Category: fat

body image · diets · fat · fitness · weight loss

I hate you Weight Watchers

Sam B31 Comments

Inspired by this recent anti-WW rant, Weight Watchers Probably Won’t Help You Lose Tons of Weight, So Maybe Stop Dieting?, I decided to write my own.

There aren’t many companies I have strong feelings about but WW is one of them. These are my feelings based solely on my experiences and your mileage may vary, yada yada yada. If it works/worked for you, great, though I suspect you are in a very small minority.

Like the author of the above post, I first went to Weight Watchers as a child, accompanied by a loving, well meaning parent. My mum has struggled with her weight all of my life and was at that point a regular attender of WW.

These days she’s also moved on from WW or “wrestling” as we dubbed it–you know a blend of fighting fat and WWF.

So when I first went to a WW meeting I was 12 or 13 years old. I have intense memories of this period of my life: my first diet. I was in Grade 6. I felt very grown up.

I did it part because I wanted shorter, grown up hair, but ‘friends’ thought I ought to lose weight first. Short hair was for svelte girls, not chubby awkward girls in knee socks.

I weighed 133 lbs when I first stepped on those scales and that number appalled me. The last I looked I wasn’t yet a 100 lbs. Where had those extra pounds come from? Keep in mind though that I was the tallest person in my class. I was probably 5’4 or so that weight shouldn’t have been as horrifying as it was.

I’m not sure I was even really overweight. When I look at pictures of me then I don’t see a fat kid. I see a slightly chubby almost teenage girl, on the verge of hips and breasts. I think she ought to have run more, played outside more but young me was a bookish, studious introvert, no lover of sports and games.

The people there were kind to me. No one thought joining was a bad idea. Indeed, I was called mature and told that it good to take care of this little problem now, before it got out of hand.

And in their defense I don’t think they knew then what we ought to know now about the dangers of dieting, especially setting up dieting habits in children. They really did think they were helping.

I remember coming home to find out there was lemon meringue pie for dessert (my parents were bakers) and that I couldn’t eat it, too many points. My mum gave me a one night reprieve for pie. I was to start the diet tomorrow.

I don’t remember how many weeks that first diet lasted. Not very many, I don’t think. I don’t think I lost any weight. It was the beginning though of a lifetime of weighing and shame associated with my size.

The good news was that even though I quit/stopped going, I did get my first real haircut anyway and it looked just fine. The world didn’t end.

Weight Watchers and I had an off and on relationship for about 30 years. A bad relationship but I kept going back, thinking they’d changed and that this time it would work.

Fast forward now to the last time I tried Weight Watchers.

Here are three things that I realized that will forever keep me away:

First, lots of the long term members and leaders seem to have seriously disordered eating habits. I actually heard an argument between a long term member, probably a life member, and a group leader about how many points you’d have to write down if you put a muffin in your mouth, chewed on it for a bit, and then read the label and spit it out.

Yes, gross. Disgusting. Ew.

The ‘chew and spew’ method never actually occurred to me as a method of sort of having your cake and not eating it too. Just yuck.

Maybe I’ve led a privileged life but the most messed up eating habits I’ve ever encountered were at WW. Life members boasted of still carrying their scales everywhere so they could measure and count every morsel they ate. They seemed thin but scarily obsessed with ever gaining the weight back.

Second, the WW approved weight for my height seems to me to be absurd. As absurd as it was to call 12 year old me overweight. I just laugh at their numbers. Even at a size 8, I’m not in their range for my height. I’m too muscular. I feel vindicated now after my visit to the Bod Pod which measures your per cent body fat. I’m almost out of the WW range for my height with 0% body fat!

My doctor offered to write me a note recommending a higher, more reasonable goal weight but the leaders refused to change my goal weight. They thought I should try it out first.

Third, they can’t handle people who actually exercise and do lots of physical activity. The leaders looked in disbelief when I told them how much I was riding my bike. Why would you want to do that? Clearly it’s not helping you with weight loss.

And yes, you get extra points for physical activity and you can spend those points on food, but you can spend them on whatever you like. Above the basic minimum for food groups, there’s no guidance at all how physically active people ought to supplement their diet. You want to spend them on all aspartame sweetened WW desserts, then go for it.

If you are biking, running, swimming….whatever, on a regular basis, then you need information about sports nutrition and WW isn’t set up at all to help with that. I ended up supplementing WW with advice from someone whose expertise was sports nutrition and then eventually, I just dropped out for good.

Good riddance Weight Watchers.

body image · fat

No more headless fatties, why not use images of active fat people complete with heads instead?

Sam B6 Comments

It’s time to expand our imagery of the obese.

