Can you be both fat and fit?

ABCNews carried this health item in June. Dr. Tim Johnson who features medical stories for ABC was doubtful in this story that overweight people who exercise regularly could still be fit, but he did plug the book The Obesity Myth, by Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law and opinion columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. Campos said, "The public health message that Americans are getting, which is that they ought to slim down, really doesn't make sense,. . .it's just fundamentally irrational."

In an interview with AlterNet, Campos draws a connection between anorexia and our current fascination with thinness being healthy--a value he says started with the fashion industry in the 1920s and migrated to the medical community:

"There are four classic symptoms of anorexia. But the one I find most interesting, I'm quoting the (psychiatric guidelines) DSM IV here, says, "Anorexic individuals often engage in compulsive rituals, strange eating habits, and the division of foods into good/safe and bad/dangerous categories." Now that's just called dieting. It's interesting how we'll recognize something as dangerously pathological if it puts you in the hospital but is considered healthy-choice living if you haven't taken that behavior to that level.

So the diet culture is simply the culture of anorexia at a socially functional level. That's why we have all this hysteria about obesity. People who are operating within an anorexic mind frame are naturally freaked out by the notion of "fat people" – a category that not coincidentally is getting bigger all the time."