Category: weight loss

athletes · diets · eating · fitness · men · motivation · running · sports nutrition · swimming · training · weight lifting · weight loss

Will I Still Have My 4-Hour Body 4 Years from Now?

Tracy I23 Comments

4HBI just finished reading Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. The book promises a lot. And it’s based on Tim Ferriss’ own form of research. He operates as a rogue researcher, not within the confines of peer review scientific scholarship. It frees him up to do some crazy things that might not receive ethics approval from an academic research council.

He uses himself, family (especially his dad), friends, and seemingly passing acquaintances as test subjects. He has some recommended “paths” through the book (even he recommends against reading the book from start to finish, and says most people won’t need more than 150 pages to ‘reinvent’ themselves), based on your goals.

The goals the book caters to are: rapid fat loss, rapid muscle gain, rapid strength gain, and rapid sense of total well-being. The book presupposes, as do most physical fitness programs, that its readers are non-disabled individuals who are not thriving physically.

It’s a funny book in lots of ways, not just because the author is quite funny and a great story-teller, but also because it has a mixed message. He starts off talking about the “minimum effective dose,” arguing that in general, where all things fitness-wise are concerned, we tend to do more than is necessary to achieve our desired results. Between that claim and the whole “4-hour body” idea, it seems as if he’s going to hand us a really do-able program.

But then so much of what he recommends is beyond extreme. The preferred diet, for example, is what he calls “The Slow Carb Diet.” The first info he gives about it details the massive food intake on “cheat day”–bear claws, chocolate croissants, grapefruit juice, coffee, pizzas… But cheat day comes only once a week. Outside of cheat day, the diet is ultra-restrictive. No “white” carbohydrates (bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta, tortillas, fried food that’s breaded, or anything white [cauliflower is allowed]). Pick a few meals and eat them over and over and over, spacing them out by four hours. Do not consume any calories as drinks. No fruit (NONE). One day off a week — that’s your “cheat day.”

Any diet that cuts out food groups is a bad idea. It’s not sustainable over the long run, despite Ferriss’s repeated claims that he and some of his friends who followed this diet for his research ended up loving it. He himself maintains that on his Saturday cheat day he eats himself sick.

This is not a big surprise. It’s a documented fact that diets lead to a sense of deprivation that results in binges. Just calling the day off a “cheat day” is itself a sign of dysfunctional eating and an unhealthy attitude about food, where some foods are “bad” and others are “good.”

This may have “worked” for Ferriss and his friends. I have no doubt that they lost weight quickly. Anyone will lose weight on a restrictive diet that cuts out whole food groups, such as carbs. But the real question is, do they keep it off? I have not seen a report of where Ferriss and his test subjects ended up five years out. Are they still eating like this — highly restricted 6 days a week with one splurge day?

Ferriss does not address any of the research about the failure of restrictive diets to produce longterm results. It’s not super-impressive that people experience rapid weight loss when they change their eating patterns for a month and follow a strict diet of the kind Ferriss recommends. The whole thing screams out “fad diet”!

Ferriss is a big believer in drug “cocktails” to bolster muscle and strength gains. One of his go-to consultants for elite training is Charlie Francis (Ben Johnson’s trainer–Johnson was stripped of his gold medal in the 1988 Olympics after testing positive for banned substances that his trainer had him on…). For most of the fat-loss “studies” undertaken in The 4-Hour Body, he relies 60% on diet, 10% on drugs, and 30% on exercise. Vegetarians or others who can’t follow the diet will need to do more drugs. No thanks.

He is also a big proponent of measurable results. Lots of tracking and weighing and measuring. In one of his experiments, he even weighs his poop. Since I have an aversion to careful tracking, a feeling not shared by all, this approach (poop aside) simply wouldn’t work for me.

The book is for “rapid” changes to body composition and strength. It’s easy to get caught up in Ferriss’ enthusiasm for getting the job done quickly. But after immersing myself in that crazy world for some time, I started to wonder, what’s so great about “rapid” changes?

