Category: diets

diets · weight loss

Losing Weight and Keeping It Off…

Tracy I12 Comments

diets2This topic has come up for me again lately because of (1) a barrage of email from Precision Nutrition asking me if I want to do it again (no thanks; see here for why) and (2) another excellent post from Ragan Chastain over at Dances with Fat talking about the ridiculousness of our obsession with weight loss. See her post “Even if Weight Loss Would Solve Every Problem.”

As she points out,

Even if becoming thin would solve every single problem in every single fat person’s life (and I don’t think it would), the truth is it doesn’t matter.  Because we don’t know how to get it done. The belief that we know how to help people lose weight long term, and that weight loss leads to greater health, is a major Galileo issue of our time – widely believed, fervently defended, and unsupported by the evidence.

So we throw around this hope, this dream, that one day the research will tell us something different. But even the science team at Weight Watchers isn’t hopeful that this will happen.  Here’s the dirt:

Weight Watchers own numbers show that the average person maintains a 5 pound weight loss after 2 years (a feat I feel could be accomplished by regular exfoliation and without paying a small fortune to Weight Watchers.)  When asked by the Federal Trade Commission to do longer-term studies, representatives from WW refused because “it would be too depressing for our clients”.

No, we wouldn’t want to depress clients with…the truth.  That would be unconscionable wouldn’t it? And why would the truth be depressing? Because, as Ragan Chastain quite rightly points out, we’ve come up with the kooky idea that losing weight is a cure all for everything that is wrong.  And it’s kind of depressing to discover that the magic cure is almost unattainable.

Better to keep people hopeful and trying.  That’s the WW strategy. That’s the PN strategy. That’s the strategy for just about every weight loss program out there.  They use before-after pictures, but the small print says “results not typical.” And it’s rare to see “after” shots that are way after. Like two or more years after. Why? Because it’s really hard to see anything dramatic in a 5 pound weight-loss, which is what WW for example says that the average person maintains 2 years out. Pics from 5 years after would be an even harder sell.

So there are a couple of things going on here. First off, we need to seriously examine why weight-loss is ascribed all the magical happy-making qualities it is. What’s that all about? It’s not as if everyone who wants to lose a few pounds is facing major health risks if they don’t. It’s not as if everyone who is in the perceived “normal healthy” (ugh!) weight range is actually healthy.  And it’s certainly not as if losing weight will solve our financial problems or marital problems or make our kids give us no grief or make the boss our best friend or stop our neighbor from dying or prevent us from getting in a car accident or make airline travel a pleasant experience, give us more vacation days, better sleep, and tickets to see our favourite band. And yet so many people, large and small alike, are filled with self-loathing and despair because they can’t lose weight and keep it off.

And then, we need to even more seriously consider why we reject the evidence before us about what a futile endeavor this actually is for the vast majority of people who undertake it. Please do not start on the “if people just did what they were supposed to do they would lose it and keep it off.” When we individualize this as if it’s all the fault of the people who can’t stick to the program as presented we miss the larger issue, which is that maybe, just maybe, these programs are a waste of time and money.

Ragan Chastain:

Almost everyone who attempts weight loss fails.  Yet doctors keep prescribing the same things and blaming the vast majority of people for “not trying hard” enough or “not doing it right”. Can you imagine if Viagra only worked 5% of the time and we blamed 95% of the guys for just not trying hard enough?  It’s completely ridiculous.  But when I point this out people roll their eyes and say “everybody knows” that you can lose weight if you really try.

Let me say it again – even if weight loss would solve every problem (and I don’t think it will), it doesn’t matter because we don’t know how to get it done and my opinion, based on the research that exists, is that it is a massive waste of time, money, and resources to keep suggesting, marketing, prescribing, and pursuing weight loss.

And finally,

If people want to keep researching weight loss methods that’s fine, it’s also fine if they want to keep researching ways to help people fly like superman, but I certainly won’t be dieting or jumping off my roof and flapping my arms. Attempting weight loss to get healthier is doing something that nobody has proven is possible for a reason that nobody has proven is valid.

It’s been a long time since I built a blog post around quotes from someone else’s blog post, but this message cannot be delivered enough. We all want to think we’re exceptions. That this time we will do it and it will work because we’ll do it better, we’ll be more vigilant, we’ll be “good,” la, la, la.

But, and I hate to be a negative ninny about it but hear me now: a new diet will probably fail and even if you lose weight and keep some or even all of it off, that is not going to mean you’ll suddenly become happy.

But there are lots of other tangible things we can do to live now in the body we have today. So rather than obsess and wring our hands over the impossible, why not move on from that and live in reality?

diets · eating · eating disorders

Disrupt your Diet Offers a Beginner’s Guide to Eating Right

Sam B5 Comments

image

What prompted the creation of the advice graphic? This! (And the hundreds of others like it.)

 

image

For Tracy’s take on “clean eating” see Living Clean without Eating Clean.

body image · diets · eating · Guest Post · health

When you and your doctor don’t agree on what “healthy” means (Guest post)

ceebeepress15 Comments

I can tell you when I lost faith in the medical establishment’s sovereignty over my body. I was sitting in my doctor’s office and she was showing me a graph that showed “healthy” BMI as it relates to height. I was 16 years old, and I weighed about 175lbs. I was a vegetarian who ate steamed broccoli every day after school before taking my dog for brisk walks. I also ate lots of cookies and toast and secretly smoked lots and lots of cigarettes. As far as teenage habits go, I was probably on the overly responsible side of average, and I’d been chubby since puberty. She looked at me, and pointed to a spot on the graph.

