Desiree Devine wasn’t always a 305-pound porn star. Three years ago, at the age of 23, she had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and was keeping her six-foot frame in athletic shape. She was, literally, half her current weight—150 pounds—she told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview from Florida, where she’s on location for a video shoot.

“Then I got cancer and put on the weight,” she recalled. “I thought my life was going to be over.”¦Who was going to want me when I was all fat? I thought I was just disgusting.”

Depressed but finished her cancer treatment, Devine didn’t work or socialize much for a year. Then a friend of a friend, who was in the adult-entertainment industry, said she liked Devine’s look. Would she consider appearing in a video with her?

“It was very liberating,” Devine said. “You’re in front of a camera and you lose all your modesty, because the camera picks up every flaw, every piece of cellulite.”¦At the same time, you take a huge risk because there’s so many people who want to criticize you.”¦But I’ll take the bad with the good, because the good is so good.”

Now porn is her full-time gig. Her Web site opens with a crotch shot; Devine reclines to reveal her rolls and masturbates with what looks like a cherry Chupa Chups lollipop. Her video credits include Whale Watching 3; Big Tits Big Toys 2, and many others. Devine was one of a handful of entertainers who represented the Big Beautiful Women category for the first time at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which took place in January at the Sands Expo centre in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fat sex is either your thing or it’s not, Devine said. But more and more porn fans, she explained, are admitting their love for BBW. If porn is the ultimate gauge of what’s desirable in the 21st century, Devine’s conclusion is that it’s hip to be fat.

Outside the adult market, 2008 was a banner year for fatties in pop culture. Whitney Thompson won America’s Next Top Model, the first plus-sizer to earn Tyra Banks’s adoration. All of the humans in Pixar’s WALL-E are morbidly obese—and eventually become heroes, rather than jokes. DreamWorks’s Kung Fu Panda stars an obese bear whose martial-arts journey focuses on achieving self-acceptance rather than losing weight.

With 41.1 percent of Vancouverites reporting themselves to be either overweight or obese, according to the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey, the city has among the lowest incidences of fatness of cities in North America. Despite its image as a mecca for yogis and vegans, an honest look at the bodies trundling down Main Street or through Stanley Park illustrates the reality that many of us are fat.

Not everyone thinks fat is hot. The B.C. Liberal government, along with many public-health agencies worldwide, has been flogging healthy eating and antiobesity campaigns for five years. Locally shot TV shows The Last 10 Pounds Bootcamp and Bulging Brides continue to get airtime, as does NBC’s The Biggest Loser.

There’s a cacophony right now on the subject of fat. But is the noise helping people live healthier, happier lives?

At Heritage Hall on January 17, curvy burlesque performer Joanie Gyoza (aka Joan Pham) shimmied out of her clothes for a room full of future brides at the wedding show Indie I Do. Bumping and grinding out of a red cheongsam, Pham ended her performance wearing a girdle, stockings, and a pair of gold pasties with black tassels that she whirled in circles as she exited the stage, twirling her 36C breasts. For joie de vivre, Pham is unbeatable. But the 25-year-old wasn’t this confident a decade ago—due in part to the admonishments of her doctor.

“He meant well, but he was always explaining how unhealthy it was to be overweight,” she told the Straight. “I was 155 pounds when I was 14, and I remember coming home from the doctor and just crying. I remember thinking, ”˜Oh, my God, I’m so obese.’ That’s when I really started to retreat as a person. I felt ugly. It’s hard to admit that, even now.”

From age 17 to 21, she battled her weight. Two years ago, she knew she was losing the fight, so she just gave up. Now, she said, she likes to make and eat cupcakes, dance for exercise, and express her creativity. She also enjoys her job as a registered nurse.

Is it so bad that Pham is content filling out her girdle?

In 2004, the provincial government slammed fat citizens for costing the health-care system $38 million per year in obesity-related costs. That year, a standing committee on health presented a report called The Path to Health and Wellness: Making British Columbians Healthier by 2010. It reported that people become fat simply because their energy “in” is greater than their energy “out”, and that losing weight should be as simple as reversing that. However, the report states, no jurisdiction has ever run an antifat campaign that has worked.

“But we all know that we [the government] must try,” it noted.

ActNow B.C. kicked off in 2005. The program exhorts British Columbians to lose weight through healthy eating and exercise. The January 2008 report entitled Measuring Our Success, however, showed B.C.’s obesity and overweight rates increasing slightly between 2003 and 2005. The “projection” optimistically shows the opposite, with obesity rates declining every year between 2003 and 2010.

The Vancouver doctor who’s creating the most international obesity buzz, Jay Wortman, isn’t surprised that the antifat campaigns aren’t working. In fact, he said, they further stigmatize bulky folks.

“People love to hate fat people,” the Vancouver-based Health Canada scientist told the Straight. “People love to blame them. And we subtly encourage that, because the model we have right now is that you’re fat because you eat too much and don’t exercise enough. And if you choose not to do those things, it suggests a flaw in your character. Physicians and other practitioners don’t overtly send the message, but it’s implicit in the current understanding of why you’re fat.”

