Thank you Bek, you inspired me to write this text about body weight
I’m lean, I’m light – I am beautiful – I’m chubby, I’m heavy – I am ugly.
These words remind me of mathematics, when we learnt the rule of three. It’s an equation that embeds the body with big colorful letters, forms an outer layer that seems so lucid and linear as the language of algebra, a simplicity and straightforwardness that is in philosophy often aligned with beauty.
But underneath the surface there boils a murky soup, a soup like an explosive matter that messes up the social, the biological, the cultural, the individual, the medical, the economical and the juridical. Body weight reflects our culture in one single human body. Body weight drifted far a way from the fact of just being a mere figure on the scale, calibrated after the kilogram prototype in Paris.
Science tries hard to elucidate the processes like satiety, appetite or hunger that influence our eating habits and herewith our body weight. Biological science is committed to soberness, and talks about satiety regulation, appetite control, hormones, reward circuits that can overrule satiety regulation and appetite control.
The language of medicine leaves already a lot more open space for interpretation. Overweight, obesity, anorexia and bulimia or ideal weight are terms that make you feel immediately the blurriness that sticks to the words.
In sports the body weight mingles with body composition and shape, in the field of fashion with body size, body proportions and height. In the arts they all meet and mix and mate and bring about weird creatures.
What remains is a lot of individual suffering our societies are prospering on. The thriving on this controversial soil makes solutions for this unfortunate situation move into a far distance.
