Introduction
Harold is not a big guy. By all subjective measures, he does not cut an imposing figure and regularly fails at intimidating anyone older than twelve. More objectively, at 5’8” and only 150 pounds, no one would think to call him fat, and most people would probably call him thin, probably not skinny, and certainly not beefy. He constantly wears a belt, stores never have his size, and he and his wife share t-shirts. He slips easily through a crowd, finds most sports cars the perfect size, and routinely finds chairs lacking sufficient cushioning.
Harold is, overall, quite typical. Like many guys, Harold likes sports and finds the excitement of basketball or football to more fully capture his attention. Maybe he has a touch of ADD, or maybe he is just influenced by our five-second culture, but he just doesn’t get baseball. He used to play a few sports recreationally when he was younger, with modest success, too, but he never really played frequently enough to master any of the nuances. Despite personal limitations, his enjoyment of watching others is not tempered. He makes his way to a few professional events in his Midwestern city every year, watches his teams on TV, even travels back to his alma mater during the football season. Even though he used to have fun playing sports, because he is a suburbanite, Harold relegates himself to spending a small portion of his free time doing some light weightlifting at a local fitness facility. It offers easy access and convenient hours; he likes spending a little time at it a few times a week because he knows everyone needs move their bodies. When he first signed up, he eagerly enjoyed the time he spent at the gym, but time sapped his motivation, his energy waned, and though he still pays his monthly dues, he rarely makes the trek any more.
After college, and marriage, and settling into a contented life, Harold slowly eased into a more sedentary life over the course of years. Spending time at home or working on his home brings satisfaction. Being a homebody has its perks, too, and he and his wife spend most of their free time together. As a result, he has been spending more time on the couch, in his car, lounging at friends’ houses, and eating in restaurants. His new life makes him happy, and as pages fly off the calendar, Harold remains unaware of how quickly time passes.
On morning, Harold wakes up not expecting anything out of the ordinary. His wife threw a surprise thirtieth birthday party for him the week before, and was certain he wouldn’t feel any differently after reaching a seemingly innocuous milestone. For the most part, that particular day came and went without any real fanfare, and thirty appeared to be just another number. However, while standing in front of the mirror on this particular day, he notices something different about his body. Something new appears to have emerged overnight. Harold looks down and actually (gasp!) sees his belly sticking out further than his chest.
The horror! Thoughts race through his mind. What happened!? He thinks to himself, “I didn’t look like this when I was 25.” The past few years rapidly flash through his memory, and he finds himself wondering. “Is it too much pie? An extra microbrew? Eating out too often? Too much time at the computer? Watching too many sports from the couch?” While the flood of memories engender a fountain of thoughts, he just cannot stop staring at his body. Before getting too depressed about the situation, and without answering himself directly, he begins to think about what might be done about fix the situation. Harold pretty easily decides it is just part of entering his thirties, which eases his mind, for a bit. He feels his life is entirely too busy anyway, and no one has the time and energy to obsess over something so irrelevant.
However, some of those thoughts just simply will not die down. Though he goes on with his life for a few weeks, his mind cannot let go of what he thinks is becoming a real problem. This perception of his newly-materialized physical dimensions grips Harold tightly. More disturbing is the fact that his mind is unwilling to release its grasp, and he suddenly finds himself thinking about it almost every day, pondering the implications. Then, these thoughts fill his head daily, then nightly. Finally, Harold steels his resolve, saying to himself, “I have to do something about this. I don’t look like myself anymore. If I can put forth a little effort, I can get back my old body.” What at first seemed like a mere passing matter, something dismissed out of hand, has evolved into a serious issue for Harold, and he soon finds himself consumed with the idea of getting rid of this unsightly allotment of belly fat.
Now, standing in front of the mirror, he notices a few other problems, as well, commenting, “My arms are pretty thin, too. I should whip those into shape. And my legs look like twigs about to snap! I am not even sure I have any shoulders.” One thought leads to another, and soon, the inadequacy of his entire body exposes itself to him. He cannot help but compare himself to practically anyone on TV, athlete or not, and nothing about his body seems quite right anymore. Everything is sloppy, saggy, and amorphous. Something must be done, this will not stand, and Harold vows to reclaim his former, proper self.
