One purpose of teaching sociology is to encourage students to question “conventional wisdom.” In his own classrooms, sociology professor David J. Hutson writes, he works to apply this kind of debunking to value judgements placed on people’s bodies.
Hutson writes that students tend to be skeptical about the “health at every size” movement, which posits that heavier weight doesn’t automatically mean being more prone to ill health. Some argue that it is self-evidently impossible to be both fat and “fit.”
“As a sociologist and teacher, I found this to be particularly disappointing given that I knew these same students to be highly capable critical thinkers around issues of race, glass, gender, and sexuality,” he writes.
Hutson suggests that one reason body weight stigma is a tricky topic for students is that bodies are seen as both an important part of a person’s identity and as something within their control. That leads to the equation of thinness with hard work, self-control, and moral value. For example, one study found that children shown pictures of other kids with various disabilities and physical differences say they’re least interested in being friends with obese children.
In teasing apart this issue, one starting point that Hutson found effective was playing a news video about the “obesity epidemic” and asking students to explain their understanding of this issue. Most followed the standard media narrative in describing obesity as a health crisis that causes health care costs to rise, caused by excessive consumption of unhealthy foods combined with increased sedentary activities.
Hutson then presented information about how new guidelines regarding the definition of obesity implemented in 1998 instantly reclassified more than 35 million American adults as overweight or obese. And he explained that there’s disagreement among researchers about the health risks of extra weight. For example, some studies have found that weights in the overweight and even obese ranges don’t necessarily significantly increase mortality risks. In some populations, higher weights may be protective. For example, some chronically ill people benefit from having greater energy stores during taxing treatments.
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Another technique Hutson has used is comparing bodybuilding and the pro-ana movement, which advocates for starvation diets and other dangerous weight-loss methods. In one exercise, he showed students a series of photos and asked students to rate their “fitness.” The images include Olympic weightlifters and other athletes in street clothes, as well as fitness models. Inevitably, most students rated the models higher than the athletes.
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Hutson then discusses the pro-ana movement. In line with most media portrayals, students tend to be horrified by it. He then introduces the fact that bodybuilders similarly use extreme food restriction, exercise, and steroids to achieve an “ideal” body like those exhibited by fitness models.
Hutson writes that “these topics clearly illustrate the social construction of stigma and the relativity of deviance”—something that’s relevant to understandings of every sort of body.
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