obesity – couldreads

From the perspective of the weight-gainer, there’s something socially bizarre about getting fat. About facing, day in and day out, acquaintances for whom fat is a culturally endorsed obsession and yet still a conversational taboo. Next to sex, size might be the thing we think about the most in general and talk about the least in mixed company. Which makes gaining weight, for the gainer, sort of like dyeing an inch of your hair pink each month, both hoping and resenting that no one will mention it. That is, if pink hair could be mitigated by Spanx.

Big Brother is excellently concerned with this and other facets of the American obesity epidemic. The novel is centered on Pandora Halfdanarson, a married stepmother of two who has spent the last few years running a successful business while also settling into the trivial stalemates of a stable marriage (she’s gained weight; her husband Fletcher has become a fitness fanatic). Strapped for cash and in between jazz gigs, Pandora’s older brother Edison comes to stay with her, but when he arrives at the airport, Pandora doesn’t recognize him. Since they last saw each other, Edison has grown from a longstanding 160 pounds to nearly 400; the flight attendants insist on rolling him out in a wheelchair.

For as long as I can remember, for as long as I have existed on this earth—with the possible exception of infancy—I have struggled with my weight. Sometimes it’s been a miniature struggle, a war waged against cafeteria food or bodega breakfast sandwiches, and sometimes it’s been a knock-down-drag-out Battle Royale, a prolonged conflict of interest between me and meals, me and gyms, me and clothes, me and the third dimension.

Throughout my life, I have always felt that there’s a misconception about fat people—and I will, for the purposes of this post, be including myself among fat people—which is that they are most directly unhappy with being fat. While there’s certainly truth in that, you’d be impressed (you thin people) with the mental gymnastics one can engage in to convince oneself that one is not in fact fat, that one is merely temporarily chubby, irreparably big-boned, retaining water, or the victim of a sizing fraud conspiracy perpetuated by the Gap. No, the reality is that fat people are second-most directly unhappy with being fat, and first-most unhappy with being emotionally over-invested in something so innocuous and apparently selectively predatory as food.

Let me take you into my brain for a moment (don’t worry, it’s spacious). Say we’re at dinner, an Italian place. As we catch up on one another’s lives, I’m looking you in the eyes and smiling, but my mind is a million miles away. My mind—since this morning, most likely—is whirring on a hamster wheel of culinary anxiety, which goes a little something like this:

Tag: obesity

Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother will probably become a Julia Roberts movie

Born round, hungry and addicted to Cinnamon Toast Crunch