“For your height…” she said “You should weigh about 100lbs”

I didn’t hear much of what she said after that. My eyes glazed over with a mixture of shame and shock. My doctor had just told me that to be healthy, I needed to reduce myself by nearly half. I thought about how I took gym every semester even though it wasn’t mandatory, and how I sometimes attended open practices for sports teams I wasn’t actually on, just to have some buddies to run around the track with. I thought about the kinds of changes I would have to make to my lifestyle to do what this person was telling me was “healthy” and I knew it wasn’t reasonable.

My mom enrolled me in Weight Watchers, and I lost some weight. I lost the most on the weeks when I went to punk shows and moshed for hours, and wasn’t totally faithful about my food journal. When the meetings before holidays were all about strategies for avoiding “cheating” when there were so many “bad” foods around, I was the person asking if it was really so terrible to eat stuffing once a year while everyone looked at me with derision. I clearly lacked their dedication to the project.

I did.

Don’t get me wrong, I hated my fat body. I loathed it. I felt hideous and horrible and unlovable and unworthy because that’s what I had been taught to feel about myself. I wanted to be thin so bad. But I also had this nagging feeling that something about the stories I had swallowed wasn’t quite right. In the moments where I could step outside my own brain I heard other girls – the girls whose “perfect” bodies I tried really hard not to ogle when changing for gym (because gay) – seemed to hate themselves as much as I did. At what weight, what BMI, what waist to hip ratio, what caliper measurement of fat rolls, what jeans size, could I possibly deserve to think I was a human being worthy of respect or care or love or pleasure or reasonable health care?

I’ve distanced myself from western medicine. I see a naturopath, an acupuncturist, and a therapist who does shiatsu and TCM. I’ve made some changes to my lifestyle and the ways I eat, none of which have the goal (or the result) of weight loss. I’m working on feeling connected to my body so I can notice when it needs to tell me something. I’m working on finding joy in my experience of my body, whether that’s through running further than I ever have, eating the most perfectly ripe avocado, finding the ways to sleep that result in actual rest, or giving myself lots and lots of great orgasms. I have come to believe that self hatred, and the urge to make ourselves ever-smaller (and quieter, more acquiescent, etc) is far more lethal than butter or chocolate or enjoying yourself. You caught me; I’m a hedonist.

But I found myself in a medical doctor’s office late in 2014 when all my non western health care practitioners agreed- I should get some tests done to check out my hormones, ovaries, and uterus. My periods have gone from seven days to nine days, then two weeks, and most recently THREE weeks. I spend several days each month incapacitated by pain and heavy bleeding. My body is telling me to pay attention; something is clearly amiss. So I asked for recommendations from friends, made some inquiries, and chose a doctor. I was sent for blood work and ultrasounds. According to the tests, I’m perfectly healthy. Healthier than he expected.

“I guess this is good news” I said. “that I don’t have endometriosis or PCOS or cancer or fibroids. But it’s also confusing news! What do I do now?”

He had two recommendations for me; hormonal birth control and weight loss. Neither of these are options I am interested in pursuing.

I use my body to get places. In the winter I walk, and the rest of the year I cycle. Most days I walk about 5k. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I do squats when I brush my teeth, and sometimes I do planks and stretching at home. I dance while I wash dishes. In the warmer seasons I am more likely to jog, hike, swim, and do other active stuff. I joined a boxing gym for a while last year, that was pretty cool. I don’t do those things because it’s “required”, or to punish myself for eating, or with the aim of losing weight. I do those things because they’re fun and they make me feel good, especially if I do them with friends. My approach to food is to eat lots and lots of plants, things easily identifiable as “food”, to cook for myself as much as possible, and to enjoy eating. It took me a long time to stop counting the WW points of everything I ate (about a decade. actually) and I am not going back to that slippery slop towards self hate.

He asked me if I wear running shoes when I walk. He told me I needed to raise my heart rate by a certain level, and probably I should sweat some. I’m 31 years old, and I was sitting in his office while he explained what exercise was.

I was livid. but I was also too frustrated to be articulate. I’m sure I sounded petulant and stubborn. I told him I needed to think more about my options before agreeing to any of his proposed solutions. The most interesting part was that for the first time, the idea of my body shrinking actually made me feel sad. It’s not just that weight loss is hard and emotionally complicated; I actually legitimately like my body, what it can do and how it looks. That sure feels healthy to me.

(bio) Carly is a 31 year old queer fat femme and white cis woman. She works in queer and trans youth sexual health in Toronto, and comes to this work from having investment in community building, body autonomy, youth agency and wisdom, intersectionality, trauma survivorship, and keeping people alive. She likes roasted vegetables and bitter foods, and hates cantaloupe and anything gelatinous. She thinks that leopard print is a neutral and that prisons should be abolished. Find her on twitter @crushslut.

Struggles and strategizing: back at the beginning, again
body image · diets · eating · Weekends with Womack

Struggles and strategizing: back at the beginning, again

catherine w22 Comments

I struggle with my weight. It’s been a lifelong drama, with many supporting players: relatives, doctors, well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) friends and boyfriends, teammates on the many sports teams I’ve played for, nutritionists, therapists, you name it. Sometimes there’s relative peace—when I’m active, social, well-rested, not too-too busy in my work life, and my relationships are on an even keel—life is calmer and I worry less about it.

Lately, as menopause has announced its presence in my life (I’m sorry, but who thought this was a good idea? evolution, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do) the struggle has resurfaced. My sleep is interrupted, and I have less energy (but more mood swings—yay) and my cravings for sugar and carbs are at an all-time high. Add to this a heavier-than-usual workload this semester and 108 inches of snow in Boston (and by the way, it’s snowing again now—argh) and it’s no surprise that my average baked good consumption is up, and I’ve gained weight.