On balance, I’d rather have slow, sustainable changes. I and lots of people I know have experienced rapid physical changes on extreme programs in the past. But the real question is always about the longer term. Will the dramatic, rapid changes I make over the course of a month still be with me one, two, five years from now? Will I have new, healthy habits that contribute to my overall well-being? Again, as in the chapter on fat loss, Ferriss doesn’t address this issue.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve encountered so many programs and plans that say “if you just do this, then you’ll achieve these amazing results.” For many of them, it’s absolutely true that “if you just do this you’ll achieve these amazing results.” The difficulty is that no one can do “this,” whatever the “this” may be, forever.

I’ve only focused on the section about fat loss. But many of the other programs for rapid change also strike me as unlikely to be sustained over time. For example, “Occam’s protocol” for rapid muscle gain involves what seems like a fairly manageable workout schedule, but the food requirement is unbelievable. Not many people could do it even for a month. And again, there is no follow up advice. Once you’ve achieved this massive muscle gain in a relatively short period of time, what then?

That leaves me skeptical about the success, for most people, of the “plans” outlined in much of the book.

I am not equally skeptical of everything, however. For one thing, Ferriss has convinced me that kettlebell swings are worth incorporating into a resistance training program, and that there are better ab exercises out there than crunches. I am also totally sold on his endorsement of Total Immersion Swimming. I have experimented with it in the past. Reading about it again in Ferriss’ book has convinced me to revisit it. And I agree with him that body weight and BMI are not useful measures, and that body composition (ratio of fat to lean mass) gives us more useful information.

The chapter on “incredible sex” is written pretty much entirely with a male heterosexual reader in mind. It’s all about how to give a woman an orgasm that lasts for 15  minutes (I first thought it took 15 minutes to get there, which isn’t all that impressive. But an orgasm that lasts for 15 minutes — worth reading about and working on the technique with your partner) and how to increase your testosterone and your sperm count. The sections about women’s orgasms were useful in that it’s not a bad thing to educate heterosexual men about women’s anatomy.

He interviewed some heavy hitters for his information about women and sex: Nina Hartley, Tallulah Salis, and Violet Blue. They provide some interesting, practical suggestions that he reviews in detail. And though Violet Blue provides some excellent advice for the woman who may never have had an orgasm, it’s hard not to feel like the whole reason for spending so much time on women’s orgasm is to give heterosexual men a way to feel like rock stars.

Ferriss has written an entertaining book filled with great stories and fascinating, crazy experiments in rapid physical changes (I hesitate to call them “improvements”). He ends with the words “it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.” This may be true. I doubt, however, that the focus on rapid change so emphasized in The 4-Hour Body is a successful formula for “reinvention.” At most, a lot of the recommendations will produce only short term, even if rapid, results.

diets · eating · fitness · health · overeating · weight loss

Intuitive eating? Yes! Intuitive Exercising? Not So Much

Tracy I10 Comments

Walking tremblantI’ve been practicing intuitive eating since the beginning of January.  When I’m hungry, I eat what I feel like eating until I feel satisfied. Then I stop.  When I get hungry again, I eat again. I do not weigh myself and I do not eat with weight loss in mind. I will never go on another weight loss diet. For the most part, I am for my own personal reasons opposed to tracking because I find it oppressive. If you find it helpful, by all means, track.

Sam asked me whether I might be attracted to intuitive exercising or intuitive training in the same way I’m attracted to intuitive eating.  One of the principles of intuitive eating as spelled out in the Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch’s wonderful book is “Exercise: Feel the Difference.” They encourage us to “forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference.”

True, I feel really good when I get active. A few laps in the pool energize me. An early morning yoga class focusing on back bends revs me up for the rest of the day.  And some body weight training with a few free-weights thrown into the mix help me to feel strong.

