Millions of Americans go through this agony every day; 68% of us are overweight or obese. Yet we have few literary insights about obesity to help comfort us; zero provocative tales about the plight of the salad-muncher for us to identify with during bleak dieting times; hardly any entertaining stories about hitting the gym which might propel us to suck it up and go to pilates class after a long workday. We turn to Oprah, or The Biggest Loser, or Weight Watchers—but not fiction.

So yeah, he’s looking for “perceptive insights about struggling with obesity” in his literature. Not exactly what I’m looking for in my own literature about fat people, quite frankly. Some of the comments are noteworthy. Cynthia Hawkins says:

I can’t think of a work that might be about struggles with obesity … but even more interesting, I can’t think of a character who just happens to be overweight who isn’t also a baffoon, a source of comedy in some way, a sidekick, or a villain, etc.

James says:

It strikes me that ‘fat fiction’ would be quite a niche market with a limited appeal to people who haven’t struggled with weight. Our favourite characters tend to be ones we can relate to, or aspire to be like.

Really—if someone is fat, there’s no way we would ever “aspire to be like” them? Because any good qualities they may have are overshadowed by their fatness, I presume? Ridiculous.

And BuffPuff’s comment (worth reading the whole thing, but I can’t figure out how to link it; just scroll down) is just the bomb:

I would say that the reason there aren’t many books with fat protagonists in either literary or popular fiction is because we live in a highly fat phobic culture. If we didn’t, literary agents wouldn’t feel the need to pose questions about the commercial appeal of same to the readers of their blogs…

In all the books I’ve ever read featuring a fat protagonist, weight/self image has been an issue of some kind and self loathing writ large. Art, after all, imitates life and it’s near impossible, as a fat individual, to make one’s way in such an openly hostile environment and not have those issues come up. This is particularly true of women, who regularly bond over their perceived physical shortcomings, particularly when it comes to issues of food and weight and regardless of what size they are. Why do you think Bridget Jones’s Diary – a book about a neurotic, weight-fixated ninny, who isn’t actually fat – struck such a massive chord with the public?

This, however, is where art and life seem to part company. What there aren’t many of are novels in which a fat female protagonist is permitted to find love, happiness or success without losing weight by some means first, (broken heart leading to convenient loss of appetite/fortuitously timed sickness/Weight Watchers), or where they’re only permitted to find happiness with another fat person because, let’s face it, no one else would have them, (and, yes, this is sarcasm). I tend to avoid these like the plague. As a fat woman whose self-esteem improved in leaps and bounds the moment she decided to make peace with her body and quit the infernal diet-go-round for good, I have a major problem with that kind of tired, patronising pish. It’s not dissimilar to the state of gay fiction back in the pre-Stonewall dark ages – you could publish it, film it or put it on the stage … just as long as the characters you were portraying were shown to be wretched, embittered, lonely and seething with self-hatred, preferably enough to hang themselves in the final act.

That whole discussion weirdly made me think of Mike and Molly. Alan Sepinwall recently said that the show “is constantly at war over whether it wants to be laughing with or at its main characters. The ‘with’ parts I like, and Gardell and McCarthy are charming. The ‘at’ parts are nauseating.”

We want to see fat characters in TV and in books, and in film, but we don’t want them to be shown as objects of pity or (the dreaded Jemima J syndrome) people whose sad lives improve immeasurably once they are thin.

So, what are your favorite books with fat characters in them? And how do you want to see fat people portrayed in books?

Thanks to aych for the link!

Oprah once ordered two pecan pies from room service and *shudder* ATE THEM BOTH!! And what, Kitty Kelley? The earth tilted on its axis from Oprah’s subsequent weight gain? As I’ve mentioned many times before in this blog, I’m a food addict, and if indeed Oprah suffers from the same problem (which I personally think she does) eating two pies in a sitting ain’t no thang. I have, after a particularly bad day, personally inhaled a whole pizza and chased it with a cheesecake.

Of course, people are reading this to reinforce “Gross! fat people and their fat eating!” instead of thinking about binge eating as an actual disorder, along the lines of the comparatively (and incorrectly) glamorized anorexia and bulimia. No, it’s just, let’s lash out at Oprah, a powerful woman of color, and target something foolproof: her weight.

2. This article about reframing the war on obesity makes a few good points, but there’s also quite a bit of fat shaming.

Instead of having a discussion about obesity, I wish it could be framed in the language of “nutrition” or “nourishment.” Because I’d like to include all the kids, fat and thin, big and small, in a larger discussion of food.

