“Weight Care” Company Sells Pill-Shaped Indulgences for “Gluttony Syndrome”
Fatness and medicalized marketing
I saw an ad for a company called Found that read “Obesity is a Disease, Not a Decision” and had the line “Prescription Weight Loss” underneath. This struck me. The company’s “What is Found?” FAQ page describes it as “weight care that fits your life.” Notice the term “weight care.”
The FAQ page specifies tactics. “Every weight care plan includes customized nutrition and movement programming, access to a personal health coach and private community, and for qualifying members, an online consultation with a board-certified practitioner to evaluate and manage the addition of medications to address weight at the cellular level.”1 Clearly, this company is attempting to profit off the medicalization of flab. “For qualifying members” means “for customers buying accounts that stand to profit this company.”
Under the guise of compassionately exculpating fat people of responsibility for their fatness, Found markets flab as a medical problem amenable to lucrative pharmaceutical solutions. Fatness is still bad — after all, it is a “disease” — but its badness derives from Fate’s oppressive whims and not individual irresponsibility. Fat people aren’t to blame for their fatness, whatever the ethereal Medical Force is that made fat people fat against their will should be faulted. Fat people aren’t gluttonous, they’re suffering from gluttony syndrome.
Found is here to save sinful fatties from Nature’s tough love by selling them indulgences in pill form. “Dear flabby children,” it says sweetly, “you should not feel guilty at all about being fat! Flab is a disease, Lord Nature cursed your bodies. You couldn’t possibly have avoided omnipotent Nature’s fickle and arbitrary wrath. Luckily for you lost little fatties, you have been Found. Here, give us some cash in exchange for Nature’s Grace so that we may cleanse your bodies of this wretched curse!”
People who respond to fatness pathologization by emphasizing that people become fat by making more pro-flab than anti-flab decisions over time are undeniably right, but many draw the wrong conclusion from this obvious reality. Just because something is a choice doesn’t mean it is the same kind of choice for everyone. Fatness results from flab-related decisions, but the difficulty of flab-related decisions isn’t uniform across individuals. Some adults, for example, developed weird relationships with food as children because their parents abused sugar to escape pain. It is harder for people who have implicitly learned that food represents comfort and security to overcome the allure of pro-flab behaviors than people fortunate enough to have never made such subconscious associations. Both groups will need to work hard if they want to develop sustainable habits for slimness, but the first sort of person will need to work harder than the second sort.
People frame problems medically when they want medical solutions. Unfortunately, “medical solutions” has become synonymous with “solutions that don’t involve enduring pain, acquiring discipline through practices of pain endurance, and strengthening discipline by increasing the intensity of the pain being endured over time.” In other words, we medicalize problems to avoid the difficulty of painstakingly rehabituating ourselves in ways of living that progressively transform underlying sources of badness into sources of goodness over time. This can look like people identifying psychological drives to escape pains like exhaustion, disappointment, or frustration in themselves and then strategically re-directing those drives away from pro-flab behaviors like eating sugary foods and toward anti-flab behaviors like exercising. This self-rehabituation process is like digging a new channel to change the trajectory of an existing stream of water. It takes effortful investment, but eventually, the hard work pays off and a new default flow is created. Developing weight discipline is hard, and it is especially hard for people with weird pre-existing relationships with food.
Some people recognize that classifying flab-related decisions as “right” or “wrong” implicitly labels fatness “bad” and oppose this categorization because they worry about the stigmatization of fat people. This is an important concern, but problems arise when caring is conflated with medicalizing because for-profit companies like Found care more about making money than providing sustainable solutions for individual problems. They exploit “quick fixes” for cash. Capitalism conspires with impatience to transfigure many medical solutions as zero-discipline panaceas that solve hard problems without hard work. Sometimes hard work isn’t required, as in the case of buying glasses to solve vision problems, but most of the time “quickness” and “ease” are profit-driven tricks people fall for out of laziness.
Found calls their services “weight care.” Care? Care for what? There must be a problem worth caring for, something bad that should be helped in some way. In a context in which fatness has been medically commercialized, “disease” is a lucrative framing that tempts fat people by implicitly suggesting they don’t need to work hard to solve their weight problems. When fat people medicalize their flab and outsource their pro-flab decisions to Nature, they displace the guilt associated with their flabbiness. Medicalization’s Mercy has supplanted God’s Grace. If these people could forgive themselves for their past decisions, it would be far easier for them to gain the patient perspective necessary to solve their flab through self-rehabituation rather than dangerous drugs.
When moralization becomes too extreme, people are punished for problems they can’t ever hope to solve. However, totalizing the medicalized frame results in an equally bad extreme in which people are punished by laziness and opportunistic businesses for problems that can almost certainly be solved through disciplined habit change.
“Weight care” that cares more about profit than sustainable slimness doesn’t really care. Get lost, Found.
Hmm “address weight at the cellular level?” What we highlight with the word “flab” isn’t at the cellular level! You can’t identify leg from arm if the science goggles through which you see are tuned to Cell Vision Mode. That’s like an ant trying to figure out which continent it’s on. The “continent” thing is at such a radically different scale than the “ant” thing that it can’t be said to really “exist” for the ant in any of the senses we ever mean when we use the term “exist.”