Those who could not or would not stop imbibing were thought to be degenerates, not deserving of social care and concern. In recent years addiction medicine has been able to pull us away from this paradigm into a broader understanding of how people become addicts and lose control of their lives. Science tells us that it is not a moral failing, but rather a complex combination of nature and nurture. There is DNA involved in addiction, as well as brain chemistry which reacts to primal pleasure sensations, seeking rewards by repeating behavior.
Addiction is not an easy illness to understand and this challenge has made it into a medical “stepchild” no one really wants to claim ownership and the illness keeps worsening. Addiction is now claiming lives in the thousands, daily, who overdose on opiates and heroin. At least society now sees a glimmer of reality by calling out the profit hungry behavior of big pharma and physicians who over-prescribe. We begin to see that addiction does not thrive in a vacuum, it thrives by virtue of hundreds of factors: social, medical, economic, individual and by the infinite possibilities in the strands of our DNA. Blaming an addict for using substances, doesn’t produce any good results and yet our society has done it over and over again.
Obesity is our latest moral failing in America, and like addiction it does not earn the appropriate attention for resolution. I read a billboard yesterday that was advertising liposuction, the billboard said “Get Your Sexy Back!” The assumption is: Of course you can’t be sexy if you are fat and of course, if you are a woman, you must be sexy. All through my youth there was a part of me that admired the woman who was not sexy and therefore did not have to glamorize her self. This woman was not being watched or looked at and had long since decided on a lifestyle with different demands. I deeply admired this kind of woman.
But the point is, that people are being denigrated and disparaged because they are overweight. Many will righteously criticize the obese making statements like: “fatty, stop feeding your face and you are a tub of lard.” Public Health appears to be much more concerned for the overweight than the addicted, which has been helpful for the overweight. Public Health brings a validity to this condition. All forms of healthy recognition can be appreciated, as long as the public understands that attacking those who suffer from addiction or obesity does not make for better public health.
What really needs to be said is this: People are not bad because they are obese, just as they are not bad because of addiction. It doesn’t help anyone to denigrate those who struggle with their behavior. There are no easy prescriptions for recovery and our culture does not support the discipline of sobriety, nor the task of healthy eating. Just the opposite, our society is concerned with selling booze and hamburgers to anyone with a dollar.
While our society spins relentlessly to the music of a dollar bill, in the meantime, our part of change is to be kind, kind to everyone, everywhere and at all times.
This means that we don’t blame, denigrate and demoralize anyone for any reason. Obesity is not a moral failing and neither is addiction.
