Schooled on Fat

What Teens Tell Us About Gender, Body Image, and Obesity

Nicole Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317409359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Reader Views Literary Award, Societal Issues and the Reviewers Choice Best Non-fiction Book of the Year, Specialty Awards, Schooled on Fat explores how body image, social status, fat stigma and teasing, food consumption behaviors, and exercise practices intersect in the daily lives of adolescent girls and boys. Based on nine months of fieldwork at a high school located near Tucson, Arizona, the book draws on social, linguistic, and theoretical contexts to illustrate how teens navigate the fraught realities of body image within a high school culture that reinforced widespread beliefs about body size as a matter of personal responsibility while offering limited opportunity to exercise and an abundance of fattening junk foods. Taylor also traces policy efforts to illustrate where we are as a nation in addressing childhood obesity and offers practical strategies schools and parents can use to promote teen wellness. This book is ideal for courses on the body, fat studies, gender studies, language and culture, school culture and policy, public ethnography, deviance, and youth culture.

1
ABOUT MY STUDY

In light of mainstream ideas about body image and fatness, I wondered whether adolescent girls and boys felt personally responsible for their body size and how those who were overweight felt about the increasingly widespread moral panic focused on large bodies, especially since mainstream media messages about obesity were reinforced at school. For example, teachers used news and op-ed articles that year to generate discussion about the dangers of obesity and what could be done to prevent weight gain. Such discussions always focused on the importance of individuals taking responsibility for managing their weight through diet and exercise, a message that was in lockstep with the dominant narrative.

I wondered how this media hype would influence teens’ ideas about body-image ideals and norms and what it would mean for teens to be considered fat during a time in the United States when obesity was framed as a threat despite the fact that most Americans were overweight or obese. As adolescents increasingly encountered overweight and obese people in their daily lives, either out in public or within their social networks, and as they engaged in the battle of the bulge, would they be more accepting of themselves and their overweight peers? I also hoped to explore how popular media-generated discourses on obesity would influence teens’ relationships with food and the ways in which they approached physical activity.

More broadly I wanted to understand how body image-related concerns and behaviors intersected for teens in their everyday lives and from their perspectives. I wondered how they thought and talked about body image and fatness, how that influenced the way they thought about and ate food and engaged in physical activity at school, and how it shaped social relations among teens at the high school.

To address these questions, I conducted interviews that included in-depth, open-ended questions and discussions with individual teens and groups of friends. I also observed how teens talked about these issues with their friends and peers at school while hanging out at lunch, in the hallway during passing periods, and during physical education (PE) classes. I obtained approval from the university institutional review board, the school district’s research and evaluation department, and the high school principal prior to participant recruitment and data collection. Names of individuals included in this book are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

Some participants volunteered height and weight information during interviews, but this data was neither systematically collected nor solicited. For those who volunteered this information, body mass index (BMI) was calculated using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s online BMI calculator for children and teens.¹ Throughout this book, when participants are described as underweight, healthy weight, or overweight, these classifications are based on BMI calculations from self-reported height and weight data.

Body size classifications are included only for the purpose of providing insight about participants’ self-perceptions of body size within the context of peers’ perceptions of their body size and are not intended to represent accurate or objective BMI measurements. In a study examining how adolescents defined and negotiated the boundaries between normal/acceptable weight and overweight, it is informative to note, for example, that many female participants who were criticized by peers for displaying too much body fat self-reported height and weight within the healthy weight BMI range.

I found that teens had, for the most part, internalized popular media messages about body size and personal responsibility, which resulted in students feeling guilt and shame about their own bodies and teasing their overweight classmates. In fact, even students who were not noticeably overweight but simply failed to effectively hide their body fat beneath clothing were subject to critique. Teens were more focused on managing and obscuring their body fat than engaging in behaviors that would help them lose weight or tone up, like eating healthfully and exercising.

I also discovered that the way teens felt about their bodies was so enmeshed with their relationship to food, exercise, and their peers that these issues could not be understood in isolation. For example, many students I interviewed, especially girls, felt guilty about eating fattening foods. Their feelings of guilt were tied to beliefs about personal responsibility, body-image ideals, and anxiety about fat stigma and social positioning among their peer groups. Girls’ guilt around junk food consumption contributed to negative feelings about the way their bodies looked, which in turn, made them feel self-conscious about exercising in front of their peers in physical education class.

