Fat People & Suicide

An article in the New York Times this week reports on a recently released Harvard University study which concludes that the likelihood of someone committing suicide decreases as their body mass index increases. In a 16-year study that followed more than 45,000 male health professionals, researchers found a steady decrease in suicides as BMI increased. This was true even after adjusting for variables like smoking, dietary factors, physical activity, marital status and alcohol use. The study’s leader, Dr. Kenneth Mukamal, said that “men in the highest 20% of BMI were almost 60% less likely to kill themselves.”

I have had a couple of reactions to this story. My first reaction was, “Duh!” But my longer term thought is that people will probably discount this story and fail to realize some significant correlations. Maybe they’ll even discount the conclusions of the study too. Moreover, I wonder if even the researchers at Harvard have a clue as to what they are really observing here. Let me explain.

Being quite a veteran of obesity and eating battles, I think of myself as perhaps one of the world’s foremost experts in this area (of being fat). I’ve developed a theory about fat men. My theory is that fat men have issues. It’s as simple as that. In fact, the fattest men are probably the best examples of that. I’ve never met a really fat man (including myself) who didn’t have issues. Now one would think that being so fat would be the issue. But I think the obesity in men is more often than not a symptom. In other words, the man is medicating himself with food as a coping mechanism. We overeat to cope with the struggles we don’t know how to handle otherwise.

So what’s the correlation to the Harvard study about BMI and suicide? It’s really pretty simple. If their body max index didn’t rise, they would be more likely to commit suicide --- as a result of the problems they didn’t know how to handle otherwise. I’ve been fat and I’ve been skinny. At my thinnest, my mind was on suicide much of the time. In fact, I remember a time of being mad at God because He made suicide a sin. I wasn’t eating to salve the pain, so my experience of the emotional pain intensified.

I used to think that fat people were more complex than everyone else. I used to think that they were capable of greater emotional spectrum than everyone else. I don’t think about it so much any more, but I’m not sure I’d want to let go of those theories. I suspect that if you could measure it, fat people have an emotional sensitivity that’s greater than other people. They experience pain differently. And when they can’t cope with the pain, they overeat (among other things). Fat people commit suicide less often than skinny people because they have less need for that form of release from their pain; they are already using food to escape from their pain.

I wonder how many millions of dollars Harvard spent on that study. I could have given them the understanding and insight for pennies on their dollar!