Harold’s entire scenario points towards a cultural norm which has infiltrated deep into his mind, a norm which tends to drive more and more people towards obsessing over minor bodily details. When engaged in such downward spirals of inadequacy, we ignore what is at the heart of these thoughts. All of a sudden, are we really not ourselves? When did that extra half pound of weight gain transform someone we once knew into this unidentifiable person? Is it really as simple as telling yourself to take control? When our obsessing is at their peak is when we ignore the logical holes upon which these obsessions rest. In effect, such cultural obsessions have turned our minds against our bodies. We have been convinced, cajoled, and coerced into believing our bodies are misrepresentations of our true selves, and Americans have proven more than willing to overlook such insidious impossibilities, or, as Glenn Gaesser points out, more than 120 million people across America “have been deceived” and “The overwhelming evidence against this deception has largely been ignored” (xx). The deception, though, goes much deeper than merely uncovering the problematic relationship Americans have with their bodies.
In truth, Harold’s little belly means practically nothing (physically, emotionally, and mentally) in and of itself. A little extra bit of one of the most benign cells in the human body will have neither short nor long-term effects on Harold whatsoever. Why, then, would a little bit of (his own) flesh register, in his mind at least, as out of sorts? His obsession—and others’, as well (percent of people on diet at any given time from Gaesser)—centers on a remarkably complex chain of thought implanted in our culture from all sides. Harold, first, sees this little noticeable bit of extra fat as an unnatural extension of his body. It has, quite literally, grown out of control. In addition, this extra bit is obscuring his true self in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable with its unfamiliarity. Second, if it is obscuring his true sense of self, then this little bit of extra cells are, indeed, insidious and menacing, something which must be eradicated. This harmful aspect is not lost on our culture. Constant bombardment concerning the perils of weight gain convince Harold of his now-impending doom. Campos posits this disarmingly simple idea while explicitly politicizing weight, writing, “Never before in American history has so much junk science been exploited to whip up hysteria about a supposed public health ‘epidemic.’ The health establishment’s constant barrage of scientifically baseless propaganda regarding the relationship between weight and health constitutes nothing less than egregious abuse of public trust” (xix). How the public trust is being abused will be addressed later, but knowing how embedded the idea is in our culture is crucial for now. Without the constant reminder of how imperative weight control is to health, Harold might have overlooked the entire problem from the start. Finally, though, this dread leads to unhappiness. If this extra portion of fat cells will spell his early and painful demise, then how happy can Harold really be with his current situation? With just a little bit of thought, Harold finds himself unhappy with his body, concerned about his health, and determined to more firmly solidify who he really is.
We have become conditioned to see any part of our bodies which protrudes beyond the strict parameters of some ideal form as problematic, unhealthy, unwanted, and wrong. As a result, this little belly feels like transgression, seems abnormal. This little belly feels like an unnatural, uncontrolled growth. Because of the constant barrage of images and voices Americans experience on a daily basis, vigilance is the inculcated watchword. The abuses authors like Campos, Oliver, and Gaesser explore, though, focus on how misguided and misrepresented the physical science behind these scare tactics has become. What about the mind games such propaganda plays on Americans who spend their days trying to shape their lives and bodies into a more normalized, yet certainly extreme, form?
Harold’s recognition of his bodily problems might find its roots in latent fears concerning his moral and class status. Fears of falling out of the class in which he has built his life could be founded on the precarious social position of most Middle Americans, but the frailty he feels is merely an illusion. Maybe Harold’s deep-rooted identity is being shaken by the simple fact of his now-uncontrollable body, even though he would not fit any codified—and flawed—definitions of overweight. Where did he go wrong, and how did his body grow and expand beyond his reach? In actuality, none of these explanations come close to illuminating why such an insignificant problem would eternally echo in his mind. As Oliver posits, “Whether it is our moral indignation, status anxiety, or just feelings of general powerlessness, we assume we can get a handle on our lives and social problems by losing weight. If we can only rid ourselves of this beast…,we believe we will not only be thin, but happy, healthy, and righteous” (12). If only we can become the thin person the diet industry and the world has convinced us is healthy, then we can all live secure in the knowledge our true selves are looking us in the mirror, right?
