This Reminds Me of a Thing

Reading this post that touches on "health," size acceptance, and self-esteem, I was reminded of an article I read during graduate school that really surprised and disturbed me. 

The focus of the article was a review of research about the relationship between positive ethnic identity (i.e., feeling good about being X ethnicity) and various outcomes like academic achievement, healthy behaviors, etc.  The paper discussed the ways that positive ethnic identity generally was a good thing for people (including white people, which was kind of weird, but whatever), but also a few findings that they described as showing that having a positive ethnic identity can lead to bad outcomes -- such as: African-American women who have a positive ethnic identity report higher levels of satisfaction with their body, even when they are overweight, than their counterparts with a less positive ethnic identity. 

So I guess they're saying that having a positive ethnic identity is bad because it makes you feel good about yourself even when you are a fat person who should obviously hate your body, which is a necessary precursor to engaging in "healthy" behaviors like dieting, plastic surgery....um, wait, what?!  I was pretty astonished by this, and it really affected my thinking about a future doing academic social psychological research related to health. 

Despite what seems like quite clear evidence to the contrary, mainstream beliefs like weight = health, dieting is Good, body dissatisfaction among fat people is Good (because it motivates people to diet, which is Good), and all that jazz permeate this field of research...to the extent that a scholar can state, without controversy, that being associated with satisfaction with one's body size is an obvious downside to having a positive ethnic identity.  There was apparently no consideration of the idea that a person who is satisfied with/accepting of her body might be more likely to do things to take care of it (e.g., go to the doctor regularly, nourish it well) than a person who is at war with her body.  No consideration of the immense stress women who are dissatisfied with their bodies experience and the demonstrated negative impact of stress on health.  No consideration of the extreme lengths that women who hate their bodies and are desperate to look different will go to, and how unhealthy many of those behaviors are. 

When are people going to get a grip that the idea that accepting fat people "encourages obesity" is basically ridiculous.