I was recently asked to buy a second seat on an airplane because the ticket clerk thought I was too large.
Airline companies base this policy on the premise of passenger comfort, which, okay, I get. But do people who smell bad have to pay for the discomfort of those around them? What about people who bring crying babies and seat-kicking children? Creepers?
Their policy is reinforced by how we construct fatness.
Typically, we use the Body Mass Index (or BMI) to tell us who is overweight and who is obese. BMI is based strictly on height and weight and the way in which it calculates healthy weight seems arbitrary.
According to the Surgeon General’s website, you measure BMI like this: Multiply your weight in pounds by 703. Divide that answer by your height in inches. Divide that answer by your height in inches again.
This means that according to the Department of Health and Human Services, Lebron James is overweight. The Pittsburg Steelers’s Troy Polamalu is obese. There’s probably something wrong with this system if these two athletes are considered unhealthy. But BMI is the measure by which we construct the vast majority of the health system. BMI makes “no allowance for the relative proportions of bone, muscle and fat in the body,” according to NPR.
It also doesn’t account for other measurements of health, like endurance, stamina and endurance or exercise and nutrition habits.
Instead of using a more holistic approach to measure health, we have rhetorically constructed “fatness” to justify the discrimination of those who struggle with weight loss.
Being overweight turns into an issue of ethics or frailty of will: heavy people are undisciplined and they simply cannot help themselves. We have constructed the logos, ethos and pathos of fatness to justify discrimination.
It begins with a false syllogism: “health is good, fat is unhealthy, therefore fat is bad.” If someone is fat and knows that fat is bad, than he or she should do something to fix it. If they’re not actively finding ways to remedy the weight issue, then they must be lazy. Laziness quickly turns into an ethos that is incapable of helping itself, lacking in discipline or control and therefore unfit for responsibility.
I would love to say that this is just the average Joe Shmoe who does this, people who should know better are doing it, too. A recent study found that doctors are discriminating against their overweight patients. The idea that fat people are lazy, dirty and lack amiability affects their quality of healthcare because their physicians do not want to treat them. They are not pushing them to look for the fullest extent of medical treatment for their health conditions, both weight and non-weight related.
Bigger bodies have been otherized in our culture in ways that are both very hard to overcome and hard to confront. At the end of the day, weight should be a health issue, but we need to reevaluate our constructions of weight and body image.
Let’s figure out what healthy means for each of us and stop judging what it means for others.
Reach the columnist at Alexandria.tippings@asu.edu or follow her @Lexij41.
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