Being overweight is un-PC.

I am sick of the apparently publicly accepted, PC approach to obesity in America.

I've written about what it's like to be fat before, but that was personal. This time, it's not just about me. This is about a societal attitude toward overweight people.

Doctors either don't mention it at all--hence a doctor who told me that I was "voluptuous" instead of testing my thyroid, which, as I learned years later, was underactive--or they blame everything on obesity and fail to find the real source of some overweight patients' problems. Fat prejudice is prevalent in health care, and it can keep overweight patients from seeking or getting the treatment they need.

Mississippi is proposing a bill that would prohibit restaurants from serving overweight patrons. The legislator who proposed it doesn't want it to pass, he says; he just wants to call attention to the problem. Truly, how kind. What problem is that? The problem where not enough Americans are looking down at overweight people, and assuming that body size is an indicator of health? Or the problem where not every overweight person is silently (or not-so-silently) judged by others for daily decisions like what to eat for dinner?

A New York Times article about brides' obsession with weight loss (which is, to be fair, an interesting and readable piece) mentions that over half the brides surveyed were of normal BMI. Yet the article states at the end that doctors should capitalize on this obsession to encourage engaged women to focus on losing weight the healthy way, even once the wedding is over. What about the majority of those women, the ones who were already at a healthy weight? Should they be encouraged to lose another ten pounds too?

Some doctors have suggested putting warning labels about the health risks of obesity in plus-size clothing. There's a thoughtful idea that wouldn't alienate fat people more than they already are. The condescension in such proposals is painful.

We are all obsessed with BMI, even though it's a flawed indicator that isn't particularly specific to individuals, since it depends on muscle mass and other factors. Swistle has a great post about what's classified as "plus-size," with a link to a fascinating slide show about what BMI says about real people's body types.

Obesity is a problem in the US. But it isn't a problem on its own. It's a problem because it has a lot of dangerous co-morbidities, such as increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. It needs to be reduced. Our country needs to be healthier.

But we need to be healthier in terms of making healthy food choices, staying active, and generally taking care of our bodies. Obesity can be used as an easy indicator for those things. But it's become too easy in this country to use overweight as a stand-in for the real problem. To blame problems on that. To assume that if an overweight person has a health problem, it's because they're overweight. To make judgments about fat people, that they're lazy or that they hate themselves.

What it comes down to is that it's societally acceptable to couch our distaste for fat people in the language of good health. We have given ourselves permission to judge overweight people based on their size. And I do not understand why that's okay.