On The Uselessness of Moral Panics

Having got back on LinkedIn recently, to let that part of the world know about my ongoing career change into the fitness professions, this morning I was presented with a thread initiated by a mother who reported pride that, when her 12-year-old daughter tried on some snow pants that didn’t fit, the daughter‘s response was along the lines of, “maybe my body is just too powerful for these pants.“

The mother was happy that her child’s first response was to take pride in her body‘s capabilities.

Let’s be clear about something up front: I could try on pants too small for me right this minute. At a BMI in the ideal zone that no doctor would quibble with. For the last few years, I’ve been in the rough range of a 34 or 33 inch waist, with 34 inch inseam. That happens to be a size which is a little rare on department store shelves. I usually have to go digging. It’s easier to find things with slightly shorter inseams, and very often also bigger waists. Or smaller waists for much shorter fellas. Just off the top of my head, 38 inch waist and 30 inch inseams seem to be pretty common. At my peak weight, I was beginning to get a little big for 40 waists. (As a teen and into my early 20s, I had several years in 32-inch waists.)

But nothing stops me from pulling a 28 or 30 inch waist pair of jeans off the shelves and trying to cram myself into them. Those sizes aren’t rare either, though their shorter legs are likely to be as much of a hindrance as getting them to zip around my hips.

It’s entirely possible that this young girl just so happened to make the same mistake at first. Yeah: you’re a medium, extra-small is not going to cut it. Not even at 10% body fat.

But … alas, not surprisingly … there were hundreds of comments debating the merits of praising an “obese” child for loving her body. Even though there was absolutely no way of knowing whether the child in question was obese, or was just trying on doll clothes.

On a basic level of human empathy, I feel as though I understand one urge that drives people to warn about rising obesity rates in situations like this, even when the person’s actual body-composition statistics have not been presented. The last couple of years of experience with the COVID pandemic have re-highlighted the difference in health outcomes that sometimes goes along with having high body fat.

But people also love to “get things off their chests,” by presenting information that most of us possess as if they’re revealing deeper truths. It’s not tough to understand why many people tune out a lecture about common knowledge.

Since we don’t know the child’s weight, leaping to obesity also has some telltale signs of a moral panic, rather than strictly a concern about individual or societal health. Many comments seemed to take the attitude: nobody else in society is brave enough to talk about how wrongheaded and misguided this mother is for letting her child become a blimp, but I will bravely make the same point that hundreds of others are also making.

Most of us already know that weight is associated with health issues. What’s less obvious is how to navigate competing needs in such a way that we keep to some weight range that won’t be problematic for our long-term well being, where that well being has to be defined to include both physical and mental health.

Competing needs? What’s he on about? Being too heavy is risky, isn’t it? What competes with that?

How about evolution?

Look: modern food abundance is EXTREMELY modern. It’s not even a worldwide phenomenon … many people still go to bed hungry every night, and not because they eat “junk” food. But where food is abundant, just think about how crazy a supermarket would have looked to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Or even Queen Elizabeth the First. Fresh vegetables year round? In WINTER? What’s this, an “avocado”? That’s originally from Mexico, maybe grown in California … how did it end up in Poughkeepsie? You transport it by what now? What’s a “container ship”? What’s a “freight railroad” and a “freezer car”? Good lord, what’s an “airplane,” you can’t be serious.

Starvation was a high risk for human populations for all but the last century. And our bodies have evolved to prepare us for THAT reality. Not the reality in which I can eat a huge bowl of steamed broccoli and a healthy chicken breast, and then chase them with a bag of Sour Patch Kids so big my mouth hurts by the last few candies. (I just told you one of my big “cheat” foods.)

Not only do we have a great deal of food available in the first place: a lot of modern food is engineered to appeal to us precisely along the lines of “signal the taste buds that this is yummy, so the gut will expect that it’s also packed with nutrition, even if it isn’t.” Our cravings for salt, fat, or sugar are there to guide us to nutrition so that we can eat enough to survive not only a growing season of plants and huntable animals running about, but a drought, or a winter.

We pack on body fat because our body expects deprivation. We eat big because tomorrow was so very not guaranteed for most of history. Evolution got that right. Our mental discipline, though ALSO a product of our evolution, has to compete with those needs.

Calls for “discipline” and moral hand-wringing about gluttony are up against quite a fight when we are, to some extent, hard-wired for gluttony.

The point isn’t to make excuses for ourselves if we are struggling with health due to weight or any other reason. The point is to find out what’s effective at improving our current state, whatever that state is. The point is to accurately understand what we’re up against and what steps work to change it.

Public hand-wringing about obesity doesn’t seem to be having a high success rate. Unless the goal is simply to “get it off our chests.” If we feel that “telling the truth about obesity” is a moral victory which puts us in the category of “good” person, our work is done. But that means we’ve made it about us, rather than about someone who might benefit from exercise (even if their weight never changes) or from learning how to eat in ways that satisfy hunger without packing on extra fat quite so easily.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. At best, leaping to the conclusion that a child is obese on flimsy evidence is a sign of good intentions without good thought processes. At best.

The road to HEALTH? Well, that’s paved with doing more thinking, learning, and getting support for choices that work well for us long-term, even though our mouths may still crave a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked (there: I’ve listed another cheat ‘meal’. See: I’m a human being with cravings too.)

Personally, I’m about neither fat “shaming” nor fat “acceptance.” I’m about body weight as one piece of data. And I’m about helping get healthier: emphasis on the comparison to yesterday or last year, rather than an ideal, even if we have an ideal in mind to guide us. I don’t yearn to train people to become malnourished with an excess of food OR an excess of deprivation.

In 2013 I rode my bike hundreds of miles and lost 20 to 25 pounds. That winter, heading into 2014, I was off the bike and in the gym; I also stopped watching my food intake. I put all of those pounds back on. I still started 2014 in better health than 2013, and MUCH better than 2012, 11, 10, 09 … you get the picture.

When I decided to also lose weight more sustainably, it was to improve on my situation further. But it wasn’t “easy.” It got easiER with time and practice. I still deal with cravings and desires to eat more. Evolution.

The moral panic about obesity is understandable but still dumb as hell. As is the use of lectures to try to encourage people to control their urges. After all: if it were so easy to control hunger urges, more of these people would have controlled their emotional urge to yak about obesity in the simplest and least helpful terms, eh?

© 2021 Grampa Fitness

Disclaimer: Ideas expressed in this blog post should not be construed as official advice on how to safely perform fitness activities. Always consult with your doctor and other medical professionals as necessary, before engaging in exercise.