Recently Avery Ray Colter posted the following message on the Science of Health At Every Size listserv. It's a copy of an email he sent to an author he heard being interviewed on a California radio station. The author had a written a book about the effects of chronic fear.
I thought Avery had a fascinating perspective on the subject, and introduced me to a new concept -- new to me, that is -- of the infinitely recursive loop. I asked him for permission to post his message on this blog, and he granted it.
Here's the text of his message to the author (emphases mine):
The Relation of Adiposity to Your Premise
I heard your interview on the [omitted] morning show. It pricked up my ears to hear you say that obesity was one of the number of effects you claim are elevated by chronic fear.Later, however, in response to one caller, you said that it would be more productive to worry about "how many lives obesity is taking".
I would like to propose that by saying this, you are falling into the very trap you are pointing out to us all, and in a particularly virulent way. Allow me to explain how.
For it seems close to a century, if not more, we have all been encouraged, by the pharmaceutical industry and sundry others, to live in chronic fear that gaining weight will increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and a number of other maladies. Interestingly enough, many of these maladies are the same ones you listed at the beginning of the interview along with obesity as effects of chronic fear.
Thus, by your own logic, making a population chronically afraid that gaining weight will increase, to choose one alleged risk, that of stroke, will cause this population to gain weight and suffer increased stroke rate. This is a negative enough fate in itself, except that the combination of components in this case leads to what we computer programmers call a terminal recursion, a program which starts a copy of itself unconditionally. In a computer, this means the process does not end until copies of this program occupy all available memory, leaving the operating system no room to act - a system crash. In this case, it is the physical health infrastructure which is ever more hijacked and obstructed until the subject is on a crash cart.
In other words, if weight gain and an increase in stroke risk occur together as a result of the fear of one causing the other, the fact that the two effects are concurrent appears to validate, and therefore reinforces, the seed fear. So as the fear of being fat on the premise of the health risks continually intensifies, this fear continually intensifies fatness and health risks. It starts early in childhood, where the fat kid gets treated to insult by his contemporaries, condescension by parents, and outright ravaging at times by physicians. I know fat women who tell of having been injected with methamphetamine at the age of 5, having their jaws wired, and even one of a later generation who had an intestinal bypass for her sweet 16 present (she ended up supersize anyway, and managed to bear two children despite a surgery-induced recurring hernia before she passed away). The situation progesses to the young adult who is substantially fat and faces threats of loneliness, lovelessness, denial of sex attacks, personal invasions from all angles. Those who do venture out of their houses -- and eventually, some of them stop doing so -- do so knowing at any moment they could have their shopping carts audited on every trip to the store, or be told by friends, lovers, and even total strangers that having their digestive systems half torn out might be a good idea. Or maybe just take something like ephedrines or Phen-Fen which, sadly enough, have wrecked many hearts by themselves. The end product is what we are so often seeing: the incredibly adipose person who, finally in complete terror of his or her own fat, suffers a stroke.
As Robert Fisk is fond of saying, "We're allowed to ask who, what, where, when and how, but you'll be tarred as a traitor if you ask why." I've come to a point of proceeding along a different path than some who criticize the rhetoric of the "obesity pandemic" by claiming that all the health statistics are cooked. I don't think it is possible to disprove that there are excess deaths associated with adiposity, or that fat people are at elevated risk of certain health issues, but actually, I don't believe it is necessary in order to challenge the dominant paradigm. The excess deaths, the number of which seems in fact in contention at this time, stated by government agencies are always said to be "associated with obesity". This means there is room to debate what is the actual cause of the woes of the adipose. Is it all inherent to their fatness, as the manufacturers of every anorexiant from Metrical to Meridia want us to believe? Or does this question lead, straight back, to you, and your own findings on chronic fear?
I, for one, would like to extend a hand as part of a new paradigm for the fat population called Health At Every Size. This concept, which you can find more on by a web search, and particularly at the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination <http://www.cswd.org> serves as a contextual gathering place for dissident activists and health care professionals who have declared an open revolt against the "be thin or die" concept which has been attempted for so long, either with no effect or, as with many other "wars" of our age, making things worse. The core of HAES is a simple one: eat wholesome food as much as your body asks, exercise in ways that invigorate rather than injure, and let go of the fear of having the body you have.
That would seem to wind round quite well with your own findings. Logically, the way to break the feedback loop of fear of which I wrote above is not to keep saying "Lose weight now." Indeed, that only drives it forward. Instead, the way to break this loop is to decouple fear from fat. If lipophobia can be taken out of the equation of bariatics, I think we will see a precipitous drop both in the health risks among the fat, and the associated "costs of obesity" of which we're all taught to be afraid (interesting how virulent fear is, isn't it?) But as long as fat people are emotionally hammered the way they have been, lipophobia will continue to leave a trail of broken bodies in its wake.
By the way, while we're all worried about how many lives fatness takes each year, a new report by the Oakland Institute says that there are 852 million starving people in the world, of which 30-50 million die each year of this condition, and 37 million of those starving are on American soil. 37 million is about 4% of 852 million. What is 4% of 30-50 million? 1.2-2 million. That's how many starvation related deaths occur here per year, 3 to 5 times the number the Surgeon General claims for obesity. Why is our attention directed the way it is? And who is profiting from this?