Samantha, Tracy, Nat and the guest bloggers have written loads about the failures and perils of diets—they don’t work in the long-term and contribute to lowered self-esteem and increased weight. I know this, too—my research areas are obesity, eating, and health behavior change. And yet I keep flirting with the idea of dieting again. For me, diets are like bad ex-boyfriends—I’ve forgotten the pain and suffering they imposed, how the relationships failed or even backfired. I just remember how good-looking or charming they were, full of seductive promises that “this time, it’ll be different”.

So what am I to do about being back in a state of weight-panic THIS time? Here are three things I’ve done this week. I’ll report back later on to let you know what’s happening—what is working, what I’ve jettisoned, what other responses I’ve adopted, and how I’m feeling.

1. I bought a book.

For an academic, nothing is more reassuring than book purchases, especially when one is confused, frightened, stalled, or in need of comfort. Just the thought of reading books, especially in a comfy study or library, is reassuring.

The book I bought is Gretchen Rubin’s “Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives”. The New York Times Well Book Club is running an online discussion, which caught my eye this week. Partly out of academic curiosity, and partly out of need to do something, I got the book and checked out the online discussion.

There are loads of books with loads of theories about behavior change, and of course this blog has talked about many of them. When I actually get around to reading this book I will fill you in. For now, all I’ve done is taken the quiz to set the stage for where I fit in Rubin’s behavior-change taxonomy. From there she has lots of suggestions for tailored strategies to optimize effectiveness.

Now, I have no particular expectation that this book is better or more effective than others; I will report back on my experiences later on. But for now, just owning this book feels like it’s helping me regain a little more perspective, which is good.

2. I’ve stopped eating sugary foods (at least for now).

While talking with a therapist about my energy levels, cravings, menopausal moods and general dissatisfaction with life on planet Earth these days, she suggested that maybe stopping eating processed sugar for a while might result in improvement of my overall mood and well-being. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about stopping eating these:

apples

but rather, stopping eating these:

bakery

For now.

I’m on day 3 of the no-baked-goods-and-other-sugary-stuff plan, and will report back on what I’ve done and learned.

3. I’ve changed primary care doctors.

This was a very big move—I’d been with the same doctor since 1998, and value familiarity, loyalty, and the deep knowledge base she has. But I never felt comfortable talking about my weight with her, and dreaded what she had to say, which never felt supportive. We squabbled about calcium and vitamin D supplements, and frequency of mammograms (she disagreed with the USPSTF recommendations which I wanted to follow). I would delay physicals in order to avoid being weighed.  Again, even though I know how bad the effects of weight stigma are on women in healthcare settings, it still took me a long time to act.

The first meeting with my new provider was eye-opening: she spent an hour with me (unprecedented in my experience), and we talked about weight, activity, menopause, sex, etc. in ways that felt positive and centered on my goals and needs.  I told her that I was willing to be weighed for my yearly physical and also when there was a medical need for complete accuracy (say, if this was a surgery pre-op visit).  Otherwise, I said I really didn’t want to be weighed, that it was a deterrent to my seeing her  She agreed, and we moved on smoothly.

Here’s how I handled the scale issue with the nurse (who I saw before the provider came in). She introduced herself and said, “I need to get your weight and height”.  I responded right away with “I’m not going to get on the scale, but I’m happy to tell you my weight; I weighed myself this week.”  She said okay.  When we got to the scale, she said, “you’re not going to get on the scale?”  I said no, but then told her my weight.  Then she asked, “are you willing to have your height measured?”  We both laughed, and I said yes indeed.  It turns out I’m the same height as the last time I was measured.

The issue of primary care office visits and weighing of patients is controversial and far from settled.  For what it’s worth, in a US National Institutes of Health document about treating obese patients, one of its recommendations is to weigh them during visits only when it’s medically appropriate.  I’m not here to speak authoritatively about this issue, but I did want to include how I handled my experiences and fears of weight stigma in this environment.

I’m very lucky not to be on any prescription meds, so I don’t see healthcare providers often. But I’m hopeful about my prospects moving forward with this new practice.

I’ll report later on progress, shifts, and lessons learned. For now, thanks for reading.

body image · diets · fitness

50,000 Hits and Counting: Why Is “She May Look Healthy But” So Popular?

Tracy I3 Comments

suits-fitness-figure

A couple of years ago, just before I left for a sailing trip in the British Virgin Islands, I whipped up a quick post questioning the health of fitness models. A few days later, when I managed to find a wifi connection on shore (at Foxy’s Beach Bar), the stats blew my mind. The post was racking up hits as if we’d hit the jackpot on a slot machine. Never before had we posted anything that attracted readers to the blog by the thousands.

“She May Look Heathy But.. Why Fitness Models Aren’t Models of Health” is still sailing strong, by far our most read post. Surpassing 50,000 hits over the weekend, it’s had more than double the exposure of the other two old stand-bys, “The Shape of an Athlete” and “Why the Thigh Gap Makes Me Sad,” each standing now at around 24,000. Close behind them: “Crotch Shots, Upskirts, Sports Reporting, and the Objectification of Female Athletes” and “Padded Sports Bras and Nipple Phobia.”

Some weeks, these and a few other of our stalwart reliables get more traffic than any of the new content. But “She May Look Healthy But..” takes first prize. And we’re kind of baffled as to why.

It’s not the tags. We have lots of posts tagged or categorized with some combination of “body image, diets, fitness, health.”

And it’s not as if it’s one of the most indepth or well-written posts on our blog. I cribbed most of it (with credit to the original, of course) from this interview with a fitness instructor who decided to prep for a women’s figure competition. And I got the rest from our friend, colleague, and figure competitor, Shay Welch.

