I think this is the key point in Marc Ambinder‘s thoughtful piece on his struggle with obesity:
Perhaps my own losing struggle with weight reflects a failure of willpower. That seems more plausible to me than the argument that I was a helpless victim of Arby’s. But most fat people aren’t like me: as an upper-middle-class professional, I could draw on plenty of resources in my battle against weight. The people most vulnerable to obesity, however, do not have access to healthy food, to role models, to solid health-care and community infrastructures, to accurate information, to effective treatments, and even to the time necessary to change their relationship with food. And if that is true for fat adults, it is even more true for fat children, many of whose choices are made for them. Their vulnerability to obesity is much more the result of societal inequalities than of any character flaw. Indeed, for all the attention paid to fat’s economic costs, the epidemic’s toll on children is a stark reminder of its moral dimension. Without some form of intervention, researchers worry, large numbers of black and Hispanic children in the United States will grow up overweight or obese and lead shorter, less fulfilling lives. Is that a legacy we want to live with?
The political conversation on obesity–like the conversation on expanding health care insurance–is inevitably skewed by the class levels of the primary voices. If you’re involved, whether you’re a politician, a staffer, or even a reporter, you’re like Ambinder–a professional person whose access to good medical care healthy food, diet information, a gym membership, or even surgery–puts your struggle with your own weight more under your control.
If you’re a professional person struggling with your weight, you’re not going to tell yourself it’s impossible, because you want to lose weight–and for you, it probably isn’t impossible. Individual willpower is a larger factor because of your access to greater resources. So you’re more likely to think that all anyone has to do to lose weight is just work harder at it. But if you’re a child growing up in a poor or working class family, you don’t have access to those things, and factors like your neighborhood not having a supermarket, or not being safe, or your family not having much money or access to medical care, are going to make a struggle with being overweight extremely hard to win, especially moving into adulthood, when your access to resources largely hasn’t changed and bad dietary and exercise habits have already been ingrained.
— A. Serwer
