Category: fat

body image · diets · eating · fat · fitness · overeating · running · swimming · weight lifting · yoga

If Diets Don’t Work, Then What?

Tracy I17 Comments

One of our favorite things about the blog is the way it has generated conversation and a sense of community.   We enjoy hearing from people, not least of which because we’ve had generous comments for the most part. Once in awhile, however, someone calls us on something. That’s okay too. Debate is good. We’re philosophers, and, as Sam said, that’s how we roll.

I was called out just last week when a regular commenter said that I spend a lot of time repeating that diets don’t work, but I don’t offer anything hopeful or helpful. Craig said, “if this blog is about getting fit and healthy, and not simply about “fat acceptance” – give us some clue as to how obese people can lose a lot of fat in a healthy way and keep it off for reasons pertaining to health, as opposed to just reminding us of the inevitability of us being fat and unhealthy forever!”

Granted he is right about one thing for sure: neither Sam nor I has given any advice for how to diet away fat and keep it off.  The stats for success using that approach are depressingly grim.  I say “depressingly” because I wish it were not so. But does this mean that I think there is no hopeful or helpful approach that might take the place of plans and programs aimed specifically at losing weight and keeping it off?  Not at all.

Sam has blogged quite a bit about the potential to be both fit and, by the standards of most charts, overweight. Both of us stress performance goals over weight loss goals.  And both of us would love to be leaner for various reasons having to do mostly with the strength that additional muscle mass would bring, thus enabling us to perform better at some of our chosen activities.

We have also talked about metabolic health. Amber at Go Kaleo! is a strong proponent of focusing on lifting heavy weights and eating in such a way as to stoke the fire that is our metabolism. That usually means eating substantially more than we thought we needed to eat and that most diet plans will tell us we need to eat for maintenance.

Though I have not yet read Amber’s new book, Taking up Space, I know that the information from her blog is first rate, and that the book compiles a lot of information from the blog, making it easy to find and use.  As Amber tells her own story, she was quite overweight by any standards and had a damaged metabolism. She says,

2008, after 35 years of the Standard American Diet, a sedentary lifestyle, and two pregnancies, I found myself obese, exhibiting a whole laundry list of Metabolic Disorder symptoms, and hurtling madly down a path toward chronic illness and an early, preventable death…After decades of diets, yo-yoing weight, and thousands of dollars spent on weight loss gimmicks, I decided to stop trying to lose weight and instead focus on nourishing my body with real, whole foods in adequate amounts, to achieve HEALTH, not weight loss. Instead of punishing myself for dietary indiscretions by spending hours running on the treadmill, interspersed with years of absolute inactivity, I started finding activities I enjoyed..

After doing her own extensive research she developed an approach that has certainly worked for her and enabled her to change her body composition dramatically while eating lots of good food, including carbohydrates. So that’s an approach that I would recommend.

I have also talked about Matt Stone’s Diet Recovery 2, another book in which metabolism and the damage that diets can do to it figure prominently.  Again, he recommends an approach that is 180 degrees from what we usually see recommended in the form of diet for weight loss.

My preferred approach and the one that I am practicing these days is Intuitive Eating.  It is working for me. By “working,” I mean that I am not obsessed with food and weight. That’s a big change from my experience for the majority of my adult life. I do not weigh myself anymore, and the last time I did (for curiosity’s sake — a dangerous move that I will not engage in very often), I weighed the same as when I’d started intuitive eating. If I end up gaining, I will not let a weight gain deter me from continuing to develop an overall healthy relationship to food, weight, and activity.

I combine this way of eating with my favorite activities: yoga, swimming, running, and resistance training. I follow a schedule for training, though I am not rigid about it.  I would rather do less than I think I ought to do than aim so high that I start wanting to skip working out or feel as if working out is an obligation instead of an enjoyable part of my life.  I recommend that anyone who is just starting out or who is struggling to find a rhythm with it aim lower rather than higher.

Above all, Sam and I don’t budge on being anti-diet.  Why? Because they don’t work. I didn’t make that up and, as I said, I wish it weren’t true. I don’t keep saying this to discourage people, but rather to allow us to move on from a failed experiment.

We pretty consistently offer a different approach to those who are interested in improving their health (again, as Sam said yesterday, you don’t have to be interested in this). And we do offer some specific tools and information for embarking on that approach.

I have said before that it is not an easy thing to do. It’s very possible that those who follow Amber’s approach or Matt Stone’s approach or the intuitive eating approach or the focus on strength, not weight, will weigh more than the weight they have in mind as their ideal. But over time, the focus on that number will recede into the distance as a more energizing focus takes its place.

The “results” might not be as immediate or dramatic as what you will see on a restrictive diet. But they will be more sustainable.

When I was always dieting and gaining back weight, my dad — a family doctor — liked to say that the only thing necessary to lose weight and keep it off was to “change your eating habits.”  This truism used to annoy me, but the fact is, I never took it seriously.  I did have to change my eating habits.  The single most necessary change I had to make was to stop eating beyond my comfort level.  This requires a more mindful approach to food and to how I feel when I eat it. It’s every bit as difficult as dieting but the difference is that it produces sustainable changes.

There is nothing extreme about eating mindfully. And there is nothing extreme about the recommended approach to activity. In both cases, let’s make choices we enjoy.

I hope very much that the overall message of our blog is not one that inspires hopelessness, but rather one that encourages those who wish to enjoy a healthy approach to physical fitness to try doing things differently, and in more sustainable ways.  We would love to offer a “how-to” with 5 or 7 or 10 easy steps. But that’s not how we do things around here.

[thanks go to Craig for sparking the conversation that led me to write this post]

body image · fat

How equating being fat with being out of shape hurts thin people too

Sam B14 Comments

I’ve been trying to write a post for awhile now about the dangers of conflating fitness and thinness. I started out wanting to address the concern a few people have raised about why there aren’t more fat fit people since clearly it’s possible to be both fat and fit.

My draft post on fatness and fitness begins by asking everyone to reconsider the claim that there aren’t lots and lots of fit and fat people. Recall my post Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI in which I talked about the number of Olympic athletes who are overweight or obese using BMI as a measure.

Another important part of my answer is that gyms are hostile environments for lots of people, including fat people. Tracy and I have both written about our negative locker room experiences–A Tale of Two Locker Rooms and Why I left Goodlife Fitness some years ago–and we are relatively privileged gym goers.

