Weight Loss v. Health

Today, I listened as a middle-aged man at work disparaged fat people.

"Why is there so much obesity down South?" he asked my boss, a lovely, kind, gentle, and very skinny woman who hails originally from Louisiana. She stammered back something about diet and lifestyle. The gentleman continued to wonder aloud how people could possibly get to be fat. "How could you let yourself be that unhealthy?" he asked.

At that moment, I recalled an article I read a few weeks ago. It discussed the newest trend in fad dieting among women: acting as though your diet is simply a health plan, not actually a diet at all. The idea, of course, is that being anorexic is shallow, but being "healthy" (i.e., relying on the pseudoscience of "detoxing" and "fasting") is acceptable:

“Most women here are at all times either on a diet, thinking about one, reading about one or hearing about one their friends are on,” says Kathy Kaehler, a fitness and food coach in L.A. who works with Julia Roberts and other celebrities. But there’s a hitch. Even in this city, if you go on too many diets, your friends will start to think that you are vain, have an eating disorder or are just plain annoying. As a result, women here are—superficially, anyway—forswearing dieting and embracing a new euphemism for it: cleansing. Sure, you’re still expected to fit into those size 00 jeans, but instead of merely being super skinny, now you’re supposed to be skinny and healthy."

As I read the list of things that women have been consuming exclusively to lose weight (lemon juice diets, for example, or the lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper combination that is apparently known as the "master cleanse"), I thought about this film we saw in middle school health class. The film was one of those classic cautionary educational films that showcase kids getting in to trouble (via drugs, eating disorders, or pregnancy) and then either dying horribly or redeeming themselves through repentance and hard work. Anyways, the girl in the film was anorexic, and all she would eat was popcorn. She said to her friend, "It hardly has any calories, but it makes me feel full!"

How is drinking nothing but lemon juice any different from eating nothing but popcorn?

It seems that we've conflated "skinny" with "healthy," and that's worrisome, because sometimes skinny is as far from healthy as it can be. Sure, we have a national obesity epidemic on our hands, and that's obviously something about which we should be concerned. But shouldn't the focus be on promoting a healthy lifestyle (exercise, a balanced diet of whole foods, knowing your body and how to interpret what it's telling you) instead of just promoting weight loss itself?

At a certain point, and under certain conditions, weight loss can be BAD. I'm underweight; my account on Keas suggests I might want to discuss this with my doctor. My low weight is the result of how my body works, not a diet; I eat like a horse, and I'm still underweight. But I'm constantly being told that my body represents a healthy ideal, and, simultaneously, I feel the pressure to ALWAYS be thinking about how to lose weight. Even though I know I'm skinny and that my goal should be to find out what's causing this underweight situation (Keas suggested Celiac Disease), I'm simultaneously being told that the way I look is the way I SHOULD look, and that I should be considering ways to lose even more weight. The message being driven home by the media these days is that weight loss is always supposed to be in the back of your mind, not necessarily healthy living.

Can't we all just agree that being healthy is good— but that being healthy entails actually consuming food at some point?