Summary Of Fat And Happy: In Duration Of Adulthood Obesity

Overweight humans often get reputations for being lazy, unhealthy, and they are often labeled with having no self-control, but is being overweight really as big of an issue as people believe it is? This question has many different factors going into its answer. As discussed in the text “Fat and Happy: In defense of Fat Acceptance,” some people, including the author Mary Ray Worley, may be overweight but actually feel fit (Worley, 2013, p. 166). While some individuals feel like they are fit while being overweight, overweight people, especially women, are subject to increased risk of some types of cancers as stated by Melina Arnold in the writing “Duration of Adulthood Overweight, Obesity, and Cancer Risk in the Women’s Health Initiative: A longitudinal

Mary Ray Worley, author of “Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance,” is a resilient, confident, overweight, woman who gives her firsthand experience about living in a big body. Worley tells her readers that living in the twentieth-century can make people believe that being overweight is a bad thing. She even gives an example about how bigger people are more reluctant to seek medical attention out of fear of being judged just as the author of “Impact of Weight Bias and Stigma on Quality of Care and Outcomes for Patients with Obesity” did. She herself even felt like she needed to conform to the skinny standard of American society until she went to a National Association to Advanced Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) convention. At this convention, she learned that many fat people loved their body and lived health lives (Worley, 2013, p. 163). Mary Ray Worley came to accept her body the way it is when she realized that her body was resisting her diets. This, she came to find out, was her body’s natural way of protecting her from starvation because it did not know the difference between starvation and a diet (Worley, 2013, p. 165). After Worley came to this conclusion about her body, she stopped dieting and began the road to self-acceptance. She soon found that she loved her body and all the things she could accomplish with it. She even considered herself to be fit once she started exercising. Worley said she exercised not to lose weight but to just have fun and achieve goals like going on all day hikes with her husband (Worley, 2013, p. 167). With this kind of confidence that Worley found, she would be more likely to seek help if she needed it because she would not be concerned with being judged like she used to be. This is one reason why being overweight can be easier for people to have true self-acceptance because they have the