Of course, it’s not like things improve once you leave the locker room. My main complaint is that everyone assumes I’m new to exercise and that once I get into the groove the pounds will just drop off. Um, here let me pick up that very heavy weight for you and no, no they won’t. For more on this theme read Myths and Stereotypes Are Ruining My Zumba Class!, Five Things Every Gym Should Already Be Doing, and Working Out While Fat.

But I also want to make a more complicated suggestion that when you think you’re only exercising to lose weight, and you don’t lose weight, then you might just quit. The reason not to quit is of course is that exercise has enormous health benefits, far beyond weight loss. And the connection between health and obesity is complicated. It’s not even clear that it’s in everyone’s health interest to lose weight. See Obesity, health, and fitness: some odd connections.

So, as I mentioned at the start I’ve been having difficulty writing this post. Something felt wrong about it. What? What’s missing? How about this: What about the thin people? The original post leaves them out and thin people are hurt too by the myth that thinness equals fitness. Probably they lose out, for example, on not having their doctors remind them of the benefits of regular exercise. I don’t know, it’s never happened to me, but I imagine they just step off the scales and get told, “you’re fine.”

If you think the main, or only, reason to exercise is weight loss and you’re a naturally thin person, you have little reason to get or stay physically active. And society will treat you as if you’re fit since we’re seem to be big on the problem I mentioned at the outset, conflating thinness and fitness.

An older male relative of mine once said it was odd that the only women he saw exercising outside in the morning are those that don’t need to. But of course that’s just wrong. Our bodies were made for lots and lots of movement throughout the day and that’s true for all of us, whatever our size. Thin people might stay home because they think they didn’t need to exercise. They’re already thin after all. Everyone assumes they’re working out. Fat people might choose not to exercise beside we’re ashamed or because it’s not “working.” We must be doing it wrong. Because we’re not losing weight.

Thin people are hurt by the myth that thinness equals fitness because they don’t think they need to exercise and they do. Thin people are a high risk group. They die at an earlier than fat people. I blogged about this: Lower death risk for the overweight, go us!

From the New York Times: “The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people. The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.”

So get out there thin people. Get moving! 🙂

——————————————————————

Of course saying that ‘thin people are hurt too’ sounds a bit like saying ‘but what about the men?’ in the context of feminism.

There is an important difference between harm and oppression and the structures of our society are set to to privilege the thin. Saying that thin privilege exists doesn’t mean denying thin people can be hurt too. The language we use matters. Some people prefer the language of ‘fat acceptance,’ while others think we need to talk about ‘body diversity’ to be properly inclusive. The worry is that the latter makes it sound as if thin people and fat people suffer equally from our norms about bodies and size. They don’t.

But here I just wanted to point out one way that thin people are harmed by the mistaken connection between thinness and fitness.

Here are some great posts on skinny bashing, body diversity, and thin privilege:

!. Miss Mary Max argues that “Skinnybashing” claims are fundamentally a display of thin privilege.

“The truth is, the pain skinnybashing causes individual people with thin privilege does not hurt less (or matter less) than the pain caused by fatphobia.  But it does occur in a different context, and it has not been institutionalized to the extent that fat oppression has.  And no matter how genuinely pained thin people are — and no matter how much we should be doing about that — skinnybashing claims re-direct discussions of fat oppression into terms of “body diversity,” erasing the power dynamics between body types and the continued prevelance of fat oppression.  In other words, while body diversity is a laudable goal, to demand that fat-acceptance activists redirect toward “diversity” requires that they quit fighting fat oppression and embrace the false notion that thin and fat bodies are — on a societal level — policed equally.  It’s the more pallatable alternative, which we use to opt out of the challenging admission that our pain and our privilege exist simultaneously.”

Read more here.

2. Thin Privilege Checklist

3. What’s This Thin Privilege Thing?

body image · diets · eating · fat · overeating · sports nutrition · weight loss

On the Grapefruit Diet, Atkins, Paleo, the Zone, Five Factor, and Cabbage Soup: Reflections on Fad Diets and the Meaning of “Success”

Tracy I10 Comments

When we track our blog stats, Sam and I always get a kick out of seeing that our post on raspberry ketones, pure green coffee bean extract, and garcina cambogia is among the most popular.  It’s not popular because everyone wants to read about why the appeal to authority is a fallacy. It’s not popular because it essentially dismisses these things, claiming that you should keep your money and focus on a healthy approach to eating real food.

No. It’s popular because “raspberry ketones,” “pure green coffee bean extract,” and “garcinia cambogia” are popular search terms for people looking for the next weight loss miracle. They are among the latest fads.
“Fad diet” is a derogatory way of referring to any trendy weight loss plan. I’ve yet to hear it used in a positive way.  When I was a teenager and in my twenties, popular fad diets included the banana diet, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the Scarsdale Diet.

The grapefruit diet is pretty representative of how these things go, so I’ll use it as an example.  You eat half a grapefruit at each meal. With it, at breakfast you have two eggs and some bacon, at lunch you have meat and salad, at dinner you have meat and a vegetable (from an approved list), and then you drink a glass of tomato juice or skim milk at bed time.

The “key” ingredient, be it cabbage soup, bananas, grapefruit, acai berries, a miracle juice or a special smoothie, is really just a diversion.  The reason people lose weight rapidly on these diets is that they involve severe calorie restriction and usually cut out most simple and complex carbohydrates (except a few vegetables and one or two types of fruit). They also include very few snacks, usually restricting eating to three bland meals a day.

Fad diets like this don’t even pretend to be long term.  They are almost always for a stated period of time, ranging from 3 days to 3 weeks.

Other kinds of fad diets, such as the Zone, Atkins, the Blood Type Diet, the Paleo Diet, or the South Beach Diet purport to be longer term and most include advice for eating their way forever.  But they also include long lists of forbidden foods, such as carbohydrates other than certain approved vegetables. I don’t care what anyone says, our bodies need carbs to function efficiently.

Again, the complicated food plans are, in my view, just a diversion.  If we eat a lot of junk food we will maintain a higher weight than many of us wish to maintain.  These plans usually cut out chips and fried foods, cakes and pies, cookies and candy bars. Cutting those things out will of course allow someone to maintain a lower weight than they might if they ate these things all the time.

The diets also often restrict juice.