Wortman has spent the past decade studying why so many folks are fat. What he’s found—and the medical profession is by no means unanimous on this—is that character flaws aren’t the problem. He says obesity is a symptom of North America’s love affair with carbohydrates, especially simple carbs such as high-fructose corn syrup, popularized in the 1970s. Not so coincidentally, he said, that’s when obesity and Type 2 diabetes rates skyrocketed.

After he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his late 40s, Wortman cut carbohydrates out of his diet to buy himself some time so that he could research treatment options for himself. He found that without carbs, his diabetes went away. He dropped 25 pounds almost immediately. His energy level improved, and he spontaneously felt like exercising.

Wortman argues that at least 25 percent of Canadians have insulin resistance, in addition to those who have prediabetes and diabetes. That is, their bodies have become, for lack of a simpler description, allergic to carbohydrates. That means they’re overproducing insulin to absorb glucose, which does two things. First, it tells muscle cells there’s not enough energy coming in; second, it convinces the liver to help the body store more fat. So a person with insulin resistance feels tired and hungry and puts on weight.

“A lot of people think you become insulin-resistant because you’re fat. But it’s a chicken-and-egg thing. Maybe you become fat because you’re insulin-resistant.” In other words, being fat is usually a symptom of insulin resistance rather than a cause of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and the $38 million a year in “obesity-related costs”, Wortman posits.

In the 1970s, Wortman said, when North America became fat, public health bodies were pushing citizens to eat a low-fat diet. People listened, he said, and they replaced fats with carbs. Now, he said, public health is telling people to eat less and exercise more—the exact opposite of what an insulin-resistant body is telling its owner to do. That’s why so many people fail at making those simple lifestyle changes.

“Now you know why people think I’m crazy,” Wortman said. Recent science backs up his experience, he noted. But the message runs so counter to common medical wisdom—that fat people are fat because they eat too much and don’t exercise enough—that many physicians resist the research.

Nonfat adults think fat people are “dirtier, lazier, less attractive, less active, less healthy, less dynamic, less hardworking, and”¦[have] less self-discipline.” This is according to a report by a UBC associate professor of psychology who was quoted at a hearing of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal on an obesity-related discrimination complaint back in 2000.

For Surrey’s Shimona Henry, who is a confident, “fabulous” size-20 pinup photographer, battling those attitudes has become her business. She shoots local women in provocative poses, and her goal is to “bring out the bombshell” in women from mini to maxi, the 23-year-old told the Straight.

At the same time, Henry’s personal struggles with weight highlight this era’s competing messages about fat. On the one hand, she appreciates the new pop-culture profile of curvy women. On the other hand, if the path to a lighter body were obvious, she would take it.

The year she was 21, after watching her aunt die from obesity-related illnesses, she put herself on an extreme diet-and-exercise regimen. She made it down to a size 14, which still put her firmly in the “overweight” category.

“It was 24 hours a day,” Henry recalled. “I had to watch everything I put into my mouth; I wrote it all down. It became my number-one priority and the only thing I thought about.”

She couldn’t make the weight loss last. She got busier. Henry lives with and cares for a sister who has Down syndrome and her 89-year-old grandmother, works full-time, and has a pinup business on the side. She said she simply can’t do it all and get her weight down to a government-approved level at the same time.

Henry said provincial government weight-loss programs make her neither happier nor healthier. Especially those such as 2008’s Healthier Choices in Vending Machines in B.C. Public Buildings, which sucked Oh Henry!s and Doritos out of universities and public schools.

Pham noted that fat can also be an economic issue: eating healthy food and finding time to exercise are far easier to do when there’s extra money in the house. This was echoed in University of Victoria medical ethicist Marsha Hanen’s 2008 lecture for the Sheldon Chumir Foundation, entitled “Responsibility for Health Care: Mine, Theirs or Everyone’s?”

Hanen documented health disparities in Japan and Britain between the highest and lowest earners. Her argument is that until governments are prepared to address the growing gap between rich and poor, obesity and its financial costs will be with us.

Wortman feels that individuals haven’t been given the opportunity to address their own obesity because they haven’t been given the right health information. He said most fat people are fat for undiagnosed metabolic reasons—such as insulin resistance—not because they are lazy, stupid, or undisciplined.

For fat folks, it will have been a dynamic decade between 2000—when the human-rights tribunal heard of the popular hatred for fat people—and 2010, by which time the B.C. government hopes obesity and overweight rates will have plummeted in time for the Olympics. But what’s really changed? Apart from a Canadian Community Health Survey blip showing that B.C. residents’ self-reported rate of obesity declined from 12.7 percent in 2005 to 10.9 percent in 2007, it’s unclear whether we’re getting thinner or fatter as a population. Indeed, self-reported rates are notoriously inaccurate, according to the 2004 Path to Health and Wellness report.

For Henry, Pham, and Devine, the answer has been to struggle through the self-judgment and to use their size to help others face the fury.

With a provincial election on May 12, the parties have an opportunity to design health and social programs that really help the 53.6 percent of B.C. residents still struggling with their weight. Given that no jurisdiction in the world has yet instituted a successful antifat plan, an effective, respectful program based on current research would be a global achievement.