Not at all fat people are unhappy. And some of us even have heads.

I’m interested in the politics of obesity, both as an ethicist with an interest in medical matters and the health care system, and as a significantly overweight person whose been obese off and on most of my adult life. And as readers of this blog know, I’m interested in the connections between being fat and being fit.

Sometimes I want to use different language–I’m big and strong, not obese (a medical term, based on BMI) but at other times I want people to realize that when they’re talking about obesity I’m part of the story. So too of course are all the Olympic athletes who count as obese.

I hate it when I try to share stories about obesity on social media, the image that almost inevitably appears is one of a headless fat torso. It’s as if there were no fat people, just fat torsos. Or as if no fat person would be willing to have their face associated with their body next to an article about fatness. But that’s just not true.

Along comes Stocky Bodies, a great new take (and pun) on stock photography. There’s loads of great images: fat people riding bikes, doing scuba, making crafts, using computers, and even (gasp) eating.

From their website:

The ‘Stocky Bodies’ image library was created in response to the stigmatised representations of overweight and obese people in the media and popular culture.

Such depictions tend to dehumanise by portraying subjects as headless, slovenly or vulnerable and reinforce stereotypes by presenting subjects as engaged in unhealthy eating practices or sedentary conduct.

Our library of stock photos was created to provide positive and diverse representations of the lived experience of fat that begin to break down the typecasting that heightens weight stigma. This is an important objective as research has strongly associated weight prejudice with widespread social and material inequalities, unfair treatment and heightened body esteem issues.

The photographs for the image library are the outcome of an interdisciplinary project between Dr Lauren Gurrieri of the Griffith Business School and Mr Isaac Brown of the Queensland College of Art. The participants are everyday people who are involved in fat-acceptance communities and keen to see change in the representation of fat bodies.

Our images challenge oversimplified and demeaning representations of weight prejudice by showing subjects engaged in everyday activities, such as bike riding, shopping for fashionable clothes and performing their jobs. The documentary imagery to be shown through the library is a non-stigmatising view of what it is to be fat and live an affirmative life.

‘Stocky Bodies’ is a free resource that can be used by the media, health professionals, social marketers, educators and others.

————–
Thanks KR!

body image · diets · fat · fitness · health · weight loss

Working Out While Fat

Sam B1 Comment

Just after I reposted my story of why I left Goodlife Fitness in 2006 two super posts appeared on the problems of working out in public while fat.

The wonderfully titled essay by Lindy West, Hello, Fellow Gym-Goers, Look at My Fat Butt, details how wonderful exercise is but also how awful it is be everyone’s idea of a ‘before’ picture:

The more I exercised, the more I loved it. I felt strong and lean, I had tons of energy, I slept like a brick. But my body didn’t look much different. You’d still see me on the street and read “fat person.” And as a fat person, going to the gym is doubly challenging. There’s the basic challenge we all face—of getting the fuck out of bed, finding a clean sports bra, physically moving your body toward a place where a man will yell at you until you do enough lunges (IT DEFIES ALL EVOLUTIONARY LOGIC)—but for fat people, there’s an even more intimidating challenge on top of that.

It’s entering a building where you know that every person inside is working toward the singular goal of not becoming you.

Do you know how hard it is to walk into a building devoted to not becoming you when you are you!? It’s the worst! I’m me literally every day! “Fat=bad/thin=good” is so seamlessly built into our culture that people I consider close friends don’t hesitate to lament their weight “problems” to me—not stopping to consider that what they’re saying, to my face, is “becoming you is my worst nightmare, and not becoming you is my top priority.”

And Emily Anderson published Fat Acceptance at the Gym Burns More Than Calories at Women’s E-News. It’s an excerpt from her contribution to the anthology “Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion.”

Being a fat woman at the gym is in itself an act of social disobedience. I shouldn’t be in there, taking up the space of the lithe-bodied, unless it’s with a face of sincere penance and shame. But I have claimed the gym as my own. I celebrate being visible and fat all over the gym–running and sweating and sometimes breaking into song, lifting dumbbells alongside muscle-laden men with uncompleted tribal band bicep tattoos, flinging my weight around in aerobics and finally cooling it poolside in my bright, non-apple-body-shape flattering tankini.

I smile and chat with women before yoga and mention how hungry I always am after class and can’t wait to eat. I want to be seen. I am fat and happy in places where I should be fat and shameful, and denying this stereotype is a political action in my eyes.

You should definitely go read Anderson’s essay to find out about her daring and transgressive act on the elliptical machine.

