FAT LOSS – BEHAVIOURAL INFLUENCES: OTHER APPROACHES
The late 1970s saw a shift towards portraying fat as a symbol in a person’s life, particularly in the Jives of women, and a re-examination of the psychodynamic aspects of being overfat. Susie Orbach saw fat as a kind of defensive psychological smoke screen, an unconscious rebellion for a woman against her sense of powerlessness in society. Compulsive eating, then, not only serves the deeper purpose of maintaining the distance between her real self and the rest of the world, but also acts to ‘blot out’ unacceptable feelings and thoughts. The problems of fatness become a reflection of a woman’s cultural position of inferiority; her compulsion to control her eating as a displacement of her inability to deal with other more profound aspects of her life. This theme was then taken up and expanded by Naomi Wolfe who sees the apparent epidemic in eating disorders as symbolic of society’s need to keep increasingly educated young women in a state of semi-starvation, rendering them ‘no trouble’.
Obviously this approach requires a different response to the behavioural strategies discussed above; if eating problems are caused by an existential and societal inequality, addressing the issue of powerlessness becomes the theme of both group and individual therapy. However, it is unclear from the feminist perspective how to account for the large numbers of men who acquire excessive fat. Presumably it is not for the same reasons of frustration and powerlessness, nor that they need to be assisted to come to terms with their ‘real’ selves. Perhaps males more easily tall into the trap of the ‘unconscious’ habits which more readily respond to the behaviour modification approaches. It seems highly likely that strategies need to be tailored to suit the individual.
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