This week, the obese rapper Lizzo announced a new line of skin-tight "Shapewear" that's apparently meant to cater to overweight consumers.
The clothing, Lizzo said, will allow its wearers to feel "fun and exciting and sexy," and—just in case this was not clear—the new line is "not an invitation to change something about yourself in a negative way." Thank goodness.
At present, our culture has a decidedly schizophrenic relationship with weight and health. Essentially everybody on the planet understands that it is an intrinsically and profoundly debilitating and unhealthy condition. Heart disease, obesity's direct progeny, is the number-one killer of adults in the United States.
But the politics of the moment also dictate that we pretend it is in the main nothing to be worried about – just another "body type," even a kind of "identity" that people can claim for themselves and wear proudly.
Of course, even the wokest and most politically correct society cannot fully suppress the capitalistic instinct, and so alongside the "body positivity" movement we have entire industries devoted to helping people lose weight, keep the weight off, eat right, and stay slim. No other country or civilization in the world has ever obsessed about healthy eating and weight loss like the modern United States. It's part of our national fabric.
No other societal problem that I am aware of is met with such antipodal responses—a weight-loss-obsessed culture on the one hand and major news pieces celebrating morbidly obese models on the other—though the end result is, as you might suspect, unsurprising.
Obesity, including childhood obesity, has been skyrocketing in recent years. Given the choice between an obsessive SlimFast lifestyle or whatever it is Lizzo eats every day, many people will assuredly opt for the easier of the two.
The choice is not that dichotomous, of course. You can eat well—even very well—without counting calories or getting fat. But ultimately a society that puts so much emphasis on both extremes will not be able to hold both in tandem; given enough time, it will become all one thing or all the other. We cannot endure permanently half obese and half fit.
Ultimately, we must learn to move beyond that binary and recognize, as much of the rest of the world has, that eating can be fun, gratifying, and healthy at the same time. That will ultimately mean abandoning the diet-and-workout obsession that has gripped so much of the country—and it will also mean ceasing to pretend that being as large as Lizzo is anything other than a slow and painful death sentence. Most assuredly, we can do both.
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