Obesity In America: How the Social Norm on Weight Has Shifted

The phe­nom­e­non raises an inter­est­ing ques­tion: When the major­ity of us are over­weight, is any­one overweight?

How “nor­mal weight” has skewed upward:

• 70 per­cent of obese peo­ple say they are merely overweight

• 39 per­cent of mor­bidly obese peo­ple think they are over­weight but not obese

• 30 per­cent of peo­ple who are over­weight think they are actu­ally of “nor­mal” size

Source: Harris Interactive Poll

One way to instantly reverse the epi­demic of obe­sity would be to revise the height and weight chart that cur­rently defines the cat­e­gories of nor­mal weight, over­weight, obe­sity, mor­bid obe­sity and super-morbid obe­sity. With a per­ma­nent marker, we would bring the cat­e­gories into align­ment with our self-perception. And as an added bonus: we would instantly and sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the world­wide epi­demic of obesity.

This clever trick would not, unfor­tu­nately, elim­i­nate the side effects of sur­plus pounds. Experts esti­mate that as much as 80 per­cent of chronic dis­ease (can­cer, stroke, heart dis­ease and dia­betes) is linked to weight, and weight is linked to lifestyle choices, such as not eat­ing healthy food, con­sum­ing too much sugar and soft drinks and so on.

So if we aren’t going to change the chart, then we’ll have to change our behav­ior. But can entire com­mu­ni­ties orches­trate a mas­sive change in eat­ing behav­ior, much as we orches­trated a shift in our atti­tude toward smoking?

The num­ber of over­weight Americans (66 per­cent) exceeds the num­ber of smok­ers 40 years ago (40 per­cent). Even then, smok­ers wished they could kick the habit as much as over­weight indi­vid­u­als today wish they could drop a few pounds, espe­cially now that we know extra weight car­ries health risks as dan­ger­ous as those asso­ci­ated with cig­a­rettes. And like those who smoke find it hard to quit smok­ing, over­weight indi­vid­u­als find it dif­fi­cult to kick the habit of eat­ing too much of the wrong kind of food.

Yet, thanks to a mas­sive cam­paign involv­ing leg­is­la­tion, prod­uct label­ing and social mar­ket­ing, nearly half the smok­ing adults have quit since 1965. Of those who con­tinue, four out of five are actively try­ing to quit smoking.

When it comes to sur­plus weight, can we engi­neer a sim­i­lar shift in the social norm? Can we help entire pop­u­la­tions go from fat to fit?

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