responsibilities.”
Overweight people are lazy and undisciplined. The “thin ideal” and “healthy weight” narratives thrive in a climate of increasing obesity, as lifestyle changes, for example plentiful, calorie rich food and increasingly sedentary lifestyles, create an environment which Gracia-Arnaiz (2010) describes as “lipophobic and obesogenic” (p. 224). Schwartz (1986) concurs, noting that the same magazines that publish articles promoting diet and exercise also have pages with recipes for double-chocolate, double-layer cakes with icing. Despite this obesogenic environment, the overweight body has come to represent “laziness, weakness, unrestrained desire and deviance” (Burns & Gavey, 2004, p. 551). For example, in the New Zealand Herald, journalist and former Member of Parliament, Deborah Coddington (2012, January 29, NZ Herald) opines:
And I’m no academic, but here’s a simple question on choice. If fat people can say “no” to a brisk walk and a salad at lunchtime, then surely they can give the same answer to an invitation to Burger King?
Evidence for a complementary public narrative relating to stereotypes about overweight people, that “overweight people are lazy and undisciplined,” can also be found in the literature. For example, Robinson, Bacon and O’Reilly (1993) cite the continued documentation of negative attitudes toward overweight people in research studies, Crandall (1994) demonstrates an “ideology of blame” (p. 882) in attitudes toward overweight people, and that “fatism” has less “negative social desirability” (p. 882) than racism, and Schwartz, Vartanian, Nosek and
Brownell (2006) found that whilst all weight groups demonstrated an anti-fat bias, people who were not overweight were also likely to attribute laziness and a lack of motivation to overweight people. Lupton (1996) concludes that there is a “cultural distaste” (p.137) for overweight people.
The “overweight people are lazy and undisciplined” public narrative was reflected in the stories of the young women. For example, Lexi shares her views on overweight people with diabetes:
Lexi (18 years): ‘Cos you know, this is going to sound horrible, you notice that, when you are in the diabetes waiting room, you know, they’re quite big(p). I sit there and
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think “woooo, you know, what’s going on here?” (p) I try not to judge, but sometimes it’s difficult (p). I’ve been quite lucky so fingers crossed it stays that way.
Lexi prefaces her comments with “this is going to sound horrible” precluding her from being positioned as judgmental. She further mitigates the judgmental nature of her talk by referring to her own body shape as “lucky.” Her story suggests that she considers that overweight people have not made an effort to take care of themselves. Similarly, Sue comments:
Sue (16 years): I have personally never worried about my weight. But I do know some girls with diabetes that are bigger. But I don’t know, it reflects what they do. One girl I know of, she’s always in the 20s. And she does not do her injections when she should. And they have to reflect on themselves a bit. And I think people like that should have the hard – be reminded of what could happen to them. I think there needs to be a strong message “you’ve got to do that to avoid that.”
A strong thread of self-discipline runs through Sue’s story. She implies that weight problems are not inherent in having diabetes, but reflect a person’s behaviour, about which they make
choices. Sue draws on the “self responsibility” public narrative, implying that self-discipline and taking care of oneself are moral behaviours. In this way, she positions herself as responsible and moral, and those who do not take care of themselves as irresponsible and immoral. This is congruent with the conclusion drawn from the findings of a qualitative analysis of Norwegian newspaper entries that obese people “who have only themselves to blame, are taking resources from innocent people who have behaved well” (Malterud & Ulriksen, 2010, p. 50).
Whilst Type 2 diabetes (T2D) results from a combination of insufficient insulin and insulin resistance, some of which may have a genetic component, a perfect storm of factors in the Western world, insufficient exercise, obesity, and a fatty, sugar-laden diet, have lead to an “epidemic” of T2D amongst young people. This has lead to a public perception that T2D is often associated with excess weight, lack of exercise and unhealthy diet. Such epidemics lead to the debate around obesity taking on the status of “moral panic” (Cohen, 2002, cited in Daneski, Higgs & Morgan, 2010, p. 739), as obesity threatens both the self, in terms of health outcomes, and society, in terms of cost to health services, and the pervasive “moral laxity” (Daneski et al., 2010, p. 739). The societal “moral panic” is reflected in the stories of some of the young women. For example, Sian comments:
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Sian (16 years): Yeh, it’s just like with all the publicity about type 2 diabetes, and how you can get it by eating heaps, being overweight and not exercising. Well, people just lump it all together. And when you say you have diabetes, people think it is because you haven’t taken care of yourself, and that you are really lazy, and eaten lots of lollies. And it’s not true.
Sian notes the conflation around the term “diabetes.” Whilst the aetiology of T2D can include lifestyle factors, there is no evidence that this is the case for T1D. Sian’s story is informed by the “self-responsibility” public narrative, as she resists being positioned as an overweight, lazy, overeater, and as at fault for contracting diabetes. Young women with T1D interviewed by Rasmussen et al. (2007) also commented on the public confusion between T1D and T2D, relating that they had feelings of frustration, anger, and of being judged as a result of the misconception.
In summary. The women’s stories describe the ways in which diabetes introduces challenges for them in terms of a predisposition to weight gain, altered eating patterns, and the complexity of integrating exercise into a diabetic regimen. This rhetorical work, which is often careful to position the young women as “normal,” at the same time positions them as having to work harder than non-diabetic young women. In this way, they are almost asking for an
amendment to the public narratives around eating, body image and weight, acknowledging that conforming to such ideals is more difficult for them. Moreover, these young women are also buffeted by public narratives relating to “self-responsibility” and “healthy weight,” which are likely to be potentiated in this group by their frequent interactions with health professionals. Their stories, which include poor body image, insulin omission and internet diet pills, are congruent with the findings that young women may feel a need to identify as the subject in the “thin ideal” narrative. This may lead to complex feelings around weight and body image that can manifest as disturbed eating behaviours (Ahern et al., 2011; Juarascio et al., 2011). Moreover, Burns and Gavey (2004) contend that body dissatisfaction and eating disorders reflect the “glorification of slenderness” (p. 554) and the weight loss messages that young women are inundated with.