Stumbled-Upon Shame

In the mind of a typical parent, there are several things that they hope a child will not grow up to be. Researching those possibilities, a journalist will occasionally run across something fascinating to pursue, and here is a great example from the archives of Tumblr.com. The material itself is more than 10 years old, authored by a female cartoon figure pseudonymously known as “edcynic.”

That page was accidentally found in the course of a search for the author of a 10-point list of items relevant to “The Shame of an Eating Disorder,” and here we will elaborate on that rather brief and brusque list, and add a bit of empathic imagination, with the purpose of capturing some of the more distinctive and awkward aspects of living with a pitiful secret that probably everyone around you has long ago guessed. If not treated, what does a binge-eating child have to look forward to?

“Who dunnit?”

Yes, it is easy to imagine the embarrassment when a roommate says, “Where’s that ice cream that was in the freezer?,” and you have to say, “Well, the empty and crumpled container is under the sink…” — especially when it is the third time this week that a supposedly shared treat did a disappearing act. The original author did not go into that much detail, but we know how to extrapolate.

And sure, you want to be as quiet as possible when raiding the refrigerator at 2 AM and everyone else is asleep. Still, that particular awkwardness can be avoided with careful planning, and the average binge eater probably catches on to the techniques of ninja-like stealth pretty early on.

The author mentions how shameful it is to realize that you can’t get to work or to school, or pick up the kids from their school, because you spent the gas money on food. But taking into account the number of people within a 10-mile radius who spent their gas money on crack or lottery tickets, it could be a lot worse.

You again…

A shame that cannot be avoided, unless you want to spend even more of that gas money driving around to stores outside your neighborhood, is the third, fourth, or fifth encounter this month with the same checkout clerk who also processed your last cartful of junk food, and the one before that…

Excessive exercise is a slow-motion purge method, lacking the elements of drama and urgency that a problem eater may be hooked on. And then, there are episodes that qualify as more than just a little embarrassing. Like calling off a plan to do something with friends, because it has become clear that staying home to binge and purge is really the only possible way your mental/emotional quirk will allow you to get through a Saturday night.

Binge-and-purge

In this equation, the “binge” element is simple. Just acquire plenty of edible items made from flour, sugar, fat, and additives. Eat as much of that stuff as possible. So far, the program is pretty straightforward.

The “purge” part is when it gets complicated. Vomiting can be induced in a couple of different ways, and is rough on the digestive system, and expensively destructive to the teeth. However, it is a relatively quick process that can successfully be accomplished in a public restroom or a friend’s bathroom, or even outdoors.

Alternately, the resulting waste may be let out through the other end. A person can swallow a substance to induce diarrhea, a choice that involves the constant threat of exposure in the most elemental, irrefutable way. And, depending on how much you like your job and/or your paycheck, you need to be technically adept at the precise self-administration of your laxatives on workdays. This purge method can also damage a person’s innards, and is not recommended by any sane individual.

A tough one

According to journalist Paula Spencer Scott, binge eating disorder (BED) is “one of the most common eating disorders.” WebMD offers a concise page covering the pertinent categories of questions that parents may have if they don’t want binge eating disorder to become a part of their child’s future.

What should a parent watch for? Exactly how harmful can it be to overall health? At what point is it appropriate for a parent to say, “Okay, this needs to be addressed”? What are the treatment options? What about prevention? And more…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Pro-Anas and Their Ridiculous “Mono” Diets,” edcynicArchive.tumblr.com, undated
Source: “Binge Eating Disorder in Kids and Teens,” WebMD.com, 02/14/26
Image by Ricinator/Pixabay

Embracing Shame and Blame

Members of the general public who tend to hunt for scapegoats can’t help noticing a huge category of humans who are eligible to receive a share of the blame for the crushing expense of modern life: the population of obese children, along with their parents, who seem to be co-conspirators in a plot to make everyone else go bankrupt.

Some families receive government assistance with their medical bills, which may be caused or exacerbated by a child’s unfortunate condition. At any given time, there is only so much money to go around, and one school of thought says that available funds should only be spent on kids whose condition was 0% caused by any actions of their own, or by any neglect or wrongdoing on the part of their parents.

