18 Quotes by Linda Bacon

Blaming fatness for heart disease is a lot like blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer, rather than considering the possibility that smoking might play a role in both. And telling people they need to lose weight is a lot like telling someone with pneumonia to stop coughing so much—it may not be possible and won’t make the disease go away.

But maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus—without being transparent about larger influences—is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces their ill health to poor “choices”and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels their oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged.

The pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in making us believe that fat is dangerous—and that they have a solution—wrote the BMI standards that are currently used.

The pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in making us believe that fat is dangerous—and that they have a solution—wrote the BMI standards that are currently used.The derivation of children’s BMI standards was even worse. They were just arbitrarily assigned, without even the pretense of considering health data.

U.S. life expectancy has increased dramatically in the same time period in which our weight rose, rising from an average 70.8 years in 1970 to 78.7 years in 2011, and continues to hit record highs.

Its laser focus on the limited parameters of weight, diet, and exercise blinded us to other factors that affect metabolism and health, including the lived realities of inequality.

While it is clear that our food choices are a matter of personal responsibility, it is important to recognize that we do not make our choices in a vacuum. We select our foods in an environment toxic with government policies that encourage cheap prices for foods with low nutrient value, and in which billions of dollars have been spent to convince us to distrust ourselves, to overeat, and to eat foods laced with ingredients that raise our setpoints and damage our health.

Food is a wonderful source of pleasure—but it will get you into trouble if it’s the only source of pleasure you have in your life.

In other words, the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.