Problems arise, though, when Americans become desperate to recover a part of themselves they feel is missing, as if they are no longer who they believed themselves to be. The paths any American can take to “uncover” a real self beneath the imposter are the subjects of this book. We will follow Harold through various attempts to find a path towards a happiness he feels is found in the thinner self he knows he can someday embody and believes will finally reveal his true self. As our test subject, Harold’s feelings about his body will be the catalyst for exploring our culture’s thoughts about the way in which unnatural evolutions within the body are completely erroneous. His obsession with ridding himself of this problem is highly problematic, and Harold’s belief he has uncontrollably expanded beyond who he believes himself to be must be debunked, dispelled, and ultimately, deconstructed. It would be foolish to say that guy from five years ago no longer exists and has been supplanted by this older, slightly paunchier dude.
The point of this book is twofold. First, we need to look at how any attempt to excavate an old self is entirely misdirected nomenclature. For Harold, his body has not been invaded, overcome, or hidden by some hedonistic facsimile of himself. Even though a large part of American culture has worked very hard to convince him this new Harold is just covering up the true Harold the world knows and loves, the tricks played on him rest on what he must come to believe about himself. In order to think he has ever solved the problems being projected onto his body, he must move beyond adopting these particular perceptions and embrace a multitude of solutions, all of which promise the results he seeks, but none of which actually deliver.
The second point of this book is to offer some tools for battling and seeing through the thoughts, ideas, and insidious self-denigrating perceptions. In a culture awash with normalizing ideas just waiting to be adopted, we need some heuristics to help us expose deeper, more accurate truths about our perceptions. Heuristics, in a rhetorical sense, are moves used when trying to analyze a text. Never forget that Harold’s body is a text in the strictest sense of the word. He looked at it, read it, interpreted it, and projected various implications based on what he thought the text presented. While the American culture at large is only willing to offer the tools for imposing these attitudes, this book will offer some less widely adopted moves capable of dispelling the powerful mindsets the culture implements.
Such heuristics, though, will prove challenging. It is not easy to push back against what seems like a tidal wave of negative thoughts. In order to do so, we will have to enlist the help of contemporary critical theorists. You may not know who Foucault or Derrida or Judith Butler are, but these thinkers will provide the tools and moves needed to redress the current fog covering America’s weight obsessions. The purpose of this book will not only be to explain some of the most pervasive phenomena our culture has engendered, but it will be to explain the critical moves in a way that enables future analysis of whatever our health-obsessed culture manufactures.
***
As someone delving deeply into the theoretical missteps associated with the problematic ideations proposed in the name of fitness, one could intimate I am immune to such inanities, but such inoculation came only after some careful considerations and a broader recognition of what is missing from any sales pitch. While it is true I have never obsessed over the types of issues with which many Americans grapple, being self-conscious enters everyone’s life at some point (more on that in the final chapter). What changed my mind was a flash of insight into the illusions promulgated by the diet industry, illusions centered on the idea that the body you want is the body the diet industry can actually deliver.
The starting points grew from the smallest of seeds, a pill actually, and have ballooned into a full-blown revelation of how grossly misdirected the diet-speak of personal satisfaction the industry broadcasts can be. While watching commercials one day, a diet pill advertisement began droning on about what it is like to lose the weight and finally feel great. While sleeping with my eyes open, a key word piqued my curiosity: control. While the testimonials offered spewed vague generalities about the happiness and pride felt by successful diet pill users, an underlying theme began to emerge. The subtext reported by these happy, bronzed spokespersons was control. I was suddenly struck with what diet pills actually say to consumers: gain back control by taking this supplement (more on this word later) which changes your body. If you cannot accomplish the ridiculous goals set up by the industry itself, then just add a little something extra to reach your potential. Immediately, the script fed to consumers became a discourse rife with deconstructive possibilities. Many people are already up in arms with the diet industry and its myriad problems and sometimes-dangerous products, but the illusions being examined here focus on how what the industry says can never be embodied by what the industry offers. With this provocative new stance, diet-speak will be rendered absurd, and promises will be profoundly subverted.