The school set students up for failure by reinforcing messages about body size as a personal choice while making fattening junk foods readily available. This book explores how teens navigated a discordant school environment in which many wanted to lose weight and get in shape but felt unable to resist consuming widely available junk foods and felt too self-conscious or unmotivated to actively engage in physical education class. It also illustrates the complex ways in which body image, social status, fat stigma and teasing, food consumption behaviors, and exercise practices intersected in the daily lives of teens from their perspectives.

Teens attempted to work through their body-image concerns largely through talk. Girls, for example, alternately supported each other through conversations about body image and junk food consumption and competed with each other to look the best in form-fitting clothes through gossip and teasing. Boys made fun of their own body fat to solicit support from girls, called each other fat, and engaged in verbal dueling with each other to compete over muscle tone and strength. Boys and girls both continually critiqued their peers’ bodies as a way to develop a shared understanding of the blurry line between acceptable and unacceptable body size but also to shift the focus away from their own bodies and momentarily position themselves as thinner than the object of critique.

I ultimately argue that schools, parents, and communities need to offer counter messages to mainstream fat shaming rhetoric and support youth in achieving healthy body weights. Teens must learn to critically examine public obesity discourses that simultaneously blame and stigmatize fat people while bombarding them with ads for fattening junk foods. Teens also need a reality check about what healthy bodies look like. Before they can accept or even feel good about their bodies, youth need to understand that the complete eradication of body fat is not possible. I urge schools, with the support of parents and local communities, to teach media literacy as well as continue efforts to offer more nutritious meals and find ways to actively engage all students in regular physical activity.

The high school where I conducted my study was located in a suburban farming community I call Montaña located thirty miles outside of Tucson. Montaña had a population of approximately 13,500 at the time of the study but was in the midst of rapid expansion. The town experienced a 150 percent rate of population growth between 2000 and 2010. When Montaña was incorporated in the late 1970s it was a small agricultural community. At the time of my study, some families in the community still ranched or farmed for a living; however, most residents either commuted to Tucson and other nearby towns to work or were employed locally by one of the major defense or mining companies, the city government, school district, local community health center, or one of the major retailers in town.

The two high schools that served the town of Montaña, Desert Vista and Arroyo Viejo, reflected the rural/suburban dichotomy within the community. Desert Vista students tended to come from middle-class socioe-conomic backgrounds and suburban neighborhoods (approximately 15 percent of students were eligible for the school’s free lunch program at the time of the study), while Arroyo Viejo students came from lower socioe-conomic backgrounds and more rural neighborhoods (approximately 40 percent of students were eligible for the school’s free lunch program at the time of the study). In terms of geographic location, Desert Vista was situated within the newer suburban part of the community, just off of the major freeway that connects Tucson to Phoenix. In contrast, Arroyo Viejo was located in the older, more rural part of the community well off the beaten path.

Southern Arizona is home to a relatively large population of Latinos, a minority group that has not been studied extensively within the body image and obesity literature. The student population reflected this ethnic diversity; both high schools served approximately 2,000 total students with 30–35 percent identifying as Hispanic or Latino and 60–65 percent identifying as white. I chose Desert Vista as my research site for its ethnic diversity but also because of its predominantly middle-class socioeconomic status and suburban location. If my study was to explore relationships among food consumption, personal style, and body image, students needed to have some degree of purchasing power to make choices about food and clothing.

I found it difficult to gather reliable socioeconomic status data from my participants because most could not clearly articulate what their parents or guardians did for a living. Indirect information on the topic emerged during interview discussions about how much lunch money and allowance students received from their parents. Additionally, during discussions about constructing personal style through clothing, makeup, and other consumer goods, I gleaned information about participants’ socioeconomic status as I listened to them talk about where they shopped, what clothing brands were their favorite, and whether or not they could afford to buy the things they wanted.

Based on the information I was able to gather, I would classify the majority of my sample as middle class and a handful of participants as lower middle class or working class. Most participants received various amounts of allowance and lunch money each week that they used to buy food, clothes, and entertainment related items such as movie tickets and music. Most said they had to budget their money in order to buy things they wanted, indicating that they had access to a modest disposable income. Six of the fifty participants in my study told me they did not receive any allowance because their parents could not afford it and two of those said they participated in the free lunch program at school.

In terms of home life, half of the participants had parents who were married and half had parents who were divorced or separated. Of the twenty-five whose parents were no longer together, ten lived in single-parent households, primarily with their mothers, and the remainder lived with one parent and either a step-parent or the parent’s live-in partner. Seven of the forty participants who lived in two-adult households had one parent or guardian who stayed at home, while the remainder lived in homes where both adults worked. Two participants with a stay-at-home parent or guardian said they stayed home by choice and the other five had a parent or guardian who could not find work or was disabled.

