Being frank about people being fat

I am, like all of us, a flawed individual. When possible, I correct my flaws.

If I can’t, I do the next best thing: recognize my flaws as flaws and act accordingly. As a result, I now write about a flaw of mine you may already know from reading this column.

I can be a bit of a body snob.

Years ago, for example, I got a cold call from an investment strategist and agreed to meet with him. While what he proposed required financial risk, that’s not why he left the meeting without a cent of my money.

When he took off his suit coat and sat down, his belly forced his dress shirt over his belt as his man boobs bounced up then down. At that time in my life, I couldn’t invest with a financier unwilling to invest in himself.

Why I now believe I could do so is best summarized by something Edward R. Murrow said: “Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.”

I now recognize that being 25 pounds overweight doesn’t always mean you don’t care enough about yourself.

In the same way that a very small percentage of the population is genetically blessed (like that crotchety neighbor of yours who smoked and drank and complained incessantly yet lived to be 98), about three percent is also genetically cursed. While being genetically cursed doesn’t doom you to weigh 300 pounds, it does mean that you are far more likely to be heavyset and that losing weight or maintaining weight will require far more effort.

So what’s the ultimate intention behind the story of the fat financier who should’ve invested in a corset and a bra?

To make you think long and hard about people being fat and about how you should view obesity.

I know I thought long and hard about both after reading “What If We Stopped Focusing on Weight?” an article written by Sunny Sea Gold (I kid you not!) in the January/February issue of Health magazine. In it, Gold opines that “size diversity is normal, [so] every person deserves respect.”

While I do believe I treat all people of all shapes with respect — even those whose behavior makes them unworthy of it — Gold’s words made me realize that I still at times harbor body-shape prejudice. I never verbalize mine, though — unlike many other people.

“Many fat people, particularly women, face an enormous amount of weight hate on a daily basis,” Gold writes. In fact, a 2015 national survey compiled by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, found 41 percent of respondents to have encountered some sort of “weight stigma.”

Which is partly the reason why Gold’s belief that “a better alternative [to battling obesity] is to throw out the focus on size, and emphasize self-care and self-acceptance” has merit.

In fact, I’m all for throwing out the focus on size — if we throw all the focus on America’s horrid eating habits.

You’ll realize my use of “horrid” isn’t hyperbole if you review the latest findings provided by the government’s healthy eating index.

While the good news is that America’s collective score improved two points, the bad news is it’s still only 58 out of 100, which means — you got it right! — we failed again.

This sorry score comes from Tufts University researchers compiling data from surveys involving more than 43,000 American adults — and the way in which we failed is especially disturbing.

Despite protracted public awareness efforts to clearly delineate between good-for-you complex carbohydrates and whole fruits and bad-for-you highly refined carbohydrates and fruit juices, 42 percent of America’s daily calories still come from what nutritionists call “low-quality” carbs. Likewise, the several recent studies enumerating the evils of added sugars — the absolute lowest of the low-quality carbs — along with the resultant media coverage only caused America’s use of them to decrease by 2 percent.

Combine the bad carbs with the unhealthy fats that the typical American consumes in a day, and the total is just shy of 55 percent.

In her article, Gold cites that “our collective waistlines are still larger than they were 35 years ago,” despite the fact that we now spend $72 billion a year to remedy that, which is one of the reasons she calls our battle with obesity “complicated.”

But the battle need not be complicated. Not if we worry less about what we look like and more about what we eat.

In essence, the Tufts University study tells us that for every 20 calories consumed in the United States, 11 clearly hurt rather than help our health — as well as make it more likely to gain weight. It’s that ratio as much as the total number of calories consumed in a day that makes 70 percent of American adults obese or overweight with a fair percentage of them feeling hopeless about it.

But there is hope.

It’s called eating right.