My post made a point that I think is worth repeating: that the healthy and fit look so many aspire to, the well-defined and sculpted body we see in magazines and competitions, is attained usually through not-so-healthy, temporary routines. The routines’ primary purpose is to produce a body that looks like that, not to promote health or fitness. And the look is not sustainable even for the people who achieve it.  It’s how you appear on game day, but not on most other days.

The disconnect between looking fit and healthy, on the one hand, and being fit and healthy, on the other hand, shines through like bright sunlight on a clear day when we read her story and also the experience of Shay, fellow-philosopher, friend, and fitness figure competitor, who told me this:

I usually am at 1200-1400 calories during off season just to maintain (which is about 25 lbs over what I should be on stage) and then at about 800 calories in the final stretch, working out twice a day for around 4 hours.  everyday.  I do a lot of crying and very little sleeping.  Off season is relatively healthy but your body will change weight super easy because the metabolism crashes to nothing.  But the final stretch is super duper uper unhealthy.  But I can’t do any other sports and I love being athletically competitive so I deal.  Most people I know who do this cannot maintain a real job.  They are almost always fitness trainers because they’re the only ones who can really endure this.  I’ve known more than a few people who had to quit their regular job because they became obsessed with dieting and being on stage.  I throw all my trophies away because I am always trying to remember that this is just a hobby.  And no one maintains except professional fitness people and they get paid to starve year round.

The post generated tons of comments. Lots of people agreed with the key idea.

But we also heard from competitors who said that the tone of my post was unduly discouraging.  They defended these competitions and the possibility of prepping in a way that isn’t as difficult, or at least isn’t any more demanding than prepping for any other physically demanding undertaking.

Competitors expressed gratitude for the support of friends and family, talking about how rewarding an experience it’s been for them. Trainers took issue with some of the claims about how restrictive the plans were.

The fact is, you’re not going to convince me that the central point is wrong. Fitness figure competitors, like any other competitors, train for specific competitions. In their case, the goal is to look a certain way for their events, or, if they’re models, for their photo shoots.

They’re the first to admit that they don’t look this way all the time. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not ready to run a marathon all the time either. No one, not wrestlers or power-lifters or rowers, “makes weight” every day.

Where things go wrong is that in the popular imaginary, we have come to associate the way the fitness models and figure competitors look with what it means to be/look healthy and fit.

It’s not just ironic. It’s downright harmful. So no. You are not going to convince me that equating health and fitness with looking like a fitness model ready for competition is a good thing. It’s not a fair or accurate representation of fitness or health.

If that’s the main message people pick up from reading our post, then I couldn’t be happier that so many read it every week. We have a good range of views represented in the comments on the original post, which is why they’re now closed.

We haven’t solved the mystery of why the spotlight lands on that post every day. But we’re grateful that it attracts a steady audience, and we hope that at least some of those readers click through to the other good content on the blog.

Thanks for reading!

diets · eating

What’s natural? And why do we care?

Sam B10 Comments
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/5f/91/d7/5f91d7eb9ddc7230c3a8d85b77fc15d8.jpg
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/85779567877556239/

From Amber of Go Kaleo:  “I watch a lot of nature videos, and it struck me a while ago: no matter what native tribe you look at, the women are never exactly thin, despite their healthy lifestyle. I mean, those people live in harsh conditions and work their asses off to survive a hostile environment, be it the Amazon jungle or the African steppes. And yet look! They have belly fat! And thick thighs! Oh noes! And the best part? THEY DON’T CARE! A thin tree is as beautiful as a thick tree, so why not a human being? Indeed.”

I like the point very much. Not all natural bodies are super lean. Nice to be reminded of that.

Why does it matter to us so much though? Why are we so fussed about what’s natural? I get that lots of people are critical of North American diets with overly processed food and North American lifestyles with not enough walking and lifting and way too much driving and sitting. But it doesn’t follow from the rejection of that diet and that lifestyle that we ought to seek out exactly what’s natural.

With Paleo diets, for example, you see a kind of romantic attitude about our natural bodies.

Now there’s lots to say about the Paleo diet. As an academic I’m interested in what anthropologists have to say about the way our ancestors really ate.

Here’s Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh Over “Paleo Diet”

In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.

The Paleo Diet is a nutritional framework based on the assumption that the human species has not yet adapted to the dietary changes engendered by the development of agriculture over the past ten thousand years. Proponents of the diet emphasize in particular the negative effects of eating large quantities of grain and its numerous by-products, which can lead to hypertension, obesity, and various other health problems. Instead, the Paleo Diet posits that a reliance on lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables while minimizing processed food is the key to health and longevity.

The nutritional benefits of the diet are not what the grievance is about, said Dr. Britta Hoyes, who organized the event. She agreed that a high-carbohydrate diet can have a detrimental effect on long-term health, as many studies have demonstrated. Instead, the group’s protest is a reaction to the biological and historical pediments of the diet, in particular the contention that pre-agricultural societies were only adapted to eat those foods existing before the Neolithic Revolution.

Hoyes, a paleoethnobotanist who specializes in reconstructing prehistoric subsistence, stated that only thing unifying the myriad diets that she’s studied has been their diversity. “You simply do not see specific, trans-regional trends in human subsistence in the archaeological record. People can live off everything from whale blubber to seeds and grasses. You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.”

As for the idea that agricultural products are somehow maladaptive to the human species, researchers at a seminar entitled “It’s When You Mate, Not What You Ate,”  pointed out that evolutionary fitness is measured by reproductive success, not by the health or longevity of an individual.

Richard Wenkel, a biostatistician who chaired the panel, explained: “As long as the diet of an individual keeps them alive long enough to successfully mate, then that diet has conferred an evolutionary advantage. By that metric, the agricultural revolution has proven to be the most effective dietary system in the history of our species. We are the most prolific higher-order vertebrate on the planet.” It is a point that he feels is overlooked by Paleo Diet enthusiasts.