And it must follow, as night follows day, that in a universe shaped like that, childhood obesity is always 100% the parents’ fault.

Yes, in certain circles, a child’s obesity is fondly accepted as being his, or her, and/or the parents’ exclusive problem. Each time a medical professional or institution is paid to alleviate a situation caused by obesity, it reduces the funding available to cure children whose medical problems cannot be dismissed as their own fault.

It means that some other child might not obtain help at all. It is the sort of public budget scandal, based on half-baked evidence and janky reasoning, that some taxpayers love to be upset by.

Universal participation

Of course, overweight kids and their progenitors are not the only recipients of blame in modern society. Shamers get blamed too, and blamers also are shamed. There are plenty of bad feelings to go around! Some grownups are blamed for trying to make overweight people feel not just lousy about themselves, but unworthy of human consideration, period. Moreover, obesity arguments tend to metastasize into every aspect of life.

For instance, more than one critic has pointed out that the average passenger airplane seat is an inch and a half narrower than its counterpart of two decades ago. And yet, the average passenger’s rump is not 1.5 lateral inches slimmer than those of his immediate ancestors. Or even close. It gets worse. Some frequent flyers report, instead, that seat width has actually narrowed by an entire two inches, while “leg room” is now as mythical as a leprechaun.

Meanwhile, folks with other interests note that, although airplane seats may have shrunk, theater seats have widened. And yet, that is not universally appreciated. In another context, a different anonymous online malcontent recently complained that theater is a dying art form because the seats are still too small. In their opinion, to discriminate against large-bottomed moviegoers is a losing strategy for an art form that hopes to stay relevant in this day and age.

Freedom of speech

It is not surprising that the more secret a website allows posters to be, the more open their communications become. A pseudonymous woman, for instance, might point out that “Fat people deserve dignity, fat people deserve to be treated with respect, fat people deserve to have their healthcare concerns taken seriously and their healthcare needs met.”

Confronted by unsympathetic normies, some correspondents take great care to explain just why their weight is so difficult to control, while others declare with explosive anger that the reason why a person is fat is nobody’s business and doesn’t matter anyway, when it comes to a basic issue like common courtesy. No one owes a rude stranger, or even a polite one, any justification for their own existence.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Wadams/Pixabay

Psychological Roots of Shame and Blame

To have a large body used to mean something. If you were a man, it implied that you possessed the power to take what you wanted. If you were a woman, it meant that your father or husband could afford to not only basically nourish, but to indulge you.

On the human scale of such matters, in the depths of the preverbal mind, there is a lot more justification for overweight people to look scornfully at normal-weight people than vice versa. It’s just so glaringly obvious (in the absence of actual logic, of course) that the overfed specimen is superior to the less bulky kind.

But with modern, logical knowledge, there is no valid reason to be proud of fat. The urge to brag about the size of the belly has been displaced. So, instead of showing off the obvious result of privileged eating — the expanded waistline — it is now necessary instead to show off how you got that way. The primitive urge to be admired for our sheer poundage is displaced by the urge to be admired for where, how, and what we eat.

Obsession leads to… more obsession

Currently, to be observed dining in an absurdly expensive restaurant is something that insecure people do in the hope that they will consequently feel better about themselves. To engineer a situation where both your financial peers and the less privileged commoners watch you eat overpriced food becomes the most significant event of the day.

Meanwhile, within someone with a differently attuned conscience, lives the awareness that impoverished people are more likely to be obese because of gnarly food additives, low availability of healthful fresh foods, unaffordable medical care, fewer opportunities to enjoy safe outdoor exercise or to afford home gym equipment, and other factors.

If a conscientious critic has a choice between mentally persecuting the wealthy obese or the poor obese, resentment toward the overfed will be much easier to justify and reconcile with a finely-tuned sense of basic morality.

Historical echoes

Whether intellectually defensible or not, the attitude itself is basically instinctive. To look at an overweight person is to trigger a very deep concept that the mind does not even need to translate into words, but to which it automatically leaps: If that person has access to enough food to fatten them up like that, it must be because they intentionally, knowingly, and wrongly deprived someone else.

