Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison

Author:Christy Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

What About Physical Discomfort?

By now I hope you understand that most chronic diseases blamed on weight can most likely be explained by other phenomena, such as weight stigma and weight cycling. (And that correlation does not equal causation.) But what about conditions such as joint pain or difficulty with movement? Those have to be caused by higher weight, right?

Not necessarily.

“I think one of the big problems with a society that’s so ready to credit thinness with anything good and to blame fatness for anything bad is that we get this idea that the only way to improve anything is by somehow making our bodies smaller,” health coach Ragen Chastain says. “And so it gives people the idea that there’s nothing to do except lose weight, when in fact there are many, many things that we can do to improve mobility, to improve flexibility.” Moreover, she says, “building strength is something that works at all sizes, whereas weight loss is something that works for almost no one. If you think your current body size is the problem, dieting gives you a 66 percent chance to make that ‘problem’ a bigger problem.” It simply is not evidence-based medicine to say that people “need to lose weight” for any health reasons, because we have no safe, sustainable method of producing weight loss.

If weight stigma and weight cycling were out of the picture, it’s possible that body size could still be a risk factor for some health issues. But we just don’t know—because controlling for those two things would be a tall order in our society at this point in time. “You cannot study fat people in this culture without also studying a history of dieting, without also studying a history of stigma,” Chastain says. Speaking of tall orders, she points out that being tall is a risk factor for certain health conditions. Male-pattern baldness is another risk factor, as mentioned earlier. Whatever your ethnic background is, it almost certainly puts you at higher risk of one health condition or another—because of racism, genetics, or both. Having light skin generally makes you less susceptible to the first, but it raises your risk of skin cancer. Yet with every condition other than body size, nobody is saying we should try to change central characteristics of people’s bodies in order to reduce the risk of certain health conditions. And even though weight can be temporarily suppressed, people’s general weight range is a trait as genetically determined as height. So why are we telling people to change their weight?

The forms of physical discomfort that get blamed on weight—mobility issues, chafing, shortness of breath, to name a few—all have solutions that don’t involve weight loss, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 10. Meanwhile, weight stigma often magnifies the discomfort of these physical issues. As author and body-liberation advocate Sonya Renee Taylor explains, the concept of discomfort means different things to different people. “There’s a lot of work around unpacking language like this. What does uncomfortable mean? Because it’s a vague word,” she says.

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