I know everyone else in the ‘sphere is writing about the major new study on obesity and friendship, but I can’t seem to resist weighing in (ouch) as well.
The opening sentence in the Times report yesterday left me wincing:
Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too.
My first reaction is fury. Fabulous, another excuse for the shunning and shaming of fat folk. I can almost hear it: “Bob, you know I love you. But the New York Times says that obesity is contagious, and I’ve noticed you’ve gained a lot of weight lately, so I’d rather not spend as much time with you because I’m afraid you’ll infect me.” The phrase “much like a virus” is infelicitous at best and genuinely misleading at worst, and to have it in the opening sentence is deeply unfortunate.
The study’s point, of course, is that other people’s behavior and appearance can impact our feelings about ourselves.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,†Dr. Christakis said.
I’m not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. After all, we’re all well aware that the media (in its nearly infinite manifestations) has a huge impact on women’s self-image; the endless message that one must be thin and toned has done demonstrable damage. The struggle to emulate movie stars and supermodels, the struggle to achieve an unattainable ideal, breaks hearts and spirits and bodies year after year after year. For most women, that struggle is played out in two dimensions — in private acts of self-denial and in public, shared acts of self-loathing. Poor body image is reinforced by peers (or parents) who make self-deprecating remarks about their own bodies, and it’s reinforced by the common and unhappy practice of “bonding” over mutual self-hatred.
When a good friend or family member begins to gain weight, it’s as if he or she has “opted out” of the destructive pursuit of an eternally elusive ideal. This opting out provides an alternative model for friends and family. Seeing a good friend gain weight can be liberating, as it raises the prospect that if you yourself put on some pounds, you won’t be alone to face the judgment of a hostile and censorious culture. Most of us who teach and practice feminism, after all, are eager to create “feminist communities” in which women and men consciously reject the culturally prescribed ideals for our appearance and our behavior. We know that it’s hard to opt out alone, and much easier to do so when you have visible allies. This study reinforces the importance of those visible allies.
While extreme obesity may be unhealthy, it may well be that the negative effects of modest weight-gain are exaggerated. Certainly, the social and psychological costs to dieting are immense. The damage that pursuing the thinness ideal does to men and women (especially women) is colossal. In many ways, the physical and spiritual damage brought on by a lifetime of dieting and self-loathing may be far worse than the threat posed by twenty, thirty, or even fifty “extra pounds”.
I’m a recreational athlete who is married to a recreational athlete; we spend a lot of our social time with other recreational athletes. We belong to a subculture in which exercise and competition is normative, and where discussions of the latest “brick workout” or the benefits of heart-rate monitoring are common at picnics and luncheons and around the dinner table. We reinforce not self-loathing, but a sense that a physically active life is an important one. This doesn’t make us in the least bit more virtuous; we’re simply competitive people who love exercising outdoors. The point is, we’ve created a small subculture in which our lifestyle choices are supported and reinforced. There’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with a group of people who don’t enjoy exercise and hate dieting mutually supporting each other as they collectively reject a societal ideal of thinness.
So there’s much about this study that is, frankly, potentially encouraging. But my fear is that the way in which it is being reported, and the way it is being discussed, will morph into still another tool with which to shame and shun those whose bodies don’t meet our societal standards.
Ergh, I’m annoyed that they’ve focused specifically on obesity in the study when it seems so much more likely that disordered eating in general (including anorexia, bulimia, and the kinds of disordered eating that make people unhealthily thin) would spread via social networks as well. So what this is telling me is that they only care about how disordered eating spreads if it makes you look bad according to conventional beauty standards.
I’m interested also in the evidence they found that living hundreds of miles away from friends made no difference. If you’re not seeing them often, then how are they managing to affect your perceptions of how people should look?
Well, it’s no surprise that the “news” media in this country presents matters in a distorted and emotionally leading way. What really should be happening is this: obesity ought to be addressed as a health matter, not just an appearance or “meeting an ideal” matter, and idiot teens who think the alternative to obesity is starving yourself into anorexia ought to get a good smack and be told that the real alternative is fitness. Being fit — even if all you’re doing is taking a brisk walk every day — just feels better than being a couch potato slug or a pencil-thin waif who faints from exhaustion merely by standing up.
