Vincent began to wonder if the anti-obesity programs—including his own—had been doing it all wrong, by (for example) giving out nutritional advice. Obese people didn’t need to be told what to eat; they knew the nutritional advice better than he did. They needed someone to understand why they ate. After meeting a person who had been raped, he told me, “I thought with a tremendously clear insight that sending this woman to see a dietitian to learn how to eat right would be grotesque.” Far from teaching the obese people, he realized they were the people who could teach him what was really going on. So he gathered the patients in groups of around fifteen, and asked them: “Why do you think people get fat? Not how. How is obvious. I’m asking why … What are the benefits?” Encouraged to think about it for the first time, they told him. The answers came in three different categories. The first was that it is sexually protective: men are less interested in you, so you are safer. The second was that it is physically protective: for example, in the program there were two prison guards, who lost between 100 and 150 pounds each. Suddenly, as they shed their bulk, they felt much more vulnerable among the prisoners—they could be more easily beaten up. To walk through those cell blocks with confidence, they explained, they needed to be the size of a refrigerator. And the third category was that it reduced people’s expectations of them. “You apply for a job weighing four hundred pounds, people assume you’re stupid, lazy,” Vincent said.If you’ve been badly hurt by the world—and sexual abuse is not the only way this can happen—you often want to retreat. Putting on a lot of weight is—paradoxically—a way of becoming invisible to a lot of humanity.
The need for perspective and empathy. We tend to only focus on the drawbacks of a person’s decisions, but not the benefits. It is easy to assume that we know better than someone when we zone in on the negative consequences of their choices.
Understanding the true reasons why one make the choices they have made (and we are usually not so different after all), based on their upbringing and situation allows us to gain a better understanding of how to change, if there is even a need to change.
While this passage focuses on obesity, I find that this resonates with plenty of other situations I’ve seen. So many of us have tried, or encountered, situations where you or people have tried to change your decision by telling you consequences that you’ve already known. We know the sitaution where we have considerations for a decision and it feels right, even if we were not able to express it well to the other party.
To attempt to convince someone without even understanding their internal dilemma is at best, slightly annoying and at worst condescending and might instead induce rebellious feelings.
Ask questions and listen first, and try to not assume you know better, even though as humans, we are bound to fall into this habit.
