| Gordito or Gordita? Obesity: It's Not Just About Looks |
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Written by RosaMaria Pegueros
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I am no fashion model myself; I have had a serious weight problem for most of my adult life. My relatives are fat. But I wasn’t heavy when I was 21, and when I think back to my classmates, I can only remember a single classmate in high school and one in law school who were obese. When I was 22, I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and the transition from walking everywhere to a car culture really made a difference. I started to put on weight. I was working as an elementary school teacher, earning $500 a month. Eating cheap was important. Carbohydrates are very filling and I didn't count calories. Maybe it is a characteristic of what I think of as “poor people's food” but the comfort foods that I crave compete for the fattiest food on the planet: pupusas stuffed with cheese or ground pork; tamales made with lard and cornmeal; fried fish or fried chicken; chorizo with eggs; fried platanos with beans and sour cream; yuca con chicharrones… fat, fat, fat. Just spread that manteca right on my thighs; I can feel my arteries hardening. I don't know how anyone eating a Salvadoran diet can be skinny; I don't know how they can avoid heart disease. Even though I crave it, I seldom eat it; the guilt is so strong that once I've given in to it, it haunts me for weeks, keeping me away for two or three months until the next time I can no longer resist. It's not just about looks. Latinos/as prefer softer-figured women to the anorexic American ideal, but diabetes, high blood pressure, and arterial sclerosis don't check to see if your name is Smith or Gonzalez. I don't know what I would do if there was a Salvadoran pupusa shack on every other corner, distributed like McDonald's or Burger King (in El Salvador and Guatemala, there are pupusa sellers everywhere, on the streets and in public parks). Fast food is easy, available and cheap. It takes five minutes to buy it and another five to eat it. But the calories pack the weight on. I resist fast food hamburgers just by remembering something that happened to my dog. I had been craving a hamburger so I stopped by a drive-through and bought one. I ate about half of it then gave the rest of the meat, alone, to my dog. This omnivore, with the indestructible stomach, gobbled it up, then ran outside and threw it up. That is the last time I ate a fast food hamburger. Sad to say, most of my Latina/o students, as most of my black students, are well on their way to the dreaded diabetes diagnosis, but the problems cut across races and ethnicities. Americans are fat. I wish I could say something to my students, but I have no credibility on this matter, and it crosses a line that is unacceptable for a professor, in any case. My own attempts to lose weight have been erratic. I lose it and then get stressed out or lose my resolve and I gain it back. Sometimes, I just want to say to them, “You don't want to look like me.” Recently, one of the historically black colleges, Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, announced that it would no longer allow obese students to graduate without taking a course in nutrition. That's harsh, but I can understand the desperation that Lincoln's administration must feel. It is an overwhelming problem for Americans; I don't know how you fix it. I want to tell them, change your habits NOW. Lose the weight NOW. If you don't, when you're 50 and facing the results of poor eating habits and overweight, including diabetes and assorted other weight-related problems, you’ll be sorry. I am. |
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