See also  How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked [Interactive & Infographic]

I also want to read Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

But let’s suppose we did have a handle on our natural diet. Two things rub me the wrong way about this.

First, what’s natural versus what’s cultural is often very hard to tell. Here’s one example. People say it’s natural for men to have a more muscular physique than women and that women are naturally smaller and thinner than men. Okay. But why then, if it’s natural, do we work so hard to achieve those differences?

Read Are You Working Hard Enough to Achieve Your Natural Body?

We commonly hear claims that men are naturally more muscular and physically intimidating than women.  “It’s a biological fact,” someone might say.  If that were true, though, we wouldn’t have to work so incredibly hard to make it so.

@IllMakeItMyself sent in this great example of the way in which we are pushed to force our bodies into a gender binary that we pretend is natural.  On the upper right part of the Men’s Health cover, it reads: “Add 15lb of muscle” and, right next door on the Women’s Health cover, it reads “5 ways to lose 15 lbs.”

If we have to try this hard to make it true, maybe we’re not as different as we think we are.

This point is true for all sorts of so called natural differences between men and women. Men and women are fed differently and treated differently from birth (maybe even earlier as more people choose to know the sex of the child they’re carrying). How we turn out is a result of both social and biological forces. It’s hard to weed out the social and talk about how men and women would be if we were treated the same. What’s nature? What’s nurture? We just don’t know.

Second, that something is natural is neither here nor there in terms of goodness. Not everything natural is worth wanting. That’s something that authors of the Natural News ought to consider.

What’s Natural News? It’s the worst of the anti-science health sites on the internet, according to Skeptoid.

When Natural News began, it was basically the blog and sales portal of anti-pharmaceutical activist Mike Adams. His basic premise has always been the Big Pharma conspiracy, the idea that the medical industry secretly wants to keep everyone sick, and conspires with the food industry to make people unhealthy, all driven by a massive plot of greed to sell poisonous medicines. Adams appears to have become a protégé of Alex Jones, for he now writes on Natural News at least as many police state conspiracy articles as he does anti-science based medicine articles. They carry ads for each other on their sites as well.

The Natural Society is also opposed to Google’s new evidence based news ranking.

But I wouldn’t wave the banner of “natural” quite so proudly. Cancer is perfectly natural. Nature isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Philosophers call the fallacy of assuming what’s natural is good the fallacy of the appeal to nature.

…[C]onsider the…argument that what is natural is somehow good and what is unnatural bad. …[T]he principle is rarely stated so explicitly, but if we look at what people actually do, this does seem to be an assumption that underlies people’s behaviour. Consider, for example, the popularity of “natural” remedies. A great many people would always prefer to take a “natural” remedy over an “artificial” one. Similarly, people prefer foods that have “all natural” ingredients.
One obvious point to make here is that this very characterization of certain things as “natural” is problematic. What always strikes me about health food shops are the rows and rows of bottles and tablets. A greengrocer seems to be a much better source of natural products than such collections of distilled essences and the like. …
However, let us set aside such doubts about the category of “the natural” for the moment and just ask, even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)

Source: Julian Baggini, Making Sense, Oxford, 2002, pp. 181-182.

Here’s an excerpt from Tim Minchin’s heroine in the story Storm:

Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

 

diets · weight loss

On wishing for weight loss (and wings that can fly)

Sam B7 Comments

Do I want to be smaller? Yes.

Ask me a hard question, as they say.

(I’m much more comfortable with big/small language instead of fat/thin. Why? Read Fat or big: What’s in a name?)

Look, it’s not irrational in a size phobic society to not want to be fat.

Why? More clothes fit, you’ll get paid more, get higher teaching evaluations if you’re a professor (like me), be seen as smarter, be more attractive to a wider range of partners (don’t get me wrong, I’ve never had a shortage of people finding me attractive but I’m a bit of a niche taste), and more to the point, in my case, climb hills faster. Zoom!

Added bonus: It’d improve my running times a lot.

Oh, and since I’m writing this on a plane, let me note that it’d be easier if there were less of me taking up seat space.

No more fat shaming and discrimination? Who wouldn’t want that? How bad is it?

The overweight and obese face significant discrimination. A 2014 study from University College London that followed nearly 3,000 adults found that overweight individuals experienced teasing, harassment, or felt that they received poorer service everywhere from restaurants to doctors offices for their size. It’s a process informally known as “fat shaming,” and it does nothing to improve the lives of the shamed. From here.

You can divide the above list of facts into two categories, those that depend on the attitudes of others and those that don’t.

Arguments about homosexuality used to have that kind of flavour back in my youth. “I don’t know why they’re called ‘gay’,” says homophobic uncle. “I’ve never met a happy one.” Another relative says, “It’s a sad life. They’re treated so badly.” But homosexuality isn’t inherently sad. It’s sad in a homophobic society. Sad to be gay when gay people are treated badly.

Lots of the arguments about it being bad to be fat are like that. Bad to be fat when fat people are hated. It’s interesting that some of the attitudes we have towards fat are more dangerous in terms of health impact than fat itself. See Fear of Far More Dangerous Than Fat. Even the health impact of obesity is a more complicated than you might think. For example, being overweight though not obese, is linked to lower overall all cause mortality.

Mostly I’m okay with the attitudes of others. I’m smart, tough, successful, and I’ve got a terrific group of family and friends. I love my body, that’s true, but even for me, multiply privileged me, it’s tiring in a fat phobic world.

It’s consistent with wishing the world were different that if I can’t change the world, my next best choice is changing me.