That assumption, arrived at by the subconscious mind of a well-to-do person, might be right or wrong. They might be recognizing a fellow piratical spirit, but they also might be totally off the mark. Likewise, a penniless individual could also be either sadly correct, or unfairly 180 degrees wrong, about the stout person.

Or, at the sight of an individual who looks pretty darn good, the onlooker might assume that he or she goes to great lengths to keep that body in presentable shape — and might be correct. Or, it could simply be the case that the fine-looking object of their gaze was lucky enough to inherit incredible genes.

A pitiful waste of mental energy

The point here is, for multiple reasons it would be much more sane and healthy for us to not think about other people’s bodies at all. First, because our subconscious minds are capable of reaching erroneous conclusions all day long, and second, because we are totally able to believe bounteous amounts of nonsense without even being aware of this flaw.

But mainly, regarding the condition another person is in, all that mental energy is simply wasted because our theories and opinions will not affect that shape at all. And how does this relate to the psychology of blame and shame?

Suppose that someone gives up the chance to run a lucrative family business in order to rescue cats that might otherwise be “put to sleep.” In the public eye, this person might be considered saintly, and spoken of in complimentary terms, and admired for the strength of his or her convictions, and for his or her refusal to bend before public opinion.

Now, suppose that a different person could have captured a top-level position in a powerful company — but sadly, during the immediate post-graduate year of corporate ladder-climbing, she gained 80 pounds. She could have prevented that from happening — but did not. She ignored public opinion, refused to bend to any sort of pressure, and just got fat, and lost the chance to climb the corporate ladder. Strangely enough, to resist the reasons and rules of others — in that situation — is not admired one little bit.

Our minds versus reality

It is totally possible that additional studies could discover other factors that affect and are affected by the relationship between obesity and income. Many other interesting truths might be discovered, too. But the bottom line is, why bother? Unless we happen to be a person working toward an advanced degree in a specialized academic field, there is really no reason at all for us to expend mental energy on these matters.

Few things in life are more futile than wasting even a moment’s thought on the shape that anyone is in, other than 1. ourselves and 2. the minor children for whose health we are legally and morally responsible. To grasp this principle is to free up countless brain cells for more productive and satisfying use.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Income and obesity: what is the direction of the relationship?,” BMJ.com, January 2018
Image by joenomias/Pixabay

The B-word and the S-word

Blaming and shaming take many forms and have many faces. Back when Twitter existed, plenty of pseudonymous Americans exercised their right of free speech by stating that, because most pandemic fatalities occurred among folks with pre-existing medical conditions, the rest of us need not worry about dying of COVID.

Often, obesity was named as a liability, as well as other conditions associated with obesity. In many cases, it seemed that the opinionated citizens really wanted to say, “If they died from a little virus that a lot of people don’t even catch, it’s their own darn fault for being fat.”

“Othering” people, or presenting alleged evidence that sickness and death are the others’ own fault, apparently helps some folks nurture the fiction that they themselves could never possibly become a pandemic statistic.

A writer went so far as to proclaim that, in 90% of COVID fatalities, the actual cause of death was “selfish lifestyle choices,” which would, of course, include the choice to be overweight. Others retaliated by accusing the blamers of kidding themselves about that, just to preserve the comfortable fiction that it could never happen to them.

Righteous rhetoric is not universal

Of course, there are always other voices to offer other views. One example is an article titled “Harms of Framing Obesity as a Disease of Individuals,” which appeared last month in JAMA Health Forum:

[T]he currently dominant “obesity is a disease requiring individual treatment” framing undermines public and political support for tackling the epidemic’s root causes. First, we contend that the media-saturated debate centering medical treatments such as expensive glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists reinforces food, pharmaceutical, and wellness industry communication strategies emphasizing obesity as a problem requiring medical treatment, rather than prevention.

The authors said a mouthful, all right! But there is more:

Second, this framing focuses on individuals rather than the food environments individuals find themselves in, which are shaped by government-set laws and financial incentives for the food industry.