But for me, it is not enough to feel the difference. When the alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m., which is when I need to get out of bed on Tuesdays to make it to yoga for a 6:30 start, a purely intuitive approach would not get me out of bed every week.  Half the time, my sleepy self would shut off the alarm, roll over, and drift off again until well past 6:30.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I schedule a swim just before lunch, as a break from my morning writing.  I love being in the pool.  But if I had to wait until I felt like swimming, I probably wouldn’t get up from my desk so easily.

The same thing goes for running.  I have to make an effort to get myself out the door some days. Once I’m out there, it’s great. And once I get back, I always feel better and am glad I went.

I appreciate Tribole and Resch’s approach for the way it encourages people to move their bodies for reasons other than calorie burning and weight loss, as just an extension of the diet mentality. The diet mentality approves of things that will lead to weight loss, whether they be food choices or activities. It disapproves of what will not lead to weight loss.

An intuitive eater or exerciser responds to her or his body’s needs at a given time. I am pretty good at this with hunger these days.  Exercise is different.  On occasion, I feel a strong urge to move my body. But, unlike my  hunger, this urge does not come at regular intervals for me.  It certainly does not come frequently enough for me to reach my training goals.

My training goals are the main reason that intuitive exercise won’t work for me.  If I want to increase my swimming and running distance and speed, I need to push myself beyond what is comfortable at the moment.  No one really enjoys intervals, but those short bursts of intense effort broken up by short low effort resting periods are the single most effective and efficient way to see noticeable gains in fitness and in performance.

The same is true of resistance training and yoga.  If I want to see changes in my strength, I need to lift heavier and do things that, on a strictly intuitive level, I might not want to do. It’s never easy to squeeze out those last two burpees! In yoga, it’s a mental and physical challenge to stay inverted in head stand for the full time the instructor expects us to (or, if at home, until the timer sounds). I almost always want to come down before it is time to come down. But I almost always stay up that little bit longer.

Going with the gut will not help me get fitter, stronger, or faster, and will not increase my endurance.

I do not think of my approach as “militant exercise.” I do the things I do because they feel good. But a long run is not a massage, and lap swimming is not a leisurely splash in the lake on a hot summer day. These things feel good in a different way.  I like harnessing my inner power and pushing myself.  As Sam says, painful workouts can be “fun.”

And I like the result. I am stronger today than I was a year ago when I had not yet re-introduced resistance training into my routine.  And my cardio health is much-improved now that I am running and swimming instead of just walking. It’s unbelievably gratifying to be able to run the distances I’m running now when I couldn’t make it all the way around the block less than one year ago.

My goals are not about weight loss and achieving a certain aesthetic, but about athleticism. Sam has a great post about the difference.  Given my training goals, I can’t just take leisurely strolls through the park and expect to get anywhere.

Some might say that, given my training goals, I should be more scheduled and structured with my eating as well. But the key difference I see, for me (maybe not for you), is that I do not want to push beyond my comfort zone in eating. In fact, I have spent years eating in all sorts of uncomfortable ways that don’t feel good in the short or long run.  I’m DONE with that.

Of course, just because I don’t take a strictly intuitive approach to exercise does not mean I never do anything “just because it feels good.”  I like leisurely walks, bike rides, and swims. I do have occasions when I go to a hot yoga class just because I feel like it and not because it’s scheduled. And in the summer when we’re sailing, the majority of my swimming, walking, and kayaking are just because I feel like it.  It’s the training that I need to structure in a more rigorous and demanding way for me to meet my goals.

Upshot: intuitive eating? Yes!  Intuitive exercise? Not so much.

body image · weight loss

Tracy is guest-blogging at Spry: Weigh No More

Tracy I

To read more about her decision to ditch the scale and get some suggestions about how you might do it too, check out her Spry post here.

body image · diets · eating · fitness · training · weight lifting · weight loss

Metabolic Health Is a Feminist Issue

Tracy I14 Comments

[Note: I am by no means an expert on metabolic health. I hardly know anything about it. I just know it’s an idea with major liberatory potential.  For more information about it, check out some of the links below]

Recently, after blogging about the thigh gap and taking Go Kaleo‘s recommendation to read Matt Stone’s Diet Recovery 2, and then reading Caitlin’s post that reminded us that, hey, we actually need to eat, the penny finally dropped for me.

