I went to an event at Metro tonight with Richard Jackson. The event was supposed to be about his work on Retrofitting Suburbia, but if that got discussed it was after I left. Mostly it was about how people are fat and it’s because we aren’t active anymore (and a little about how that’s related to car-dependent sprawl), and how being fat increases the risk for terrible diseases like diabetes.
I felt really uncomfortable after a while because there was so much focus on how it’s bad to be fat and it makes you sick and so many people are fat and sick. I understand that Jackson is in public health, and that he is concerned about weight as it affects health and about establishing that the epidemic of obesity is caused by a change in the environment (a common-source epidemic). That’s really important and it’s an essential role for public health to play: to make the connection that more calories and less activity are making it hard to be healthy, and to find the causes for both and work on how to change them.
But I wish that he had spent a lot more time talking about health and the built environment, and a lot less talking about how so many people are fat now. My personal relationship with weight and food is fairly untroubled, but my family history has made me very conscious of the potential for illness if that changes, and I have seen many friends (who are as active and eat similarly, but don’t have the same body type) really struggle with weight and food.
Did you go? If you did, how did you feel? If you didn’t, how does my description strike you? Would you have been uncomfortable, or felt ashamed or strange?
Crossposted to Facebook and Google Plus for the sake of varied discussion.
Chris Smith
June 19, 2012 at 9:20amAs a person who has struggled with weight my whole life (I was obese before it was trendy), I was not offended. He described a very real epidemiological problem in our society in very stark terms. It has huge impacts on our health, quality of life and prosperity and we need to talk straightforwardly about it.
But he also made the point that whatever your weight you’re going to be healthier if you’re active than if you’re not. This gets lost in the discussion and it’s important to reinforce.
And I too was waiting for the instruction book on how to re-make suburbia :-)
Vera
June 19, 2012 at 11:53amI would have felt very uncomfortable. I completely agree that the discusion of obesity in our county needs to include a discussion of using cars less and bodies more, but focusing a conversation on retrofitting suburbia on obesity instead is very weird. For myself, I get frustrated when it is more convenient to drive across the street to the store instead of walking because there is no foot traffic infrastructure in the suburbs, and that had less to do with my desire to be fit and more to do with a personal preference of using my body more.