I loved what both writers had to say, despite my own ambivalence about the word ‘fat’ as it applies to me. Thanks Lindy West and Emily Anderson for your fat pride trail blazing ways. I too hate it when people assume I’m either new to the gym (ha ha ha) or that I must already have lost a lot of weight and then they express admiration that I’ve made it so far. I really do worry about putting fat people off exercise when they think they only reason to do it is to lose weight and then they meet me.

I’ve often thought I’d like to teach a fitness class for big people, one that doesn’t mention weight loss at all. No mention of calories burned or looking good in your skinny jeans. I’m cool with people trying to lose weight–I’m not without goals in that department myself–but my dream class would focus on fitness and moving for fun only. The Y’s fitness instructor certification classes look like they might be fun. And I think I’d have a blast teaching spin classes too. Perhaps I’ll get my certification as part of this ‘fittest at fifty’ project.

Clearly, there’s a need for a spaces without fat shaming. A gym in Vancouver, Body Exchange, set out to create a safe haven for plus size exercisers but it ran into controversy with its plans not accept skinny members.

The Province interviewed Tony Leyland, from Simon Fraser University’s department of biomedical physiology and kinesiology, about the plus sized gyms and he was adamant that people not downplay the social value of creating safe places for mothballed bodies.
Leyland also says some bodies are naturally resistant to being lean. Even slightly pudgy people can be terrific athletes, he says. “Fitness trumps a lot of things,” he says. “The evidence is clear that people are really going to benefit from getting fit whether they lose weight or not.”You can read more about it here, Canada’s only plus size fitness company: no skinnies need apply.
I’m still not sure of what I think of a plus size only gym–generally speaking I prefer inclusion to hiding out in safe spaces and I worry that then people would think that’s where you belong, “Get thee to the fat gym”–but I think plus size, healthy at every size inspired classes would be lovely.
fat · fitness · health · sports nutrition · weight loss

Fat, fit, and why I want to be leaner anyway

Sam B22 Comments

As you’ll know from reading my posts on our blog, I’m fat and fit, aiming to be fitter and to be the fittest I’ve ever been, at 50. (In some moods I prefer big and fit, read why here.)

Weight loss isn’t a direct goal for me in this project. That’s partly because I’m a supporter of the Healthy At Every Size movement, partly because I don’t think there’s a fatness-fitness connection, and partly because for me, personally, there aren’t health related reasons to lose weight. So I take it as a starting point that it’s possible to be the fittest I’ve ever been and not weigh the least I’ve ever weighed. Indeed, although I wouldn’t like it, I might be the fittest I’ve ever been and weigh more than I do now, though I’d much rather that not be the outcome I get.

As I detailed in Fat, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI I’m a bit of a healthy living rock star. Yes, I’m significantly overweight but I have excellent blood pressure and heart rate, excellent good-bad cholesterol ratios, and excellent blood sugar levels. I’m also an over-achiever in the bone density department but that’s from years of living large and lifting heavy weights.

(An aside: Bone density is a great reason to lift weights, especially for you small, thin women whose frames aren’t much challenged by the mass you carry around. Weight lifting works to build bones unlike endurance sports such as swimming, cycling, and running which in volume can actually hurt bone density. Read “Training to Improve Bone Density in Adults: A Review and Recommendation here.)

I’m also not sure about the wisdom of picking a goal–long term weight loss–that defeats almost all the people who aim for it. (Read Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting for some of my reasons.)

Oh, and I already eat very well. I’m a vegetarian, aspiring vegan, non-drinker, who stays well away from fast food. I have a bit of a sweet tooth and sometimes I eat too much of  good thing but there’s not a lot of room for nutrition improvement.

But I really would like to improve my ratio of lean to fat, by building more muscle and losing some fat, even if I think that’s got zero to do with fitness or being fittest by fifty.

Why?

That’s a question that in our culture hardly seems worth asking. Everyone I know, pretty much, wants to shrink. The size 4s want to get back to size 0, the 10s back to 4, and so on. It’s a cultural obsession and mega money making industry. I try to stay clear.

Most people assume weight loss is why I exercise. But really, if that were my goal I would have quit long ago. Indeed I worry that lots of fat people quit working out because they aren’t getting thinner and why else would they go to gym? The fat but fit person looks like she’s doing all the work and not getting the rewards. Nevermind that the real rewards are health related and have nothing to do with weight.

So again, why do I want to be leaner?

My main reason I want to get leaner is sports performance. An awful lot of what I do depends on a power to weight ratio. For an explanation of power to weight ratio and its importance when it comes to cycling, read The Pursuit of Leanness over at Australia’s Cycling Tips blog.