Yes! I finally understand that metabolic health is a big deal. Huge. Bigger than the next fad diet, bigger than any particular training program, bigger than aspiring to have ripped abs or a thigh gap.

After we posted about fitness models earlier in the month, we noticed some fascinating discussion on a figure competitors’ discussion boards about ways to train smarter with more calories. Sam drew my attention to former figure competitor Clara Ross’s post about how she destroyed her metabolism and her decision to retire forever from competing to restore her metabolic health.

One of the missteps that Clare Ross admits she made was to go beyond her coach’s advice.  She ate fewer than the recommended calories. She did more than the recommended cardio. She did not take rest days.  Ross thought she was training harder and better than everyone around her. She pushed through the exhaustion and didn’t think about any health consequences.  She says:

“In reality what I was doing was conditioning my body to cope with and anticipate ongoing famine and severe physical hardship. Faced with this, it did exactly what it is supposed to do – it adapted. It learned to do more and more with less and less.”

I have long been aware of the so-called “famine response” or “starvation response” to drastic reductions in calories.  Fitness Mantra defines it as “a proportional reduction in metabolism in response to reduced availability of food.”  If the body reacts this way to severe calorie reduction, that explains why the metabolism slows down when we go on extreme diets.  But that’s just half of the story.

If eating less slows down the metabolism, then why shouldn’t eating more speed it up? In his Diet Recovery 2 plan, Matt Stone recommends more or less that we do exactly that if we have suffered metabolic damage. By definition, if you have slowed your metabolism by eating too little, then even apparently normal amounts of food will be more than your body strictly needs.

His plan follows many of the basic principles of Intuitive Eating, which is the approach I use and is working for me.  He recommends that people eat regular meals with snacks in between if they’re hungry, eat enough to feel satisfied (not more, not less), eat what appeals to you, listen to your body and respond to its feedback (i.e. make adjustments where necessary), eat nutritious foods as the main basis but there is also unlimited freedom to supplement with “junk” food as desired.

He is big on taking fluids only in response to thirst. Most of us drink more than is optimal for our metabolism, he claims.

He does do a quite a bit to fill in the sorts of things that we should be striving for to achieve metabolic health, with an emphasis on body temperature, warm hands and feet, regular bowel movements, uninterrupted sleep, and urination every 4 or so hours and your pee should be yellow or gold, not clear.

But this post isn’t about Matt’s plan, it’s about the more general idea of metabolic health and its relationship to anti-dieting. For reasons I won’t go into here, I’m happy to stick with intuitive eating, at least for the time being.

I love this takeaway point in both approaches: under-eating will not sustain long term weight loss because the body will adapt.  This one little fact goes a long way to explaining why diets simply do not work.

It also explains why you need to keep eating and keep moving.  Activity as much as food stokes the fire of metabolism.  We have all heard of the idea of “calories in, calories out.”  Many of us, like Clare Ross, have interpreted this to mean simply that if we eat less and move more then we will automatically lose weight.

“Eat less, move more” is one of the main tenets of the Weight Watchers program, a plan on which the more you lose the less you get to eat.  They are awful at recognizing activity as requiring more food to keep the body functioning adequately. When I last went there, it was totally optional to add food to compensate for activity points, and it was definitely regarded as extra-virtuous NOT to eat more if you earned extra points through activity. That’s one of Sam’s reasons for hating Weight Watchers.