I see lots of thin kids at school and they are eating the same foods as the obese kids. Are they eating the right calories and fats to nourish their bodies? Somehow I don’t think so… [it's just that] in our thin world it’s easy to say “let’s fight fat!”

Apparently originally, the blogger wrote “…being obese is a big problem and if you are overweight, you did something to get there.” People took issue in the comments, but I saw a lot of “don’t blame kids, blame their fat, lazy parents!” The full comment has been edited out, but the “being obese is a big problem” is still there.

3. And speaking of kids, PETA strikes again!

The advertisement? “Tot Teetering on Childhood Obesity? Go Vegan!” You know the fools at PETA were all, “OMG HILARIOUS PLAY ON TEETER-TOTTER OMG HIGH FIVE!!!”

Ugh, this kills me. I know getting upset about PETA’s press releases is completely futile* but still I rise. Can you imagine a little fat kid (who, btw, is already teased mercilessly because kids are the motherflipping MEANEST) coming to the playground and seeing those teeter-totters? Stunts like this don’t turn kids vegan but I bet they could turn them suicidal. Further, how many fat kids do you know who venture near a teeter-totter anyway, it’s already ground for public humiliation. Way to know your audience, PETA!

And what of all the thin kids with malnutrition and fast food diets? There are tons of them, believe it. Just because they’re skinny, they get a free pass? Thin does not healthy make. What a crappy lesson all the way around.

4. An interesting article about classism in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution:

Food Revolution highlights how much of the war on obesity is rooted in classism. One scene shows Oliver reacting to a newspaper article that suggests he thinks the people of Huntington are cola-swilling rubes who think an apple is just a character in the Bible. So most of his time isn’t spent cooking, it’s spent convincing residents he doesn’t look down on them. It’ll be an uphill battle. Advice on better eating isn’t evaluated on the quality of the advice as much as on its source. The lower-middle class doesn’t want to be lectured by a more well-off person about how easy and worthwhile upgrading one’s diet is, because the immediate thought is, sure, easy for you, perhaps. When Oliver arrives in Huntington with his British accent and his crates of radicchio, he’s dooming himself from the start. He’s not only a rich guy, he’s a rich British guy, thumbing his nose at our good, old-fashioned American preservatives.

5. The Curvy Fashionista came to Igigi with a group of us last week, and she is awesome. Maybe now that I’ve decided to follow her around like a baby duckling in search of fashion advice, I’ll be plugged in more to events like these.

Thanks to Michelle, Rebecca, Aych, Ian, and Jess for the links!

In the clip I saw on Jezebel, Star apologizes to her colleagues for “placing a burden” on them and says she never asked them to lie, and that “Pilates and portion control” was invented by the tabloids. Oprah said “I’d heard Pilates too… I was doing Pilates and I went, well damn… what kind of Pilates is she doing?” Oprah goes on to say:

What I thought, as a viewer, is that you were… ashamed. And I wasn’t thinking ashamed of the weight because I really believed you, along with so many other people, when you were saying that you were fine being overweight. I thought you were ashamed of gastric bypass. I thought you were ashamed to say “I did it this way” and I didn’t, you know, work out every day and do the diet thing.

Star’s response is that it would have been “the easiest thing in the world to say gastric bypass” but harder to admit she had been “selling a bill of goods” for the last few years, and she didn’t want to talk about it at all. Then the clip ends.

I guess I would interpret “selling a bill of goods” that her whole “I’m fine being fat” was a lie, and that she didn’t want to admit it was a lie. But tell me if you disagree with my interpretation. I don’t feel like Star Jones is straightforward enough here for me to understand her, although I do understand simply wanting to keep it private. The Oprah blog reports on another part of the interview:

Jones admitted she was scared to disappoint people and ashamed that she wasn’t able to control her weight. “… I was an addict for all practical purposes, that I had never stuck to a real diet, that I’d never stuck to a real exercise program, and that when confronted by my doctor and the doctor said if you don’t make changes, you will die. I had no choice.” Jones said. “When you hear people say, oh, you took the easy way out, I would have longed for an easy way. It was not an easy way. It was this — the hardest struggle of my whole entire life and I still struggle.”

The ladies on The View then respond to Star’s appearance on Oprah’s show. They say things like “she looks great” and “she seems healthy and happy” and “we really do wish her well.” Then Joy Behar says:

We had to cover for her. I don’t know if you call that [a] “lie,” I wouldn’t call it a lie. But she did have her bypass, and we had to say it was with dieting and exercise, which it wasn’t. So now we all know the truth. So good. Let her go and have a happy life.

