Thank you for a bracing, but honest, interpretation of the conclusion. It may not be the most preferable step to ditch fat friends, but the data suggests that it's something that might help.

Of course, even after hearing it from you, I would never suggest it to anybody I knew. My non-professional judgment is that it's more acceptable to remind people of their individuality and their personal responsibility (however far it extends) to take care of their health. Or, better yet, to encourage one's fat friends to do the things that need to be done.

And now that the zeitgeist is aware of society's effect on eating, I'm wondering if Saletan or anybody at Slate (Fraysters, especially) can take measured look at social norms and the balances that end up being struck. For example, stigmatizing fat may make people skinnier, but it's also very likely to increase the rate for individuals to develop eating disorders, which are some of the deadliest mental illnesses around.

One of the big problems is defining "fat". In my social circle, "fat" used to mean having thighs that rubbed when you walked. I was very fit, had a BMI of 19, but, due to my build, had thighs that rubbed. By the definition of me and my peers, I was fat. I'm not sure that shunning me would have had advantageous effect.

I'm not going to argue that obesity isn't a health issue - my aunts and grandmother had adult onset diabetes as a result. One aunt and my grandmother were able to control it through weight loss. The other aunt has had terrible health problems due to her inability to lose weight. I'm just adding personal anecdote to support your concern. Terms like "fat" are too vague and socially loaded to do much good. It's kind of like saying we could alleviate poverty if we were all just more ethical. It sounds good, but it doesn't really mean anything.

It sounds like you've asked (as I've seen a few others mention) another very important question: what's fat?

Where my parents are from, three or four generations ago, it was good to be fat, but it very quickly changed to a bad thing, even though the actual fatness hadn't changed. Your example points out how unreliable the general understanding of what "overweight" is and how it can really be a bummer to be accidentally caught in the social circle that is overly spartan, as well as being in a social circle that is too permissive like the article mentions.

Honestly, now you're making me doubt Saletan's honest and well-intentioned advice. If the scientific community itself doesn't have a reliable (or, at least, translatable) lexicon for fatness and it can't even be sure what a good lifestyle is (e.g. calorie restriction? diets in general? vitamin pills?), how can Saletan rely on the general public to know what's best? If he errs, he errs by having higher standards, but your example about indefinite frameworks and my question about eating disorders certainly make it obvious that there are ways where his good intention can cause real damage.

Not to be overly critical, but it sounds like you need to take a look at your friends - they sound a wee bit too shallow. Honestly ever since graduating from college I haven't ever heard the issue surface beyond the "I need to lose weight" lament. I've never heard someone point it out, never heard of a person getting shunned, and frankly don't see too many social reprecussions for it.

I see plenty of overly thin men and women, they hang out with their overly thin friends, but as for the rest of the adults, a little fat, a little thin, a little in-between. They/I have more pressing concerns in life.

Thank you. Let's not even begin to consider all the people who weigh a bit more, but who are extremely fit. I have a friend who definitely carries her weight around her waist (a "definite sign" of obesity) who still does marathons, mountain bikes, plays tennis, and could generally kick my a** in any test of fitness, though my bmi is probably lower than hers. Go figure.

And, as I've noted in other posts, I'm not convinced Saletan's advice is well-intentioned or even particularly altruistic.

"Terms like "fat" are too vague and socially loaded to do much good. It's kind of like saying we could alleviate poverty if we were all just more ethical."

Honestly, I don't think the notion of what is fat is a huge issue. I'd bet that most people who are overweight know it. I'd been overweight my whole life and I knew it. And there is a medical definition of overweight/obese/morbidly obese based on BMI. If there are exceptions to this of larger people who are fit, that's great, don't worry about them, but I would guess that they are in a pretty small minority.

And I don't think the poverty analogy holds. Again, it's not hard to define what poverty is. There is an official poverty line. Though there is debate about where to set it and what it really means, most people just know whether they can afford next month's rent or not, or have enough money to feed the family. How to solve these issues is a whole other issue though.

This question of how to define the problem feels like an excuse to do nothing. Efforts to help the majority of those with the problem will most likely help those who are borderline too.

That said, I don't agree with Saletan's conclusions that stigmatization is a good thing. He makes too wild a leap from saying a person has responsibility for their weight to saying that stigmatizing them will cure them of their obesity. Putting a negative spin on weight loss can be dangerous, demoralizing, and ultimately self-defeating. Losing weight can and should be a positive, empowering experience, and if you saddle yourself with guilt, you can easily become mired in self-pity and just give up.

On the contrary, I'm becoming even more convinced that "fat" is an indistinct and malleable term the more I think about it.

You state that since we have metrics in place, for things like fatness and poverty, that it's all we need, even though you acknowledge that these metrics are subject to error. The point the other poster has made is that the metrics may not be just wrong, but also unclear. Whichever is the lesser of the two evils, the greatest evil is obviously to be both wrong and unclear.

Starting with your example of poverty. What is it? Is it not being able to afford things necessary to survival? Or is it being permanently lodged in a certain social class, i.e. the poor? Or is it having to struggle financially? Within even just these three examples, you have the numerous debates about things like what is enough to survive, what separates one social class from another, and how much hardship is enough to be struggling. The answer to these questions will determine a lot, like who can enter what program, who gets what aid, what taxes are appropriate for whom and so forth.

Regardless of how long you have admitted to being overweight, the BMI is famously unreliable. It cannot factor in healthy weight, such as skeletal muscle or bone density, and compare it to unhealthy weight, generally adipose tissue. It can't even account for primitive measures like somatotypes. Competing metrics drastically change the amount of people considered overweight by the BMI. A WHR measure, for instance, would increase the amount of people considered overweight two to three times what are considered such under a BMI.

You have a much more convincing point that people who are overweight recognize it already, metrics be damned. You may be right or wrong about that, but, as it is, the study in question generally tends to disagree with you, implying that fat peers will alter one's understanding of fatness, or at least what's acceptable. It doesn't directly refute you, but it does suggest a high degree of malleability in regards to what one considers fat.

Intense fear of losing weight or becoming thin, even though overweight. [While this may initially seem paradoxical there really is a significant fear in many obese patients of actually achieving a "normal" weight. It may be due to underlying anxiety of dealing with social acceptance in circles they do not have to deal with when obese..

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Raaj

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