Shaming the overweight

[Paul Murphy]

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Shaming the overweight

Date
July 12, 2012 - 7:49AM

Kasey Edwards
Writer, author of 30-Something and Over It

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If fat shaming were an Olympic sport, then Australia would be a gold medal contender.

Our governments, health professionals, and now personal trainers-cum-TV-celebrities have joined in the fun of detailing the personal failings of fat people.

And where has this united effort of moralising and scorn got us? Well let’s just say that the United Nations has declared obesity to be epidemic and our politicians are bandying around phrases like ‘the war on obesity’.

The latest entrant in the fat shaming contest is the West Australian government’s health promotion body WA Health with its recently-launched LiveLighter anti-obesity campaign.

Piggybacking off the success of the graphic drink driving and anti-smoking campaigns, the LiveLighter campaign features graphic images of fat, labeling it toxic and portraying it as disgusting.

One poster features a man grabbing his gut alongside organs covered with fat emblazoned with the alarming message ‘GRABBABLE GUT OUTSIDE MEANS TOXIC FAT INSIDE’.

The campaign booklet notes ‘At times, it’s graphic and confronting, but it has to be. We need everyone to realise that achieving and maintaining a healthy weight should be a priority right now — and not something that can be put off “until tomorrow”.’

While urgency is all well and good, WA Health, along with their campaign partners The Heart Foundation and The Cancer Council might have taken the time to look at some evidence. If they did, they’d have realised that these kinds of shock campaigns, which have been running all over the developed world for decades, have not led to long-term weight loss. In fact, as we are repeatedly told: we’re getting fatter.

As Neil Seeman and Patrick Luciani, both senior residents at Massey College, University of Toronto, write in their book XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame, ‘[shaming] public health policies have clearly worked in reducing levels of smoking, as an example, but they won’t work in the case of obesity [because] the amalgam of psychological determinants of obesity is far more complex than that for smoking or drinking.’

For starters, unlike smoking and drinking, it is not possible to simply abstain from eating or avoid situations where food is consumed. People have to eat. Eating is a complex mix of culture, social rituals, food availability, economics, appetite, fashion and peer pressure, pleasure and emotion.

LiveLighter is also an example in spruiking the bleeding obvious. Does anybody not know that it’s a good idea to eat well and exercise? It’s hard to imagine that there is a single person in Australia who hasn’t internalised the message that thin is good and fat is bad.

But LiveLighter is not just guilty of wasting taxpayers money repeating the same messages people have heard hundreds of times before. To the extent that the campaign engages in shaming, its effects are likely to do more harm than good.

Fat people are already shamed in our culture. Studies show that fat people – particularly women – are discriminated against in the workplace, receive inferior medical care, and are more likely to be denied a bank loan and given longer prison sentences.

And research shows that the prejudice can persist even after people lose weight. A study published in the journal Obesity, by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, The University of Manchester, and Monash University found that people were more biased against people after learning that they had lost wright. According to Science Daily, the researchers also found that ‘negative attitudes towards obese people increase when participants are falsely told that body weight is easily controllable.’

Shaming can also lead to depression, anxiety, self-loathing and self-harm. Feeling bad about yourself is also counter productive in encouraging healthy life choices. Numerous studies have shown that shame is more likely to drive people into the arms of Mr Cadbury for comfort than encourage them to take their kids to the park or go for a bike ride.

Lydia Jade Turner, a psychotherapist specialising in eating disorders says that the campaign is also likely to contribute to increasing rates of dysfunctional eating and has slammed the campaign for perpetuating the stereotype that all fat people are fat because they are gluttonous and sedentary.

If we weren't so busy tut-tutting at all the fatties perhaps somebody would have stepped back for a moment and realised that the public shaming strategy isn't working.

Rather than shouting the same hateful messages more loudly, perhaps the folks in WA and other government health bodies should start with the principle of ‘Do No Harm’ and focus on the positive, rather than shaming fat people.

Kasey Edwards is the best-selling author of 4 books 30-Something and Over It, 30-Something and The Clock is Ticking, OMG! That's Not My Husband, and OMG! That's Not My Child.

www.kaseyedwards.com
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22 comments so far

Well put Casey. It’s all true. I am a male in my mid-fifties. At my heaviest I was in excess of 170kg. Thanks to surgery, I am now about 125kg, and slowly going down. I have said for years, that when smokers were beaten into submission, the obese would be next for kicking and shaming. This ill-conceived campaign will result in unnecessary suicides.

Commenter
GJH
Location
Sydney
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 8:42AM

'Unecessary' suicides? As posed to not unnecessary?

I happent to think fat shaming should proceed. For all except those with a genuine medical condition, obesity is a sign of sloth and weak willpower. The non-fat despise you, and you should know it.

