Thinking-Thin Racket

Fat Wears Away With Centuries

By Marilyn Goldstein

1972 Newsday

Thinness as the ideal body shape is a fairly modern concept. Well into the first decades of the 20th Century, the rotund build was still the symbol of wealth and health.

Ample girth advertised that the person could afford to be well fed. As Dr. Abraham Weinberg, a psychiatrist, put it, "Fatness was survival.”

But, as the century progressed. America's vision of the ideal figure did an about-face. According to students of this trend. the reasons for the reversal are economic, psychological and sociological.

In some cases. trying to get thin has its masochistic elements, Weinberg said. reflecting masochistic tendencies in modern life.

"There is a basic need for anxiety," he said. "They (the weight-watchers, especially the twiggy-syndrome group) need to be anxious about something It's easier to be fat than to stay thin and we like to make it hard for ourselves.”

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STAYING this has another psychological advantage, according to Weinberg. "It's a beautiful way of refusing to grow up," he said. "Stay small and little and have someone take care of you."

In rare cases. he said, dieting for the emaciated look represents a suicide attempt. Being overly thin is as likely to kill a person as obesity.

Since it's easier to be fatter than thinner, Weinberg explained, the masses of the populace will always be heavier.

"And it's more expensive to stay thin." Protein foods, he pointed out. are higher priced than starches.

JOYCE FABREY of the National Association to Aid Fat Americans. thinks world affairs helped change the measurements of the ideal figure. "It started with World War I," she said. If you were fat. people thought perhaps you were hoarding food.'

Mrs. Fabrey doesn't discount the

often-promulgated thesis that voluptuous bodies were frowned upon by homosexual male dress designers who became the arbiters of fashion as the industry burgeoned after World War I. "Homosexual fashion designers want the girls to look like pretty boys,” she said.

MARVIN GROSSWIRTH, author of "Fat Pride a Survival Handbook," said, "just compare a copy of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar with Playboy or Penthouse. The girls who pose for Vogue fashions would be laughed out of the offices of Playboy.

Then there is the economic point of view. Thinness. Grosswirth said, is good for business. “You can cut more size eight dresses than size 18s out of a piece of fabric.

"If they can sell more eights than 18s, it's more conomical for the manufacturer. More small seats can be crammed into the movie theater or the airplane."

Grosswirth also thinks the introduction of the so-called ideal-weight insurance charts had much to do with the thinness cult.

"THE CHARTS first appeared at the turn of the century and were revised in the '20s," he said. Before that. nobody had any standard of too fat or too thin.

Also, Mrs. Fabrey said. the charts don't separate the weight of fat from the weight of muscle.

The whole thinness cult. Groswirth said, "is aided and abetted by the medical profession. They're making money out of it."

But, while many factors point to the thin ideal figue, there still remains with us, Weinberg said, the old memory of the days when we stored our food in our bodies instead of refrigerators, when "fatness meant survival."

"Deep down we still remember," he said. And he thinks this conflict between the modern ideal of thinness and the old corpulent ideal may be a reason we can't keep weight off permanently.