As expected, I disagree with Hugo on one point:
There’s nothing wrong with that, just as there’s nothing wrong with a group of people who don’t enjoy exercise and hate dieting mutually supporting each other as they collectively reject a societal ideal of thinness.
Well, I do think there’s a little something wring with the latter, as people who turn up their nose at exercise for the reason of “rejecting a societal ideal of thinness” are doing so for the wrong reason and essentially pooling their own stupidity to their collective detriment. Not all social reinforcement is good, such as (to use an extreme example) racists getting together to mutually support one another’s whiteness as they “collectively reject a societal ideal” of tolerance. People are free to eat badly and refuse to exercise if they wish, but they ought to be informed that if their decision is based on rejecting media images of thinness, they’re missing the point. The point is reduced life expectancy, and an increased chance of illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. As long as people are armed with facts and not bogus cultural ideals, then hey, let them be free to make their own smart or stupid choices as they see fit. It just discourages me to see people making stupid choices because they’ve been misinformed.
Martin, you don’t need to sell me on the merits of fitness. But all things being equal, I’d rather have folks who are under-exercised and well-fed and happy than neurotically counting calories, high on self-denial, and full of anxiety about their bodies. Morbid obesity is one thing, being heavier than what is considered desirable is another.
Well, the issue is: are people concerned about “being heavier than what is considered desirable” for good health reasons or simply for looks reasons? I think there’s too much of the latter way of thinking and not enough of the former. When people are motivated by the latter, their approach to weight loss is, as you say, neurotic and stupid. If it’s the former, what you tend to see are people enjoying living an active lifestyle.
As a guy in my early 40′s, I consider a flat stomach more desirable than a paunch because the latter can contribute to things like heart disease and other issues as I get into my 50′s and 60′s. It also looks better, but that reason isn’t the #1 motivator as it was in my 20′s.
One thing that galls me about the news coverage of the study is that the study didn’t examine the *cause* of this correlation of weights – it simply found that there was a correlation of weights – someone with heavy friends is likely to also be heavier. The idea that it’s due to social pressure is simply a postulation, albeit a likely one. It has not been proven.
And addressing Martin above, I think that it’s a very tricky thing to separate out exercise from the social pressure to look thin – even as someone who played multiple sports growing up, and who enjoyed them, as an adult it’s been difficult to get into the idea of exercise as something I can do that’s enjoyable – it’s always presented to me as a way to get thin, and by people who have a problem with my fatness. And they have a problem with the *fatness*, not my health – the fact that I’m a vegetarian, don’t drink and haven’t smoked for years is not discussed, ever. The fact that I’m overweight is the sole reason behind (most) people’s concern.
I know many people who, after years of screwing up their metabolisms, are fit and eat healthfully but are still overweight (or obese). Yes, they could diet down to a lower weight, but after what their bodies have already been through, it would require permanent low-level starvation to remain at that weight. Seeing someone with a paunch is not equivalent to seeing someone who is unhealthy.’
That’s leaving aside the whole issue of whether it’s okay to judge folks based on their health – I sympathize with folks who want to make sure people are making decisions with complete information, like Martin above, but I chafe at the idea that people are judging me based on my decisions about my health.
Amanda says the correlation between having fat friends and being fat is between men, not women:
http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2007/07/26/having-fat-friends-does-not-hurt-your-standing-in-the-patriarchy/
Interesting.
The study itself can be found and read, FOR FREE, at the NEJM website.
I’m a little surprised that no one has really attributed this to some kind of self selection. I mean, really, so many other groups of people self-segregate, why not (at least somewhat) by weight? In my experience, people have a tendency towards hanging out with people that look like themselves or who have similar habits. Sometimes we overcome these things, but certainly not always. Just a thought.
Oh, great. Someone finally realized that all this hype about the “obesity epidemic” is stupid because fat isn’t a contagious disease, so let’s pony up some numbers to make look like it is.
Gee, I wonder who funded that study.