American culture is riddled with paradigmatic paradoxes in weight and weight loss, body image and body images. Trying to wrap your brain around them may twist your thoughts into knots.
What comes to mind first is the immense value our culture puts on both physical beauty AND indulgent food. They cannot realistically co-exist! Yet, we are bombarded with beauty images and irresistible food. We’re told the standard for physical attractiveness is to be slim and trim while we’re also told that it’s our “right” to eat indulgently and without denying ourselves. We struggle with guilt and regret for failing to meet EACH of these standards.
The weight loss business is in the billions but it is its own variation on planned obsolescence. Weight loss diets put so much emphasis on maintaining food gratification and pleasure that new habits for weight loss maintenance are not learned; weight is almost guaranteed to be regained. Americans have bought into the marketing. People expect weight loss without sacrifice. We insist on having our cake and losing weight too.
Weight loss products and services are based on what sells, not what works. They are intensely marketed as easy, in fact, it’s best if you don’t have to change what you eat! But wait…weight loss can’t be “too” easy. No, if you go on a diet, it should offer rapid results without sacrifice but if you have weight loss surgery? It’s TOO easy to lose weight that way. Because having your body permanently cut up and modified is sooooooo…easy.
The intense shame projected upon fat people has created a twisted maze of multi-angled contradictions. Some of it is complicated by political correctness. Our culture glorifies thinness and millions of women desperately pursue this standard but projected shame has convinced these women their bodies reflect not their genetics, not their biology, not their physiology, but their own emotional faults and weaknesses. Like guzzling cough medicine to cure a toothache, women fail in their struggle to take control of their weight, investing all their resources and effort toward fixing flaws that are manufactured by a viciously biased society. A beauty standard born of surrender and political correctness finds demeaned and beaten down women insisting they love their “curves” when in fact they desperately wish they could slim them down.