Commenter
trim now
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 10:17AM

Fantastic piece, Kasey! You hit the nail on the head!! :-)

For those who wish to see this fearmongering campaign axed, please SIGN THE PETITION on change.org here https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/wa-state-gov-t-heart-foundat...

Please also note that The Heart Foundation, which is leading this 'fat is toxic' campaign, claimed they had tested the advertising messages to ensure they are "unlikely to generate unintended consequences."

Yet they are unwilling to disclose full methodology - despite spending $9 million of taxpayers' money on what will be a 3 yr campaign. What we do know is that they haven't tested the campaign for harmful effects on TEENAGERS - the most 'at risk' group for eating disorders.

Please SIGN THE PETITION and tell The Heart Foundation it's not cool to tell teens fat is something to be feared.

Thanks,
Lydia Jade Turner
Petition Organizer

Commenter
Lydia Jade Turner
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 9:00AM

Great article - you've hit the nail on the head. The creators of this campaign should be ashamed of themselves. They're perpetrating exactly the same kind of ignorant prejudice that is rife in our culture, that demonises overweight people by claiming weightloss is easily done. If it was so f$%#&*g easy, none of us would be overweight! Do they seriously think people WANT to be obese?

The briefest glance at the science surrounding obesity and eating disorders would tell the dumbest of people that weightloss is in fact, incredibly complex, and simply telling people they are fat and useless is not actually listed as one of the potential cures. In reality, it's consistently listed as one of the CAUSES.

Commenter
Mackenzie
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 9:05AM

"If it was so f$%#&*g easy, none of us would be overweight!"
Nothing worthwhile is easy but I guess lard-o's are so used to making things easy for themselves that the thought of doing something difficult terrifies them. It's far easier to open the fridge and gorge on chocolate than to psych yourself up for a 5km run Unless there is a medical condition that prevents weight loss, it can be achieved through diet and exercise - not that hard really!

Do they seriously think people WANT to be obese?
Well, if obese people don't diet and exercise then yes. Or are you saying they don't want to be obese but don't want to work for it?

Commenter
dr know
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 10:18AM

Don't try to give obesity PC protection, it won't work. Of course it's not easy to lose weight. But failure is mainly from lack of trying. Fatties are weak, slothful, lesser people, and probably gluttons. It IS something to be ashamed of, and they should be reminded of it.

Commenter
trim now
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 10:21AM

I think you could have applied the same arguments against the anti-smoking campaigns. People knew about the dangers of smoking but took it up for complex reasons and smoking has the added danger of being addictive. Yet shaming advertising worked against smoking. Therefore, I don't accept the assertion that shaming about obesity won't work. Give it time.

Either that, or make access to health care for obesity-related issues more expensive. People tend to really take notice when you hit their hip pocket. Considering we have taxpayer funded health care then we owe it to each other to do all we can to decrease our own burden on it.

Commenter
Bender
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 9:10AM

Bender, Bender, Bender...Yeah you're right. I think people who drug on including excess ethanol usage should all pay more when they rock up to hospital.I mean they are a burden on the system.

Commenter
Aloysia
Location
Sydney
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 10:15AM

"Yet shaming advertising worked against smoking"

Did you not read the article, or did you just not understand it?

"..make access to health care for obesity-related issues more expensive. People tend to really take notice when you hit their hip pocket"

True. I can't afford a Lexus. Which is why I can't and won't buy one. Thankfully, though, me not owning a Lexus does not impact my health and livelihood.

Commenter
Donna Joy
Location
Date and time
July 12, 2012, 10:33AM

You are making an illogical assumption that smoking and weight loss have the same causes and therefore the same solution can be applied.
Smoking is addictive chemically, with cultural factors contributing to it's prevalence.
Eating is a requirement for life.
The aim of anti-smoking campaigns is to encourage people to never smoke again. The aim of obesity campaigns is not (for obvious reasons).
Obesity (according to virtually every single legitimate study) is increasing due to sedentary lifestyles which are culturally and economically unavoidable and the preponderance of available unhealthy food options.
Tobacco is an outside agent, not contingent to survival and the desire to smoke is not inbuilt.
Eating is fundamental to the human condition, contingent to survival, and the body has a myriad of inbuilt triggers which spur the consumption of food to unhealthy levels.
Smoking has roughly the same effect regardless of the person's physiology or genetic make-up.
Eating has a thousand variables depending on a person's make-up, from metabolism to hormonal disposition, to gender and many, many more.
When you quit smoking, your body craves the chemical for a time, before eventually losing the chemical addiction. The body begins to heal, unless too much damage has already been done.
When you adjust your diet and increase exercise the body has a myriad of responses to actually fight the process (an inbuilt biological evolutionary response), from triggering the starvation response, to slowing the metabolic rate, to increasing stress hormones to prevent fat burning amongst many others.

They are completely different problems, with completely different required responses.

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[Paul Murphy]

[Paul Murphy]