What's Wrong With Fat? (43 page)

91. Olshansky et al., “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in
the 21st Century,” 1143.

92. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,”
in
Th
e Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and
David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993).

93. Lisa Greene, “Fighting Obesity in America; It’s What’s Killing Us,”
St. Petersburg
Times (Florida)
, March 10, 2004.

94.
Business Wire,
“Physical Inactivity & Poor Eating Habits Becoming Leading Causes
of Preventable Deaths; Cuts Fitness for Men Providing an Effective & Popular
Solution,” March 16, 2004.

CHAPTER 5

1. Ali H. Mokdad et al., “Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000,”
Journal
of the American Medical Association
(
JAMA
) 291, no. 10 (2004): 1242.

2. K. M. Flegal et al., “Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and
Obesity,”
JAMA
293, no. 15 (2005): 1861–67.

3. Julie Guthman,
Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

4. Wendy Griswold, “The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the
United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies,”
American Journal of Sociology
92, no. 5 (1987); 1077–117 ; Darnell Hunt,
O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News
Rituals in the Construction of Reality
(New York: Cambridge University Press,
1999).

5. While commonly used in psychology, experimental design is rarely used in soci
ology, and it had not been part of my own methodological training. However,
I knew a talented PhD candidate in the UCLA psychology department with this
training: David Frederick. Having supervised David as a teaching assistant for an
interdisciplinary course, I had gotten to know about his impressive independent
research agenda on body-image issues. David agreed to help me design and con
duct a series of experiments to test these questions, and we received additional
assistance from UCLA PhD candidate Kjerstin Gruys, who had collaborated with
me on related research and was conducting research of her own on issues of body
size and inequality. David A. Frederick et al., “The UCLA Body Project I: Gender
and Ethnic Differences in Self-Objectification and Body Satisfaction among 2,206
Undergraduates,”
Sex Roles
57(2007): 317–27 ; Viren Swami et al., “The Attractive
Female Body Weight and Female Body Dissatisfaction in 26 Countries across 10
World Regions: Results of the International Body Project I,”
Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin
36, no. 3 (2010): 309–25 ; David A. Frederick, Peplau LetitfiAnne, and Janet Lever, “The Swimsuit Issue: Correlates of Body Image in a Sample
of 52,677 Heterosexual Adults,”
Body Image
3, no. 4 (2006): 413–19 ; Kjerstin
Gruys, “Living Mannequins: How Fit Models Accomplish Aesthetic Labor through
Bodily Capital and Embodied Cultural Capital” (paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association, Denver, CO, August 17, 2012) ;
Kjerstin Gruys, “Does This Make Me Look Fat? Aesthetic Labor and Fat Talk as
Emotional Labor in a Women’s Plus-Size Clothing Store,”
Social Problems
59, no. 4
(forthcoming) ; Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys, “Morality and Health: News
Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders,”
Social Problems
57, no.
2 (2010): 231–50 ; Abigail C. Saguy, Kjerstin Gruys, and Shanna Gong, “Social
Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on ‘Overweight’
and ‘Obesity’ in the U.S. and France,”
Social Problems
57, no. 4 (2010): 586–610.

6. My discussion of these experiments draws upon David A. Frederick, Abigail C.
Saguy, and Kjerstin Gruys, “Does This Article Make Me Look Fat? How Anti-fat
Attitudes Are Shaped by Exposure to Specific News Representations of Fat Bodies”
(paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association,
Las Vegas, NV, August 17, 2011).

7. Christian Crandall, “Do Parents Discriminate against Their Heavyweight
Daughters?”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
37, no. 1 (1995): 724–35 ;
Tatiana Andreyeva, Rebecca M. Puhl, and Kelly D. Brownell, “Changes in Perceived
Weight Discrimination among Americans: 1995–1996 through 2004–2006,”
besity
16, no. 5 (2008): 1129–34 ; Janna L. Fikkan and Esther D. Rothblum, “Is
Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendering Nature of Weight Bias,”
Sex Roles
66, no. 9–10 (2012): 575–92.

