Is “Fat Power” an Idea Whose Time Is Coming?

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When They Start Singing “We Shall Overeat,” Look Out

According to the CDC, 35.7 percent of U.S. adults are obese. Depending on whose figures you use, they are merely one segment of the 61.5 to 69 percent of Americans who are, to varying degrees, clinically overweight. Most experts settle at 66 percent.

Given the current U.S. population of 312 million, that works out to about 206 million obese or overweight people. Eliminate the roughly 25 percent of the population who are under 18, and you get about 154 million obese or overweight adults in the land of the free and the well-fed. That’s a pretty hefty number, absolutely no pun intended, and at least for me, it raises a fascinating question, as follows.

Why isn’t the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) the largest political interest group in the country?

Why isn’t it one of the most powerful? Why doesn’t it have a lobby so financially juiced and aggressive and intimidating that it makes the NRA look like a scrapbooking club? If just one in 10 of the NAAFA’s potential members — i.e. those weighing more than average — signed on for dues of say, five bucks a month, you’re looking at $75 million coming in every four weeks, month after month.

That kind of money buys a lot of Acceptance, at least from members of Congress. As we have seen time and again, there is almost no hoop that our beloved elected representatives will not happily jump through to please big-time campaign donors. For the right kind of financial consideration, they could pass legislation forbidding airlines from charging plus-size passengers extra, or for that matter, could require the airlines to outfit all their planes with wider seats.

Senators would be elbowing one another aside to be the first to introduce legislation outlawing all forms of discrimination based on extreme girth.

But if the NAAFA has any official agenda that it is promoting in the nation’s capital, or anywhere else, they’ve certainly managed to remain low-key about it. Not to get too first-personal, but I’m a fairly avid follower of current events via newspaper, magazine and TV, and yet if I were not a regular contributor to CalorieLab, and thus always on the lookout for items regarding diet and weight loss, I don’t think I would have ever heard of the organization. An organization, mind you, with a larger natural constituency than the NAACP.

So, the answer to “Why aren’t the overweight flocking to join NAAFA?” may simply be that the vast majority have no idea that it exists. But the organization has been around since 1969, and was the subject of considerable media coverage upon its 40th anniversary, and yet it has only about 12,000 members. There are bagpipe appreciation clubs with larger memberships.

It might be that the general overweight population is not all that enthusiastic about the Acceptance concept. If most overweight individuals genuinely accepted their condition, Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig would be little more than obscure cults, and the “Diets” section of your Barnes & Noble wouldn’t be much bigger than the “Witchcraft” section.

Or, the problem with NAAFA recruitment may be the F-word. Fat.

Since we brought up the NAACP, let’s note that it’s an acronym for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The word “Colored,” I suspect, was not idly chosen. As a vague euphemism for “dark skinned,” it covers a lot of dermatological territory. And “colored” was the politically acceptable racial adjective for decades. Not until the 1960s did the movement for racial equality invoke the B word. Black. As in Black Power.

It may be that NAAFA has invoked its version of Black right out of the starting gate. And perhaps many of is potential members are not quite ready, for a variety of reasons, to explicitly identify themselves as Fat. A National Association to Advance Overweight Acceptance, by comparison, sounds far more conciliatory and sympathetic — after all, who isn’t to some extent overweight? Fat, on the other hand, sounds… fat. It calls forth visions of people weighing north of 350 pounds wearing unflattering shorts, tank tops and bathing suits. It’s not exactly a “Where do I sign up?” image.

But perhaps the NAAFA is, even after 43 years, simply still ahead of its time, and it’s only a matter of time before the weight liberation movement reaches the “Say it loud, I’m fat and I’m proud” point. But if it ever does reach that point, hang on to your hats. When the obese start marching, you don’t want to be in their way.

One more thing: I am still puzzled by the extent of weightism, by which I mean prejudice, discrimination or unfair treatment directed against the overweight. If two-thirds of the country is in fact composed of overweight Americans, how is weightism possible? Don’t get me wrong: it is clearly not only possible but goes on all the time, in everything from hiring practices to medical fees to clothing costs to child custody hearings to club memberships. Anti-fat prejudice is a fact. But it’s a fact that flies in the face of simple arithmetic.

A clear majority being treated like an unpopular minority just doesn’t make sense. The NAAFA should look into that. It might be the basis for a terrific recruiting campaign. Possible slogan: “We are the 66 percenters!”

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Is “Fat Power” an Idea Whose Time Is Coming? is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/06/06/is-fat-power-an-idea-whose-time-is-coming/

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