I’ll never be a hill climber. I’m a reasonably powerful sprinter and time trialer (for a recreational cyclist in her midlife years!). I know my place in the cycling world. But I’m sick of getting dropped on hills.

My second motivation for the pursuit of lean is wear and tear on joints. I love sports and physical activity. Hard to imagine life without it. But you don’t see many overweight runners in their 70s. Cyclists either. I worry about stress on my knees and hips and think there’s got to be an advantage to weighing less. Or at least if I want to play with people lots younger than me, as seems to be the case with every sport that I do, I want to even the playing field.

Evening the playing field is one of the reasons I feel great being a non-drinker on multi-day cycling events. Stay up, you 19 year olds and 25 year olds. Have another beer. I’ll be asleep, sober, and well hydrated by 10 pm. Not fun now but fun when I see you suffering tomorrow.

Finally, there’s  bad motivation, one of which I try to be wary. And no, it’s not looking good naked. Like Tracy, I’m pretty comfortable in that department. I don’t have a lot of body image issues. I’ve often wondered about why that’s so. I’ve got some thoughts about my resilience in that department, fodder for a later post, I think. (Short answer: Thanks spouse, thanks feminism, thanks queer community.)

Sometimes I want to look like the very fit person I am. There are days when I’m weary of fighting the good fight, challenging our notions of the size and shape fitness takes. Sometimes I want people to look at me and see who I am and what I do.

For example, I’ve got incredible abs. You can’t see them as they are under a layer of fat but they do amazing things. I’m very strong in my core but it’s like they’re a secret super power, my invisible abs.

Not being seen for who I am is a bit of a struggle on my life on a few fronts. (You can read some of my work on bisexual invisibility here and here.)

So sometimes I’m sick of it all and want to be seen as the athlete I am.

But I’m hoping to keep those motivations at bay and focus on the hills and the climbing.

body image · fat · fitness · health · weight loss

Fitness and exercise are what matters, not weight loss

Sam B5 Comments

Even though it’s quite clear to me that exercise itself has no effect on weight loss, from time to time I need to remind myself that even if I’m not losing weight, exercise is helping my health.  Indeed, weight loss itself is a lousy measure of just about anything. Here’s two blog posts that came across my screen this week as reminders.

Longevity Shocker! Exercise Increases Life Expectancy Regardless Of Your Weight:

A new study on physical activity that involved more than half a million participants over age 40 found that modest exercise increases life expectancy regardless of weight.

That’s right, it doesn’t matter whether you are morbidly obese or have a normal body mass index (BMI), exercise helps you live longer regardless.

Counter to most of the attention given to obesity as the crucial risk factor for health, the study found that an active lifestyle increased life expectancy to a greater extent than a lower BMI, in general. In fact, participants who were active but class I obese lived an average of 3.1 years longer than those who were at a normal weight but didn’t engage in physical activity. This is in-line with reports from earlier this year that excessive sitting is unhealthy and that reducing excessive sitting to less than 3 hours a day alone can improve longevity by 2.0 years.

Health is Not a Size:

When I was 250 pounds, I was eating the right amount, tons of vegetables, very little junk food.  I was exercising regularly, 6 times a week for more than an hour each time without fail.  I had lost almost 40 pounds but I was still obese.  People could look at me and make assumptions about my lifestyle based on my size, but they would have been wrong.  Lucky for me, I realized that improving my health was about actions and behaviors.  Repetition of those behaviors led to weight loss.

When I was 230 pounds, I could run a 5K.  I have “healthy” weight friends who cannot run one mile.  Who is more fit, the fat girl who can run 3 miles or the thin girl who gets tired walking up the steps?

At no time at any weight did I ever have high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, or any other diagnosable health problem.  “Healthy” weight people can have heart disease.  Heart attacks.  Triple bypass surgery.  Diabetes.  High blood pressure.  These issues can often be resolved by lifestyle changes.  Inactivity and over-consumption of junk food can harm your health even if you are thin.  Our focus is in the wrong place.  How many thin people afflicted by lifestyle-related diseases thought they were immune because their weight was within the “right” range?

fat · fitness · weight lifting · weight loss

Science, exercise, and weight loss: when our bodies scheme against us

Sam B8 Comments

I love it (okay, not really, need sarcasm font) when people suggest to me that to lose weight, I should get a bit of exercise, you know, walk more, or take the stairs instead of the elevator. When I tried Weight Watchers for the very last time they gave handy hints like getting off the bus one stop early and walking to your destination. (Um, I ride my bike to work most days. I ride hundreds of kilometers a week, in addition, for fun when the weather is good. How does that fit in?)

