Big is Beautiful

Listening to the BBC World Service the other day, I was reminded how much our perception of beauty is formed by our culture.

The BBC radio programme was about the global obesity crisis and the first episode explored how this major health problem was affecting South Africa. It surprised me that South Africa had this problem - when I switched on the radio at the start of the episode, I was expecting the programme to be talking about fat Americans in Texas or overweight teens in the UK. But the programme reported that not only are South Africans facing early mortality from gun crime, violence, traffic accidents and developing world diseases as well as HIV/ AIDS, they are also now having to deal with the disease of affluent nations: obesity.

What struck me was an experiment that some health experts ran. They showed photographs of a range of people of different shapes and sizes - from the very skinny to the extremely fat - and asked participants to identify which shape represented someone in the bloom of perfect health. The majority pointed to pictures of people who in clinical health terms would be considered obese or overweight. For South Africans, a big, round woman is one who is healthy and prosperous. “The same for men”, one of the interviewees laughed.

And the tragic truth emerges. For them, someone who is slim or skinny is someone who has HIV or AIDS. In today’s world, being thin is associated with the disease that is devastating their country. I imagine that in the past, before AIDS, being thin would have been associated with mal-nourishment, famine and want.

In the West, being beautiful is generally equated with being slim - to the extent that at the extreme end of beautiful in Hollywood movies and TV series, the women are skinny, gaunt and sometimes on the verge of anorexia. Sometimes, when I watch a series like O.C. I find myself wondering how the actresses have the energy to move around as they look like they eat nothing but celery sticks. The most extreme was that period of “heroin chic” when glossy magazines were plastered with pictures of emaciated young women made to look deliberately as if they were ill from drugs.

In other parts of the world, like Africa and Asia, rounder, fleshier women are considered more attractive, with pudginess being associated with health and prosperity. Meeting someone who has gained weight, especially if they have progressed well in their career, it’s quite a compliment to say, “Aah, you’re looking prosperous” - I’ve said that in London to people I haven’t seen for awhile (Westerners): interestingly, they’ve all understood the subtext of that comment but, to my embarrassment, they have been slightly offended by it. I’m switching to “Aah, you’re looking very well”, which has the advantage of being neutral!

The trouble with being bigger than you need to be is that you’re then in the front line for getting diabetes, heart problems and other nasty diseases. It also makes you more prone to side-effects when under medication and it’s more difficult to recover from trauma like operations.

For me, I’m lucky enough to have a reasonably good metabolism so that I’ve never had to struggle to keep my weight within the appropriate parameters for my height. However, as I’m getting a bit older these days, I find that I do have to watch what I eat and be more diligent about exercising. The alarm trigger I use to warn me when I’m getting tubby is the moment when my stomach can feel itself when I sit down - you know, because of the crease that appears when you’ve got more stomachs than you really need… My theory is that if I can keep away from that crease, I’ll be keeping away from the slippery slope of weight gain. So, I’m off for a jog now the moment I finish this post….

Additional resources

Listen to Part 1 of the BBC series “Globesity” or download it as an mp3.

Go to the BBC’s website on Globesity

News item: “South Africans as fat as Americans”

Photo: from the BBC Globesity website