Mover Mike

When my Mom, who’ll be 87 this year, was a teenager there was a stigma against people with tans. It was assumed that you were a laborer or field worker if you had a tan. The rich were white or pale from being out of the sun. You know that attitude has changed! Now people who have discretionary income take vacations in places where they can relax by the pool and get tan.

Time was in this country that people who were fat were rich.

“Plump bodies represented success, generosity, fertility, wealth, and beauty…”

We know in this country there has been a move away from this image for some time. Now the rich have trainers, and massages and exercise rooms and watch their weight. It’s the poor who are obese. In a new a cross-cultural study of attitudes to obesity to be published in the April issue of Current Anthropology, attitudes toward fat people are changing.

While the US and other Western countries have idealized slimness and stigmatized fatness for decades, in other parts of the world, this has not been the case, until now.

Now countries like “…Mexico, Paraguay, and - perhaps most surprisingly - in American Samoa” were changing rapidly and fat people were stigmatized at “lazy.” Slimness was starting to become the ideal.

The pendulum is swinging back to thin. It may be a subconscious way to survive in a increasingly hostile world, a world of shortages and drought and more people competing for fewer resources. Or it may be a dawning on us all that obesity shortens our lives and brings on so many health problems.

Even I, who laughed at people who exercised, who has steadily added pounds each year, from the time I was 165 in the army until I was flirting recently with 225, have lost 15 pounds and working my way back to 190. Carrying around two bowling balls, I figured, wasn’t good for my hips and knees and heart.

Maybe, we are shifting away from the Seven Deadly Sins of which one is Gluttony, derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow, means over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drink, or intoxicants to the point of waste.

Tags: Health Care, culture //
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