The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

6 SR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020

I

WAS in the fourth grade,sitting

in a doctor’s office, the first time

my face flushed with shame. I was,

I had just learned, overweight.

I will remember the pediatrician’s

words forever: It’s probably from eat-

ing all that pizza and ice cream. It

tastes good, doesn’t it? But it makes

your body big and fat.

I felt my face sear with shame.

There was more: Just imagine that

your body is made out of clay. If you

can just stay the same weight, as you

grow, you’ll stretch out. And once you

grow up, you’ll be thin and beautiful.

Won’t that be great?

I learned so much in that one mo-

ment: You’re not beautiful. You’re in-

dulging too much. Your body is wrong.

You must have done it. I’d failed a test I

didn’t even know I’d taken, and the

sense of failure and self-loathing it in-

spired planted the seeds of a depres-

sion I would live with for many years.

As the holiday season approaches,

with its celebratory family meals and

seasonal treats, I worry about the chil-

dren across the country who will en-

dure similar remarks, the kind that

shatter their confidence, reject their

bodies and usher them into a harsh

new world of judgment.

For the rest of my childhood, I weath-

ered conversations like the one I had at

the doctor’s office. Well-meaning, sup-

portive adults eagerly pointed out my

perceived failings at every turn. As the

years went on, more and more foods, I

was told, were off limits.

It wasn’t just that I shouldn’t eat

them; it was that they were sinful, bad,

tempting. Many of those foods — eggs,

nuts, avocados — would later fall back

into the good graces of healthy eating.

At the time, though, they were collat-

eral damage in a crusade to cut calories

at all costs. The focus was never on en-

joying nutritious foods, just on depriva-

tion, will and lack.

My life was filled with self-flagella-

tion, forced performances to display

my commitment to changing an unac-

ceptable body. Adults asked openly

about what I had eaten, when I had ex-

ercised and whether I knew how to do

either correctly. After all, if I was still

fat, it must be my fault.

My body wasn’t just a body, the way

a thinner one might have been. It was

perceived as a burden, an inconven-

ience, a bothersome problem to solve.

Only thinness would allow me to forget

my body, but despite my best efforts,

thinness never came.

The more I and others tried to

change my size, the deeper my depres-

sion became. Even at such a young age,

I had been declared an enemy combat-

ant in the nation’s war on childhood

obesity, and I felt that fact deeply. Bod-

ies like mine represented an epidemic,

and we were its virus, personified.

The war on obesity seemed to

emerge near the turn of the millen-

nium, but its roots run deeper than

that. C. Everett Koop, surgeon general

under President Ronald Reagan, made

fatness a priority for his office in the

1980s. In 2004, nearly three years after

the Sept. 11 attacks, Surgeon General

Richard Carmona compared the war

on obesity to the war on terror. Sud-

denly, fat people weren’t just neigh-

bors, friends or family members — we

were enemies to be feared.

The war on childhood obesity

reached its zenith with the 2010 intro-

duction of the national “Let’s Move!”

campaign, “dedicated to solving the

problem of obesity within a genera-

tion.” It was a campaign against “child-

hood obesity” — not specific health

conditions or the behaviors that may

contribute to those health conditions. It

wasn’t a campaign against foods with

little nutritional value, or against the

unchecked poverty that called for such

low-cost, shelf-stable foods. It was a

campaign against a body type.

In 2012, Georgia began its

Strong4Life campaign aimed at reduc-

ing children’s weight and lowering the

state’s national ranking: second in

childhood obesity. Run by the pediatric

hospital Children’s Healthcare of Atlan-

ta, it was inspired in part by a previous

anti-meth campaign. Now, instead of

targeting addiction in adults, the bill-

boards targeted fatness in children.

Somber black-and-white photographs

of fat children stared at viewers, embla-

zoned with bold text. “WARNING: My

fat may be funny to you but it’s killing

me. Stop childhood obesity.” “WARN-

ING: Fat prevention begins at home.

And the buffet line.” The billboards pur-

ported to warn parents of the danger of

childhood fatness, but to many they ap-

peared to be public ridicule of fat kids.

Strong4Life became one of the nation’s

highest-profile fat-shaming campaigns

— and its targets were children.

These declarations of an obesity epi-

demic and a war on childhood obesity

all doggedly pursued one question, and

one question only: How do we make fat

kids thin? In other words, how do we

get rid of fat kids?

Overwhelmingly, childhood anti-

obesity programs hinged on shame and

fear, a scared-straight approach for fat

children. As of 2017, fully half of the

states required that schools track stu-

dents’ body mass index. Many require

“B.M.I. report cards” to be sent home

to parents, despite the fact that 53 per-

cent of parents don’t actually believe

that the reports accurately categorize

their child’s weight status. And obser-

vational studies in Arkansas and Cali-

fornia have shown that the practice of

parental notification doesn’t appear to

lead to individual weight loss or an

overall reduction in students’ B.M.I.s.

One eating disorder treatment center

called the report cards a “pathway to

weight stigma” that would most likely

contribute to the development of eating

disorders in predisposed students.

Experiencing weight stigma has sig-

nificant long-term effects, too. A 2012

study in the journal Obesity asked fat

adults to indicate how often they had

experienced various weight-stigmatiz-

ing events. Seventy-four percent of

women and 70 percent of men of simi-

lar B.M.I. and age reported others’

making negative assumptions. The ef-

fects of stigma were especially dire for

young people, very fat people and

those who started dieting early in life.

To cope, 79 percent of all respondents

reported eating, 74 percent isolated

themselves, and 41 percent left the situ-

ation or avoided it in the future. Rather

than motivating fat people to lose

weight, weight stigma had led to more

isolation, more avoidance and less sup-

port.