First, we must ask what is being offered? Supposedly, if you want to get rid of your excess fat, the diet industry can help you burn it off. If your true self is buried under the unfit person you’ve become, they can help you gain control of your life and master your flesh. If you feel you lack the self-control to stick to a diet, they have life-long plans to help you build self-control and, subsequently, self-esteem. All these ideas sound promising, and many people tend to literally buy into the messages being constantly broadcast (to the tune of an estimated $50 billion a year (Gaesser, 34)); however, on the whole, these ideas are patently incapable of being true, and, more interestingly, these deluded promises, when seen through the lens of critical theories, tend to reveal the opposite of what they propose. With abjection theory and scientific literature, it becomes obvious you cannot burn off or melt away the fat. Through deconstruction, it will be apparent you will never be able to reveal your true self through any artificial means proposed in a diet pill advertisement. And based on Foucauldian analysis and psychology, self-control will always elude you as your mind loses its power and willpower fades. Through the use of these and other theoretical perspectives, my aim is to systematically dismantle each proposition in turn; the goal of this book is to uncover how the inanities of diet-speak are produced, why these and other promises break down, and how ridiculous diet-speak proves to be in the end. The promises made are inevitably broken.
Of course, these faulty propositions extend beyond the head games in which the diet industry engages. The physical world which Americans inhabit, more and more, caters to the diet industry’s whims and are also plump with inconsistencies, plagued by delusional control, and bloated with problematic displays of compliance. Networks of support become disciplinary spaces, as online forums feel more like voluntary involvement in a big brother program. Such spaces quickly subvert the motivations and intentions of the exercisers, and instead, support involves compliance in a heavily policed world. Also, the monument to fitness that is the twenty-first century gym is built on inconsistencies in design, usage, and involvement. Even for those who regularly frequent such gyms within their neighborhoods (including your author), many stare in awe of how bizarrely these monoliths are constructed. The designs and interior spaces alone destabilize the intended purposes of the building itself as each building quite literally becomes the window on the exercising soul. When people engage in these cyber or physical spaces, they enter a world built on inconsistent thinking, a world promising good intentions but delivering unsettling insights, as the autonomous exerciser instead becomes corrupted and coerced by an inner self who subsists on and yearns for approval.
It should be noted this project is not going to crusade for any cause, movement, program, association, or group. I am not interested in taking down the diet and fitness industry, dismantling America’s pervasive fat-phobia, or wrecking personally edifying routines. Nor will this project devolve into a free-for-all of relativity. The history of the politics of obesity in America has already been ably documented, and supplementing (pun intended) such analyses will not be the goal here. What I am interested in doing is exposing the tragicomic way in which American culture engages in, promotes, and engenders patently empty promises. American culture is complicit in the wholesale manufacturing of ideals and good intentions only for those same intentions to become the epitome of what cannot be attained, what cannot be sustained, and what cannot be embodied, and the aim of this book it to examine the ways in which such narratives crumble under the weight of their own language and images.
In addition, this book is written as a response to the exercise nuts, fitness buffs, and workout crazies. It is written as a means of letting those types of people know exactly what the costs of their obsessions are and how the mania is affecting their everyday thoughts and actions. Because fat prejudice is so rampant (and shows no signs of dissipating), because fitness fanatics show their bodies as some sort of cultural badge of honor (and the fashion industry happily obliges), because these people disdain all things pudgy or bulging or squishy (even as far back as Hans und Frans), this book needs to be written, if only to demonstrate the inanity and insanity of the choices these types of people make. If fat people are constantly going to be denigrated throughout society, then someone needs to take shots at those perpetrating the crimes. If they begin to rethink their own lifestyles, maybe they will stop obsessing over the lifestyles of other people.
However, don’t get me wrong, please. This adventure through the world of fitness is firmly rooted in the pure enjoyment of the endeavor. I do not have it out for fitness buffs, I do not wish to shut down gyms, I do not wish to close every GNC, and I do not intend to provide ammunition to ridicule those who fall victim to America’s obsessions. For me, the fun is in the gamesmanship. The fun is in the pursuit, the play, and to imbue such efforts with more than a simple nudge, wink, or chuckle would be to impose profundity beyond the intended scope of this book. Think of this endeavor as similar to so many other aspects of modern life in which the curtain is pulled aside and greater insight doesn’t necessarily yield greater resistance, just like reading a New Yorker piece about top liners probably won’t stop anyone from bouncing around to the latest hit pop song. New gyms will always be built, people will always begin their diets on New Year’s Day, the first, or on Monday (notational boundaries from the new Yorker), and the elusive quick fixes--such as surgical stomach balloons--will always be in high demand, but, after reading this book, my hope is you will be better prepared to more fully understand what it means when you play these games and stop being duped.
