Fat Shaming: A new way to prevent obesity?

As much as we would deny it and insist that we don’t participate, there tends to be a lot of, well, unkindness that gets directed toward the overweight population. This might be in the form of a stray comment at the water cooler, or a roll of the eyes when at a restaurant. Regardless, obese individuals are regularly ostracized by our behavior and the things that our culture produces. In many cases they can even be discriminated against because of their appearance.

Our culture glorifies beauty, and beauty, it tells us, comes in a very, very specific package: thin and fit. Therefore, when we see people who fall outside of these criteria for beauty we can regard them as anomalous, or altogether ugly; we feel that our cultural measurements of beauty entitle us to evaluate other people’s health and appearance. It also doesn’t help that loads of scientific research indicate that obesity puts people at risk for severe illness in the future. We can often feel that these little medical factoids justify our disgust with obese individuals, and we hide our insulting behavior under the guise of advancing healthier behavior. But despite how offensive or hurtful this stigmatizing can be, some people are beginning to think that it might be the only effective way to combat the obesity epidemic.

Recently, a researcher at a national bioethics institution published a paper evaluating an alternative method of obesity prevention. Daniel Callahan has proposed that we should begin to allow “edgier” anti-obesity initiatives that essentially involve shaming the individual into losing weight. Now, the approach isn’t (entirely) as extreme as it sounds – to put it into perspective, Callahan cited the remarkable success that similar marketing initiatives have had on the smoking community. By increasing awareness about the adverse health effects of smoking, we were able to stigmatize the act of smoking, thus making it significantly less attractive to its proponents. Callahan said that the “campaign to stigmatize smoking was a great success, turning what had been considered simply a bad habit into reprehensible behavior”.

Callahan’s observation about smoking is an astute one: if we see a very preventable activity causing widespread illness and death in our society, shouldn’t we respond to the harmful behavior according to how serious the issue is? In this case, the act of smoking was publicly eviscerated as unhealthy, unwise, and downright irresponsible – this stigmatization of smoking proved to be very effective. So should we use a similar method for the case of obesity? This is the question that has people divided on just how similar the two cases actually are.

With smoking, the cigarette was what was attacked. More specifically, the action that people typically perform with a cigarette was attacked, but nevertheless, the cigarette was the symbol that became publicly humiliated. If we evaluate the problem of obesity, pretty quickly we’ll recognize that there might not be any “symbol” that we can separate from the person to whom it pertains. Obesity is an anatomically inherent condition that is being stigmatized, not some secondary device that can be observed on its own. To attack obesity would necessarily mean attacking the person who it is attached to.

This raises questions about increased workforce discrimination, and whether worsening an already serious issue is really the solution to obesity. However, Callahan argues that there needs to be some sort of palpable social pressure to prevent obesity if we intend on decreasing its impact in the future. The best way to do this, Callahan suggests, would make people want to strongly avoid becoming obese through marketing and other public service initiatives. Since the fear of illness, immobility, or death don’t seem to decrease the growing obesity numbers, we need to do something that will prevent people from ever becoming obese in the first place, rather than trying to change the habits of those who already are.

Despite being an ethically dubious approach to the obesity crisis, Callahan’s suggestion is still extremely interesting, and seems as though it would be effective, but the concerns of his opponents are still just as valid. It’s difficult to decide if obesity is something that we should handle with tact, or with aggression. There are plenty of healthy, medically supervised options available when it comes to weight loss, but these opportunities aren't addressing the obesity problem effectively. We need to decide if the severity of the issue requires similarly severe methods of prevention.