As a Matter of Fat

The city's new weight discrimination law is badly reasoned, legally defective, costly, and bad for public health

A A A Comments By Peter Byrne Wednesday, Jan 17 2001

...continued from page 5

Exercise has been shown to lower the set point, hence lowering weight. Eating saturated fat has been shown to raise the set point and weight.

Obese people often suffer from set point imbalance. The good news is that people can gradually regulate their weight by manipulating the set point with a nutritious diet and regular exercise.

Scott Musgrove

Akim Aginsky

Size activist Sondra Solovay, author of Tipping the Scales of Justice.

More About

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Weekly Newsletter: Our weekly feature stories, movie reviews, calendar picks and more - minus the newsprint and sent directly to your inbox.

The bad news, at least for those who support a weight discrimination ordinance, is that the vast majority of the medical establishment does not consider obesity to be immutable. And to the extent that obesity is now seen, in a scientific sense, to be changeable, the arguments for protecting obesity with a strongly enforceable discrimination law are seriously undermined, and the argument that San Francisco's law is an endorsement of unhealthiness seems ever more persuasive.

Krissy Keefer's latest modern dance composition, Cavewoman, is impressive. In a performance at the Dance Mission studio, her troupe of beautiful, athletic, short, tall, plump, and rawly feminist women danced a thumping ballet of ritual sex, murder, and rebirth, to the cadence of taiko drums that they beat with fury and joy.

So why is Keefer battling to send her daughter into the jaws of what would seem to be the enemy of her aesthetic, the taskmeisters of classical ballet?

She says she wants her daughter to go to the San Francisco Ballet because its school has the best facilities in town. But Fredrika, who danced on the same bill as Cavewoman, seemed able to perform with great gusto and freedom in her mother's wonderful dance space, which spreads over several thousand square feet. The only apparent problems with Dance Mission seem to be easily fixable, if enough money is available. All the studio needs is a few broader chairs, a wider bathroom, taller doors, a shorter refreshment counter, and some disability handrails that heavy people could use while climbing the building's long flight of steep stairs.

Oh. An elevator might be nice, too.