What “F” word, you ask?

Fat.

Last Monday Maura Kelly, a writer for Marie Claire magazine, posted this controversial blog in which she openly stated her opinion regarding fat people showing public affection (both on TV and in real life). She has since augmented the post with a somewhat lacking apology, but not before hundreds of comments were posted calling her, among other things, shallow, rude, and bigoted. There are now thousands of comments to this article, with a surprising number of  individuals stating in so many words how “sizeism” like that displayed in the article should not be tolerated.

Now if you know anything about me (which you may or may not, depending on how you’ve stumbled across this particular entry), you know I have something to say about this. In brief, I like fat. I think fat is sexy. This is not to be confused with the idea that I support people getting/staying fat for cosmetic reasons. Saying to a loved one “you’d look so much better if you gained weight” is equivalently as bad as saying “you’d look so much better if you lost 5/10/25 pounds,” especially if it’s just for vanity reasons.

When I say “I like fat” I mean that if someone is overweight and they are comfortable with it (and the possible health risks associated with it), then I fully support it and have no issues with how they look.

So after hearing that, it may come as a surprise that, in a weird way, this article made me happy. I guess I was surprised at the number of people who came forward who openly admitted to being angered by Kelly’s words. It made me happy to see so many people as upset by her article as I was.

That being said, of course there was the number of posts that, while not necessarily agreeing with her, cited the ever-popular argument that “being fat is a drain on government money because of the associated health risks” and therefore being fat is bad.

Here’s where I feel I should comment. I understand this concern (and I’ll address it momentarily), but what I don’t see is why these people are making that comment on Kelly’s blog. Nowhere does she discuss the “health drain” that being fat supposedly is; she simply discusses how grossed out she gets by two heavier people making out in public. How is that related to health issues? It’s like trying to argue that because smoking causes high health costs, two smokers making out should therefore be viewed as bad.

Anyway, that was just an aside.

What I really want to address is this idea that being fat is “bad” because it causes higher health costs (at least in the States, where there is a super high percentage of overweight and obese individuals). I can understand this logic insofar as the general reasoning, but I think a lot of people who make this argument fail to see the other important sides of it.

What do I mean? Well, let’s look at it this way. In the extreme version of this argument, people “choose” to be fat by eating too much and exercising to little. Therefore, they choose to become overweight, and this choice, when chosen by a large amount of people, leads to higher healthcare costs. Let’s ignore arguments that take into account genetic contributions or other illnesses that lead to people gaining weight and just focus on this extreme version.

Obviously, such an extreme argument can be applied loosely to other choices that also can lead to higher healthcare costs. A small example: drug consumption. People “choose” to begin to consume, say, prescription drugs that they don’t need, a select number develop an addiction that is often followed by a myriad number of health conditions that, if enough people exhibit these symptoms, can raise healthcare costs.

I’m not equating obesity to prescription drug abuse (‘cause that would be dumb), but I AM trying to make the following point: people seem to place a large amount of the “this is why healthcare costs are increasing” blame on overweight and obese people while, if things were broken down a different way, I think we would see that there are enough instances of OTHER risky health-related behaviors (that are unregulated by the government) that can be seen as raising healthcare costs just as much as the obesity epidemic.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: obesity is probably chosen as the scapegoat health issue because 1) it IS becoming an epidemic if it isn’t one already, and 2) it’s a very obvious issue, “obvious” meaning that it’s something others can simply look around themselves to see. You can’t just look around to pick out the people that may be drinking too much or abusing drugs or doing any number of other risky health-related things, but you CAN do that with obesity, and I think that’s why a lot of people are so hard on individuals who happen to be carrying extra weight.

I don’t know. This may be total BS, but that’s what Ms. Kelly’s blog reminded me of. It also got me quite upset because of the nature of her tone, but I decided not to blog about that to save my blood pressure from spiking.

Anyway.

Today’s song: Heat of the Moment by Asia