Of course, this advice is always from well-meaning people who don’t know me. Those who know me, know that I work out at a variety of sports and physical activities most days of the week, often twice a day. I run, ride my bike, play soccer, lift weights, practice Aikido, and most recently have taken up Crossfit. And yet, I’m very overweight. Fat, big, call it what you will.

How on earth can this be? Newcomers to cycling sometimes say “Oh keep riding the bike and you’ll lose weight,” thinking I’m new too. (I like passing those people, zoom!) Sometimes I’m aware I actually put other fat women off exercise because they are starting to exercise in order to lose weight and then they see me, and think it’s all pointless. But I don’t exercise to lose weight. My experience tells me that, on its own, it doesn’t do very much.

So why doesn’t exercise help with weight loss? (Or to put the question precisely, why doesn’t it help as much as it seems it ought to, when you consider the calories burned in our efforts at fitness?) Given my interests and personality type–geek, academic, fitness buff–I’ve read rather a  lot about this question.

There are a number of different answers.

The first answer is simple and it’s probably that first thing that came to your mind: when we exercise, we eat more. Indeed, if you care about performance and recovery, you need and ought to eat more. I was once told by a cycling coach that it’s foolish to try to lose weight during the racing season. Not eating enough–which is what you need to do to lose weight–cuts your speed and your recovery. Diet in the off season when you’re just riding for fun, he said. Don’t hurt your performance by dieting.

But there’s another answer that I find intriguing. Our bodies’ efforts at maintaining weight are ingenious. It turns out that when we exercise more, we also move less the rest of the day. This isn’t intentional. It isn’t anything we decide to do. The idea is that our bodies decide for us.

I’m interested, and fascinated by, the way our bodies undercut our best efforts. Heavy exercisers, it turns out, often move less the rest of the day and so burn not that many more calories than if they hadn’t exercised at all. When not exercising, they’re chronic sitters!

The study which sets out to prove this is cited in the Gretchen Reynolds’ book The First 20 Minutes  and she writes about it in her New York Times Phys Ed blog too. “Following a group of young men assigned to a heavy exercise program, researchers were surprised at how little weight they lost. Yes, they ate more but more surprisingly, “They also were resolutely inactive in the hours outside of exercise, the motion sensors show. When they weren’t working out, they were, for the most part, sitting. “I think they were fatigued,” Mr. Rosenkilde says.”

Some people say we ought to “listen to our bodies.” But in my experience our bodies are sneaky experts at staying the same size. They need to be ready for feasts and famines and those women with extra body fat are more reproductively successful.

It’s another argument in favour of short, sharp, intense Crossfit style workouts since they don’t seem to have this effect. Once again, it’s High Intensity Interval Training (HIT) for the win. Thirty minutes, says Reynolds, is the sweet spot for exercise.

And it’s yet one more argument against sitting.

Some personal observations:

  • In the past I’ve been a big fan of the hard exercise followed by flopping! It’s when I write best, physically exhausted and mentally alert. Without exercise, I’m a big fidgeter and pacer in a career that rewards focus, concentration, and long bouts of sitting. Now I’m working at a standing desk (at home anyway) and I’m liking the change. I’m also trying to incorporate more movement throughout my day. 
  • This puts me in a mind of a discussion members of my bike club used to have about our long Saturday morning rides. Some of us thought we ought to have shorter routes, say 100 km rather than 150 km, not because we couldn’t ride 150 km but rather because we wanted to do things with our families afterwards. The extra kilometers tipped us past the point where much was possible after other than a nap, a bath, and lounging about the house. It seemed all wrong to come home and then tell the kids that I couldn’t go to the park, go for a bike ride (yikes!), or walk the dog because I was too tired from all the bike riding!
  • While exercising itself doesn’t make much difference, changing your body composition does. A body with more muscle burns more calories throughout the day and so there’s good reasons to lift heavy weights. I know lots of women do long, slow cardio to lose weight (you know, the “fat loss” button on the exercise machine at the gym) but science says they ought to be lifting weights instead to get lean.
  • In terms of appetite, I think HIT is right on. Long, slow runs and bike rides make me famished. I can control what I eat after but it takes tremendous effort. Endurance exercise makes me hungry, whereas intense efforts have just the opposite effect.
  • Of course, why listen to a big person talk about exercise and weight loss? The truth is I’m terrific at weight loss. I’ve lost 50-70 lbs quite a few times. I’m a failure at maintaining the new lower weight, but that’s a puzzle for another time.
body image · diets · eating · fat · fitness · health · motivation · overeating · sports nutrition · training · weight loss

Can fit2fat2fit empathize with unfit2fit2unfit?