I was at a talk the other day by Harley Pasternak, personal trainer for many Hollywood celebrities and author of “The Five Factor Diet.”  Other that his approved smoothies (because apparently we ingest more nutritional ingredients when our food is blended than when we chew it ourselves), his diet requires that all drinks be calorie free. He spoke of fresh squeezed OJ as if it was the devil (note that a cup and a half does contain an alarming 450 calories—this might be good information to have but doesn’t automatically mean you ought never drink fresh squeezed orange juice again).

An interesting thing that Harley Pasternak said was this. Though he believes, and all the research points to the fact that, slow, steady weight loss of about half a pound a week is the most effective for long term good results, no one is interested in that kind of weight loss. A book that offered that would not sell.  These days, we want fast results, a la Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Body. Without fast results in the first week or two, people will not stick to a plan.

That goes a long way to explaining the appeal of fad diets that are for a limited time only. They get the weight off quickly.  So those who go on them feel successful. That keeps them focused, at least for the period of the diet.  And knowing that it is time-limited makes it bearable.

But as I’ve said many times before, short term results aren’t all that interesting.  They’re uninteresting because they are fleeting at best.  The weight comes back and in 98% of the cases, people end up heavier than they were before they went on the diet.

This is in part because they have damaged their metabolism. The body responds to severely restricted eating by slowing down the metabolism to cope with the lower food intake and use it more efficiently. Most of us do not ease ourselves off of fad diets, but rebound with a major binge on all that we were deprived of while eating half grapefruits and meat and salad.

The need for quick results is what sabotages our efforts from the get go.  If slow but steady is what works, then why are we so resistant to slow progress?  Maybe we need new measures of success. Much of what Sam and I are trying to do in our lives, and are trying to champion in the blog, is to revise our visions of success.  Sam has a great post that explains why body weight and even BMI have been shown to be poor measures of fitness and health. I’m with her when she advocates for athletic over aesthetic values.  It’s not all about looking a certain way, as we can see when we look at the reality of fitness figure competitors.

These days, I have a more diverse sense of goals.  I do not have weight loss goals at all anymore.  I am happy with what my body can do and I enjoy fueling it according to the guidelines of the intuitive eating approach.  A great measure of success for me is to maintain a non-obsessive relationship with food, eat what I want when I need it and in the amounts that keep me satisfied, and above all to enjoy eating.  It’s a wonderful part of life.

I also have performance goals for distance and speed in swimming and running, and for weight and reps in my resistance training, and for gaining strength, confidence, and balance in my yoga practice.

Besides those goals, I have simple “practice” goals each week.  These are just about showing up to do what I said I would do and what I feel I need to do to train well.  For me, this means running 3 times a week, going swimming 2 times a week, resistance training every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and going to yoga 3-4 times per week.  If I can stay on task with these commitments, I feel pretty successful.

I feel fairly confident that following through on doing what is necessary to meet these goals will automatically change the ratio of lean mass to fat in my body composition. I do not preoccupy myself with this as a goal, but I do look on it with interest, for the purposes of our “fittest by fifty” adventure.  To that end, I have scheduled another bod pod visit for next month.

Finally, I’ve got an overall goal that supports my sense of well-being, and that is to have a pretty relaxed attitude about it all. I’m not a drill sergeant anymore. If I miss a workout or eat less mindfully than I rather would, it’s not the end of the world and I don’t spend a single second in remorse.  Onward!

Fad diets fuel an all-or-nothing mentality.  You’re on it or you’re not.  They set us up to fail even if we are successful on the diet itself. Why? Because the pounds will return. They do not promote good health, strong muscles, or sustainable habits. They do not promote moderation, but rather, extremism.  I’m not alone in my views about fad diets. Go Kaleo has a whole blog with the tagline: Are you as tired of fad diets as I am?

I liked Sam’s post about moderation yesterday because I’m a big fan of it myself. I’m also a big fan of slow and steady progress that takes me in a consistent direction. And I’m an advocate of doing less instead of more. And I really don’t like wasting my time with things that set me up for failure, demoralize me, and make me feel badly about myself.  Fad diets have done all of these things to me, lots of my friends, and millions of people I don’t know.

Let’s revise our view of success in ways that support our well-being.

aging · body image · clothing · diets · fat · fitness · yoga

A Tale of Two Locker Rooms

Tracy I19 Comments

Happy International Women’s Day! In honour of IWD, I thought I’d write about my experience in a women-only space that lots of us who lead active lifestyles spend some time in: the women’s locker room.

I frequent two locker rooms regularly: the women’s locker room at the hot yoga studio and the adults only women’s locker room at the Y. These locker rooms have very different vibes and cultures. The difference fascinates me.

More than half of the women in the hot yoga locker room are under 35. A good majority of these women have youthful, firm, slender bodies that fit the ideal of feminine beauty so prized by our current social context. They take their hot yoga class wearing the shortest shorts and the teeniest crop tops. And to me, they look enviably perfect in their hot yoga clothes.

Yet these same young women hide behind their towels when they are getting dressed in the locker room. Some even change in the shower stalls or the bathroom stalls.  Many do not shower at the studio after hot yoga. They opt to leave the building hot and wet with sweat rather than get naked in a public (not so public really — it’s a locker room!) space.

The culture of modesty in this locker room even makes me change my behaviour a bit. I feel positively brazen when I remove my towel to get dressed after my shower (unlike the majority whose skills of getting their bras and panties on while holding a towel astound me). I face the wall and get my undies on as quickly as I can.

At the Y, I chose an adult’s only membership mostly because I love the locker room.  It’s got extra amenities like a steam room, hot tub, and sauna. In addition to having plenty of day lockers, each member gets a kit locker where she can keep some basics like swim goggles, toiletries, gym shoes, and a lock. There are stacks of clean white towels.

But the main reason I love that locker room at the Y is that everyone is comfortable walking around naked.  The age demographic is different from the hot yoga studio.  In my locker room at the Y, most women are between 40-75.  Of course you get a few beautiful bodies in that age range, but for the most part we are an average bunch, with cellulite and saggy arms, tummies and back fat.

No one hides behind a towel. We walk naked from the shower to the steam room where we lie down, still naked, on our white towels.  We lounge naked in the hot tub.  Sometimes, we’ll throw a towel around our waist when we leave the shower area and blow dry our hair while topless.  No blinks, winks, or furtive glances. No cowering or mincing behind towels.

No body shame.

Samantha has written quite a bit about body shaming. I’m with her. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make me feel good about who I am.  It makes us do drastic things to punish ourselves. It makes young women starve themselves to achieve thigh gaps.