And, they offer a solution: Follow the example of the war on smoking, which has achieved at least partial success by simply pricing a lot of would-be tobacco fiends right out of the market. A skeptic could retort that we would then face the ludicrous sight of cars with tinted windows pulling up next to schools to peddle candy and cupcakes to innocent children.

But as it has done in so many similar cases, the government could probably arrange to discourage any sugar black market. Before our readers go on to read that very interesting article, let us contemplate just one more quotation from it:

Narratives describing an identified individual’s struggle with obesity […] generate less support for obesity prevention policies than depersonalized narratives” and “personalized stories make people less likely to […] support governmental actions.

Among the small percentage of adult Americans who could be considered healthy, a devout belief in the virtues of diet and exercise apparently helped to allay their fears. Of course, some of the same zealots had previously devoted their energy to dissing First Lady Michelle Obama, who did her best to encourage everyone to be as healthy as possible. Some critics are just never satisfied.

And, of course, there exists the possibility that both public and private action can coexist and support each other!

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Harms of Framing Obesity as a Disease of Individuals,” JAMA Health Forum, 05/01/26
Image by truthseeker08/Pixabay

Nice Try, Obesogenic Chemicals

As the old saying goes, “No news is good news.” It is a joking-but-not-really expression. If nobody came rushing up to you today saying, “Did you hear about… (some horrible thing),” then today was a good day. Since yesterday, no disaster has happened, and to be aware of that is, in its way, “good news.”

But lately, the expression “No news is good news” has taken on a whole different meaning. It’s pretty much all bad news. None of it could be classified as good. At least that’s how it looks on some days, doesn’t it?

Just to illustrate the point, here is a very recent headline, along with its subtitle:

“Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples”
Study of mothers in Seattle underscores ‘widespread, systemic problem’ of chemical contamination, experts say

The journalist is Tom Perkins, who goes on to clarify: “Breast milk samples from mothers in Seattle contain alarming levels of dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals.” Amongst those substances are BPA, BPS, and melamine, all of which perform the useful service of allowing food products to slide unhindered from their packaging materials.

BPA is associated with obesity, and so is BPS. Between them, they have a lot to do with an estimated 100 million (probably a lot more) cases of obesity worldwide. Apparently, the detection of melamine in breast milk is a fairly recent occurrence, but never fear, it is unlikely to disappear. In fact, Perkins reports, “Congress is considering gutting the nation’s laws around toxic chemicals.”

Further information is added by Ryan Babadi, senior scientist at a nonprofit called Toxic Free Future and a lead author of the pertinent study. He also affirms that this gunk being found in mothers’ milk represents a “widespread, systemic problem” for which we need “stronger protections […] not rollbacks.” His work explains what nobody in a civilized world should have to explain; namely, why and how the stuff makes its way into the mouths of infants “who are undergoing rapid stages of development that are orchestrated by the endocrine system.”

It’s not brand new

Previous studies have found endocrine disruptors, like, for instance, flame retardants, in mothers’ milk, which indicates trouble not only for those mothers and their children, but for the entire societal structure of “adults, workers, and communities.” This currently discussed study is one of the recent ones in which melamine is showing up for the first time.

Out of 50 specimens of mothers’ milk tested in this study, about 92% of them contained one or more of the substances the technicians were looking for, which are known to be “harmful at very low levels of exposure” — especially to a fetus, a possibility that should not even be conceivable outside the script of a horror movie. The news is all bad, because…

The chemicals have been found in epidemiological studies to have a wide range of developmental and reproductive harms.

How could those mothers let this happen? What were they thinking? And yet, we are assured that many of the study participants were intelligent, educated women, some of them even able to afford the highest quality groceries. In their defense, Babadi notes that the harmful chemicals are so universally present in edible products that the very concept of trying to avoid them is a joke. Consumers can’t just “shop their way out of this.”

The study also found cyanuric acid and triclosan, but they are old news at this point. Along with the breastfeeding hazard, these substances and others equally bizarre are found in commercially available baby formulas.