Tracy I5 Comments

Imagine setting out to gain weight and lose fitness. I’ve done the lose-gain yo-yo loads of times. But never on purpose.

Personal trainer Drew Manning was as buff as buff gets. In May 2011 he made a decision to stop exercising and stop eating smartly for six months. He wanted to get out of shape so he could better understand the struggles of some of his clients. He documents his journey from fit to fat and back to fit again on his blog, Fit2Fat2Fit. Recently he published a book about it. Drew gained 70 pounds and lost much of his physical fitness in six months. Six months later he’d returned to his previous level of uber-fitness and low body fat.

My question: how well would this venture help him to empathize with clients who struggle to make long-term changes in both fitness and fat percentage? My guess: not so well. Here’s why.

First let’s remember that fat and fit are not polar opposites. As we know, people can be overweight (by BMI and even body fat percentage standards) and still be fit on other measures.

Drew is different from the clients he’s trying to understand. His “yo-yo” is the opposite of theirs. Most people who struggle with weight and fitness go from unfit to fit to unfit, not the other way around. And the real challenge is long-term maintenance. This makes sense because, over time, people gravitate back towards old habits. Face it, permanent lifestyle changes are tough to make.

But Drew’s “old” habits are the habits of a super-fit, lean, muscle machine. He already eats right and gets plenty of exercise. He could get back to his original state of fitness with relative ease because he just had to re-adopt a lifestyle that he’d already internalized. But the clients he’s trying to relate to have to stay vigilant to retain the new habits. That’s harder to do than to revert to old patterns.

If you watch some of the amusing “food challenges” Drew videotaped on his website—like eating a one pound bacon cheese burger, bacon cheese fries, and a hot fudge brownie sundae with a large coke—he has a lot of trouble meeting them. He hates brownies and chocolate. Salt and grease “get to him,” which is why he found the KFC challenge so difficult. Drew is more in tune with his body than many of his clients might be.

Many yo-yo dieters can’t easily detect their hunger signals. They have difficulty knowing when they’re hungry and when to stop eating. They can’t tell when they’re full until they’re ready to burst. That’s why some people can eat a whole tub of ice cream or down an entire bag of cookies. They don’t realize it until the spoon hits the bottom or their hand reaches into an empty bag.

But in his food challenges, Drew reluctantly stuffs down more food. He knows he’s eaten more than he’s comfortable eating. If not for the challenge, he would stop way before the end of a dozen donuts or a bucket of fried chicken. His default setting is to eat reasonable portions of healthy food.

Drew started off very fit, with high quality muscle. That gave him an advantage. True, he had some health issues by the end (high cholesterol, a fatty and enlarged liver, compromised kidney functioning, to name a few). But while gaining 70 pounds he didn’t at the same time lose all of his muscle. Most of his struggling clients will start with far less muscle. Their road will be more difficult.

And it’s worth pointing out that if Drew works with women, especially older women, they just don’t change as quickly or easily as men. My husband and I started personal training at the same time last March. Within seven months, he’s lost about 20 pounds and looks fitter, leaner, and younger.

I dare say I’ve worked harder. But after seven months my weight has dropped by about five pounds and my body fat percentage feels like it’s not budging (maybe it’s changed a bit). When we went back to our regular yoga class after the summer, our teacher raved at how awesome Renald looked (and he does look great). His friends are always saying things to him about how much younger and fitter and leaner he looks (he does). Me—not so much.

I’m not trying to be negative about Drew’s story. It’s fascinating and Drew comes across as a sincere, likeable guy. He knows his stuff and freely shares printable food plans and workout plans on his website.

I’m just not convinced that fit2fat2fit can help Drew really know what it’s like to walk in the another’s shoes because he walked in the opposite direction.

Thanks to reader Daphne Gray-Grant for drawing Drew’s challenge to my attention.

body image · fat · fitness

“Feeling Fat” or Feeling Fit: Some unscientific thoughts on body image

Tracy I2 Comments

Samantha blogged recently about “Fat or Big: What’s in a Name?” And in that post she talked about her ambivalent relationship with the word “fat.”  She concluded that in lots of ways a more apt description for her is “big.”  I want to write about something a bit different that many women I know, including myself, have experienced: “feeling fat.”  Feeling fat is not at all the same thing as being in any objective sense overweight, but in my experience it carries with it all of the societal baggage and bias against people who are perceived as fat. We live in a world where it is not acceptable to be big (unless you are obviously muscular and lean in your bigness). And since the standard set in media, particularly for women, is so unattainable — somewhere between a size zero at the low end and 4-6 at the high end — many of the women I know are perpetually either dieting or “watching what they eat” and exercising in order either to lose or maintain their weight.  So, with that as our context, one way that self-loathing can present itself (in my psyche anyway) is through “feeling fat.”