In terms of metabolic health, you can see why this makes no sense.  If you move more, you need to eat more to keep your metabolism working. Otherwise, you risk going into the famine response. Your body, like Clare Ross’s body, will adapt to the new conditions, thus further reducing what it “needs”.  At a certain point, however, this becomes unsustainable.  Even Weight Watchers has a minimum amount of points you need to consume in a day.  For those like me whose “plan” kept them at that minimum, losing weight eventually became impossible.

Amber at Go Kaleo linked to a metabolic calculator that she likes to recommend. Based on your age, height, and activity level, it tells you how many calories you need to consume to maintain an “energy balance” of optimal metabolic functioning. I’m always astonished when I put in the numbers because it tells me I should be consuming over 2600 calories a day! That’s about double what Weight Watchers recommended for me and 800 more than I was told to eat last fall by my sports nutritionist and my personal trainer.

I have stopped attempting to lose weight or even to lose fat. Instead, I am simply doing what I can to gain muscle through resistance training and to increase my performance as a runner, yogi, and swimmer. I eat when I feel hungry and focus on whole foods in satisfying amounts. I enjoy sweets.

I do not know how much I weigh because I stopped weighing myself on January 1, 2013. This might be the single most liberating thing I have done for myself in the past year.

Without being overly preoccupied with body temperature and without needing a long period of what Matt calls “rest and refeeding,” I feel well on my way to firing up my metabolism so it functions more effectively than it did when I was caught in the cycle of chronic dieting.

Metabolic health is a feminist issue because women are taught much more than men to under eat, to starve themselves in order to look a certain way. The message that diets don’t work has great potential to free women from the false promise that dieting will lead to thinness and thinness will lead to happiness. The further message that we can eat our way back to good health is liberating and empowering.

If instead of dieting, we eat what we need, and engage in fitness activities with performance goals that will increase our physical functioning and fire up our metabolisms, we will be stronger and freer. I like this idea:  Instead of going on a low carb diet, increase your activity level to the point where you need to eat carbs.

Let’s move and let’s eat!

[disclaimer:  Matt Stone is not a feminist. The book has good information for those interested in learning more about metabolic health.]

body image · diets · eating · motivation · weight loss

Why the “Thigh Gap” Makes Me Sad

Tracy I53 Comments

It’s not the newest news, but the whole “thigh gap” thing, especially among young women, has been a simmering pot that came into media focus a couple of weeks ago when I was off the grid on a sailboat vacation.  It was on the news and in the paper and on the web. It’s a popular hashtag on Twitter.

Sam alluded to it in her post about bathing suit anxiety.  The “thigh gap” aspiration is the newest thing driving young women to obsessive dieting and disordered eating.

I am a woman in her late forties with no teenagers, so I’m a bit out of the loop sometimes. When I discovered the world of tumblrs (such as “fuckyeahthighgap” and “thigh gap” ) devoted to the thigh gap, I confess to being not just shocked, but profoundly saddened.

I don’t even want to link to the sites because they are so terribly disturbing (to some) yet so many teenaged girls seek them out as thinspiration (that is, as inspiration to keep dieting and being thin). If you’re curious, they’re just one google search away.

The sites invariably include photo after photo of incredibly thin young women who look like they could use a few good meals. In some of the pics there is visible evidence that they engage in the further self-harm of cutting.

The thigh gap is just another example of the false idea that achieving a certain (often unattainable by most) aesthetic will bring happiness. Seeking inspiration from representations of unattainable ideals is a set-up — at a minimum it leads to disappointment and demoralization, at worst it can lead people to under-eat, overexercise, and develop eating disorders.

The messages and themes on these thigh gap websites is all about hating the body you’ve got and pushing yourself until you’ve got the body you want.  But as Sam noted the other day, love is much more motivating than hate.

I’m also quite convinced from my own experience with hating the body I had and “achieving” the thinness I thought I sought, that getting there doesn’t make you love yourself more. As an adult, I have weighed 106 pounds to 146 pounds and I’ve felt equally horrible about myself at both ends of the scale and lots of places in between. Thankfully, I now feel good about who I am and what I am about. Thigh gap or not (not), I like the way I look today too.