That’s true of race as well.

I remember reading Lawrence Thomas’s piece years ago and being moved by it.

Next Life, I’ll Be White Maybe Then, I’ll Be Trusted By Others

My 40-year journey through life has revealed to me that more often than not, I need only to be in the presence of a white woman and she will begin clutching her pocketbook. My sheer presence has reminded more white people – female and male alike – to lock their car doors than I care to think about. I suppose it can be said here that I make an unwitting contribution to public safety.

I rarely enjoy what is properly called the public trust of whites. That is to say, the white person on the street who does not know me from Adam or Eve is much more likely to judge me negatively on account of my skin color, however much my attire and mannerisms (including gait) conform to the traditional standards of well-off white males.

I’m not comparing in all aspects size discrimination with race discrimination but that’s clearly one way they’re alike. In both cases prejudice, discrimination, and implicit bias make your life worse.

The other set of regrets are tougher. They’re more like the laws of physics. Hill climbing is all about power to weight ratio. To beat someone who weighs 140 lbs up a hill I have to be an awful lot faster and and more powerful. If I lost fifty pounds I’d shave lots of minutes off my five km time.

So just how much can you expect to benefit from being lighter? Joe Henderson, the author of various books on running, has this to offer: “The loss of a single pound doesn’t mean much for a single mile, but the effect multiplies nicely. Ten pounds equals 20 seconds per mile, which grows to a minute-plus in a 5K, more than two minutes in a 10K, nearly 4.5 minutes in a half-marathon and almost nine minutes in a marathon.”

So, yes, lots of reasons to want to be smaller.

But also lots of reasons to want to be taller too. It’s a real help in rowing though not in cycling or running. Cycling favours smaller bodies and height isn’t a factor in running. Yes, tall people have longer legs but they weigh more and that offsets the height advantage in running.

Yet, while I’m teased about my height no one expects me to do anything about it.

My height for those who don’t know me in person is a life long, family related joke. I’M NOT SHORT. (“You keep telling people that mum.”)

I’m 5’7. That’s well above average height for a North American woman. But in my family, it’s short. My daughter Mallory is 5’11. All the men in the family are above 6’3. In that context, I’m short.

Cue the Hobbit Mother jokes. They even play the Hobbit song when I’m sad. “Here the music of your people will cheer you up!” (Or the Taking to Hobbits to Isengard song on 10 hour loop when they want to annoy me.)

But weight isn’t like height. Usually we think that one is changeable and other other isn’t. I’m not sure they’re that different.

Is long term weight loss impossible? I suspect impossible is too strong. Some people have done it so it’s not impossible. It’s just very very hard, highly unlikely, improbable. I know in my case it’s tough.

It might both be true that weight loss is near impossible and true that excess weight hurts health. That’s sad but something being sad doesn’t stop it being true.

The poodle video makes this Health at Every Size point in terms of dogs. See Poodle Science.

image

No one wants greyhounds to put on weight, or chihuahuas to get taller. No one expects Saint Bernard to slim down. That’s true even though the larger dogs have shorter lives.

Now when it comes to humans and weight, it’s more complicated than that. But the truth is there’s lots of things I want that I can’t have. For example, I’d love changeable length hair. And while we’re really dreaming, changeable height. And wings. And maybe we could be playful with gender.

I’ve often thought it would be great to have size adjustable breasts, big and fancy for going out, pretty much flat while running.

I’d also like to have houses in New Zealand and Australia, find a cure for cancer, end racial discrimination, make the world happy and safe for people of all sexual and gender orientations and have more time for camping, canoeing, biking, etc. Life is full of things worth wishing for.

We do what we can. I’ve exercise a lot not just because it’s healthy but also because I’m happiest moving a lot. I eat well, again because eating well helps my body move in ways I enjoy.

If I lose weight, that’s terrific. But frankly while it’s something I want I have no big expectations beyond losing weight for the cycling season which I know I can do. Keeping it off is tough. I’ve been trying to lose weight most of my life. And wanting what I can’t have has never seemed a good game plan for life happiness.

image

diets · eating · equality · Uncategorized

Does Feeling Good about Weight Loss Make Me a “Bad Feminist?”

Tracy I24 Comments

EqualityMy post the other day about reasons for losing weight besides body hatred generated a great discussion about my implication that appearance-oriented reasons aren’t “consistent with” feminism.

This world has lots to be sad about, including the phenomenon of healthy disagreement among feminists (a good thing) turning into accusations and finger-pointing and the charge that someone is either a “bad feminist” or not a feminist at all. I don’t like to participate in that.

And yet, I don’t think that just anything is consistent with feminism. It’s a political ideology with a clear agenda. That agenda aims first and foremost at promoting gender equality and eradicating gender oppression. Recognizing that women are a diverse group, most feminists either implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that you can’t just isolate gender — race, class, disability, sexuality, ethnicity are also significant dimensions of oppression, and these can interact with one another and with gender to create unique forms of oppression–that is, structural patterns of systemic disadvantage and inequality (forgive me if this is pedantic — I am after all a philosophy professor).

In short, feminism is not just a simple matter of promoting choice for individuals. We need to be keenly aware of the way structures can create social arrangements that privilege some and disadvantage others, not on the basis of individual skills, talents, or means, but rather on the basis of membership (or perceived membership) in visible social groups (be the marked by gender, race, class, sexuality, disability or some combination of these and other social categories that people use to classify people and create social hierarchies).

So while I don’t like all that slamming of one another for not being feminist enough, I also truly believe that there is usually room for improvement.  It’s a simple fact that some behaviors and attitudes do contribute to and promote those patterns of inequality.  And that means that individual choices can have consequences beyond the individual who makes them.