It’s a strange and complicated thing, feeling fat is.  It can settle in overnight, or even through the course of a day. Clothes that fit just fine when I put them on in the morning might by lunch time start to feel like they’re pinching and snug, especially if I had a bad morning.  Even the red silk scarf, not a body-hugging item, might not look right when just yesterday it accessorized perfectly. And a general feeling of unworthiness accompanies feeling fat. It’s astonishing and sad that internalized cultural stigma against weight and body type can feed so powerfully into these negative attitudes about oneself. Remember, feeling fat is amazingly unconnected to actual body size and even percentage of fat. But it is also, for many women I know, the “go-to” feeling when they are unhappy with themselves about something…about anything.  This says a lot about the hold that our culture’s attitudes about weight and body size has on us. Even those of us who are explicitly and consciously attentive to the irrational and unfair social stigma, even working to challenge it, latch onto fatness (real or imagined) as a personal deficiency. It then spirals into an energy-sucking, self-defeating stick that might make a person feel motivated to get active (but for all the wrong reasons) or thoroughly hopeless about exercise because it doesn’t “work” (as if its only purpose is to lose or control one’s weight).

We’ve talked a bit on the blog about the disconnect between the usual assumptions about fat and fit–the assumptions that anyone fat is necessarily not healthy and fit, and anyone slender is healthy and fit. Neither is true.  We know that BMI is a poor measure of health and fitness–many elite athletes come out as obese when BMI is used as an indicator.  So if feeling fat doesn’t have to map on to anything objective, neither does feeling fit. And feeling fit has a lot more going for it.

Feeling fit is a much more empowering, positive way to feel. This feeling too can change from day to day. I feel my fittest when I eat ample, healthy foods that actually fuel my body appropriately for the amount of activity I engage in, and when I get active doing the things I love (yoga, running, weight training, tai chi, as well as the more seasonal things like skiing, snowboarding, kayaking, and swimming). I can go from feeling sluggish and lead-footed one day, to feeling fit, energetic and strong the next.  But when I’m not feeling fit, I can do some things to change that, and that helps me feel comfortable in (and with) my body and just generally happy with who I am. It also takes me closer to not just feeling fit, but to actually being fit (on some objective measures). And the more we can divorce fitness from a particular aesthetic, the oppressive aesthetic that makes “feeling fat” such an intense yet completely unwarranted form of self-loathing, the easier it will be for us to experience genuine joy and satisfaction as we engage in our preferred physical activities (instead of wasting our time with “feeling fat”).

body image · fat

Fat or big: What’s in a name?

Sam B17 Comments

Confession: I’ve got an ambivalent relationship with the label “fat.” I do often claim to be “fit and fat” but I’m never quite sure if “fat” is the word I want. This isn’t because the word makes me ashamed. I’m all about reclaiming labels and I’m a huge fan of some of the blogs that make up the “fatosphere.”

My favourite was Kate Harding’s now defunct Shapely Prose. (If you haven’t read it, it’s worth browsing the archive.) I’m also a tremendous fan of the Healthy at Every Size movement. A terrific recent defense of using the word “fat” is in an essay by Lesley at xojane called, “Fat: Using the Other F Word.” If you want to know why anyone would call themselves “fat,” read Lesley.

Or another favourite, Ragen Chastain, the blogger behind Dances with Fat.

I also recognize that by numbers on the scale/BMI I’m significantly overweight. And I know that some people see me as fat. Others don’t though. I’m most likely to claim the label when some well meaning person within ear shot starts equating being fat with being out of shape, thinking, what exactly, that I’ll agree with them? Sometimes they say “Oh, we don’t mean you. You’re not fat really.” Then I want to remind people that I’m part of the story too.  When we start talking about the statistics, I want in.

So why the ambivalence? Well, I wear size 12 clothes–well within the range of easily available sizes–and I don’t feel particularly fat. The bits of me that have clothes issues relate to muscles and women’s clothing styles: biceps, shoulders, and calves. So I sometimes use the label “fat” but I often feel squeamish about it, as if I don’t really belong in the club.

What’s the alternative? At Aikido the other day I started to notice the vocabulary we have to describe male bodies. We often joke about how much fun it is to throw the “big” guys. Someone commented that I should pay attention to how they roll because they have to do it with more finesse to avoid crashing into the mats. (A mistake I make from time to time. Ouch, sore shoulder.) And the big men are big in different ways. Some are overweight, others are tall, some are extremely muscular such as the power lifter in the club. One of the guys is a Clydesdale weight adventure runner. But there’s no angst in referring to them as “big.”