Harold is, overall, quite typical. Like many guys, Harold likes sports and finds the excitement of basketball or football to more fully capture his attention. Maybe he has a touch of ADD, or maybe he is just influenced by our five-second culture, but he just doesn’t get baseball. He used to play a few sports recreationally when he was younger, with modest success, too, but he never really played frequently enough to master any of the nuances. Despite personal limitations, his enjoyment of watching others is not tempered. He makes his way to a few professional events in his Midwestern city every year, watches his teams on TV, even travels back to his alma mater during the football season. Even though he used to have fun playing sports, because he is a suburbanite, Harold relegates himself to spending a small portion of his free time doing some light weightlifting at a local fitness facility. It offers easy access and convenient hours; he likes spending a little time at it a few times a week because he knows everyone needs move their bodies. When he first signed up, he eagerly enjoyed the time he spent at the gym, but time sapped his motivation, his energy waned, and though he still pays his monthly dues, he rarely makes the trek any more.
After college, and marriage, and settling into a contented life, Harold slowly eased into a more sedentary life over the course of years. Spending time at home or working on his home brings satisfaction. Being a homebody has its perks, too, and he and his wife spend most of their free time together. As a result, he has been spending more time on the couch, in his car, lounging at friends’ houses, and eating in restaurants. His new life makes him happy, and as pages fly off the calendar, Harold remains unaware of how quickly time passes.
On morning, Harold wakes up not expecting anything out of the ordinary. His wife threw a surprise thirtieth birthday party for him the week before, and was certain he wouldn’t feel any differently after reaching a seemingly innocuous milestone. For the most part, that particular day came and went without any real fanfare, and thirty appeared to be just another number. However, while standing in front of the mirror on this particular day, he notices something different about his body. Something new appears to have emerged overnight. Harold looks down and actually (gasp!) sees his belly sticking out further than his chest.
The horror! Thoughts race through his mind. What happened!? He thinks to himself, “I didn’t look like this when I was 25.” The past few years rapidly flash through his memory, and he finds himself wondering. “Is it too much pie? An extra microbrew? Eating out too often? Too much time at the computer? Watching too many sports from the couch?” While the flood of memories engender a fountain of thoughts, he just cannot stop staring at his body. Before getting too depressed about the situation, and without answering himself directly, he begins to think about what might be done about fix the situation. Harold pretty easily decides it is just part of entering his thirties, which eases his mind, for a bit. He feels his life is entirely too busy anyway, and no one has the time and energy to obsess over something so irrelevant.
However, some of those thoughts just simply will not die down. Though he goes on with his life for a few weeks, his mind cannot let go of what he thinks is becoming a real problem. This perception of his newly-materialized physical dimensions grips Harold tightly. More disturbing is the fact that his mind is unwilling to release its grasp, and he suddenly finds himself thinking about it almost every day, pondering the implications. Then, these thoughts fill his head daily, then nightly. Finally, Harold steels his resolve, saying to himself, “I have to do something about this. I don’t look like myself anymore. If I can put forth a little effort, I can get back my old body.” What at first seemed like a mere passing matter, something dismissed out of hand, has evolved into a serious issue for Harold, and he soon finds himself consumed with the idea of getting rid of this unsightly allotment of belly fat.
Now, standing in front of the mirror, he notices a few other problems, as well, commenting, “My arms are pretty thin, too. I should whip those into shape. And my legs look like twigs about to snap! I am not even sure I have any shoulders.” One thought leads to another, and soon, the inadequacy of his entire body exposes itself to him. He cannot help but compare himself to practically anyone on TV, athlete or not, and nothing about his body seems quite right anymore. Everything is sloppy, saggy, and amorphous. Something must be done, this will not stand, and Harold vows to reclaim his former, proper self.