Someone commented that she didn’t really like the implication that it was un-feminist to want to lose weight for the sake of appearance only. I’d suggested in my post that there may be other reasons — health, performance — that were “okay,” but wanting to be thinner for its own sake wasn’t among them.

The fact is, I have unsettled views about all of this as it plays out in my own life. I spend a lot of time trying to re-train my reaction to weight gain and weight loss. For decades the scale determined how I felt about myself. Daily, it either gave me permission to feel okay about myself (if the number went down) or not (if the number went up).

In other words, losing weight has always made me feel kind of good, gaining has always made me feel kind of bad. And at a meta-level, my self-awareness about this fact about me makes me feel a little hypocritical, as if I’m a “bad feminist.” Natalie commented about this and we agreed that there is a lot to say about this issue still.

Intellectually I believe 100% that I am not my weight.  I’m 110% behind the view that no one else’s worth or worthiness is determined by the number on the scale. And yet in my own case, at some level, I still think of weight loss as an achievement of sorts.

Now, why should that make me a bad feminist?  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that we are anti-diet, anti-appearance focused in our approach to fitness. I have a strong conviction that this is the right way to go, that dieting and the obsession with getting thin is not only self-defeating at the individual level, but oppressive to women more generally. It buys into normative femininity, promotes a narrow view of what an acceptable women’s body is like, and supports a fat-phobic point of view.

The saving grace in my life over the past couple of years has been my slow and steady evolution from a chronic dieter and slave to the scale to a triathlete who cares dramatically more about getting stronger and faster than getting thinner.

And so when I feel that twinge of disappointment, as I did when I got back from my vacation and had gained four pounds, I feel bad twice. Once from the disappointment and once from judging myself for being disappointed. Bad feminist!

When I reflect more fully on this state of affairs though, I don’t actually believe that it makes me a bad feminist. Instead, I think it means I’m having an understandably difficult time fully extricating myself from oppressive social attitudes. My gut still reacts in the way it always has, in the way I’ve been conditioned to react — as if weight loss is a good thing, weight gain a bad thing.

But upon reflection, I know that it’s just a thing — not good, not bad. And I know too that there are lots of other more productive ways we, as women, can spend our time than embroiled in our typically fruitless attempts to change our bodies.  Weight loss can be empowering, but so can all sorts of other things.

Maybe the real issue is that I’m weighing myself at all. Whether that makes me a bad feminist is not so much the point. The fact is, I’ve had times in my life when I swore off the scale completely, and at those times, I was able to turn my attention to other things.  Whatever our view of weight loss, for most of us there are more important things in the world that we can spend our energy on, and without compromising our health.

Those things might actually contribute to social equality. And that’s something any feminist can feel good about.

body image · diets · Uncategorized · weight loss

Weight Loss, Body Hatred, and the Possibility of Other Motives

Tracy I27 Comments

We spend a lot of time on the blog talking about body positivity and self-acceptance.  But sometimes we also talk about weight loss.  Whether it be for performance reasons, as I’ve discussed (with some skepticism that it makes it “okay” to have it as a goal) and as Samantha thinks about re. her cycling or to get the blood pressure in check, as Natalie has done, there are reasons other than normative femininity to lose weight.

But some people think that as a feminist blog, we should never ever talk about weight loss as something to aim for. Weight loss is associated the the pressure to be thin, oppressive norms, and a generally negative opinion of fat, fat bodies, and fat people. I

Not only that, but we have always taken a strong anti-diet position on the blog. Diets don’t work. The staggering statistics in support of their inefficacy speak for themselves. Almost everyone who successfully loses weight with restrictive dieting gains most (often more) of it back over time. Sometimes it takes a few years, sometimes just a few weeks. It depends on the method — fad diets and highly restrictive approaches to weight loss have the worst outcomes.

And if diets don’t work, why are doctors always pushing us to lose weight anyway? They give all sorts of unsolicited advice, making body weight monitoring a regular part of ongoing medical care even for people who aren’t having any health issues at all.

We reject the whole BMI thing.  And both Sam and I promote the idea of finding activities you enjoy and getting out and doing them, no matter what your size and without having weight loss as a focal point.

We care about metabolic health, and are more likely to encourage everyone to eat more, not less! In fact, I’m not sure we have any posts that encourage people to eat less.

We’ve written about all of this and more. And yet sometimes we talk about weight loss.  And a few people have let us know that it disturbs them. That it indicates to them that we’re not “feminist enough.”

I’m not big on defending myself as a feminist, either to anti-feminists or to other feminists.  But what I want to say here is that Sam and I aren’t just feminists. We’re actually feminist philosophers.

Now, not all feminist philosophers believe exactly the same things. But one of the things that makes us fairly compatible is that we’re both fairly moderate and open to other ways of seeing things. This means that on our Facebook page, for example, we’ll sometimes post content that we don’t agree with,. We might do that just because it makes an interesting point worthy of consideration OR because it’s clearly getting something wrong in an interesting way.

But the real question for me when we post about weight loss, at least where feminism is concerned, is: are their any legitimate reasons for wanting to lose weight, reasons that have nothing to do with hating our bodies, trying to fit normative ideals, or even worse, hating and punishing ourselves.

And I think the answer to that is pretty clearly “yes.”

I think we’re right to be skeptical about medical reasons even though in some cases it could make a difference.  The fact is, so does getting active and developing healthy eating habits.  Weight loss could be a by-product of that, but setting it as a primary goal is probably going to be self-defeating anyway.

Then there are the performance reasons that athletes obsess about. I blogged about racing weight not too long ago. And Sam has talked about wanting to weigh less so she can fly up hills more quickly. In my post, I worried that after a couple of years of liberating myself from weight loss as a goal, aiming for “racing weight” or any kind of weight-related performance improvement could take me back to old bad habits associated with dieting: poor body image, weight obsession, worrying about food all the time, berating myself for eating.

