Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own by Mika Brzezinski Read Free Book Online Page A

HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm , agrees that women on TV are especially likely to be judged based on what they look like. And Susie says it’s a no-win proposition: a woman who seems to care too much about her looks “gets described as self-loathing. If she lets her weight go, then she’s described as not caring about herself. It’s like you can’t win.”
    That’s reality, and research backs up this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aspect of things. A 2012 survey conducted for Glamour magazine by Yale’s Rebecca Puhl seems to confirm Susie’s suspicion. Puhl asked nearly two thousand women, ages eighteen to forty, to envision a female stranger who was either “overweight” or “thin,” and then to choose two words to describe her. The most common words used to describe the overweight woman were slow, undisciplined, sloppy , and lazy . Thin women didn’t fare much better. They were called bitchy, mean, controlling, vain , and self-centered . 3
    Surprisingly, Puhl found that the weight of the survey respondents didn’t affect their answers. Heavy women were just as likely to use words like sloppy to describe someone who was overweight. Likewise, slender women were just as likely to say that a thin woman was mean .
    “What that survey showed is that we judge people who are overweight in very negative ways, and then sometimes we judge people who are thin in negative ways as well. It’s a no-winsituation,” says Puhl, who is an expert in weight stigma. Part of that results from stereotypes of overweight and obese individuals presented in both children’s and adult media. “We know that the more people are exposed to media, the worse attitudes they have, and the more prejudice they express toward people who are overweight and obese. That is something that has increased significantly during the past fifty years.”
    Puhl wants us to confront some of that negativity. “This highlights the need to educate ourselves about how the media and how our culture are shaping these values that promote bias and prejudice and judgment. And we need to find ways to challenge those.”

    Weight is almost the only place where people are willing to speak bluntly about their prejudices toward an entire group of people. At Yale’s Rudd Center, researchers use a tool known as the Fat Phobia Scale to ask people to rate characteristics of those who are fat. Puhl says she would not have been able to get candid answers if she had used a similar scale to study gender or racial bias. “It’s no longer socially acceptable or politically correct to say that someone feels negatively, or has prejudice, because of race or gender. With body weight, that’s not the case. People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.”
    People are willing to express very readily the stereotypes and negative attitudes that they have toward obese people.— Rebecca Puhl
    That willingness to stereotype reflects a prevailing idea that obesity results from lack of willpower and discipline. It totally ignores the reality of our contemporary food environment, which makes high-fat, high-sugar foods easy to access, and it shows ignorance about how such foods can get a grip on us that is hard to release. It shrugs off the mixed messages we get: one that tells us “being thin is worth just about any price” and one that says “this food is cheap, available 24/7, and designed to stimulate pathways in your brain that keep you coming back for more.”
    When we lay fault entirely at the feet of people who carry extra weight rather than see them in that larger context, it becomes easy to say unkind things about them. “Blaming individuals for their excess weight is at the root of a lot of stigma that we see,” says Puhl.
    New Jersey Governor Chris Christie can attest to this. He is often in the spotlight, not only because of his leadership role, but also because of his size. Like any