Most participants spent time at home alone or with siblings at the end of the school day because their parents were at work until 6 or 7pm. They generally watched television or played around on the computer until dinnertime. In any given week, most participants’ dinnertime routines varied in a pretty consistent way. Some nights they ate together as a family, either takeout or a home cooked meal and some nights they were responsible for providing their own dinner, which was generally pre-packaged and easy to prepare, like ramen noodles, frozen pizza, or cereal.

The most strikingly consistent food related trend that transcended home and school was a tendency to constantly snack on “junk foods” between meals. Teens reported grazing on vending machine fare (e.g., chips, cakes, candies) all day during school and then going home and snacking on similar types of foods all evening. While my study focuses on teens’ experiences with body image, food, exercise, and fat teasing within the school context, it is important to remember that teens operate within multiple environments, including school, home, and community. Their experiences across these environments influence their beliefs, behaviors, and relationships in complex ways. I’ve offered a bit of context about my participants’ home lives, family dynamics, and community history to give the reader a better sense of who they are and where they come from before honing in on their experiences at school.

When a student enrolled in my study by submitting signed assent and consent forms, I would ask them to complete a one-page screener designed to gather basic demographic and background information. The screener asked for their name, gender, ethnicity, level of body satisfaction on a scale of one to five, self-perception of body size on a scale ranging from smaller than average to obese, whether or not they had ever been teased about their weight and, if so, by whom. I recruited thirty girls and twenty boys, all of whom were fourteen- or fifteen-year-old freshmen.

Of the fifty total participants, half identified as Latino or Hispanic and half identified as white. I was thrilled at the sample’s ethnic composition because my initial research plan focused on examining gender and ethnic differences as key variables in adolescent discourses about body image, food, exercise, and fat teasing practices. What I failed to anticipate was the dissonance in how youth identified ethnically outside the high school setting in their homes and communities and their lived ethnic identities day-to-day within the social context of the high school.

Over the school year, I became increasingly skeptical of the social meaning of ethnicity among adolescents as I observed student behavior. For one thing, during interviews I learned that some participants who had initially identified as white on the screener and in the high school social context identified as Latino or Hispanic outside the school context. For example, one girl who had identified as white on the screener later told me during an interview that if she could change one thing about the way she looked, she would make her skin lighter because she did not like looking Hispanic. When I asked the girl why she thought she looked Hispanic, she blushed, looked down at the table, and sheepishly told me she was Hispanic.

Similarly, I learned through an interview with a boy who had identified as white on the screener that he really considered himself Latino. His friends on campus were white, and so he identified as white at school, presumably to fit in. However, the boy’s maternal grandparents had emigrated from Mexico and his mother was Mexican, though his father was white. At home, his family celebrated quinceañeras, ate traditional Mexican food cooked by his mother, and attended a Catholic church with mostly Latino parishioners.

Gradually, it became clear to me that at Desert Vista students defined ethnicity through social practice and that it varied depending on context. The lines between socially enacted ethnic identities across family, community, and school contexts were sufficiently blurred that the concept of ethnicity among these teens raised more questions than my study on body image and obesity could sufficiently address or incorporate. Consequently, I realized that if I were to analyze my data according to ethnicity I would have to impose my own categorization onto teens because their perceptions about what it meant to be “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “white” were neither consistent nor apparent.

As an anthropologist who is committed to foregrounding the voices of the individuals I work with, I felt it would be unethical to impose ethnic labels on these adolescents, many of whom felt conflicted about this aspect of themselves and enacted different ethnic identities depending on the context. I also chose not to analyze data according to ethnicity because it did not emerge as a salient category for teens during interviews. Instead, gender and, to a lesser degree, social group affiliations were the most meaningful categories to teens at Desert Vista.

With regard to social cliques, the vast majority of teens at the high school were part of small, fluid groups with few defining features, membership of which shifted and overlapped in a complex network of social relations. However, a few high-profile social cliques that were readily identifiable in terms of personal style were referenced and discussed at length in interview discussions by both members and outsiders. These few...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. About My Study
• 2. “You Can’t Have Your Fat Showing”
• 3. “Guys, She’s Humongous!”
• 4. “When I Run My Legs Jiggle”
• 5. “It’s All Going to Turn into Fat”
• 6. So What? What Now?
• Appendix
• References
• Index