August 4, 2004
NEW YORK (AP) -- Overweight activists, unashamed of their size, fed up with fat
jokes and angry at the national obsession with dieting, are mounting a feisty
protest movement against the medical establishment's campaign against obesity.
"We're living in the middle of a witch hunt and fat
people are the witches," said Marilyn Wann of San Francisco, a militant
member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). "It's
gotten markedly worse in the last few years because of the propaganda that
fatness, a natural human characteristic, is somehow a form of disease."
The association, NAAFA, holds its annual convention
starting today in Newark, N.J., bringing together activists for social events
and workshops on self-acceptance, political advocacy and the "fat
liberation" movement.
"I hope we can be a viable force of sanity in the
midst of hysteria," said NAAFA spokeswoman Mary Ray Worley of Madison, Wis.
"I've found allies in all kinds of unexpected places, but overall there's a
lot of animosity. Some people act like obesity is the next worst thing after
terrorism."
The convention comes as the movement is scrambling to
counter federal government pronouncements that obesity is a "critical
public health problem" costing more than $100 billion and 300,000 lives per
year.
Jeannie Moloo, an American Dietetic Association
spokeswoman who counsels overweight clients at her nutrition practice in
Sacramento, Calif., empathizes with the activists' fight against bias, but says
they should be wary of oversimplifying obesity-related health issues.
"Some people can be overweight all their lives and
not end up with diabetes or heart disease or hypertension," Miss Moloo
said. "But the majority are probably going to develop one of these
life-altering conditions."
Fat-acceptance groups were dismayed when federal
officials announced last month that Medicare was discarding its declaration that
obesity isn't a disease. The policy change likely will prompt overweight
Americans covered by Medicare to file medical claims for treatments such as
stomach surgery and diet programs.
"Obesity is not a disease," insisted Allen
Steadham, director of the Austin, Texas-based International Size Acceptance
Association. "All this does is open the door for the diet and bariatric
surgery industries to make a potentially tremendous profit."
Most fat-acceptance activists endorse the concept of
eating healthy food and exercising regularly, but they oppose any fixation on
losing weight and contend that more than 95 percent of diets fail. They also
decry the rapid growth of stomach-shrinking surgery; the number of such
procedures has quadrupled to 100,000 annually since 1998.
Miss Wann depicts bariatric surgery as "stomach
amputation" that imposes anorexia on patients and exposes them to long-term
risks.
Kelly Bliss, a self-described "full-figured fitness
instructor" from Lansdowne, Pa., predicts that future generations will look
back on stomach surgery as "comparable to lobotomies."
|