Fat & Choice: A Personal Essay
by Marilyn Wann
Plenty of people think that I choose to be fat. Currently, it's popular to believe that everyone's weight is a choice, readily influenced by eating and exercise. This is a big, fat lie.
Why would anyone (the government, doctors, advertisers, the media) lie? To make money. Fat hatred -- and fear of fat -- sells. Every year, Americans waste $50 billion on products that promise (and fail to deliver) lasting weight loss. In fact, the ongoing existence of weight-loss methods (plural) is proof that all of them conform to the medically documented 90 percent to 98 percent failure rate; i.e., if any one of them "worked," the rest would be out of business. (Failure is necessary for their business model. Repeat customers, and all.)
With the billions that Americans invest each year in hating our thighs and our abs and our butts (and our fat sisters and brothers), we could feed all of the hungry and food-insecure people in the US, we could build numerous houses for each homeless person in the US, or we could put more than a third of high school graduates through college for free.
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