The main difference between these two locker rooms is the presence of body-shame in the air.  I’m not saying that the women in the hot yoga locker room are shaming one another. I think it’s more insidious than that. These young women shame themselves. They — beautiful, youthful, fit, slender, strong — do not like the way they look naked. They feel painfully self-conscious.

And so they hide behind their towels, deny themselves a good shower until they get home, dress in the shower stall if they do shower, or pull dry top layers over soaking wet yoga clothes for the trip home.

I’m not sure why the extra step of being naked brings this on, considering that lots of hot yoga clothes are, of necessity, pretty minimal to begin with. I myself do hot yoga in the skimpiest clothing I feel comfortable in (no exposed midriff for me — yes, I do experience some self-consciousness sometimes. I’m much more comfortable totally naked than in skimpy clothing).

I would love to take every single one of these women hiding behind towels to the locker room at the Y. I’d love to say “SEE! You are allowed to enjoy your post-workout routine without trying to be invisible.”

Older women can teach younger women to take up space, not to seek to be unseen.

I have sometimes reflected that the level of comfort with nudity in the Y locker room could have something to do with our cultural assumptions about sexuality and age.  Younger women’s bodies are undeniably more sexualized than older women’s bodies. Some people think (annoyingly and wrongly) that over fifty or maybe over sixty women aren’t “sexual.” I’ve heard older women express a kind of relief that, past a certain age, they are not considered sexual beings anymore.  Might the inverse be true of the young women? Our hyper-sexualization of young women might make them want to hide their bodies. Could this have something to do with their ability to feel at ease naked in the locker room?

I hope that’s not the reason. I hope, rather, that we reach a certain age in our lives when we feel comfortable with who we are and accepting of one another.  Maybe some get there sooner than others, but we can all get there eventually.

If you aren’t there yet and want to feel inspired, I recommend a gym like my Y  where there’s a diverse age range in the locker room, bodies of all shapes, sizes, and abilities, and no shame. There’s a lot to learn about body image from the wise women who have reached a certain age.

aging · fat · swimming

My Life Long Love Affair with Swimming

Tracy I6 Comments

I was not yet five years old, the youngest person at my first swimming lesson at an unheated (freezing) outdoor pool in the Don Mills townhouse complex where my family lived when we first immigrated to Canada from South Africa in the late sixties.

My mother stood at the side of the pool and wept that day.  In South Africa at that time swimming lessons were for whites only. Most (all?) public pools were for whites only. And the beaches with the safe swimming were for whites only. Of the many things that apartheid would have denied us if we’d stayed in SA, the swimming lessons were the least negotiable with my mother once we moved to Canada.

And though I may not have fallen in love with it that very first day, it didn’t take me long. I cannot remember a time in my life when I haven’t loved to swim.

Before I turned five, my family moved out of the townhouse complex and into a single family home further out in the suburbs.  After a year or two there, taking advantage of the spacious back yard, we put in a concrete swimming pool.  The construction ended sometime in November.

November in Toronto is cold.  No matter. My dad cranked up the heat on the new pool and we swam and swam until it had to be closed for the winter. The steam rose from the water as we splashed around.  The cold didn’t deter us from running (okay, walking quickly, because running on deck is a no-no) to the diving board and showing off our best dives.

Through my childhood and teens, those swimming lessons were a constant.  When I ran out of levels in the regular lessons, I switched to synchronized swimming for a while, to competitive swimming (back stroke was my best event, with freestyle a close second), and even to diving.

When I outgrew lessons, I still loved the backyard pool. Even though 40 feet is short for lap swimming, it works if you want it to work.

Like Samantha, I’m training for that triathlon in July, so I dove back into the pool this week after a pretty long hiatus from lap swimming.  A couple of days ago a friend and I made a date to meet at the Y for a swim instead of going out for lunch as we normally would.

When I slid into the fast lane of the pool, I had a feeling of “coming home.” I wound up slowly with ten lengths of breast stroke and then got into a rhythmic freestyle for about fifteen more minutes.  I shared the lane with just one other swimmer who was happy to let me pass whenever I lapped him (I do get a bit competitive in the pool. I love to pass, hate being passed.).

Swimming laps calms me like no other activity I do. In 1988, when started as a PhD student at MIT, the first thing I did was look up the pool hours. I used to go swimming every morning at 8 a.m. I did 40 lengths of the 25 metre pool. Just enough to keep me in the water, suspended in a thought-free state, listening only to the rhythm of my breath and the splash of my arms for about 20 minutes.  It kept me grounded in the early months of  what was for me an extraordinarily stressful PhD program. It has a meditative quality that I have spoken of before.

After just a few months, I gave up swimming for the gym when I read in a women’s fitness magazine that swimming made it harder to lose fat. I have no idea if that’s true. I’ve seen some pretty lean looking swimmers. But that article kept me out of the pool for a few years.

I felt deprived. Looking back, I can see that I experienced a deep sense of loss and sadness.  But because my goals back then were more aesthetic than anything else, an activity that would keep me “fat” (note: I was not the least bit overweight) just wouldn’t do.

After a few years without the pool as part of my life, I dove back in, intermittently, when I joined the Y here in London in the mid-nineties.  It’s been on-again, off-again since then.  A few years ago I got serious with swimming again. I even started working with a new style of swimming, total immersion.

And then the ear aches began.  After two or three minutes in the pool I’d have an excruciating ear ache that made swimming impossible. So I stopped.

I went to a conference a couple of years back at a university that had an exquisite 50 metre pool. By then, I’d actually forgotten why I stopped swimming. I read about the 50 metre pool to which I’d have access and it was a no-brainer. Of course I would use it. In I went. Again came the ear ache.

These days, I do a lot of sailing. And when I sail, I swim.  I’ve been experimenting for a few seasons now with ear plugs.  For the kind of light swimming I do in the lake when we’re on the sailboat, the earplugs have served me well. No problems.

So for my first trip back this week, I took them to the pool.  I went in cautious, worried that the ear plugs might not work for serious lap swimming. But they did!  And for that period of time that I was in the water I felt like a kid again. Swimming is the only thing I do activity-wise that doesn’t force me to think about wear and tear on my aging body! I feel as light and at ease in the pool now as I did when I was a child.

Because I wasn’t sure how this experiment would go, I took a day-pass earlier in the week. I am joining the Y again today, recommitting to my first love on Valentine’s Day.

Swimming, I love you and will never leave you again!  And Mum, thank you for introducing us and insisting we got to know each other!

body image · diets · eating · fat · fitness · motivation · sports nutrition

“Nutrition is the foundation of health and fitness. You simply cannot out train a poor diet.”

