food, even if I can’t access it–we simply haven’t had enough time to evolve to change how the body responds to scarcity.
So saying that someone who lives in a constant state of food insecurity is lying because they’re fat? It’s a profoundly stupid, uninformed thing to think. If you want to worry about obesity, the best way to do it is guarantee that everyone–and I mean EVERYONE–has access to nutritious food. Not ramen, not cheap, shitty, high-calorie low-nutritious food, but good food.
(I live in the fucking future, in one of the richest countries in the world, and yet there are people who don’t have enough to eat. I cannot begin to tell you how infuriating this is to me.)
Access to healthier foods at a low cost would not solve the problem at hand without proper education, though. And there are plenty of nutritious foods that are at very low cost that most people who are worried about getting food on the table should be buying instead of the cheap, but unhealthy options.
Do you honestly think that if the solution to food insecurity was as simple as just buying rice and beans, that anyone would still be starving in the US or Canada? Do you really believe that poor parents are just choosing to let their children go hungry because they are too ignorant and uneducated to know better? Honestly, a person must hold some pretty prejudiced and condescending beliefs about poor people to justify this type of comment.
For the record: Poor people do not need “education” from wealthy people who have never experienced true food insecurity concerning the best ways to live and eat. Poor people are not poor and lacking food because they are ignorant, or uneducated, or lazy. Yes, even poor fat people! Poor people suffer from food insecurity because they experience legitimate social, economic, and physical barriers to accessing adequate food to survive. Period.
Poor people need to be able to earn a real living wage (or be provided with more than the most basic bare minimums to support both good physical AND mental health – for their own version of healthy – by social welfare programs such as disability, retirement, and SNAP benefits.
We need to not have to balance two or more jobs and sometimes school just to scrape by and be so exhausted from physical and emotional labor required by their shitty jobs where they are overworked and undervalued that leave them unable to cook the nutritious food they want to eat.
We need to be treated like competent human beings because we ARE.
We need rich (or even who are well into “comfortable” range) people to shut the entire hell up about deciding what we need to eat and whether or not poor drug users even qualify as human enough to justify being able to eat.
We need a healthcare system that isn’t dizzying in its ineptitude. After nearly four years of Medicaid not paying for what Medicare didn’t cover I finally got frustrated enough to seek help from a legal aid society. It should not be necessary to HIRE A LAWYER – even one who works pro bono – to get bills paid. I tried four years on my own and I am an intelligent, educated person. I can’t even imagine how people with developmental and learning disabilities and/or the elderly handle this if they do not have a strong support system.
We need to remind you that we ALSO pay taxes that find these programs. We get taxed at a higher percentage, and we earn dramatically less money.
The assumption that there are are plenty of cheap nutritious foods available for everyone omits a serious problem that many American face: food deserts. According to the American Nutrition Association, food deserts are “parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas. This is largely due to a lack of grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers.This has become a big problem because while food deserts are often short on whole food providers, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, instead, they are heavy on local quickie marts that provide a wealth of processed, sugar, and fat laden foods[.]”
How common are food deserts in America? Take a look:
Those are a LOT of places where Americans, especially poor Americans, don’t have access to whole foods, especially fresh fruits and veggies. You can’t buy what isn’t available in your local grocery.
And you also can’t buy what you can’t afford. Costs are relative. What is cheap to someone who is upper middle class or wealthy may be too costly for someone struggling to make ends meet–and anyone on SNAP has to meet income and resource tests.
Nor does SNAP automatically pay for everything in the grocery cart. A single person could get, at most, $194 per month. That’s just for food items (hand soap, sanitary napkins, toilet paper, etc., are not covered and must be paid for by the person). Assuming that the SNAP recipient goes shopping once a week, that would permit them to spend $48.50 SNAP credit on food each week in a four-week month. In a long month that contains half a week or so at the end, the food budget might drop to $38.80 SNAP credits per week.
That’s not much money to pay for an entire week’s worth of groceries. And allotments go down as numbers of people per household increase. Two people in a household would get $357 per month ($89.25 per week in a four-week month, or $44.62 for one and $44.63 for the other; $71.40 per week in a five-week month, or $35.70 for each person).
And $194 per month for one person (or $357 for two people) is the MAXIMUM.
Most recipients won’t get nearly that much.
So yes. I can well believe that Sharon’s monthly SNAP benefits do not allow her to purchase much food. It’s simple mathematics.
All of this, plus a note that most medical measures of fatness are standardized around abled upperclass cis white men and are far less accurate estimates of body fat, even on broad scale, for women and people of color. Physically disabled people and trans people are typically not looked at in general when these measures are constructed, instead they are standardized around abled cis men. Poor people also tend to be shorter, which measures like BMI penalize.
The demographics of poor people are different than those of wealthy people.
BMI was directly created as a eugenicist ideal and the fact that it stigmatizes women, poor people, and people of color as deviants more is a feature, not a bug.
That combination of stigmatizing fat people and using a measure designed to call poor people, women, and people of color fatter is absolutely also about policing and medicalizing the bodies of the poor, women, trans people, people of color, and disabled people.
^^ This is some spot-on analysis right here. Thank you, I agree with everything you say.
