Famous Fat
In an interesting turn about, Professor Michael McMahon of Nuffield Health claims that overweight celebrities are seen as role models, which may help to make being overweight acceptable.
“Professor McMahon, a expert on keyhole surgery, said: “The increasing profile of larger celebrities, for example James Corden, Eamonn Holmes, Ruth Jones and Beth Ditto, means that being overweight is now perceived as being ‘normal’ in the eyes of the public.
““We talk about the dangers of skinny media images, but the problem actually swings both ways.””
It’s an interesting take on celebrities’ weight. Normally we associate celebrities with the anorexic side of the dietary debate. But it is true that there are more and more overweight stars playing leading roles in both television and the movies. On one hand, this is good, as these people conform more to reality and less to an impossible ideal (for most of us). Obese people could find that seeing the overweight succeeding in this way may encourage them to be more motivated to succeed. Lack of self-esteem and poor motivation are a very common part of the mental make-up of the morbidly obese, leading to obsessive/compulsive eating habits and lack of ability to persist with change (note: this is an oversimplified summary – the causes of obesity are very complex and multifactorial).
I remain unconvinced that seeing a lot of fat people on TV will encourage us overweight folk to do something about it.
Professor McMahon’s view, on the other hand, seems much more convincing. It seems to me to be far likelier that a profusion of overweight stars will condition us to accept that being overweight is not only the norm (as it, indeed, is), it will convince us that excessive weight is an acceptable norm. While I have no particular wish to side with the diet nazis who would like to ban everything enjoyable under the sun because it makes us fat, I also would not like to see us accepting a Body Mass Index of 30 as the new “starting point” (currently 27+ is “overweight” and 30+ is “obese”). Even though I am perilously close to “obese”.
There should be a happy medium somewhere, but I don’t see one in Hollywood. Curiously, I note that most leading ladies are either absurdly thin or enormous. There seems to be a dearth of women in the “normal” category. Weight seems immaterial for leading men. For men only muscles count – they are either buffed and honed to greek statue proportions, or they are almost absurdly weedy.
Such are the distortions of the movie world.
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Jun 30 09 8:09 am
Because everyone wants to emulate their favourite celebrity I found that after watching the entire Cracker series on DVD I decided that I too wanted to be a fat, smoking alcoholic like Robbie Coltrane’s character. First step on the go as we speak.
I feel your pain. I watched too many episodes of “Frost” and turned into a short bald cynical man in a dirty raincoat…
Jul 1 09 8:26 am
I wonder about your opinions on the exclusion of minorities from television and film. Fat people exist. They’re an integral part of society. They’re our mothers, father, brothers, sisters, children. Denying them any kind of representation in the media is akin to censorship of them. If shaming and isolating people ever worked to encourage weight loss, we’d be a nation of thin people already.
I don’t know what people object to most — the fact that fat people can be fat and successful, or that they exist at all.
Jul 1 09 8:37 am
English TV already has it’s share of fat, bald, unattractive characters. It is US TV that gets a good looking woman and sticks some nerd teeth into her face and calls her Ugly Betty. The English would have just used Dawn French.
Jul 1 09 7:25 pm
Rachel: I wonder about your opinions on the exclusion of minorities from television and film.
Actually, just the opposite tends to happen. Minorities are often over-emphasised rather than marginalised (with the notable exceptions of the elderly and the disabled). This can sometimes give a TV series or movie a distorted, almost “preachy” feel.
I think McMahon’s problem with fat celebrities is that they are very overweight, often morbidly obese, and are thus bad examples of “normal”. It is very, very rare for an overweight celebrity’s character to be serious about losing weight.
My problem with overweight celebrities is that they are almost always portrayed as someone to laugh at. Even when the character is a serious one, the excessive weight is often portrayed in a humorous fashion.
Jul 2 09 10:41 am
Hang on – but Fitz in Cracker was a fat bastard and he was always sleeping with attractive women? You mean it isn’t true?