The Perkins piece leaves us with a thought that, after all this, is not actually very inspiring:

Babadi emphasized that breastfeeding remains the healthiest choice for infants when possible, because it is the most nutritious and generally the safest option.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples,” TheGuardian.com, 06/14/26
Source: “BPA Exposure Linked to 127 Million Global Metabolic Disease Cases,” AJMC.com, 11/20/25
Image by K3IST/Pixabay

It’s Worse Than Wrong, It’s Useless

The previous post touched on a couple of aspects of obesity, whether found in a child or an adult. The minute this subject comes up, it obviously raises some questions, such as: Why do many allegedly civilized adults feel it is their responsibility to notify overweight people about how much they disapprove? Granted, this treatment, when meted out to adults, and by adults, is much more subtle than the techniques employed by mean children. But it’s there, nonetheless.

Dr. Pretlow once pointed out that, according to research done by UC San Diego and apparently bumped offline since then, a group of young people undergoing chemotherapy against cancer, and another group of young people who were obese, rated their quality of life as pretty much the same.

A certain degree of puzzlement elicited a follow-up question: “If obese young people are truly miserable, due to being obese, why don’t they simply eat healthy, exercise, lose weight, and not be miserable anymore? Obviously, something else is going on.” That mysterious factor may simply (but, aha, not really so simply) be that they can’t stop using food as a tool in a transparently illogical coping mechanism. Deciding to eat less is quite a different matter from, for instance, deciding not to have cancer.

Hmmm…

Looking at this objectively, it seems possible that people, including the young, may have adopted for their own comfort the idea that all obesity is the fault of food manufacturers who fill their products with fattening ingredients, transforming them into “problem foods.” Which of course is valid to a certain extent — but nowhere near an extent that would justify all the overweight people using it as an excuse, all the time.

To make a long story short, it seems pretty obvious that, as Dr. Pretlow noted,

[…] rather than incriminating specific constituents of food as the cause of obesity, we should look at why people consume large amounts in the first place, and keep doing so, even though they are aware that it will result in further weight gain.

At any rate, either way, it is glaringly obvious that many overweight and obese people of all ages have a pretty hard time of it, just maintaining enough morale to support a bearable existence. Tempting as it is to shame and blame them, any improvement in the overall situation is liable to be quite negligible. Worsening of the overall situation, on the other hand, is a quite likely result.

A while back, radio personality Ira Glass of “This American Life” chose writer Lindy West as an interview subject. West is far from slender, and they discussed related topics, including self-esteem, quality of life, and fat-shaming. Glass reported that because West is married to a tall, handsome man, people meeting them socially will assume that they are not a couple.

Even if they’re at a bar holding hands, looking exactly like a couple, people say stuff to them like, so you guys roommates? Women hit on him in front of Lindy. She describes being fat as simultaneously being way too visible and being invisible — not wanting people looking at her, noticing her, noticing what she eats. She worried — and she worries still, all the time — about destroying chairs by sitting on them.

Glass went on to relate some of West’s remarks about hypocritical critics:

It’s not about health. It’s about “ew.” You think fat people are icky. Ew. A fat person might touch you on a plane with their fat. Ew! If you were concerned about my health, you would also be concerned about my mental health, which has spent the past 28 years being slowly eroded.

To another reporter from another publication, West described being uncomfortable in public because so many male comics have made her life miserable:

If I go to a comedy club and I look around, I don’t know which of the dudes lining the wall told me that I was too fat to get raped.

To yet another journalist, who asked about “the cultural relationship between fatness and moral failure,” she replied,

I still bought into the idea that I was broken and needed to be fixed. And that this was going to be the defining struggle of my life. That some day I would win, you know, I would defeat my body and I would become thin…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Tell Me I’m Fat,” ThisAmericanLife.org, 06/17/16
Source: “How to Fight Fat Shaming, Internet Trolls, and Rape Culture,” MotherJones.com, 05/23/16
Source: “Lindy West is the troll-fighting feminist warrior you’ve been waiting for,” LATimes.com, 05/20/16
Image by Kyra Starr/Pixabay