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I think this should draw our attention to the fact that even measures of “health” are contrived, despite efforts to make them neutral or objective. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: ‘A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.'” It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for ‘normal’ bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. Maybe by some medical metric there is such a thing as “over” weight, but who gets to delineate those boundaries, and based on what criteria?Īs Roxane Gay writes in her book Hunger, “In truth, many medical designations are arbitrary. I liked that she pointed this out, and I think it’s a good way of showing how these categories are socially constructed. In another part of the interview, West points out the problem with term “overweight,” as it implies that there is a “normal” or “correct” weight and people can be categorized (and therefore judged) accordingly.
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I can glean this in part from my own personal experiences as someone who has internalized that idea about herself. But to me, this question suggests that on some level, even if it’s unconscious, the assumption is that she doesn’t really deserve to feel confident. Because self-confidence is such an issue in general, and in our society it is an even more difficult battle if you are “too” big, the mystery is apparent and the question is a reasonable one. “Where do you get your confidence?” is one of the questions West is most frequently asked. In the interview with West, we are asked to question several assumptions in quick succession. The ensuing discussion about weight and health is an old one, at least for me - but, in case there’s still doubt in your mind: Yes, it is possible to be fat and healthy at the same time, and cultural assumptions that equate being fat with being unhealthy are often inaccurate and have consequences for the way big people are treated within the health care system (see the slam in the references below). In other words, it’s not okay for a fat person to just be happy the way they are.
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I think she brings up a lot of interesting thoughts, including her critique of the perception in our culture that being fat is okay as long as you’re trying to “fix” it. In the Prologue and Act 1, Lindy West tells the story of her coming to grips with being fat and how that played out in her job as a journalist and her relationship with her boss, Dan Savage. They interrogate our politics, society, and humanity. The stories in “Tell Me I’m Fat” are some of the most engaging I’ve heard on this show. This episode is a great example of This American Life doing what it does best – presenting several stories related to a particular theme in a style that combines journalism and anthropology. Recently I listened to a rerun of This American Life called “ Tell Me I’m Fat.” I’ll run through my reactions and then link to other resources at the end. But what does that mean, exactly? How do we know that? And what are the social effects of women being the primary focus of that moral judgment?
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We all “know,” culturally, that being fat is bad. Content warning: The content linked to in this post, and to a lesser extent in this post itself, explicitly discusses body image, eating disorders, and fat-shaming.