Harold’s entire scenario points towards a cultural norm which has infiltrated deep into his mind, a norm which tends to drive more and more people towards obsessing over minor bodily details. When engaged in such downward spirals of inadequacy, we ignore what is at the heart of these thoughts. All of a sudden, are we really not ourselves? When did that extra half pound of weight gain transform someone we once knew into this unidentifiable person? Is it really as simple as telling yourself to take control? When our obsessing is at their peak is when we ignore the logical holes upon which these obsessions rest. In effect, such cultural obsessions have turned our minds against our bodies. We have been convinced, cajoled, and coerced into believing our bodies are misrepresentations of our true selves, and Americans have proven more than willing to overlook such insidious impossibilities, or, as Glenn Gaesser points out, more than 120 million people across America “have been deceived” and “The overwhelming evidence against this deception has largely been ignored” (xx). The deception, though, goes much deeper than merely uncovering the problematic relationship Americans have with their bodies.
In truth, Harold’s little belly means practically nothing (physically, emotionally, and mentally) in and of itself. A little extra bit of one of the most benign cells in the human body will have neither short nor long-term effects on Harold whatsoever. Why, then, would a little bit of (his own) flesh register, in his mind at least, as out of sorts? His obsession—and others’, as well (percent of people on diet at any given time from Gaesser)—centers on a remarkably complex chain of thought implanted in our culture from all sides. Harold, first, sees this little noticeable bit of extra fat as an unnatural extension of his body. It has, quite literally, grown out of control. In addition, this extra bit is obscuring his true self in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable with its unfamiliarity. Second, if it is obscuring his true sense of self, then this little bit of extra cells are, indeed, insidious and menacing, something which must be eradicated. This harmful aspect is not lost on our culture. Constant bombardment concerning the perils of weight gain convince Harold of his now-impending doom. Campos posits this disarmingly simple idea while explicitly politicizing weight, writing, “Never before in American history has so much junk science been exploited to whip up hysteria about a supposed public health ‘epidemic.’ The health establishment’s constant barrage of scientifically baseless propaganda regarding the relationship between weight and health constitutes nothing less than egregious abuse of public trust” (xix). How the public trust is being abused will be addressed later, but knowing how embedded the idea is in our culture is crucial for now. Without the constant reminder of how imperative weight control is to health, Harold might have overlooked the entire problem from the start. Finally, though, this dread leads to unhappiness. If this extra portion of fat cells will spell his early and painful demise, then how happy can Harold really be with his current situation? With just a little bit of thought, Harold finds himself unhappy with his body, concerned about his health, and determined to more firmly solidify who he really is.
We have become conditioned to see any part of our bodies which protrudes beyond the strict parameters of some ideal form as problematic, unhealthy, unwanted, and wrong. As a result, this little belly feels like transgression, seems abnormal. This little belly feels like an unnatural, uncontrolled growth. Because of the constant barrage of images and voices Americans experience on a daily basis, vigilance is the inculcated watchword. The abuses authors like Campos, Oliver, and Gaesser explore, though, focus on how misguided and misrepresented the physical science behind these scare tactics has become. What about the mind games such propaganda plays on Americans who spend their days trying to shape their lives and bodies into a more normalized, yet certainly extreme, form?
Harold’s recognition of his bodily problems might find its roots in latent fears concerning his moral and class status. Fears of falling out of the class in which he has built his life could be founded on the precarious social position of most Middle Americans, but the frailty he feels is merely an illusion. Maybe Harold’s deep-rooted identity is being shaken by the simple fact of his now-uncontrollable body, even though he would not fit any codified—and flawed—definitions of overweight. Where did he go wrong, and how did his body grow and expand beyond his reach? In actuality, none of these explanations come close to illuminating why such an insignificant problem would eternally echo in his mind. As Oliver posits, “Whether it is our moral indignation, status anxiety, or just feelings of general powerlessness, we assume we can get a handle on our lives and social problems by losing weight. If we can only rid ourselves of this beast…,we believe we will not only be thin, but happy, healthy, and righteous” (12). If only we can become the thin person the diet industry and the world has convinced us is healthy, then we can all live secure in the knowledge our true selves are looking us in the mirror, right?
