WELLINGTONIAN Annemarie Jutel is a health expert with a refreshingly different view on weight issues. She thinks fat people need to be cut some slack, although she says it more eloquently than that.
“We have to liberate ourselves from the measurement stuff. There’s plenty of research to show that underweight people have higher mortality and morbidity rates than moderately overweight people,” she says.
In fact, Jutel says that both those of “normal” weight and those who are significantly overweight have the same mortality rates, while people who are “moderately overweight” actually live longer.
Jutel completed her PhD in physical education, but went on to become a sociologist.
“Sociology is about looking more closely at the things we take for granted as true things, and at how they came to be that way,” she says.
The combination of a health background with a curiosity for digging deeper has led Jutel to make some interesting claims. She thinks we need to change our ideas about weight and move the importance over to health, and she says you can’t tell if people are healthy by how they look.
“If you’re heavy for whatever reason, people presume you’re lazy and a pig. That’s not what being big means. It can mean that, but it can mean a whole host of other things. There are lots of shapes and sizes of people and all of them can learn to eat healthily without fretting about their shape.”
Jutel is an avid runner, and naturally slender, but she doesn’t agree with calorie counting.
“It makes people feel bad, and feeling bad doesn’t help to change behaviours. We tend to get ‘analysis paralysis.”
As a sociologist, Jutel highlights a few reasons for our obsession with weight as a measure of health.
“Science likes things that are objective and measurable; it doesn’t like to rely on personal reports.
“We also have standards of beauty that affect what we see as ‘good’. We can’t see that something as abnormal as fatness could be healthy, just like we can’t see that imperfect skin could be healthy. But there is research to show that hefty people who exercise regularly and eat well can be very healthy.”
The media and advertising motivations feed into this, she says.
“Weight loss is portrayed like a secret door to a perfect life, but it doesn’t exist. We need to think of it in the same way that we can think of princesses and queens; there are all sorts of things we’d like, but we are who we are and the best thing we can do is learn to love that.”
Jutel wants people to approach Christmas and any accompanying stress over food temptations in a relaxed way.
“Enjoy your Christmas meal. It may be a big week of eating but if you’re a healthy person you can cope with that pleasure, particularly if you get out and take advantage of the beautiful summer weather.
“If you can feel too full for a run, you can still go for a stumbly walk.”