A Few Extra Pounds Might Not Be So Bad

Like many others, I am of the type who has been made to feel less.  Less than healthy, less than human; whatever, the kind of feeling that sells diet food and diet plans.

When some of the wire services picked up on the latest meta-analysis about obesity and mortality, I had to smile.  I’ve seen and read so many things about how horrible it is to lose weight, how wonderful it is to be thin; and then, this.  Ah, at least a morsel of vindication.  It makes me think of a classic Broadway song lyric, from “If I were a Rich Man,” in Fiddler on the Roof.  “I’d see my wife, my Golde, looking like a rich man’s wife with a proper double-chin.” It was not that long ago, maybe the 1930s, that a couple of extra pounds said their bearer could afford to eat a little more, to satisfy their own hunger.  I saw photos of a woman I met from the Ukraine, from before she made it stateside.  To the modern eye, she looks thin and very glamorous.  From what she told me, there was at least the worry of starvation.  Both metaphorically and realistically, there has always been the idea that a little extra layer of fat protects — physically, from the cold; emotionally, from the attention of men.  Such things come out often in psychotherapy.  Even in my self-understanding of my own obese state, on at least one level, I was protecting myself from the unwanted attention of men while I was studying my ass off.  Literally. The article indexed here is a meta-analysis.  I have more and more trouble believing any individual article.  I have to check it out, and I’ve become pretty damned compulsive.  I need to know who has funded a study, what the interest is, and what somebody has to prove. It is a lot easier to give some credence to someone who reviews other articles.  I know smart people who do this informally and decide whether or not the experts agree.  More formally, people jump in quite aggressively with fancy statistics and clump together a bunch of research studies, looking at what is going on across the board as a way of accessing the truth.  So there is probably something here that is on the way to an absolute truth. In such cases, one of my favorite preceptors would jump right in and tell me, despite the enthusiasm of me and others, it is almost never possible to prove causality — at least not when you are working with human organisms versus little bitty molecules.  We have found, perhaps, an epiphenomenon. Maybe the diminished mortality that comes with being overweight is from something else.  Maybe people who are overweight and not obese are more relaxed, or a little more prosperous, or something else.  Whatever it is, if it is a couple of extra pounds and not wild obesity, maybe it is not so bad.

Once again, I find myself with a song cue – Allen Sherman’s Hail to Thee, Fat Person.  When I was little, I got the same thing from my Mother and Grandmother-of-Blessed-Memory that Sherman did.  I really believed that I was doing something to keep kids in Europe from starving when I was cleaning my plate.  I did inquire about it fairly early, precocious child that I was.  I got no logical answer, only that I was “lucky.”

It did take a while for me to figure out my own weight loss.  When I did, I wrote a book.  And nobody can or will make me feel like less or sell me on marketed weight loss boloney ever again.