We have other positive words too. My favourite is “brawny.”  No need for further explanation or apology. They are fun to throw. I’d much rather play Aikido with one of them than with a frail person I’d worry about hurting. Their large bodies feel resilient and strong. Why can’t we feel the same way about big women?

And please don’t get me started on all the cutesy labels women use to avoid the word “fat”: fluffy, chunky, chubby…

So “fat,” I guess. But big suits me better.

By the way, I like “big” in the title of an academic essay on women, sport, and size, for which I was an interview subject. It’s a great article, by Krista Scott Dixon, well worth reading: “Big Girls Don’t Cry: Fitness, Fatness, and the Production of Feminist Knowledge”. Sociology of Sport Journal 25 (2007): 22-47.

Here’s the abstract:  Feminists have produced a number of important critiques of the way in which fat and fit are understood. While fitness provides opportunities for women’s personal and political empowerment, in practice, because fitness is so frequently viewed as a cosmetic project and connected to achieving thinness, such opportunities have generally failed to materialize despite rapid increases in women’s sports and exercise participation. I examine the experiences of larger female athletes in strength and power-based sports to examine how they negotiate their identities as athletes and women, and how they navigate “fitness” and “fatness.”

Photo by Chih Eric Li
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body image · fat · fitness · health

Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI

Sam B29 Comments

I’d like us to ditch all talk of BMI as a meaningful measure when it comes to individuals. And please don’t say it’s better than weight because it’s just weight + height taken into account. So  insofar as weight is a problematic measure and BMI relies on weight, so too is BMI problematic. I’ve long loved Kate Harding’s project BMI Illustrated over at Shapely Prose. She describes it this way, “I put together a slideshow to demonstrate just how ridiculous the BMI standards are.” This isn’t to deny that BMI talk is useful about populations and big picture trends, it’s just that I think it’s misleading and harmful when it comes to individuals.

Lots of thin people are falsely reassured by their BMI, while lots of people with BMIs  in the overweight/obese categories might be worrying with no good reason. Fit and fat are linked but not in the ways most people think. I worry that lots of fat people don’t exercise because they worry what people will think especially if you exercise and don’t get any smaller. Yet fat and fit people can be very healthy.  “People can be obese yet physically healthy and fit and at no greater risk of heart disease or cancer than normal weight people, say researchers.The key is being “metabolically fit”, meaning no high blood pressure, cholesterol or raised blood sugar, and exercising, according to experts. Looking at data from over 43,000 US people they found that being overweight per se did not pose a big health risk.” reports the BBC.

I love my family doctor who cheered me up immensely when she looked at my chart and said, “This is the part of the visit when, given your weight, I should warn you about the health problems associated with overweight and obesity. However, given that you’ve got low to normal blood pressure, no sugar issues, and the best ratio of good to bad cholesterol we’ve ever seen at this clinic, I can’t in good conscience do that. You’re extremely healthy. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

A few years ago I tried Weight Watchers–for probably the 6th time in my life, will I never learn?–and I was shocked at their weight range for my height. Weights I haven’t seen since Grade 6. And to give you some perspective they were also weights I never weighed even when at 5’7 I wore size 8 clothing.  The so called “healthy” or “normal” weight range for me has never seemed plausible. I had an interesting experience recently. This summer I was measured in the BodPod at the Fowler Kennedy Sports Medicine Clinic which tells you exactly how much of your body is fat and how much is muscle, bone etc. I was happy to see that to weigh what Weight Watchers thought of as my ideal, I’d be allowed a mere 20 lbs of body fat. I won’t discuss exact weights today but I will tell you that I’m 122 lbs not fat. It’s my goal as part of my ‘fittest at fifty’ plan to improve my ratio of lean body mass. You can read more about the difference between the BMI approach and the lean body mass approach here. I plan to both develop my muscles and lose some body fat. I’d also like to lose pounds in absolute numbers too, mostly though to make running easier on my joints and to make it easier to get up hills faster on the bike! Hill climbing on the bike is all about power to weight ratio and so I’ll never be a climber but I hate to get dropped on hills on a regular basis. According to BMI, I’ll likely always be overweight or obese and I’ve made my peace with that. (I’ll write more about my ambivalence around ‘fat’ as a label for me later.)

Marc Perry notes in Get Lean that according to BMI most American football players count as obese. So too do many Olympic athletes. There is list here of all of the Gold medal athletes from the 2004 Olympics in Athens who count as overweight or obese according to BMI. We need to change our image of what athletes look like. Usually they don’t look like fitness models. See Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein: The Different Body Types of Olympic Athletes.