Anybody seen ‘norm’ lately?

About 20 minutes after our invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration launched a diversionary assault: The obesity crisis. Based on a report from the World Health Organization, overweight was costing the nation a pretty penny.

We couldn’t get any body counts, but there was information-a-plenty about the evils of fat.
The public health warnings went out, and nobody but the New York Times carried anything trying to correct the calculation error in the WHO report that artificially inflated the impact of the problem. Trust me: The actual data was bad enough.

Before anyone accuses me of being in fat-chick denial, let me make it really clear that I am not saying obesity isn’t unhealthy. But, as usual, we’re going about addressing the issue all wrong. I say it’s the rare 5-year-old in this country who does not know it would be unhealthy to eat M&Ms three meals a day. While education is important, familial and cultural circumstances are going to dictate that’s child’s primary diet, and, as a country, we have refused to acknowledge the link between obesity and poverty.

There’s another often-overlooked connection I still am waiting to hear much about.

The victim of sexual assault, not one person put on this earth to protect me as a child did his or her job. Not one. I remember the very day in 1977 when I decided to try and eat myself to death. Minding my own business, walking down Genesee Street near the old Post Office in Syracuse, a man pulled out of traffic and tried to pick me up.

Incredulous, I walked toward the car and squatted down on the sidewalk a safe distance from the vehicle and said, “Do you realize I am 12 years old?”

“Well, you don’t walk like you’re 12,” was his response.

I had, in effect, said, “Go to jail; go directly to jail; do not pass ‘Go,’” and he didn’t care.

I went back to work (another story in itself), and knew how I would solve my man problems. I ordered a large pizza and ate the entire thing during my shift. Only, it didn’t solve the problem, and 30 years later, I am still cleaning up the toxic waste of those experiences and that decision.

While doing victim advocacy work later in life, I was horrified to find the numbers of victims of sexual assault and other forms of abuse who had turned to anorexia, bulimia or compulsive overeating to try and protect themselves. Those lucky enough to have health insurance these days will find mental health benefits sorely lacking, especially in this field of treatment. For those who think of eating disorders as a female issue, think again. The numbers in our boys are rising at an alarming rate.

The anti-tobacco and -alcohol initiatives over the past couple of years have tried to counter those drugs’ high visibility by launching a campaign that they “are not the norms in our society.” By this, they mean that the majority of people don’t regularly use them. The problem is, when something is not “normal,” what does it become? Abnormal. And “abnormal” equals “bad” or “wrong.”

The difference between being addicted to tobacco or alcohol and being over- or underweight is that one of those conditions is immediately, visually identifiable. We are setting up our “non-conforming” children for much bigger problems as the targets of legitimized ostracization and discrimination. Worse, some geniuses now are working to have children’s body mass indices included on school report cards.

There is more and more information on genetic causes of obesity coming to light each day, but it may be too late for this generation’s young people. In a highly publicized case a couple of years ago, a 12-year-old chose suicide to escape the peers who tormented her because of her physical appearance.

It’s open season on smokers and fat people, and suicide is a way out of our problems … whether they light up, pour another drink, devour another slice of pizza or put a bullet in their heads is anybody’s guess.

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse, New York.