The History of Health at Every Size®: Chapter 2: The 1960s
Image courtesy of Carlos Alberto Gómez Iñiguez on Unsplash. Image description: A horizontal traffic light with the green light lit sways from a metal cord running across the photo in front of a partly cloudy sky.
by Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., DCSW. Previously posted on the Health At Every Size® Blog and reposted here with author permission.
The decade of the 1960s was one of intense possibility, both for good and bad. A charismatic, youthful president vowed to put a person on the moon before the end of the decade, and ultimately succeeded.
The Beatles rose to megastardom. Birth control pills finally gave women control over their reproductive processes and the second wave of feminism began. The Civil Rights Act was passed. President John Kennedy, his brother/attorney general Senator Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. The Stonewall riots began the gay rights movement. The Vietnam war raged, as did the counterculture protests against it.
Also, Weight Watchers began and became popular around the United States. British waiflike model Twiggy became the new beauty standard and Thin was In. And the gastric bypass began.
In Vermont, Ethan Allen Sims experimented on students and later, prisoners, to test intentional weight gain of 20-30 pounds. One subject required 7,000 calories a day to maintain weight gain. All the subjects doubled their normal daily intake of food and required an extra 2,000 calories a day to maintain their extra weight. Like the subjects of Keys’ weight-loss experiment in the 1940s, Sims’ subjects also got lethargic and apathetic, and rapidly returned to their pre-experiment weights once they stopped overeating.
An article called “More People Should Be FAT” appeared in a major national magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Its author was Lew Louderback, whose experience as a fat person married to a fat person was augmented by research into fatness. The article said that:
Sexual responsiveness in women is positively and significantly correlated with a general positive attitude toward food and eating.
Among survivors of heart attacks, fat people live longer than thin people.
Fat people have a lower risk of tuberculosis.
Fat people have a lower suicide rate.
There are “thin fat people” who suffer physically and emotionally from having dieted to below their natural body weight.
Forced changes in weight are not only likely to be temporary, but also to cause physical and emotional damage.
Dieting seems to unleash destructive emotional forces.
The five-year cure rate for obesity is virtually zero.
Eating normally, without dieting, allowed Louderback and his wife to relax, feel physically better, and normalize and stabilize their eating and weight.
It has now become so “in” to be thin that fat people’s civil rights are repeatedly and openly violated.
Fat people are discriminated against in jobs and in education.
The persecution of fat people is not for health reasons, but aesthetics.
Bill Fabrey, a young engineer with a fat wife and a history of preferring larger women, read Louderback’s article and was elated to fi nd that he was not alone. He had been enraged at the mistreatment accorded his wife and other fat people. He contacted Louderback in 1968 and they helped each other: He helped Louderback research his subsequent book, Fat Power, and Louderback supported Fabrey in founding in 1969 the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA), a nonprofit human rights organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for fat people through public education, research, advocacy, and member support.
NAAFA would subsequently change its name by the mid-1980s to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. The size acceptance movement was born.
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Pic is of Barbara Altman Bruno, a woman with short light brown hair and glasses
Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., LCSW, is a clinical social worker, size acceptance activist, and HAES pioneer. She has presented at clinical conferences, appeared in television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and demonstrations, and has written many articles, including well-being columns for larger people, guidelines for therapists who treat fat clients, a brief history of HAES, and a book, Worth Your Weight (what you CAN do about a weight problem). She is former co-chair of education for the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) and is on NAAFA’s Advisory Board.