Making Addicts of the Fat: Obesity, Psychiatry and the ‘Fatties Anonymous’ Model of Self-Help Weight Loss in the Post-War United States

Abstract

Purpose – To reconsider the historical relationship between addiction and obesity, which current literature tends to treat as unrelated until the late twentieth century. Approach – We describe the forms of sociality and therapeutic discourses manifested in the emerging weight loss group movement from the 1940s until 1970 in cultural and intellectual context, drawing mainly on popular media and medical literature. The histories of these ‘Fatties Anonymous’ groups serve as valuable lens for studying the mutable cultural linkage between drug addiction and obesity that was first forged in the golden age of psychoanalysis. Findings – We show that medicine began interpreting obesity as addiction around 1940 and that this view achieved dominance in both medical and popular discourse by 1950. The theoretical framing of a psychoanalytical interpretation of obesity in the 1940s, combined with the simultaneous rise to prominence of obesity-related problems in public health and popular stigma around fatness, was translated in the Cold War United States into a popular mutual-aid weight loss movement modelled on Alcoholics Anonymous. Originality value – Our account challenges the present received view that the stigmatised health conditions of obesity and addiction only came to be related in the late twentieth century. There is notable similarity between the 1950s ‘Fatties Anonymous’ type group and present public health campaigns in fostering the individual's sense of self-control and encouraging self-enterprising improvement. Neither historical and contemporary similarities nor differences should be elided. Further research in this area would be of value to current and future developments in public health.