Problems arise, though, when Americans become desperate to recover a part of themselves they feel is missing, as if they are no longer who they believed themselves to be. The paths any American can take to “uncover” a real self beneath the imposter are the subjects of this book. We will follow Harold through various attempts to find a path towards a happiness he feels is found in the thinner self he knows he can someday embody and believes will finally reveal his true self. As our test subject, Harold’s feelings about his body will be the catalyst for exploring our culture’s thoughts about the way in which unnatural evolutions within the body are completely erroneous. His obsession with ridding himself of this problem is highly problematic, and Harold’s belief he has uncontrollably expanded beyond who he believes himself to be must be debunked, dispelled, and ultimately, deconstructed. It would be foolish to say that guy from five years ago no longer exists and has been supplanted by this older, slightly paunchier dude.
The point of this book is twofold. First, we need to look at how any attempt to excavate an old self is entirely misdirected nomenclature. For Harold, his body has not been invaded, overcome, or hidden by some hedonistic facsimile of himself. Even though a large part of American culture has worked very hard to convince him this new Harold is just covering up the true Harold the world knows and loves, the tricks played on him rest on what he must come to believe about himself. In order to think he has ever solved the problems being projected onto his body, he must move beyond adopting these particular perceptions and embrace a multitude of solutions, all of which promise the results he seeks, but none of which actually deliver.
The second point of this book is to offer some tools for battling and seeing through the thoughts, ideas, and insidious self-denigrating perceptions. In a culture awash with normalizing ideas just waiting to be adopted, we need some heuristics to help us expose deeper, more accurate truths about our perceptions. Heuristics, in a rhetorical sense, are moves used when trying to analyze a text. Never forget that Harold’s body is a text in the strictest sense of the word. He looked at it, read it, interpreted it, and projected various implications based on what he thought the text presented. While the American culture at large is only willing to offer the tools for imposing these attitudes, this book will offer some less widely adopted moves capable of dispelling the powerful mindsets the culture implements.
Such heuristics, though, will prove challenging. It is not easy to push back against what seems like a tidal wave of negative thoughts. In order to do so, we will have to enlist the help of contemporary critical theorists. You may not know who Foucault or Derrida or Judith Butler are, but these thinkers will provide the tools and moves needed to redress the current fog covering America’s weight obsessions. The purpose of this book will not only be to explain some of the most pervasive phenomena our culture has engendered, but it will be to explain the critical moves in a way that enables future analysis of whatever our health-obsessed culture manufactures.
***
As someone delving deeply into the theoretical missteps associated with the problematic ideations proposed in the name of fitness, one could intimate I am immune to such inanities, but such inoculation came only after some careful considerations and a broader recognition of what is missing from any sales pitch. While it is true I have never obsessed over the types of issues with which many Americans grapple, being self-conscious enters everyone’s life at some point (more on that in the final chapter). What changed my mind was a flash of insight into the illusions promulgated by the diet industry, illusions centered on the idea that the body you want is the body the diet industry can actually deliver.
The starting points grew from the smallest of seeds, a pill actually, and have ballooned into a full-blown revelation of how grossly misdirected the diet-speak of personal satisfaction the industry broadcasts can be. While watching commercials one day, a diet pill advertisement began droning on about what it is like to lose the weight and finally feel great. While sleeping with my eyes open, a key word piqued my curiosity: control. While the testimonials offered spewed vague generalities about the happiness and pride felt by successful diet pill users, an underlying theme began to emerge. The subtext reported by these happy, bronzed spokespersons was control. I was suddenly struck with what diet pills actually say to consumers: gain back control by taking this supplement (more on this word later) which changes your body. If you cannot accomplish the ridiculous goals set up by the industry itself, then just add a little something extra to reach your potential. Immediately, the script fed to consumers became a discourse rife with deconstructive possibilities. Many people are already up in arms with the diet industry and its myriad problems and sometimes-dangerous products, but the illusions being examined here focus on how what the industry says can never be embodied by what the industry offers. With this provocative new stance, diet-speak will be rendered absurd, and promises will be profoundly subverted.