Sam B21 Comments

The quotation above is from Greg Glassman, the founder of Crossfit. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between nutrition and fitness and thinking about where there’s room for improvement in my efforts to be the ‘fittest by fifty.’

Unlike my co-blogger Tracy who has decided that sports nutrition counseling isn’t for her and who has stepped away from the scale, I’m continuing with habit based nutrition counseling. I’m a numbers geek, I like tracking, and I’m looking forward to getting leaner in the year ahead.

It’s not about hating the body I’m got, I’m quite fond of it thanks, and it can do amazing things, but I need reminders to give it the love and attention it deserves. With three kids and a busy career, I sometimes struggle to take care of myself. I’m not quite the opposite of the food obsessed dieter but it’s true that for me, more often than not, convenience and the needs of others, take precedence over my own food choices.

Whether it’s a banana and a protein bar before Crossfit, a drive thru coffee and bagel on the way to rowing, a pizza slice post Aikido or instant oatmeal as a warm bedtime snack, some of my food choices aren’t the best. And given the demands I place on my body, I need to do better.

For some reason, for me, physical activity is easy. I love it, can’t get enough of it, but nutrition is another matter. And yet, eating well supports everything else I do. And I do a lot so I need to eat very well. So I’m setting out to work on the foundation this year, to try to pay as much attention to nutrition as I do to other aspects of sports performance. I’m trying to think of eating as part of sports training. Nutrition counseling helps serve as a reminder that this matters.

I’ve blogged here about my reasons for wanting to be leaner but I need to balance that goal with making sure I eat enough to support my physical activity.

I just did another check in at the Bod Pod this week and I’m happy with my progress so far. I’ve lost another 4 lbs overall but more importantly, as part of that overall, I’ve also gained 2 lbs of muscle since my last check in, and so my per cent body fat is down 2%. Yay Crossfit! Yippee new muscles! I’ve joined Tracy in the merely “excess fat” category, heading towards “moderately lean.”

I’m also now following the Lean Eating program at Precision Nutrition.

You’ve probably read a few wonderful rants I’ve linked to by Krista Scott Dixon. Here’s my faves:

In addition to having put together the best women’s weight lifting site on the web, and having a PhD in Women’s Studies she’s also the Coaching Program Director for Precision Nutrition.  I’m actually working with another Precision Nutrition Krista though. Krista Chaus is another woman with a pretty impressive bio.

“Since beginning her competitive career as a strength athlete 10 year ago, Krista has become one of the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s Top 20 Female Powerlifters. She is also a National champion, provincial record holder and two times Commonwealth Championship medalist.

Recently, Krista has turned her competitive attention to the physique side of the industry, capturing 7 overall finishes in bodybuilding in 2008 and placing 5th at the 2009 Arnolds Amateur Bodybuilding Championships.  She’s currently working towards a National bench press record with the Canadian Powerlifting Association.” from her PN bio

It’s not a diet, in terms of short term change. Instead, I’m trying new habits on for size and trying to make them part of my life. The first big change for me is that one will sound familiar to those who’ve been following the blog: slow mindful eating.

There’ll be no vibrating forks for me though. I’m hoping to pay more attention to my food and less attention to electronic gadgets at the dinner table.

Anyway, wish me luck.

body image · diets · eating · fat · fitness · health · running

Thinking Critically about Obesity

Sam B3 Comments

Philosophers looking for excellent examples to use in critical thinking classes might be well served by our thinking about overweight, obesity, and weight loss. “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts about Obesity,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine today reviews shoddy reasoning abut obesity and asks why it is we continue to believe things to be true on the basis of little or no evidence in their favour or even with substantial evidence against.

Here’s Gina Kolata writing about the article in the New York Times,

“Myths and unproven assumptions about obesity and weight loss that have been repeated so often and with such conviction that even scientists like David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have fallen for some of them.Now, he is trying to set the record straight. In an article published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine, he and his colleagues lay out seven myths and six unsubstantiated presumptions about obesity. They also list nine facts that, unfortunately, promise little in the way of quick fixes for the weight-obsessed.” Myths of Weight Loss Are Plentiful, Researcher Says

The myths, “beliefs held true despite substantial evidence refuting them,” are:

“1. Small sustained changes in energy intake or expenditure will produce large, long-term weight changes

2. Setting realistic goals in obesity treatment is important because otherwise patients will become frustrated and lose less weight

3. Large, rapid weight loss is associated with poorer long-term weight outcomes than is slow, gradual weight loss

4. Assessing the stage of change or diet readiness is important in helping patients who seek weight-loss treatment

5. Physical-education classes in their current format play an important role in preventing or reducing childhood obesity

6. Breast-feeding is protective against obesity

7. A bout of sexual activity burns 100 to 300 kcal for each person involved”

The six presumptions, believed to be true but without evidence in their favour, are:

“1. Regularly eating (vs. skipping) breakfast is protective against obesity
2. Early childhood is the period during which we learn exercise and eating habits that influence our weight throughout life
3. Eating more fruits and vegetables will result in weight loss or less weight gain, regardless of whether one intentionally makes any other behavioral or environmental changes
4. Weight cycling (i.e., yo-yo dieting) is associated with increased mortality
5. Snacking contributes to weight gain and obesity
6. The built environment, in terms of sidewalk and park availability, influences obesity”

Why do we, where that includes many health care professionals, believe things to be true when there is no evidence in their favour (the presumptions) or worse when there is evidence against them (the myths)?

In the section of the article called “Knowing and Not Knowing” Allison discusses various sorts of biases that influence our thinking about health and weight. Writes Allison:

“When media coverage about obesity is extensive, many people appear to believe some myths (e.g., rapid weight loss facilitates weight regain) simply because of repeated exposure to the claims. Cognitive dissonance may prevent us from abandoning ideas that are important to us, despite contradictory evidence (e.g., the idea that breast-feeding prevents obesity in children). Similarly, confirmation bias may prevent us from seeking data that might refute propositions we have already intuitively accepted as true because they seem obvious (e.g., the value of realistic weight-loss goals).”

The 9 facts are less interesting, as facts tend to be! Diets don’t work in the long term. Exercise does help keep weight off. Heredity is important but is not destiny. Weight loss is greater with programs that provide meals. Some prescription drugs help with weight loss and maintenance. Weight-loss surgery is a good solution for some people. For overweight children programs that involve the whole family work best. Exercise is good for your health regardless of its effect on your weight. And in order to maintain a new lower weight you need to continue the conditions that led to weight loss.