I can’t imagine that many, if any, of these young women are feeling good about themselves even if and when they attain that ever elusive thigh gap.

And in any case, it should come as no surprise that genetics dictate a large part of who can and cannot attain a thigh gap. At times in my life, especially as a young woman, even though it wasn’t a “thing,” I hated that the top of my legs rubbed together. My guess is that I’d have to be pretty darn skinny, like about ready to die skinny, to have a thigh gap.  But being in the company of Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce on that score is perfectly fine with me.

In one interview, a therapist said that girls aspire to the thigh gap as an objective marker of beauty.  Some thigh-gap aspirants use  the (not surprisingly) twisted logic that since J-Lo and Beyonce have other things going for them in the beauty department, they don’t need a thigh gap. But for an ordinary girl who is not a captivating beauty, having a thigh gap makes her more attractive.

As a feminist, I don’t just lament the skeletally thin aesthetic associated with the thigh gap. I also question what it represents with respect to sexual access. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I can’t help but think of this in the context of sexual access to women’s most intimate parts. Why is the thigh gap the thing to aspire to instead of, say, losing that loose flesh on the back of the arm (not to give any thinspos a new idea of what to go for next)?

Given our blog emphasis on performance and athleticism and our de-emphasis on weight loss, weight loss programs,  diets, and strictly aesthetic goals, it should come as no surprise that we aren’t big proponents of “thigh gap” type fitness goals.  I also agree with Samantha about the underpants rule. It’s not up to me to tell people what to do and how to live their lives.

That doesn’t stop me from feeling that this thigh gap phenomenon is sad.  Many of the girls chasing after thinness as a goal in and of itself are setting themselves up for self-hatred and disappointment, if not illness, or in some cases death.

Of course, there are those who rail against the thigh gap. And you can also find protest tumblrs like this one that celebrate touching thighs.  I really like what I see here on this anti-thinspo pinterest page, including this:

I do worry for girls and young women.  And I really like this reminder (from that same pinterest page) about what kinds of compliments can help to nudge them in a healthy direction that might make them feel good about themselves. The caption reads, “Compliment girls on their characters, not their bodies.”

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

Intuitive Eating: What It Is and Why I Love It!

Tracy I39 Comments

Recently I wrote about my (personal, not for everyone) decisions not to get further sports nutrition counseling and to stop weighing myself.  I committed to re-acquainting myself with two books that helped me a lot back in the early nineties when I was a compulsive dieter and exerciser with a diagnosed eating disorder (that I didn’t believe I had because I wasn’t skinny enough).

The books were Overcoming Overeating: How to Break the Diet-Binge Cycle and Live a Happier, More Satisfying Life by psychotherapists Carol H. Munter and Jane R. Hirschmann and Intuitive Eating, Third Edition:A Revolutionary Program That Works by nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.  You can find my review of and experience with Overcoming Overeating here. There I say that while I liked a lot of the principles, Intuitive Eating resonates much more strongly with me.  So today’s post is about this approach and why it’s working for me.

Intuitive Eating (IE) is based on ten principles, to each of which the authors devote a full chapter:

  1. reject the diet mentality
  2. honor your hunger
  3. make peace with food
  4. challenge the food police
  5. feel your fullness
  6. discover the satisfaction factor
  7. cope with your emotions without using food
  8. respect your body
  9. exercise: feel the difference
  10. honor your health with gentle nutrition

The authors introduce the concept of IE. They identify a number of different eating “personalities” who have an unhealthy relationship with food–the Careful Eater who is obsessed with nutrition, the Professional Dieter who is perpetually on a diet, and the Unconscious Eater who pairs eating with another activity, such as watching TV or reading, or just generally eats mindlessly because they are too busy, vulnerable to the presence of food (like the cookie jar or the donuts at meetings), or they don’t like to waste food (they’d rather clean their plate and then move on to their children’s or spouse’s plates), or they use food to cope with emotions.