8. We only report results that were statistically significant at p<0.05, meaning there
is less that 5 percent chance that the results were the product of sampling error.

9. We used the following five attitudinal measures as the basis for this measure,
including: (1) “The rise in the number of overweight people over the last 30 years
represents a major public health crisis”; (2) “Being fat is very bad for your health”;
(3) “Being fat causes people to develop dangerous diseases (e.g., heart disease,
diabetes, cancer)”; (4) “Relatively speaking, being fat doesn’t really aff ect one’s
health very much at all”; and (5) “Being fat can actually be good for your health.”
We reversed the scale for questions 4 and 5 before averaging those scores in with
the others, so that higher scores signal greater support agreement with the idea
that being fat is unhealthy.

10. Jacob Cohen,
Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences
, 2nd ed. (Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, 1988).

11. The effect sizes were moderate to large. Compared to the control case, the effect
sizes were -0.7, -0.63, 0.84, and 1.06 for personal responsibility, public health
crisis, health at every size, and fat rights, respectively.

12. Experiment 1, 2, and 5 used seven measures developed by Crandall to measure
anti-fat prejudice, including: (1) I really don’t like fat people much; (2) I don’t have
many friends that are fat; (3) I tend to think people who are overweight are a little
untrustworthy; (4) Although some fat people are sure smart, in general, I think
they tend not to be quite as bright as normal weight people; (5) I have a hard time
taking fat people too seriously; (6) Fat people make me feel somewhat uncomfort
able; and (7) If I were an employer looking to hire, I might avoid hiring a fat
person. Experiments 3, 6, and 7 used measures developed by Morrison and
O’Connor, including: (1) “Fat people are less sexually attractive than slender peo
ple”; (2) “On average, fat people are lazier than slender people”; (3) “Fat people
have only themselves to blame for their weight”; (4) “It is disgusting when a fat
person wears a bathing suit at the beach”; and (5) “I would never date a fat person.”
In Experiment 4, we used the first four of these measures only but changed “peo
ple” or “person” to “women” or “woman.” In Experiment 5, we used the first four
of these measures only but changed “people” or “person” to “men” or “man.” In
Experiments 6 and 7, we used three attitudinal items to measure workplace
discrimination, including: (1) “Fat people generally aren’t as motivated as other
slender people in the workplace”; (2) “When hiring people for jobs, it should be
illegal to discriminate against fat people”; and (3) “If I was choosing between a
slender person and a fat person to hire for an office job, I would feel more inclined
to hire the slender person.” We reversed the scale for #2 before averaging it in with
the others, so that a higher number represented greater support for weight-based
discrimination.
Todd G. Morrison and Wendy E. O’Connor, “Psychometric
Properties of a Scale Measuring Negative Attitudes toward Overweight
Individuals,”
Journal of Social Psychology
139, no. 4 (1999): 436–45 ; Chris S.
Crandall, “Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-Interest,”
Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology
66 (1994): 882–94.

13.
New York Times
, “Death Rate from Obesity Gains Fast on Smoking,” 2004.

14. This was an abridged version of a
New York Times
report, actually published in
October 2011. Jane Brody, “How Cancer Rose to the Top of the Charts,”
New York
Times
, October 13, 2011.

15. This was measured by asking about agreement on a nine-point scale with three
statements, including: (1) “People should embrace the idea that ‘big is
beautiful’”; (2) “We should celebrate fatness and the diversity in people’s body
size”; and (3) “It is morally wrong to pressure fat people to lose weight if they
don’t want to.”

16. Christian Crandall and Rebecca Martinez, “Culture, Ideology, and Anti-fat
Attitudes,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
22 (1996): 1165–76
;
Crandall, “Prejudice against Fat People” ; Chris S. Crandall and Amy Eshleman,
“A Justification-Suppression Model of the Expression and Experience of Prejudice,”
Psychological Bulletin
129, no. 3 (2003): 414–46.