First, we must ask what is being offered? Supposedly, if you want to get rid of your excess fat, the diet industry can help you burn it off. If your true self is buried under the unfit person you’ve become, they can help you gain control of your life and master your flesh. If you feel you lack the self-control to stick to a diet, they have life-long plans to help you build self-control and, subsequently, self-esteem. All these ideas sound promising, and many people tend to literally buy into the messages being constantly broadcast (to the tune of an estimated $50 billion a year (Gaesser, 34)); however, on the whole, these ideas are patently incapable of being true, and, more interestingly, these deluded promises, when seen through the lens of critical theories, tend to reveal the opposite of what they propose. With abjection theory and scientific literature, it becomes obvious you cannot burn off or melt away the fat. Through deconstruction, it will be apparent you will never be able to reveal your true self through any artificial means proposed in a diet pill advertisement. And based on Foucauldian analysis and psychology, self-control will always elude you as your mind loses its power and willpower fades. Through the use of these and other theoretical perspectives, my aim is to systematically dismantle each proposition in turn; the goal of this book is to uncover how the inanities of diet-speak are produced, why these and other promises break down, and how ridiculous diet-speak proves to be in the end. The promises made are inevitably broken.
Of course, these faulty propositions extend beyond the head games in which the diet industry engages. The physical world which Americans inhabit, more and more, caters to the diet industry’s whims and are also plump with inconsistencies, plagued by delusional control, and bloated with problematic displays of compliance. Networks of support become disciplinary spaces, as online forums feel more like voluntary involvement in a big brother program. Such spaces quickly subvert the motivations and intentions of the exercisers, and instead, support involves compliance in a heavily policed world. Also, the monument to fitness that is the twenty-first century gym is built on inconsistencies in design, usage, and involvement. Even for those who regularly frequent such gyms within their neighborhoods (including your author), many stare in awe of how bizarrely these monoliths are constructed. The designs and interior spaces alone destabilize the intended purposes of the building itself as each building quite literally becomes the window on the exercising soul. When people engage in these cyber or physical spaces, they enter a world built on inconsistent thinking, a world promising good intentions but delivering unsettling insights, as the autonomous exerciser instead becomes corrupted and coerced by an inner self who subsists on and yearns for approval.
It should be noted this project is not going to crusade for any cause, movement, program, association, or group. I am not interested in taking down the diet and fitness industry, dismantling America’s pervasive fat-phobia, or wrecking personally edifying routines. Nor will this project devolve into a free-for-all of relativity. The history of the politics of obesity in America has already been ably documented, and supplementing (pun intended) such analyses will not be the goal here. What I am interested in doing is exposing the tragicomic way in which American culture engages in, promotes, and engenders patently empty promises. American culture is complicit in the wholesale manufacturing of ideals and good intentions only for those same intentions to become the epitome of what cannot be attained, what cannot be sustained, and what cannot be embodied, and the aim of this book it to examine the ways in which such narratives crumble under the weight of their own language and images.
In addition, this book is written as a response to the exercise nuts, fitness buffs, and workout crazies. It is written as a means of letting those types of people know exactly what the costs of their obsessions are and how the mania is affecting their everyday thoughts and actions. Because fat prejudice is so rampant (and shows no signs of dissipating), because fitness fanatics show their bodies as some sort of cultural badge of honor (and the fashion industry happily obliges), because these people disdain all things pudgy or bulging or squishy (even as far back as Hans und Frans), this book needs to be written, if only to demonstrate the inanity and insanity of the choices these types of people make. If fat people are constantly going to be denigrated throughout society, then someone needs to take shots at those perpetrating the crimes. If they begin to rethink their own lifestyles, maybe they will stop obsessing over the lifestyles of other people.
However, don’t get me wrong, please. This adventure through the world of fitness is firmly rooted in the pure enjoyment of the endeavor. I do not have it out for fitness buffs, I do not wish to shut down gyms, I do not wish to close every GNC, and I do not intend to provide ammunition to ridicule those who fall victim to America’s obsessions. For me, the fun is in the gamesmanship. The fun is in the pursuit, the play, and to imbue such efforts with more than a simple nudge, wink, or chuckle would be to impose profundity beyond the intended scope of this book. Think of this endeavor as similar to so many other aspects of modern life in which the curtain is pulled aside and greater insight doesn’t necessarily yield greater resistance, just like reading a New Yorker piece about top liners probably won’t stop anyone from bouncing around to the latest hit pop song. New gyms will always be built, people will always begin their diets on New Year’s Day, the first, or on Monday (notational boundaries from the new Yorker), and the elusive quick fixes--such as surgical stomach balloons--will always be in high demand, but, after reading this book, my hope is you will be better prepared to more fully understand what it means when you play these games and stop being duped.