The Intuitive Eater, by contrast, has what the authors consider to be a healthy relationship with food. They “march to their inner hunger signals, and eat whatever they choose without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma.” The authors believe children are born as intuitive eaters, but that social messaging leads many people to develop an unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition, weight loss, and food. The goal of the book is to help people who, in their words, have “hit diet bottom” become Intuitive Eaters.

The first four principles help to change the diet mentality, where food is the enemy and needs to be controlled and restricted to reach the ideal weight.  Principles 5 and 6, feel your fullness and discover the satisfaction factor, nudge us in the direction of a more intuitive relationship to the food we eat. Principle 7 addresses the issue of emotional eating and offers alternative modes of self-care that are more successful.  Principle 8 calls upon us to stop body-bashing, and, as Samantha has recently urged, respect the body we have.

Principles 9 and 10 are introduced last for a reason. The authors think that both exercise and attention to nutrition (The Careful  Eater) can be used as covert ways of implementing The Diet Mentality.  Not only that, many people with a history of dieting and food obsession have negative associations with exercise in particular. They strongly suggest that people work with the first 8 principles to become comfortable Intuitive Eaters and only then pay close attention to exercise and nutrition.

I can’t go into the principles in detail, but I want to say a bit more about my favourites.

Of course, I love the idea of rejecting the diet mentality. I’ve spoken of it here, here, and here.

Feeling your fullness (Principle 5) is the one that challenges me the most and that I have worked with most closely since I started this approach back in early January. The authors claim that “the ability to stop eating because you have had enough to eat biologically hinges critically on giving yourself unconditional permission to eat (Principle 3: Make peace with food).

In order to feel your fullness, the authors recommend conscious eating. Instead of moving into autopilot, they suggest paying attention, eating without distraction, pausing part way through a meal to register whether the food still tastes good and whether you’re still hungry. Samantha is doing the same thing with her recent attention to mindful eating. They introduce the idea of comfortable satiety, where you’ve had enough to eat but are not overstuffed.  Respecting your fullness means stopping at comfortable satiety. In order to achieve this, you need to eat engage in mindful or conscious eating.

Their approach to both exercise and nutrition focuses not on weight loss but on how good both make you feel and how they act as methods of self care.  In fact, the authors note that exercise is a great stress buffer.  A good relationship with exercise, when it is a part of your life that you actually enjoy instead of see as an obligation, can go a long way to curbing emotional eating.

The IE approach appeals to me for so many reasons.  I am convinced that diets don’t work for long term weight loss and I despise food tracking and monitoring.  So the idea of learning to identify and respond to my body’s natural hunger signals provides an exciting alternative and a reason for optimism. Since I started focusing on mindful eating and respecting my fullness I have been much more capable of eating when hungry and stopping at the point of comfortable satiety.

I am eating foods I enjoy, engaging in exercise I enjoy, and have no hard rules around the foods I choose.  My tendency is towards nutritious foods anyway. I love salads, legumes, soy, whole grains, and fruit. I have a sweet tooth which I satisfy with a whole range of things, from medjool dates and dried pineapple to my favourite vegan chocolate cake and home-baked coconut cranberry chocolate chip cookies.  I have discovered a few things too, like I prefer mangoes to french fries. I have total permission to eat either, depending what I feel like.

The recommendation to toss the scale, found both here and in Overcoming Overeating, has been the single most positive change for me.  I love not weighing myself and instead tuning in with how I am feeling.

On my recent sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands, I maintained an easy level of activity with snorkeling, kayaking, and swimming with a few push-ups and burpees thrown into the mix, ate when I felt hungry and stopped when I felt satisfied, and drank one totally indulgent virgin cocktail (I don’t drink alcohol) a day.

