AT. Don't you just hate it. Even if probably especially if you are covered in the stuff yourself. Fat is unhealthy, fat is unsightly, fat slows you up and weighs you down, right?
Wrong, actually, according to a new movement which is sweeping the US and looks set to colonise the rest of the overfed Western world.
It was in the US - the fattest and most diet ridden country in the world - that the tendency to turn weight into an obsession began. And now the signs from that country are that the tide might - just might - be turning. First came Laura Fraser's book Losing It, which focuses on the various enterprises that feed on society's yen for thin. After years of writing about weight loss and body image for women's and health magazines, Ms Fraser, a former bulimic, has assembled an impressive array of evidence that the commercial weight loss industry, with its crash diets, fat free foods, pills, potions and surgery, is a fraud. During the peak years of get fit, no fat craze, 1989 to 1991, the average American swelled in size by 8 per cent. Diets, she concludes, simply don't work.
There's nothing new about this. Fifteen years ago Geoffrey Cannon published Dieting Makes You Fat, which propounded the same thesis as Fraser: that our bodies resist any attempts to lose weight by slowing the metabolic rate so we conserve energy.
Not only that, but diets make our bodies believe there's a famine on, thereby re setting our baseline weight at a higher level. As a method of weight loss, dieting doesn't just fail - it actually makes you fatter.
What is new, however, is the growing scale and intensity of the pro fat protests. Losing It is just one contribution to what has become the latest publishing phenomenon in the US and Canada. In Big Fat Lies, for example, Glenn A. Gaesser, associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia, has compiled even more studies than Ms Fraser, all showing that being fat is not necessarily detrimental to health.
Some diseases, such as adult onset diabetes, are more common among the overweight but others such as anaemia, chronic bronchitis, some cancers and osteoporosis are less common.
Prof Gaesser is angry with a medical establishment that continues to berate people for being overweight", against increasing evidence that this is largely irrelevant to health and well being.
As well as such books, there are now magazines which promote fat acceptance: Fat Girl, Radiance, En Large and Fat!So?. There is a growing number of information sites and support groups for large people on the Internet. And membership is rapidly increasing in fat activist organisations such as the Fat Acceptance Society, which urges the overweight to resist the prejudice against fat, enjoy their food and accept their body size.
Even fashion magazines are getting in on the trend. The past few years have seen many minor magazine launches throughout the US and Europe, including the UK magazine Chic which, its distributors say, has a small but growing" readership in Ireland.
The most significant of these - Mode - was launched at the end of last year, the first major fashion magazine aimed at the 60 per cent, of American women who are size 12 or larger.
"In the past six months we've reached the point of no return," editor Veronique Vienne said in a recent interview. "You can feel it and see it. The majority of women are over size 10. It's an undertapped market. Women are stronger. We are saying enough is enough. We have a voice." Mode hopes to "retrain the eye of the reader", to sell "a fantasy with curves".
One of the most interesting contributions to this increasingly vocal debate is the new book from Richard Klein called Eat Fat. Klein took a tilt at cigarettes a while ago in Cigarettes Are Sublime, which pooh poohed the medical establishment's denigration of nicotine. Now he's trying to do the same for fat. He doesn't want us to just accept our flab; he wants to make us love it. Klein describes his book as "post modern", which in his definition seems to equate to working against received ideas. His contention is that an obsession with fat can be dissipated by aestheticising it and embracing the urge to indulge.
The flavour of the book is encapsulated in his confession of his fascination, while a young students in France, with the girth of Roland Barthes. "I sat in front of the class and had a view of his enormous belly pushing through the linen of his voluminous shirt," Klein writes. "And I found myself being affected and even aroused by a kind of aura or halo that seemed to emerge from his paunch and suffuse it. I had never had that experience before; it has happened since more than once. But belly worship is an old story. In the omnipresent figure of Buddha, the belly is a round mandala, a kind of prayer wheel, into whose entrancing convolutions the celebrant dissolves."
The philosopher Barthes, whose major contribution was to semiotics (the study of symbols and meanings) has obviously influenced Klein in more ways than one. The first sentence of the preface to this book reads: skip this preface! And in it he announces his intention to hypnotise us out, of our fat phobia. To do this, he uses repetition, particularly of the word fat, and of his title EAT FAT, which is printed throughout with the second word directly under the first so we can see how similar the two words look.
A fat man himself ("at this moment, I'm statistically obese"), a Professor of French and a literary critic of the deconstructive kind, Klein attempts in this book to use language in a way that weaves a mildly hypnotic spell, a spell that will lull us out of our anti fat prejudices.
And prejudiced almost all of us are. When we look at a very fat body - our own or anybody else's - we involuntarily shudder. Our ideal body shape has been getting thinner and thinner in recent decades. By today's standard Marilyn Monroe was hefty. Klein recognises this aesthetic reality and that all the arguments about fat not being detrimental to health are useless against it.
"The value of fat has been so devalued," he says, "that it takes a minor miracle, a trick or sleight of hand, a little epiphany in order to glimpse an alternative: a world in which fat is affirmed and appreciated and loved - in which fat in all its forms is once again blessed - fair fat, fine fat, fresh and fluffy fat fabulously fit." The incantatory effect of such repetition, combined with his meandering, stream of consciousness style will, Klein reckons, make us more susceptible to absorbing his ideas than the more usual didactic approach.
Our aversion to fat is, he points out, a historical aberration. Reviewing bodily aesthetics from the 20,000 year old Venus of Willendorf to the nudes of Boucher, Klein concludes that there were only three periods when thin was in the Gothic, the Romantic and now. And it's not so long ago since fat was valued at the end of the last century magazines gave women directions on how to gain weight and books like How To Become Plump were best sellers.
KLEIN is right in his recognition that the core challenge for the fat acceptance movement is the changing of aesthetic perceptions. Their intellectual arguments cannot be faulted. Yes, the health implications of fat have been wildly exaggerated. Yes, the health industry has a vested interest in making slimness de rigueur. Yes, the guilt and self loathing on which most dieting is premised is more damaging to well being than a few extra pounds or even stones. Yes, the world would be a happier place if we could all just accept our bodies for what they are rather than trying to mould them into a given ideal.
But does the fact that increasing numbers of people are beginning to think this way herald a new era where fat is "once again blessed"? Richard Klein thinks so, and ends his book with a prediction fat is about to make a comeback.
Maybe it is, or maybe he's just a fat person indulging in some wishful thinking.