Reference:

“Myths, Presumptions, and Facts about Obesity”

Krista Casazza, Ph.D., R.D., Kevin R. Fontaine, Ph.D., Arne Astrup, M.D., Ph.D., Leann L. Birch, Ph.D., Andrew W. Brown, Ph.D., Michelle M. Bohan Brown, Ph.D., Nefertiti Durant, M.D., M.P.H., Gareth Dutton, Ph.D., E. Michael Foster, Ph.D., Steven B. Heymsfield, M.D., Kerry McIver, M.S., Tapan Mehta, M.S., Nir Menachemi, Ph.D., P.K. Newby, Sc.D., M.P.H., Russell Pate, Ph.D., Barbara J. Rolls, Ph.D., Bisakha Sen, Ph.D., Daniel L. Smith, Jr., Ph.D., Diana M. Thomas, Ph.D., and David B. Allison, Ph.D.

N Engl J Med 2013; 368:446-454 January 31, 2013 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa120805

body image · diets · eating · fat · health

Shame on You Daniel Callahan or Bad Fat Day Rant

Sam B7 Comments

by Sam B and guest blogger, Kristin Rodier. (Kristin will be guest blogging later about her cross country ski experiences.)

Kristin is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. She works on “the connection between freedom and embodiment — specifically on habit, how to change habits, how habits constitute our selves, and different ways of having habits especially habits of gender.” And Kristin’s work is supervised by Cressida Heyes whose work on Weight Watchers and Foucault, we’ve mentioned here.  Her website is here, http://kristinrodier.wordpress.com/

____________________________________________________________

Yesterday was a bad day for fat news on the internet.

First across the newsfeed was this treat, Obese Drivers 80% More Likely to Die in Accidents.

“With thanks to current scientific research, scholars have already have observed issues connecting obesity with unsustainable ecology with causal links to industrial chemicals. Obesity is an ongoing global health concern, perhaps second only to the trend of climate change, and a recent study has discovered that auto accidents are a new venue of risk of fatality for obese people. Recently published research has indicated that the significantly overweight are 80% more likely to perish in an auto accident.”

How are climate change and death rates in auto crashes connected? Is the higher death rate in car crashes karmic revenge for the role fat people play in causing global warming? All this bad reasoning before morning coffee. (Coffee didn’t help.)

Because, you know it’s not large fossil fuel and fossil fueled corporations that are responsible for our environmental woes, nor the fault of governments who largely don’t regulate them, it’s the fault of individual fat people and our bad fat choices. (Actually, there are team meetings where we plot the downfall of the planet, text us your BMI and we’ll see you’re invited next time.)

It’s reminiscent of the episode of Dr. OZ where he had on Glen Gasser, author of Big Fat Lies.  Dr. OZ asked Gasser to put on a backpack weighing 80 pounds and then asked him to walk up a flight of stairs.  Gasser, being the Health At Every Size Proponent that he is, was there to promote the idea that weight maintenance and not necessarily weight loss combined with lifestyle changes can improve health at any size. When Gasser tried to walk up the stairs and fumbled slightly Dr. OZ said “even your risk of falling increases with obesity.” As was pointed out by blogger Ragen Chastain, argues, yes if you gain 80 pounds in five seconds, you might fall.

But, that isn’t how fat is experienced on the body when it is living supportive tissue that sustains and is sustained within an organism.  As fat women, we both have had our  lean body mass index assessed and our lean body mass is 122 lbs. for one of us and 187 pounds for the other (we won’t say who is who or what the rest of our bodies weigh!).  If  either one of us were to lose 80 pounds, it would likely be a combination of fat and muscle because we wouldn’t need as much muscle to move our bodies (fat and other tissues) around. Gasser was asked to put on 80 pounds of dead weight on his back.

Next up on the news was this, a hate filled review of in the National Review, Fat Politics , by Betsy Woodruff.
“To hear “fat activists” tell it, the only problem with being obese is societal oppression.”  Woodruff’s caricature of fat activists makes it seem as though their fat has interrupted their brainwaves and thereby made them delusional truth-haters.

But worst, was a goal on our home net so to speak, a call for more fat shame from noted bioethicist Daniel Callahan published in the usually reputable bioethics publication Hastings Report.

“Fat-shaming may curb obesity, bioethicist says” Read more here http://todayhealth.today.com/_news/2013/01/24/16664866-fat-shaming-may-curb-obesity-bioethicist-says

Because you know fat people are all proud, never feel any shame, and really aren’t even aware we are fat because no one ever points that out. Women’s magazines hardly ever mention weight.

Honestly, if shame caused weight loss, we’d all look like Twiggy.

Two hard questions for Callahan: Does shame motivate anyone to change their ways? If fat people were to change our ways, what would you suggest Daniel Callahan? Diet? Like that’s successful for more than a very few people. Exercise? Sure. We all ought to move more. It’s good for everyone but it doesn’t lead to weight loss. Read Science, exercise, and weight loss: when our bodies scheme against us on this blog for some discussion of why that’s so.

Now shaming might be a useful social tool if and when there are clear reasons for doing so and there are clear methods to enact the shaming and to use it to bring forth a new future. This doesn’t seem to us to meet those criteria.

Fat activists and health at every size proponents believe that we took a very wrong turn in society when we let weight loss industry studies infiltrate our medical categorizations of bodies.  Look upstream of any obesity study and you will see that they are funded largely by people who will profit from making other people lose weight REGARDLESS of the health effects or the long term sustainability of the procedure. In fact, it is fat activists’ and HAES proponents’ point that the overriding desire of others for fat people to lose weight is what is making everyone less healthy.

Perhaps  Callahan should read some carefully reasoned articles by people who disagree with him in order to make his case more sound—i.e., the principle of charity meaning that we should respond to the strongest version of our opponent’s view.  This is something that we teach our undergraduates and it is a best practice that perhaps eludes him.  I suggest reading Anna Kirkland’s “The Environmental Account of Obesity.”