It’s interesting that she says “I wouldn’t call it a lie.” What else would you call it?

The View clip:

It’s a tough situation. Because does Star Jones have an obligation to set the record straight about “Pilates and portion control,” or does she have the right to keep her weight loss surgery private? People (even Oprah Winfrey) were misled into thinking they could lose drastic amounts of weight with “Pilates and portion control,” but was that Star’s fault? How about the average person who gets WLS… is it okay to pretend it was “exercise and diet” when it wasn’t? Why?

Oprah had invited him a few months ago to one of her “amazing weight loss shows” to tell his weight loss story. But he declined the offer, saying he couldn’t get off from work. “I lied about that” he told Oprah yesterday. The truth was Eric Chopin has regained 107 lbs of the 214 lbs he initially lost. He said he decided to reveal the truth to his fans after Oprah’s courageous move of revealing her 40 lb weight gain…

How did Eric gain the weight? Well, he didn’t really know – it just crept up on him, he said. Perhaps the fact that he wasn’t working out 5 hours a day like he was on the “Biggest Loser” ranch, helped…

I think a lot of people can relate to the experience of regaining weight. Being confronted with pictures of yourself at your thinnest, un-maintainable weight, the feeling of failure, all of that positive reinforcement that comes with losing weight—hey, everyone notices!—gradually turning to silence when you regain it. I’ve lost and regained weight myself, and I’ve been there. But what do you do then?

Everyone assumes if you did it before, you can do it again. Do you buy into that same mentality, go back on the diet, let your weight continue to yo-yo? Or do you let go of that expectation, “someday I will be that skinny again” and embrace good principles of health, try to focus on eating fruits and veggies and exercising to the best of your ability and all that good stuff, and stop caring what people think? Do you flat-out tell people, hey, the number on the scale isn’t everything.

My friends, it’s hard, and I don’t have answers for you. I wonder, though, how much harder is it when you’re on television, when you’ve “won” a reality show, when you’ve been praised not only by your friends and loved ones but by all of America? You’re voluntarily putting yourself under the microscope, and then you’re under that microscope forever. I look at Eric and I see my own anxieties and insecurities and “oh shit, how hard could it have been to just stay the same weight” magnified times a hundred, and I know he’ll never be able to get away from those expectations of losing all the weight all over again, and I feel sad for him and a little sad for everyone else.

On Oprah, Eric looked ashamed of himself, the old “I did this to myself” and Oprah, now the world’s most renown expert on “falling off the wagon” consoled him that 2009 would be a better year… But should Eric or any of the “Biggest losers” who were unable to maintain the loss really be blamed? It’s quite possible that the only thing “they did to themselves” was offer themselves up to be on the show.

That’s an excellent question. And my other question is: have you lost weight and then regained it, or regained part of it? Have you had to put back on the fat pants, start shopping in the plus section again, face other issues that you thought you wouldn’t have to face again? How do you handle that, and what does it all make you think, and how does it make you feel? Let’s talk about it.

“I’m mad at myself,” Winfrey writes… “I’m embarrassed. I can’t believe that after all these years, all the things I know how to do, I’m still talking about my weight. I look at my thinner self and think, `How did I let this happen again?’”

Kate Harding had a good answer:

Honey, you didn’t “let it” happen again. Your body made it happen again, because your body does not freakin’ want to be thin. And every time you quit the part-time job of dieting — or even just cut back your hours — your body goes, “Thank god!” and starts storing fat hand over fist. It happens to nearly all of us. I know you’re a woman who’s used to defying odds by quite a lot, but there is no shame in having a body that responds to dieting in exactly the same way as pretty much everyone else’s.

Rachel also responds, echoing a point Kate made and a point we’ve made before:

She’s the poster child for unproven, untested, unsuccessful and medically unsound weight-loss plans galore – plans that despite their proven ineffectiveness, continue to motivate viewers to try similar methods because Oprah did it! And yet even with her great wealth, personal chef and trainer and access to healthy foods and fitness resources, Oprah hasn’t been able to sustain a weight loss for any length of time.

Interestingly enough, when my husband sent me the link this morning he read it as “Oprah is going to stop dieting!” and quoted me this:

Winfrey also writes that her goal is no longer to be thin; instead, she wants to be strong, healthy and fit.

I think that this little snippet may have gotten lost in the hubbub: her goal is no longer to be thin. She may not be the perfect size acceptance advocate by any stretch of the imagination, but what this quote tells me is that she might actually be on the right track at last. I’ll be interested to see what she says on her show and in her magazine. She no longer strives to be thin. Does she really mean it?

