Reimagining Obesity

ABSTRACT

This article draws on Mills’ sociological imagination (from the 1959 publication The Sociological Imagination) to consider the connections between personal trouble and social issues when it comes to the causes and consequences of obesity. These connections may be important for assuaging the “obesity bias” that pervades our discipline, particularly as it manifests in our undergraduate students and influences the ways they will act as future professionals.

KEYWORDS:

• Kinesiology
• obesity
• obesity bias
• sociological imagination

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Douglas Hochstetler and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful comments.

Notes

1. Before the AMA’s declaration, other prominent organizations, including the Obesity Society, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare, and the Centers for Disease Control had classified obesity as a disease.

2. About 17% of American children and adolescents are obese. For children, “overweight” is defined as a BMI between the 85th and the 95th percentiles for children of the same age and sex. “Obesity” relates to those BMIs above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.

3. Those with BMIs that ranged from 32 to 39.9 could participate, provided they submit to the BSA medical staff their health data and a recommendation from a personal health-care provider.

4. Loy and Booth (2004) list “corporeality” as a fifth sensibility. Giddens (1986) identifies three sensibilities that are “indispensible to sociological analysis,” including historical, critical, and anthropological (p. 13).

5. There is mounting evidence that shows those values are disappearing. After surveying the inhabitants of 10 countries and territories around the world, anthropologist Alexandra Brewis (2011) ascertained that “norms about fat-as-bad and fat-as-unhealthy are spreading globally and that cultural diversity in conceptions of ideal or acceptable body size appears to be on the decline.” Of the populations assessed, she determined that only Tanzanians seemed to be “fat neutral, with an absence of fat-stigmatizing beliefs” (p. 274). In her study of Fijians, Becker (2004) found that the spread of Western media contributes to the erosion of traditional valuations of large bodies in favor of the slim aesthetic. These changes have paradoxically occurred at the same time that epidemiologists have sounded the alarms about “globesity,” or “an escalating global epidemic of overweight and obesity” (World Health Organization, n.d.).

6. An NBC online poll determined that 94% of Americans want exercise as a daily “core” subject for students in all grades (Fox, 2013).

7. Interestingly, recent research has revealed the so-called “obesity paradox,” which suggests that some people classified as overweight or obese are better or more likely to survive certain chronic conditions. The belief is, as was posited so long ago, that these people have greater reserves of muscle and fat during times of physical stress.