“The most recent survey of Americans’ fast food habits revealed high-frequency customers (the 14 percent of the population that accounts for half of sales) to be men below middle age with incomes averaging $67,575 (“Study Says” 2008). Yet we haven’t seen upper-middle-class men discussed as a subpopulation of concern for obesity researchers. Americans are actually more physically active today than in past decades (Kolata 2007b, 194). It would seem that this would make us thinner, except that it turns out that exercise cannot be shown to necessarily produce weight loss (Taubes 2007). Walking (which many urban residents of all income levels presumably do a lot of) can have health benefits, but people participating in walking programs only lose about two pounds on average (Richardson et al. 2008). We make a long chain of assumptions about causal relationships in antiobesity policy, and the rhetoric in which they are presented rarely represents them as contested, uncertain, or incomplete.”

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2011, vol. 36, no. 2] (463-485)

Perhaps as a man who fits closely to the at-risk group for fast food consumption, Callahan should shame himself, especially for writing the aforementioned article.

Oh, and of course, all of these articles featured the ubiquitous headless fatties photos. Sigh. We suggest journalists read this.

(Last word from Sam: Now this blog is about fitness. You might wonder how fatness and fitness are related. It’s not in the way most people think and I’ve blogged about that here, Obesity, health, and fitness: some odd connections. If you’ve been reading the blog, you also know I’m ambivalent about the label ‘fat’ as it applies to me though by BMI categories, I’m so there. You can read about that here, Fat or big: What’s in a name?.)

(Last word from Kristin: I would like to see bioethicists debate the worth of anti-obesity policies and procedures in a way that does not just presume that fat people are too stupid to figure out that diet and exercise leads to fat loss and thus an increase in health. That is just diet and weight loss industry rhetoric and I ain’t buying it.)

 

body image · diets · eating · fat · overeating · sports nutrition · weight loss

Overcoming Overeating: Overview, Review, and Update

Tracy I33 Comments

oocoverA few weeks ago I announced that I’ve given up the scale — no more weigh-ins. This new commitment to dispensing with weight as a measure of my fitness progress came in part because I’ve been following some of the recommendations in Overcoming Overeating: How to Break the Diet/Binge Cycle and Live a Healthier, More Satisfying Life by Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter.

The book is aimed at chronic dieters who feel ready to break free from the cycle of weight gain, weight loss, weight gain, and the food obsession and body hatred that accompanies that cycle.  I first encountered the book back in the early nineties and its methods have helped me get perspective over the years.

But the holidays, coupled with my personal trainer’s insistence on weigh-ins, had me right back in the despair of poor body image and food obsession.  And that’s why I picked the book back up, along with Intuitive Eating:A Revolutionary Program That Works, Third Edition, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

Today’s post is about the plan outlined in Overcoming Overeating. The authors do an excellent job of explaining the psychology of the diet-binge cycle and the horrible feelings associated with it. They are also pretty convincing on the futility of the “Change Your Shape, Change Your Life” game. The game has a few well-known rules: 1. Fat is bad, 2. Fat people eat too much, 3. Thin is beautiful, 4. Eating Requires Control, 5. Criticism Leads to Change. The rules take us in one direction:  dieting.

The game is futile because….drumroll please…DIETS DON’T WORK.  Roughly, they don’t work because the natural response to rules and control is rebellion (i.e. the binge).  They also have a  metabolic impact that undermines our efforts. If diets don’t work, then we need a new approach.

Their approach begins with two radical ideas. The first is to accept the weight and body you have now as if it will never change (for this, they have you engage in a thought experiment where you live on a planet where they inject a gas into the air that, once inhaled, makes it impossible to gain or lose weight ever again. They urge us to think about how we would approach food in this scenario). The second is the idea that you can eat your way out of your “problem.”

I was good with lots of their recommendations. They encourage people who do not own a full-length mirror to get one and to stand in front of it, naked, and observe their bodies in a purely objective, descriptive way. For example, “I am round here, smooth there, bony here, hairy there.” This is supposed to get you in touch with what your body looks like in a neutral way.

They tell you to toss the scale.

There is the old stand-by: the closet clean-out. This is where you get rid of the clothes you plan to wear when you lose a few inches and the clothes you plan to wear when you gain a few inches.  You get rid of that dress that pinches at the waist, the beautiful blouse that pulls across the back, the bra that needs constant adjusting, anything with a hole in it. You keep only the clothes you feel good in.

If that leaves you with very little, go shopping. Buy according to fit, not the size on the label.  I’ve always liked cleaning out my closet because it serves the dual purpose of helping me declutter. Occasionally, I even discover things that I forgot I had and can start wearing again.

And finally, the one suggestion that makes all chronic dieters absolutely terrified and giddy, sad and relieved: dump the diet.  If you can’t face this idea, they remind you of the facts: 1. The vast majority of dieters regain their weight plus some, 2. Diets make you fat, 3. Deprivation ensures a fight-back response—the binge.

With the diet dumped, many of us need a new way to live. I had already pretty much resolved not to diet for weight-loss anymore. But diet-like behaviors  and thinking started creeping back into my eating when I started personal training and began to concern myself with “sports nutrition.”  For me, tracking and planning and measuring and counting, even in the name of sports nutrition, created a diet mentality. This might not be the same for everyone.

The new way to live involves legalizing food — carrot sticks are not any better or worse than carrot cake. No food is forbidden (allergies and moral commitments aside, of course. If peanuts will kill you, don’t eat them. If you don’t eat animal products, you don’t have to start).

Up to this point in the plan, I’m on board. It’s the next part where I jumped ship this time. That’s where they tell you to stock up on all your favourite foods in quantities so vast you couldn’t possibly eat them in one sitting.

If you adore dark chocolate, don’t buy one chocolate bar, buy ten. If you love carrot cake, don’t buy one cake, buy three so you can keep two in the freezer.  If you like crusty bread, buy a few loaves.  If you want the whole soy milk instead of the light, buy it! Cashews and almonds—buy the family sized packages.

This part just didn’t speak to me this year. It may be that I am already over the food categories for the most part from the work I have done over the years with the very ideas recommended in the book. I do have bars and bars of dark chocolate in my pantry already and that’s not a problem for me. Sometimes I eat a few pieces of chocolate. Other times it just sits there for weeks or months untouched. I do prefer the regular soy milk over the light so that’s what I buy.  And I haven’t found a vegan carrot cake that I like, so carrot cake is off the menu these days anyway. The triple chocolate cake at Veg Out is bar none the best chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted in my life. But I am happy enough to know that I can go have a piece whenever I like. I don’t need a few cakes in my freezer.

halloween2009_candy_bowlWhen I was a graduate student, my housemate and I followed the suggestion to overstock the pantry with favourites. We had a big bowl of Halloween candy on our kitchen table and we kept it filled to the brim all the time.  The first week or two, we ate a lot of candy and had to refill the bowl frequently.  By the third week, the pace slowed. And by the fourth week, it was so commonplace that some evenings it just sat there, or we might take one Aero bar.  After a few months, having convinced ourselves that candy was truly “legal,” it had lost its mystique.

