Mutiny" for several months in January and February on _The Colbert Report_. "They always pick on your weakest points," Mr. Colbert noted, "so I will go as the fat man. They don't want to see that I am not a normal person. They will only make fun of me for being what I am. So now they will be dealing with me."
And in the United States, a recent study of 1,600 men and women who weighed more than half their natural weight suggests that such derision might not just be idle chatter. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded that overweight women who are mocked and shamed by thin, slim people may be more vulnerable to obesity. In a study published in the _International Journal of Obesity_ , researchers reported that those who felt body shaming was common had a higher chance of becoming overweight or obese.
Meanwhile, a separate report suggests that the weight shaming epidemic is spilling over into schools. In an effort to fight obesity, many high schools and colleges have hired fat-management consultants to help teachers and students learn to be body positive. It turns out that for many young adults, however, the experience of fat-shaming was their first encounter with professional body shaming. They have turned their anger into activism. One woman who weighed more than two hundred pounds, for instance, recalled being asked in high school by her guidance counselor how much weight she had gained. "She said that the guidance counselor said that she should come into the office to discuss my weight and that there were all these studies out there on how being fat could lead to all these bad things."
To be sure, much of what has made fat shaming so controversial in recent years was its unvarnished cruelty and callousness, with fat people ridiculed and marginalized, made to feel like pariahs or even less than human. As Michael Pollan wrote in his essay "On Being Fat," "We may love our bodies, but we are also at war with them." Pollan, the author of the best-selling book _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ , wrote the essay as he fought his own battle with weight loss, a fact that only adds to the pathos of the piece. "When we fat people get mocked," he concluded, "we just have to bite back."
_Bitter Melody_ , _Bullies_ , and _The Fat Studies Reader_ are also part of the growing body of scholarly literature devoted to fat activism and fat studies. These books offer insight into the many ways fat shaming has been and continues to be reinforced by a variety of other institutions, including schools, workplaces, and government. But it's important to remember that even as the forces of body shaming have become more sophisticated over the years, they have not always succeeded in preventing fat people from living healthy, fulfilled lives.
A good place to start our search for solutions is the story of a very overweight boy.
# CHAPTER 9
# THE OBSESSION WITH BODY SHAME IN AMERICA
> _In some societies, men with excess fat on their chests and backs are regarded as animals or demons. In our own society, we have been taught to recognize fat, and in particular stomach fat, as an ugly thing to have. . . . It's a reminder that we're animals with bodies that have excess fat. And we think we've got to watch that fat carefully. For years in our culture, being fat was associated with all kinds of failures._
>
> —GARY PINKER, PH.D., _WHY WE GET FAT_
IN AUGUST 2013, KENJI McCAIN SPENT DAYS ON THE FRONT LINES, WORKING with firefighters in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, the second-costliest storm to ever hit New Orleans. That same year, the forty-seven-year-old school psychologist got married again. Just a few years earlier, he and his new wife, Kim, had ended their troubled twelve-year marriage. But by 2013, after more than a year of celibacy, the two had found each other again and were getting serious about the prospect of another try at a relationship. "Kim's the one that got me going back to dating," says McCain, a man who has been on a losing streak for so long that it seems to have turned into something of an obsession for him. "That first time when we got together, I was so sure of myself. I felt like I could be a real contender."
Now McCain planned to put in the hard work to get his life back on track. He knew it would be a long haul. "The way I have lived my life," he explains, "it is going to take a while before I reach a point where I'm satisfied with myself."
That's the same way it is with almost every fat man.
"I haven't accomplished what I set out to do in my life," McCain continued. "I've been running from disaster. And when the disasters came and hit, I crumbled."
McCain is from a middle-class family in Florida. "When I was young," he said, "I was fat. I mean _fat_. I don't even know how to put it into words. I just knew I was fat. My friends used to say I looked like the Michelin Man. I was a fat kid, and I used to cry because I was so ashamed of my body. My mother had a bad weight problem her whole life. She couldn't lose weight even though she'd been trying for years."
As a child, McCain tried to deal with his lifelong body issues by developing a self-confident swagger. "That's what kept me going as a kid," he said. "I was the toughest kid in the neighborhood. In fourth grade, I was fat. In fifth grade, I was fat. In sixth grade, I was fat. But I beat all the bullies at school. It was one of the few things that I had going for me."
But despite the swagger, things were getting harder for McCain as he got older. By the time he reached high school, he had started to notice what he called a stigma against fat people. He started paying attention to how other people saw him and noticed a disconnect between how other people saw him and how he saw himself. "You know how it is," McCain said. "You're at school with a bunch of people, and you start paying attention to what they're saying and how you're being perceived by them. I was always aware of what I weighed and what other people thought about it. I used to wonder what the people in the gym were thinking about my body when I took off my shirt and shorts."
McCain was still working out and watching his diet carefully, but he was gaining weight steadily over the years. "I remember when I was twenty years old, we had a guy who could not go one day without eating. He was a monster, and he was the one they called 'the fatty.' I started wondering how I could compete with him."
During high school, McCain was always conscious of the size of his waist. "If it was a small waist," he said, "I was a happy boy." That changed as he started working in a convenience store, where the customers included teenage boys who would pay homage to him by calling him names, like "fat bastard" and "fat jerk." That's when he started thinking about leaving the only life he had known. "It was a long time before I could accept myself," he said. "And it took me a long time to accept myself."
In 1997, when he was twenty-six, McCain returned to the University of Mississippi from a stint in the military and got his master's degree in school counseling. He made a good living, selling drugs and moving pot and guns for his boss. But that life also left McCain a little desperate, "because I never did nothing illegal." So he decided to go back to college. "I went to the University of Southern Mississippi," McCain said. "I took it easy the first semester. I was getting sick of all the drugs."
McCain did very well in school during that first semester at the university. By the end of it, he decided he'd try to do something for real. "I told myself if I didn't pass the test the next semester, I was leaving school," he said. "And when I did pass the test, I took another one. My score was perfect. And that's when I really figured that I would become a teacher. I'm a teacher today because I couldn't get over how much I wanted to make the effort. All the effort that I made in college to make it through and keep at it and stick with it. That's the one thing I didn't have for myself—the drive. So that's what I chose. I figured that I was tired of doing nothing. And the first thing I decided to do was focus on how I looked."
McCain started gaining weight in his second year in college. After graduation, he spent two years working in a federal prison and doing a lot of reading about weight loss. "I thought I was going to go on a diet after I left prison," McCain says. "But by the time I got out of prison, I just looked for something to eat. I wasn't on a diet. I wasn't watching what I ate, but I was getting bigger and bigger. I just didn't