17. Crandall and Eshleman, “A Justification-Suppression Model.”

18. Similarly, a study of 152 fifth-grade girls found that watching a 15- to 20-minute
puppet show with a no-teasing/size-acceptance/antidiet theme led girls to express
more positive attitudes about large bodies. Lori M. Irving, “Promoting Size
Acceptance in Elementary School Children: The EDAP Puppet Program,”
Eating
Disorders
8 (2000): 221–32.

19. Deborah A. Galuska et al., “Are Health Care Professionals Advising Obese Patients
to Lose Weight?”
JAMA
282, no. 16 (1999): 1576–78.

20. Kjerstin Gruys, “Day 257: Does the CDC Care about Eating Disorders? Or, Why
My NHANES ‘Preliminary Report (Card) of Findings’ Made Me Feel Fat,” Mirror,
Mirror
.
.
.
OFF the Wall, December 6, 2011,
www.ayearwithoutmirrors.
com/2011/12/day-257-does-cdc-care-about-eating.html.

21. Flegal et al., “Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and
Obesity.”

22. F. Benedetti et al., “When Words Are Painful: Unraveling the Mechanisms of the
Nocebo Effect,”
Neuroscience
147, no. 2 (2007): 260–71.

23. For a review, see Rebecca M. Puhl and Chelsea A. Heuer, “The Stigma of Obesity:
A Review and Update,”
Obesity
17 (2009): 941–64.

24
.
Michele Lamont, “Responses to Racism, Health, and Social Inclusion as a
Dimension of Successful Societies,” in
Successful Societies: How Culture and
Institutions Aff ect Health
, ed. Peter Hall and Michele Lamont (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009) ; Nancy Krieger, “Embodying Inequality: A Review of
Concepts, Measures, and Methods for Studying Health Consequences of
Discrimination,”
International Journal of Health Services
29, no. 2 (1999): 295–352 ;
Waqar I. Ahmad and Hannah Branby, “Locating Ethnicity and Health: Exploring
Concepts and Contexts,”
Sociology of Health & Illness
29, no. 6 (2007): 795–810 ;
Max Guyll, Karen A. Matthews, and Joyce T. Bromberger, “Discrimination and
Unfair Treatment: Relationship to Cardiovascular Reactivity among African
American and European American Women,”
Health Psychology
20, no. 5 (2001):
315–25 ; Stephen J. Lepore et al., “Effects of Social Stressors on Cardiovascular
Reactivity in Black and White Women,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
31, no. 2
(2006): 120–27.

25. Rebecca M. Puhl and Janet D. Latner, “Stigma, Obesity, and the Health of the
Nation’s Children,”
Psychological Bulletin
133, no. 4 (2007): 557–80.

26. Peter Muennig, Haomiao Jia, and Erica Lubetkin, “I Think Therefore I Am:
Perceived Ideal Weight as a Determinant of Health,”
American Journal of Public
Health
98, no. 3 (2008): 501–6.

27. Puhl and Heuer, “The Stigma of Obesity.”

28. Katherine W. Bauer, Y. Wendy Yang, and S. Bryn Austin, “‘How Can We Stay
Healthy When You’re Throwing All This in Front of Us?’ Findings from Focus
Groups and Interviews in Middle Schools on Environmental Influences on
Nutrition and Physical Activity,”
Health Education Behavior
31, no. 1 (2004):
34–36 ; Myles S. Faith et al., “Weight Criticism during Physical Activity, Coping
Skills, and Reported Physical Activity in Children,” pt. 1,
Pediatrics
110, no. 2
(2002): e23 ; Eric A. Storch et al., “Peer Victimization, Psychosocial Adjustment,
and Physical Activity in Overweight and At-Risk-for-Overweight Youth,”
Pediatric
Psychology
32, no. 1 (2007): 80–89.