Whether you need to do this will depend how game you are to legalize food.  Overstocking is part of the process of convincing yourself it’s okay.

The is all a prelude to the central idea in the book: food on demand.

The idea is this. We chronic dieters have spent our lives eating controlled, pre-determined portions of pre-planned food at specific times of the day. How much, what, and when we ate had nothing to do with how much or what we wanted or whether we were hungry. And then there were those times we ate from “mouth hunger” instead of “stomach hunger.”

Demand feeding requires learning to feel and respond to stomach hunger. Imagine a ledger (or even keep one for a few days) that has two columns — stomach hunger and mouth hunger. If a chronic dieter recorded whether she ate from one or the other each tie she ate, she’d have more check marks in the mouth hunger column.  The goal then, is to move the checks from the mouth hunger column to the stomach hunger column.

This re-calibration of eating habits requires vigilance. In particular, it requires that we attend to emotional reasons for eating, since a lot of times we seek food for comfort (mouth hunger) even though what comfort it brings is fleeting. How do you move the checkmarks?

Let yourself get hungry as much as possible during the day and eat just enough to satisfy that hunger each time.  Carry a food bag, filled with your favourite foods, so that you are never hungry and without something to satisfy that hunger.  Stop thinking in terms of meals or of food that is appropriate to specific times of day. If you wake up hungry and feel like eating a bowl of chili, eat it. If it’s “lunch time” and all you want is a piece of chocolate cake, have the cake.

Stop eating when you are satisfied — not stuffed.  This makes total sense.  Of course it does. For me, this is the one area of eating with which I have always struggled.  If I am not paying very close attention, I will eat more than I need to eat, and I will feel over full.  The authors recommend sticking with this, learning to forgive yourself, keeping at it long enough to convince yourself that you can stop now because, in an hour when you are hungry again, it will be okay to eat.  The idea is that if you know you will have permission to eat later (unlike when you’re dieting), it’ll be easier to stop at a comfortable place.

I tossed the scale and dumped the diet. I didn’t overstock the pantry and I do not carry a food bag. I have not stopped thinking in terms of meals — I like meals.  But I do pay closer attention and find myself eating smaller portions. I eat what I want. What I want turns out to be fairly nutritious for the most part.  I actually do like salad as much as I like fries, and which I have depends on what I feel like eating at the time.

The authors suggest that over time, the nutrition issue will take care of itself.  In my case, this has happened, but my issue has always been more about the “how much” of eating than the “what” or even “when” of it.  In order to keep with the program, you need to have a lot of faith in the process and just forge ahead, trusting that the authors are not leading you astray.

The plan is not designed for weight loss, but they maintain that if you have been overweight from the diet/binge cycle, you may indeed lose weight in the long run.  At the beginning, it’s pretty normal to gain a bit when all the favourite foods become legal.  What they do promise is that over time, people who follow this plan will find that their weight settles. Instead of the crazy range that many of us have become accustomed to, we’ll reach a comfortable weight and moreorless stay there.

I’m not sure about that because I’ve not followed the plan 100% and what little I have followed I’ve only been doing for about a month. Before I started, my weight had been in a four-pound range for quite some time (about a year).  Since I’ve tossed the scale, I can’t say where it is now, but I can say my clothes all fit me still.

If you are a serious emotional eater, there may not be enough in the book to help with your “core issues.”

I know I haven’t really come down strongly in favor or against the plan outlined in the book. I like some of the suggestions and think that, as an alternative to dieting, it has potential. But the suggestions about stocking up, carrying a food bag, and feeding on demand were a bit too much for me.  Still, I am more in touch with the feelings of hunger and satiety since I started reading this and Intuitive Eating (which I am more partial to and will explain why in a later post).

If you’re tired of dieting and ready to try something else, it’s worth a read and a try.  The advice that resonates most strongly with me is: toss the scale, legalize food, dump the diet, and pay attention to how you feel (both emotionally and physically) when you eat.  I like the visual of moving the checkmarks in the ledger over to the “stomach hunger” side.  Mindful or conscious eating is a good goal.

How has what I’ve tried worked for me this month? I feel freer. I’m drastically less preoccupied with food than I was just a month ago and not at all preoccupied with weight. I’m eating less at a sitting and enjoying what I eat more. All good outcomes.

For more information about the plan, check out the authors’ website.

fat · weight loss

Fear of fat more dangerous than actual fat

Sam B2 Comments

On my 2013 list of books to read is What’s Wrong With Fat? by Abigail Saguy, published by Oxford University Press.

What caught my was this press release from UCLA in my twitter feed.

Public obsession with obesity may be more dangerous than obesity itself, UCLA author says

“”What’s Wrong With Fat?” shows how debates over the best way to discuss body size — including as either a health or civil rights problem — do not take place on an even playing field. Saguy contends that powerful interests benefit from drawing attention to the “crisis,” including the International Obesity Task Force (a lobbying group funded by pharmaceutical companies), obesity researchers and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the other hand, fat-acceptance groups, which try to reframe fatness as a civil rights issue, are at a disadvantage because they have considerably less economic power and cultural authority, she says.”

But beyond the incomplete and misleading information on the issue, America’s obsession with obesity is itself unhealthy, she argues.

Saguy cites studies demonstrating that fat women are reluctant to get medical care for fear of being chided about their weight or treated insensitively by their doctors. In fact, research has shown that obese women are more likely to get cervical cancer because they are less likely than thinner women to get pap smears.
Meanwhile, Saguy’s own research shows that people who read news accounts of the “obesity epidemic” are more likely than people who have not read such reports to perceive fat people as lazy, unmotivated, sloppy, and lacking in self-discipline and competence.
Those attitudes have been shown to play out in a variety of socially damaging ways, Saguy says, including in increasingly widespread weight discrimination. Recent research has shown, for example, that bias against fat people in employment, education, health care and other areas is now comparable in prevalence to reported rates of racial discrimination in the U.S.
Heavier women in particular, Saguy notes, are less likely to be hired and less likely to earn a higher salary, compared with their similarly qualified but thinner peers.
“American attitudes about fat may be more dangerous to public health than obesity itself,” she says.”