Free What's Wrong With Fat? by Abigail C. Saguy

approach. For instance, Bacon writes in a conference paper delivered at the 2009 NAAFA convention that “as long as it is more difficult to live in a fat body, I have to fear becoming fat. This resulted in an eating disorder I endured when I was younger, along with accompanying difficulties with food, body image and self-esteem.” 31 Similarly, Joslyn Smith, who has served as vice president of the ASDAH board, as a member of the public policy committee for ASDAH, and on the diversity task force for the National Eating Disorders Association, explains that she got involved with HAES as a direct result of having struggled, despite her large body size, with symptoms of anorexia. She said that she came to a realization that if she didn’t change her way of thinking, she “wouldn’t survive.” 32
    To the extent that the fat field is dominated by the assumption that being fat is a medical problem and public health crisis and that weight loss is the goal, those who challenge these assumptions are at a disadvantage for acquiring resources. Different researchers respond to this challenge in various ways at specific points in time. For instance, Glenn Gaesser acknowledges in an interview with me that he has emphasized weight loss as a measure of his intervention’s success, in order to receive NIH funding. In contrast, neuroscientist Ernsberger says that he has had difficulty getting NIH funding for his work on yo-yo dieting, since it has to pass muster by peer reviewers who are typically “so-called experts who are running weight-loss clinics” and who reject the premise that weight cycling is harmful. He says he “can’t blame them entirely, because if I was running a weight loss clinic and I believed that it was harmful to repeatedly lose and regain weight, I would have to close shop.” Still, he says that “if I’d had funding, I would’ve been able to go a lot further” with this research. Ernsberger expresses frustration that “what’s been defined as an obesity expert is somebody who treats obesity.” Political scientist Joan Wolf refers to this as the “expert paradox,” through which “precisely what qualifies certain individuals to serve as advisers can hinder their ability to assess the literature objectively.” 33
    Some researcher-scholars are trying to change these institutional constraints. 34 For instance, U.S. nutritionist Linda Bacon recounts how, in the summer of 2009, Joslyn Smith offered training in lobbying for members of NAAFA and ASDAH. Smith, in turn, speaks of the positive reception that the group of 53 ASDAH and NAAFA members got from congressional staff members “on the Hill.” In a context in which getting 15 minutes is considered a lot of time, she said numerous people got hour-long meetings. Smith, Bacon, U.S. psychologist Deb Burgard, and Australian health-promotion manager Lily O’Hara set up a meeting with “someone high up” at NIH who was overseeing grants for NIH. They explained to her how the wording of many grants excluded research that did not include weight loss as a measure of the success of the nutritional and/or exercise intervention. The ASDAH members were invited to help reword grants to make them more open-ended. Bacon comments that she is “amazed that we were able to help her to make new options.”
    While ASDAH members work to change the way in which body size is studied within the context of health, some scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and law, in concert with fat rights activists, are creating a new field of study around fatness as a form of social identity. In so doing, they are following in the footsteps of gender studies, African American studies, Chicana studies, ethnic studies, and other interdisciplinary fields of research that build on related political movements. In a forward to The Fat Studies Reader , Marilyn Wann describes a fat studies approach as offering “no opposition to the simple fact of human weight diversity, but instead