The Record: Woman challenges film’s — and society’s — attitude toward obesity

When she was 12 years old, Amy Kerr was a competitive swimmer. She got injured and had to stop. But her appetite was as hearty as ever, and she started gaining weight.
She was bullied mercilessly by the other girls in her Grade 7 class, who called her names... Then she started starving herself. By Grade 11, she was in hospital with depression. Since then, she has struggled to accept her own body.

A few days ago, Kerr, now a 23-year-old student at Conestoga College, went onto her Facebook account. An ad popped up for the new movie, Pitch Perfect. She looked at it. And something snapped inside her.

The ad showed pictures of four young women who are characters in the movie, which is about competitive singing, à la the popular TV show Glee. The pictures introduce the actors by the names of their characters: Beca, Aubrey, Chloe. And “Fat Amy.”

Kerr was in different kinds of therapy for years and only learned to accept her body this year, after undergoing hypnotherapy. She got “really angry” to see the one heavier woman in the movie singled out that way.

It gives the message that “it’s OK to put a label on bigger people — because they’re not really people,” she said. She wrote to Universal Pictures and asked them to change their promotional material.

“Please, please do it for all the men and women in hospitals, at home, at work who are starving themselves and puking their guts out so that the world will think that they too, are beautiful people. Please, please do it for them,” she wrote.

Kerr says she hasn’t had an answer from Universal yet. She read the information about the movie, which explains that the character calls herself “Fat Amy” so that the others won’t say it behind her back. But that didn’t make her feel better.

Kerr’s eloquent plea to Universal contains a kernel of truth about how our affluent, educated society — so open and generous to other minorities like gay and transgendered people, aboriginals and atheists and people of all colours — still judges fat people in a harsh and arbitrary manner. It is, perhaps, the last remaining socially acceptable form of discrimination.
People who are about to go out on a blind date, who would never in a million years dream of asking about the colour of their date’s skin, will still say: “Does she take care of herself?” Which is, of course, code for: “Is she fat?”

It’s a cruel irony that in our culture, where food is plentiful and cheap, slenderness is prized. Overweight people are viewed as not having discipline or willpower. They’re cruelly punished by being shunted off to the sidelines — socially, at work, and even in the classroom. A 2008 report by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University pointed out that teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children. No wonder so many young women and men resort to dangerous, and sometimes deadly, eating disorders.

Wealthy, successful people in North America are almost always slim, which perpetuates the stereotype that fat people are fat because they’re weak. But more and more research is being done that shows this theory to be grossly simplistic. Overweight and obesity have complex, tangled roots in the human psyche.

It’s not just that people can’t be bothered to burn the calories they eat. Sexual abuse and lack of sleep can be contributing factors, to name just two. One study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that sexually abused children are more than twice as likely to be obese by their early 20s as their unmolested counterparts. One possible explanation is the idea that victims unconsciously build a protective wall of fat around them, in order to ward off further sexual advances.

Meanwhile, numerous studies on sleep deprivation — one of which tested 65,000 adults across Europe — show that if you don’t sleep enough, you are more likely to overeat and to gain weight. Given the shifting nature of work, the decline of the full-time nine-to-five job, and the more demanding pace of life for so many of us, this country’s rising obesity rate takes on a whole new dimension. One that the “Fat Amy” character does absolutely nothing to illuminate.

Source: therecord