1. “Carnie Wilson’s War” (with video from the Tyra Banks show, of course) is Carnie’s battle with her weight after her highly publicized weight loss surgery.

2. Britney Spears is on the Posh Spice diet (water with lemon, steamed fish, edamame, and seaweed) and has gone from a size 14 to a size 10!

3. Oprah has gained weight again!

From that last post:

I hate how we are so quick to pay attention to how much weight everyone loses and gains. I know, Oprah has tons of money and I’m really not a big fan… Nonetheless, money or not, she has the same body issues many of us “normal” women have — probably moreso because she’s constantly being scrutinized by people. When she loses weight, people give her a hard time. When she gains it, people give her a hard time and laugh at her. It’s sad. Maybe I’m just sensitive, but I really hate seeing people being judged by their weight — fat, skinny, whatever.

I don’t want to point out again that all of the posts I ran across today were about women. But, oops, I guess I just did!

Why don’t you lose weight if you’re not happy with how you’re treated?
Unfortunately, it is not easy to lose large amounts of weight and keep it off. A study from the National Weight Control Registry looked at the habits of people who lost significant amounts of weight and found that on average, they ate less than 1400 calories a day and exercised for an average of 90 minutes each day. It is a rare person who is able to maintain that sort of lifestyle indefinitely. Look at someone like Oprah Winfrey…she is a successful, intelligent, ambitious woman with every conceivable resource at her disposal, yet she continues to struggle with her weight.

I thought that Oprah was a great example, and now the very same point has come up on Feed Me and The-F-Word. A story in the Orlando Sentinel says:

Oprah has become synonymous with dieting. When the diet drug Alli came on the market last year, one wag commented: “Hello, there is no magic pill. If there were, Oprah would have found it and told us all about it.”…

“Some people will look at Oprah and say, ‘Wow, if she’s struggling, and she has all those resources, that makes me feel better’ ,” says Sandee Nebel, a Winter Park licensed mental-health counselor who specializes in eating behavior. “Other people will see her and say, ‘If she can’t do it with all those resources, then I could never do it.’ ”

Indeed, Oprah, by her own admission, has tried everything. She tried the Atkins diet, she tried diet pills. She tried the Scarsdale diet, the banana, hot dog and egg diet. She tried a 1,000 calorie a day diet. She tried Weight Watchers, Diet Work Shop and Diet Center. She tried Nutri-System. Everything worked for a while.

And Rachel talks about Oprah’s latest gimmick, clearing your clutter to lose weight. She says:

It wasn’t that long ago Oprah went on a liquid diet, inspiring thousands of viewers to embark on their own liquid weight-loss diets. She’s the poster child for unproven, untested, unsuccessful and medically unsound weight-loss plans galore – plans that despite their proven ineffectiveness, continues to motivate viewers to try similar methods because Oprah did it and look at her! And yet Oprah, who I’m sure has a maid to scrub her toilets and clean her immaculate mansion, continues to gain weight. Obviously, there is something far greater to body weight than having a messy house.

Now I’m thinking we need to get a segment on the Oprah show, so we can talk about getting off the dangerous yo-yo dieting bandwagon and actually focusing on the right things—like exercise and nutrition. Fatosphere powers, activate!

Call it the Fat Follies or the Obesity Opera: How big anyone is, or looks to be, seems to be the most compelling topic for public conversation… In this new world of weightertainment, fat Britney Spears is more fascinating than her younger, slimmer persona. She’s clearly a media savant: The reveal of her chunky middle at the MTV Video Music Awards is what now qualifies as great TV.

Definitely gave me pause to think. I remember the furor over Tyra Banks and her bathing suit, Catherine Zeta-Jones and her anorexia, and of course Britney at the VMAs. Not to mention the covers of People and Star every week. Damn. Maybe she’s got a point.

(Notice that it’s women, though. Always, always women. Sigh.)

Let’s face it, no matter what anyone says, when any fat celebrity cleans up and become svelte and part of the Jenny Craig group, they are no longer fun and part of the In Crowd. Nope, they become a part of the Beautiful People, that no one in the huddled masses can identify with. They make all of us, who have struggled forever, feel bad.

Do celebrities who lose a lot of weight become unrelateable? I kind of felt betrayed by Sara Rue, actually. But Oprah’s weight has fluctuated up and down and she’s been very public about her struggles, and I don’t feel the same way about her at all. Is there a difference, really?