Despite ample federal and state

funding, multiple national public

health campaigns and a slew of televi-

sion shows, the war on obesity does not

appear to be lowering Americans’

B.M.I.s. According to the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention, since

1999 there has been a 39 percent in-

crease in adult obesity and a 33.1 per-

cent increase in obesity among chil-

dren.

Weight stigma kick-starts what for

many will become lifelong cycles of

shame. And it sends a clear, heart-

breaking message to fat children: The

world would be a better place without

you in it.

Yet, despite its demonstrated inef-

fectiveness, the so-called war on child-

hood obesity rages on. This holiday

season, for the sake of children who are

told You’re not beautiful. You’re indulg-

ing too much. Your body is wrong. You

must have done it, I hope some parents

will declare a cease-fire.

Leave Overweight Kids Alone

ANGIE WANG

The ‘war on childhood

obesity’ has caused only

shame.

OPINION

BY AUBREY

GORDON

A writer who has

written under the

pseudonym “Your

Fat Friend,” a

columnist for Self

magazine, a

co-host of the

podcast

“Maintenance

Phase” and the

author of the

forthcoming book

“What We Don’t

Talk About When

We Talk About

Fat.”

I

TEACH philosophyto college stu-

dents, and there was no way I was

going to give them exams this se-

mester, with our classes being held

online. Why not? Simple — cheating. It

is nothing personal with these particu-

lar students, but I have read enough

psychological research to know that it

would be very hard for them to resist

looking for help in places where they

are not supposed to, such as their

notes, their friends and the internet.

I am fortunate that papers are a

great alternative means of assessment

in philosophy courses. But they do not

work so well in certain other fields, like

the sciences. In this time of widespread

online learning and home-schooling,

what can be done to curb cheating on

exams?

One solution is remote proctoring,

where the student is video-recorded

during the exam, with any suspicious

web browsing reported. That might be

effective, but it strikes me as a crude

approach, relying as it does on active

surveillance, which creates an overt at-

mosphere of distrust. Naturally

enough there are also privacy con-

cerns, as well as some anecdotal evi-

dence that remote proctoring technol-

ogy encodes racial biases.

Instead I suggest that a practice that

has been used widely in other educa-

tional contexts be extended to the

world of online testing: pledging one’s

honor. Honor pledges not only are sur-

prisingly effective in curbing cheating;

they also promote honesty. Students

who abide by them refrain from cheat-

ing not because they can’t, but because

they choose not to.

It is easy to be cynical about honor

pledges and honor codes. They can

seem to be — and sadly too often are —

public relations stunts for schools look-

ing to burnish their image. Or adminis-

trative mandates that do not have buy-

in from the faculty. Or just a formality,

where students check a box on a form

during first-year orientation and then

never give it any thought for the rest of

the year. Honor codes like these are in-

deed mere facades.

But many schools and programs,

from elementary to graduate level,

take their honor codes seriously. And

for good reason. Empirical research

has repeatedly found that schools that

are committed to honor codes have sig-

nificantly reduced cheating rates com-

pared with schools that are not.

Donald McCabe at Rutgers Business

School and Linda Treviño at the Smeal

College of Business at Penn State found

a 23 percent rate of helping someone

with answers on a test at colleges with-

out an honor code, versus only 11 per-

cent at schools with an honor code.

They reported impressive differences

as well for plagiarism (20 percent ver-

sus 10 percent), unauthorized crib

notes (17 percent versus 11 percent)

and forbidden collaboration (49 per-

cent versus 27 percent), among other

forms of cheating.

A serious commitment to the honor

code is crucial to its efficacy. As Profes-

sors McCabe and Treviño insist, an

honor code should be “well imple-

mented and strongly embedded in the

student culture.”

What does that look like in practice?

A few schools start the academic year

with an actual commitment ceremony,

where each student has to publicly

pledge to uphold the school’s code. To

this can be added a requirement to af-

firm the honor code on each graded as-

signment.

Signing an honor code can serve as a

moral reminder. As we know from both

ordinary life and recent experimental

findings, most of us are willing to cheat

to some extent if we think it would be

rewarding and we can get away with it.

At the same time, we also want to think

of ourselves as honest people and gen-

uinely believe that cheating is wrong.

But our more honorable intentions can

be pushed to one side in our minds

when tempting opportunities arise to

come out ahead, even if by cheating.

What a moral reminder does, then, is

help to place our values front and cen-

ter in our minds.

This is borne out by recent findings

in the lab. In a widely cited study, Nina

Mazar at the Questrom School of Busi-

ness at Boston University and her col-

leagues had one group of students take

a 20-problem test for which they would

be paid 50 cents per correct answer. It

was a hard test — students averaged

only 3.4 correct answers. A second

group of students took the same test,

but they graded their own work and re-

ported their “scores” with no questions

asked. The average in this group was

6.1 correct answers, suggesting some

cheating. The third and most interest-

ing group, though, began by signing an

honor code and then took the test, fol-

lowed by grading their own work. The

result? An honorable 3.1 correct an-

swers. Cheating was eliminated at the

group level. Signing the honor code did

the job.

Studies of honor codes and cheating

have typically been conducted in face-

to-face environments. But as we settle

into the routine of online instruction,

we should consider trying to extend the

impact of an honor code virtually as

well.

Honor codes won’t eliminate cheat-

ing. Deeply dishonest students will not

be deterred. But fortunately, the re-

search confirms what experience sug-

gests: Most students are not deeply

dishonest.

How Dishonest Are Students?

Many are tempted to

cheat, but honor codes

are often effective.

OPINION

BY CHRISTIAN B.

MILLER

A professor of

philosophy at

Wake Forest

University, the

director of the

Honesty Project

and the author,

most recently, of

“The Character

Gap: How Good

Are We?”

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