Conflating Aesthetics and Health: Still Extremely Deleterious to the Latter

Seeing this post reminded me that I’ve been meaning to link to Ampersand’s exhaustive decimation of yet another study that starts with assumptions about weight loss being the object (rather than a potential aesthetic side effect) of healthy dieting and exercise, and because of this makes a series of pernicious snake oil claims that aren’t supported by the data. Weight, as an independent variable, has a small impact on health in all but extreme cases, and the failure to understand this produces all kinds of distortions. Some of his conclusions are particularly worthy of notice:

* But by claiming that losing weight has been scientifically proven to be both practical and easy, they’re legitimizing bigotry against fat people, by spreading the myth that the only reason anyone remains fat is laziness and lack of caring.

* By pushing weight-loss methods that have been scientifically shown, according to the studies they themselves cite, to not work in the long term, they’re encouraging yo-yo dieting, which has terrible health consequences.

* By making weight their only measure of health, they’re obscuring the fact that eating well and exercising regularly has enormous, maintainable, long-term benefits for fat people regardless of if any weight is lost.

* By making weight their only measure of health, they’re obscuring the fact that being “normal” weight is no guarantee of good health; health-concerned “normal” people need to eat a healthy diet and exercise, too.

All of these points are extremely important. The conflation of weight and health is bad, first of all, because it’s utterly ineffective at encouraging lifestyle changes. People who aren’t overweight will believe there’s no harm in eating bad diets and/or being sedentary, and overweight people are likely to abandon salutary lifestyle changes when they discover that, in most cases, the radical transformation of their bodies they’ve been promised doesn’t occur. But it’s much worse than that. The conflation of health and weight creates all kinds extremely bad outcomes–not just yo-yo dieting, but eating disorders, grossly unbalanced fad diets, social isolation, cocktails of speed and laxatives, etc. etc.–that are far, far worse than not doing anything at all. Eating a good diet and getting consistent exercise are good and should be encouraged, full stop. Claiming that a particular body type, rather than health, is the ultimate object of these lifestyle choices is both empirically fallacious and obviously counterproductive.