Fat Dudley, and Obesity in Canon

[Judy Shapiro]

No: HPFGUIDX 43171

Eric said, with emphasis:
> _All Dudley had to do to avoid the trap was to stick to the diet that had 
been set for him._

Well, I am generally not one to defend Dudley (or Draco, for that matter.) 
 But, I do have a lot of experience with diets, and I want to point out 
that sticking to a diet is not easy at all.  It is torture for a famished 
person to refrain from eating when food is presented.  In fact, real 
torturers have found that starving prisoners and then offering them food is 
an effective way force a confession.  (There is a description of this in 
"The Gulag Archipelago.") It is very clear from GoF that the Dudley's diet 
is not enough to stave off hunger; as soon as Harry heard about Dudley's 
new diet, and the fact that the whole family would be on it, Harry sent an 
appeal for food to all his friends.  GoF implies that Harry didn't think he 
could *survive* on Dudley's diet.

Perhaps you are thinking "Harry might be hungry, but Dudley wouldn't be; he 
has all that fat to live off of."  If only the human body worked that 
way!!!  Mine certainly doesn't.  When I diet, I am so hungry that I can't 
even work, let alone sleep, and my body has plenty of fat; it just doesn't 
seem to want to use it.  In animal studies, rats with lesions to the 
ventromedial hypothalamus get massively obese, but when food is withdrawn, 
they die of starvation much *sooner* than normal rats.  The lesioned rats 
can not access their fat as fuel (which appears to be one reason why they 
become so fat in the first place.)  So, going without food isn't easy at 
all, and this may be *more* true for obese people than for normal weight 
people.  I perceived Dudley as truly suffering on his diet, and didn't 
blame him at all for eating the food the twins gave him.

Jenny said:
> [Dudley] is as much a target of his parents' abuse as Harry
> is, but obviously he is suffering in other ways.  Here in the States
> there have been cases where parents have been accused of and found
> guilty of abuse because they have young children who are obese.
> Wouldn't you say that is the case with Dudley?  He doesn't have a
> gland problem; his parents feed him constantly.  They never say no.

Yes, there has been at least one case in the US where a mother was 
convicted of abuse after her massively obese (700 pound plus) daughter died 
of heart failure.  I thought this was a travesty of justice; in fact, I 
wrote to the woman who was convicted and told her how horribly unfair I 
thought it was. (She sent me a nice letter back.)  There is absolutely 
nothing a parent can do that will make a normal child weigh 700 pounds. 
 The girl who died must have had some physiological problem.  Not only was 
our society unable to help the girl, we then punished her poor mother, who 
had lost her only child to a disease that no one could cure. So, no, I 
don't feel Dudley's weight tells us anything about whether the Dursleys are 
abusive.  (They are certainly horrible parents in many other ways, though.)

I'd say there is actually substantial evidence in the books *against* the 
claim that Dudley is fat because of what his parents feed him.  Dudley 
continues to gain weight at school, where he is away from his parents. 
 Although there are some points where the Dursleys restrict Harry's food, 
for the most part, Harry seems to eat the same food at the Dursleys' house 
as Dudley does, and Harry doesn't get fat on it.  Neither does Petunia. 
 Also, there are plenty of other kids in the books who are shown as getting 
lots of fattening foods without becoming fat -- delicate little Draco gets 
sweets from home almost every day, it seems.  For that matter, *all* the 
kids at Hogwarts seem to have unlimited access to heavy, fattening food, 
and few of them are overweight.  Ron is described as thin, even though he 
seems almost obsessed with candy.

Dudley *could* have a gland problem. Vernon and his sister Marge are also 
described as being overweight, and the inference I have always made is that 
Dudley inherited the genes for obesity from his father.  My theory is that 
Vernon, Marge, and Dudley are fat because there are genes for obesity on 
the Dursley side of the family; Petunia, Harry, and Lily are thin or normal 
weight because there are no genes for obesity on the Evans side of the 
family. (Or on the Potter side, either, in Harry's case.)

As one of the many millions of obese people in the world, here is my take 
on how obesity is presented in the JKR books.  For the most part, JKR seems 
to present obesity in a reasonable way. Some people are fat, some are thin. 
 Some of the fat people are nice (Molly), some are rotten (Dudley, Vernon, 
Marge.)  Some thin people are nice (Harry) some are rotten (the Malfoys.) 
 A lot of kids are really into sweets (Ron, Dudley); some of them are fat 
(Dudley) but some are thin (Ron).  Unfortunately, this reasonable approach 
is undermined by the heavy (er, no pun intended) emphasis on nasty, fat 
Dudley and what a glutton he is. JKR repeatedly draws attention to a 
connection between Dudley stuffing himself and being fat, while never at 
all mentioning Ron's fondness for sweets in connection with the fact that 
Ron is thin, or Draco's constant receipt of sweets in connection with the 
fact that Draco is delicate.  So, on balance I think the books somewhat 
reinforce the idea that fat people are to blame for their obesity.


Obese-and-not-exactly-proud-of-it-but-not-blaming-herself-either!Judy