I also worried that you can dress it up anyway you like, but aiming for weight loss for whatever reason is going to have the same results. Wanting to perform better doesn’t mean your weight loss is going to be any more lasting than if you did it for other reasons. Athletes don’t even expect to maintain their race weight or the weight they will compete at on game day through the entire year. It’s seasonal.

So I guess I have my worries about that too. Yes, we can have non-body-hating reasons to want to lose weight. And in the end, I think those reasons can be consistent with feminist ideals. But having different reasons doesn’t change the facts about sustainable weight loss.

Sam has blogged about weight loss unicorns before. They’re the people, and we all know some of them, who lose weight and keep it off. They’re unicorns because they are rare.

And even if someone has reasons for wanting to lose weight that are consistent with feminism, I myself avoid entering into any conversation with anyone where my expected role is to praise them for their weight loss efforts. I pretty much never do that because, as I blogged about here, I do not believe “You’ve lost weight, you look great” is a compliment in polite society. Rather, it bespeaks a kind of body policing. It’s really hard to be explicit about noticing someone’s weight loss (or gain) and not be engaged in body policing.

Weight loss and dieting have long been considered as oppressive tools, contrary to the liberatory goals of feminism. Besides blogging about it a lot I’ve also done a bit of philosophical work on the topic. For me, I know weight loss is a dangerous goal. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand why some people might want to lose a few pounds for reasons that are consistent with the aims of feminism, among which, of course, are the freedom to make our own choices without being condemned for them.

 

diets · weight loss

Why don’t plus sized athletes lose weight?

Sam B6 Comments

Last week I wrote about plus sized athletes: Plus sized endurance athletes, we exist!

And at the end of my post I said the reader might be wondering why these runners/swimmers/cyclists are so big. Why don’t they lose weight?

This question comes in two different flavours:

First, the curious: How could they be that big after all that swimming/biking/cycling? Shouldn’t all that activity have resulted in weight loss?

Second, the normative: Why haven’t they tried to lose weight? Surely you’d be a faster swimmer/runner/cyclist if you dropped a few kilos?

In response to the first version, it’s amazing how much you can move your body and not lose weight. Tracy blogged too about this too when she wrote about the connection between endurance training and getting lean. (Hint: basketball won’t make you tall either.)

I was alternately amused/outraged when a staff person in the academic department where I work suggest that in order to lose weight I should consider walking to work. You know, start with the little things, like getting off the bus one stop earlier. Apparently, according to her, it makes all the difference.  Except of course it doesn’t, even as far as fitness, not weight loss is concerned. See Taking the stairs will not get you in shape.

At the time I was training for a triathlon, swimming every morning, doing 100 km + bike rides on the weekends, running, and lifting weights. When the staff member found that out she was flabbergasted. I think she wondered, why keep doing it, going to all that effort, if it isn’t working? I was getting faster, fitter, feeling better but in her mind the only real measure of success was weight loss. That still strikes me as sad.

If you’re curious about the relationship between exercise and weight loss see Which is more important for weight loss? Diet or Exercise?

Dr. John Briffa, who runs an excellent health blog, analyzed a study examining weight loss without dietary intervention here. He explains:

In this study, 320 post-menopausal women whose weight ranged from normal to obese were randomised to either an additional exercise or no additional exercise group (the control group). Those in the exercise group were instructed to take 45 minutes worth of moderate-vigorous aerobic exercise, 5 times a week for a year. Both groups (the additional exercise and the control group) were instructed not to change their diets.

At the end of the year, it was found that the exercise group, compared to the control group, lost an average of 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of fat. I’d say that quite a lot of us would be glad to drop a couple of kgs of fat. But now I’d also like to focus on what these women had to do to achieve this loss.

While the exercise group were instructed to exercise 5 times a week for 45 minutes, what they actually did was exercise for an average of 3.6 days each week. Total exercise time averaged 178.5 mins per week. We can multiply this by 52 to get the total number of minutes exercise over the course of the year, and divide this by 60 to convert it into hours. Doing this, we get a total of just under 155 hours. That’s about 77 hours of exercise for each kg of fat lost.

Most people would balk at the idea of exercising for 77 hours to lose 1 kg of fat. (Or equivalently 35 hours to lose 1 pound, for us American folk.)

That’s in response to the first version of the question.

In response to the normative version, have a look at our posts on the near impossibility of long term weight loss. See Sam and Tracy Respond to the Near Impossibility of Weight Loss: Our Posts All In One Place. Given the success rate, it seems a perfectly reasonable response not to have weight loss as a goal. I’d like to be 5’10 too. But no one asks what I’m doing to make it happen.

Some people have complicated weight loss journeys. See here. Some of my weight loss saga is here.

Or the larger athletes might just be happy being larger. Not everyone wants to be thin as hard as it is to believe that.

I really enjoyed reading Ragen Chastain’s blog post on what would happen if she lost weight training for the IronMan competition. She highly doubts she will lose weight but….

So, with all of that said, what happens if I lose weight on the path to the IM? First of all, if I do experience weight loss then it would most likely be a short term loss in response to extraordinary circumstances and, like all weight loss, the chances of me maintaining it are miniscule.

It’s highly unlikely that if I lose weight at all I would lose enough weight to no longer be considered “fat” There are plenty of fat endurance athletes. What I think is more likely is that I will lose a couple of pounds and have to deal with annoying and unwanted “compliments” from people who assume I’ll be grateful that they are keeping tabs on my body size, or who assume that I will be happier with a body that is smaller.