You Don't Know What You're Doing (Or Why You're Still Fat)

(NOTE: PEOPLE WITH INTRACTABLE WEIGHT PROBLEMS THAT ARE CAUSED BY REAL ILLNESSES OR GENUINE CONGENITAL ABNORMALITIES ARE EXEMPTED FROM THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION.)

Awhile back I wrote a short humor piece in which I poked fun at a grossly overweight woman.

The piece was called "Peggie" and it elicited a fair share of irate mail from women who identified with the title character.

"I hate you," went a typical response. "How could you write such hurtful trash? Do you have any idea what it's like to struggle all your life with an obesity problem? Do you know what it is to be forced to endure incessant jokes and insults, to torture yourself with one failed diet after another and to live with a constant sense of guilt and shame? How could you be so cruel and insensitive?"

Okay. I'll admit to bad taste (and, as several other readers felt the need to point out, to committing less than deathless prose as well), but I have to say that I remain unmoved by the suffering I'm accused of inflicting.

Why? Because the "obesity problem" of which my correspondents speak (and I'm including all of the emotional woes that attend it) is actually their solution to a deeper and more urgent problem. What's more, it's a solution that, to judge by their obvious absorption in it, is working very well for them.

Now in order to grasp what I'm driving at it is first necessary to acknowledge something about guilt and shame. To feel guilt and shame is built into our essence?-it's a natural consequence of being mortal. Not only must we have done some nasty stuff to be in so much trouble but, unable to come up with a way to alter our situation, to change the given, we're incompetent where it matters most.

It's also necessary to remind ourselves that, accompanied as they are by the sheer terror the fact of being mortal causes us, our natural feelings of guilt and shame constitute an intolerable burden that must be relieved if we are to function in the world with even a modest degree of equanimity.

Finally, it's necessary to recognize the last thing we want to recognize since to recognize it is to undermine the success of our purpose: virtually everything we do is, in one way or another, really designed to mollify our existential dread and anxiety. It is, in fact, precisely this need that makes the world go around.

Bearing such truths in mind, I'm saying that people with perpetual obesity issues are playing a game with themselves.

Look. One of the ways we accomplish the mitigation of our natural guilt and shame is by finding, and becoming obsessed with, other things to feel guilty and ashamed about, things that (to assure them an authentic gravity) are culturally certified as real and legitimate faults or deficiencies and which, at the same time, are POTENTIALLY REDEEMABLE, that are within our capacity to overcome or transcend. What we do is make THEM what is essentially wrong with us?-indeed, we make them, in our minds, the very reason for the death sentence we've been handed. Implicitly, these acquired problems also embody a way to achieve our salvation. If they are what is fundamentally wrong with us, by defeating them we will be absolved of what is fundamentally wrong with us. If we still must die we will survive our death in heaven.

But here's the thing. If we succeed in beating the problem we've concocted for ourselves we're returned to where we began. Once the flush of victory wanes we discover that our underlying dilemma is still there, that we're left to nakedly confront our existential horrors once again.

So what do we do?

Well, if (and indulging, of course, an innate predilection) we've made weight our problem, and if, with dieting and exercise, we've managed to overcome this problem, what we do is find a reason to quit exercising, to go off our diet. Then what we do is renew our struggle and when the process has run its course again we repeat it.

We hold, that is, any permanent resolution of our weight problem in abeyance.

Yes, each time weight recurs the pain and humiliation we experience is nothing short of devastating. But the degree of our anguish serves to validate the size and authenticity of our manufactured problem. In order to make it feel real and significant enough to work its purpose we need to experience real torment. Finally, however, for all of the misery it causes us, our weight problem functions as the anodyne for a larger misery. The more we flagellate ourselves with it the more we suppress our fundamental dread and anxiety and the more we achieve a measure of peace on the level that matters most to us.

Say all that to say that, whether or not I intended it as such, I think fat people should regard my story as a gift.