I am sure that I gained no weight and quite possibly lost some (of course I can’t be sure). What matters most is that I feel really good, like I took care of myself, ate well, and kept moving during my vacation. Though I experienced a bit of self-consciousness in my bikini at the beginning (I adjust more quickly to being totally nude than being in a bikini, as explained here), I respected my body and didn’t engage in body-bashing.  After a day or two I felt good.

A couple of other things about the book.

Since the original edition came out in the early nineties, there have been quite a few studies on the approach to gauge its success as a health strategy. The authors have included a chapter about the science behind the IE approach. The chapter adds scientific validity to the author’s suggestions and makes a strong case that Intuitive Eaters experience both mental and physical health. Moreover, they cite studies that show it as a viable solution for the prevention of eating disorders and obesity.

It includes chapters on raising children to be intuitive eaters, and on using the IE approach to treat eating disorders. It also has a Q and A appendix to answer common questions about Intuitive Eating, such as “If I let myself eat whatever I want, won’t I eat uncontrollably and gain lots of weight?” The authors do not believe this will be the case because “when you have made complete peace with food and know that what you like will always be available to you, you’ll be able to stop after a moderate amount. If you’re only giving yourself pseudo-permission, it won’t work, because you don’t really believe you’ll always have access to food. So check out how genuine your permission-giving is.”

Finally, the book has a really helpful appendix that outlines strategies for implementing each of the principles.

I’m a total convert to this approach to eating.  I don’t think about food all the time and don’t spend a lot of time planning my meals and snacks. I just make sure there I’ve always got lots of good food that I like on hand for when I am hungry. I do pay attention to nutrition though I am not a slave to it, and I am as active as I want to be, minimally doing at least one weight training or yoga session a day and one “cardio” activity a day.

I never track and I no longer weigh myself.

If you are ready to do something different and truly willing to commit to never dieting again, I highly recommend that you read this book.

body image · diets · eating · fitness · weight loss

Loving the body you’ve got: Body positivity and queer community

Sam B16 Comments

For the most part I love the body I’ve got and while I aspire to being leaner, more fit, faster, more powerful, that will all be a bonus. Really, even my ‘get leaner’ goals are cast in terms of being kinder to the body I have now.
I feel like it deserves better treatment.

When I express the view that I love my body–it’s me after all, not a home improvement project–many people are surprised. They think it’s remarkable you can be overweight (fat, big, whatever) and still love the body you have.

Often what I think is truly remarkable about this is that it’s my attitude that stands out as noteworthy. I’m always shocked at the number of people–almost all of them women, almost all of them lots smaller than me–who are ashamed of their bodies. And I mean really ashamed, unhappy to the point of tears, and to the point of not doing things they might want to do but can’t do because they think they aren’t thin enough. Only thin people deserve nice things and exciting experiences, according to this world view.

I talked about body shame in my post about why I left Goodlife Fitness.

But here’s another anecdote. It will be sadly familiar to almost every woman reading, I think.

After a hot sweaty summertime soccer game, one of my teammates offered us all a field trip to her backyard pool. Swimming pool, snacks, and fruity drinks, post game. Count me in. Yes.

I drove to her house, ripped off sweaty soccer duds and threw on a bikini and ran to the backyard and jumped in the pool. (Yes, I wear a bikini. Started once I realized the plan I had as a twenty year old–I’ll wear a bikini when I get skinny–was based on a vitally flawed assumption. Also, I have a long torso, regular bathing suits don’t fit, and it’s pain to get them off to pee. And yes, I know the trick. But I like bikinis. Not tankinis either. I like unreconstructed belly baring two piece bathing suits. So there.)

But lots of my soccer friends hid behind towels, put clothes on over their bathing suits which they didn’t take off til the edge of the pool, and almost everyone had to make some self-deprecating comment about how bad they looked in a bathing suit. (I was tempted to mention Tracy’s solution but I’m not that brave so I didn’t.)

If bathing suits are your hang up, your particular nemesis, this is great reading, by the way, If I Hear One More Word About Beach Bodies, I’m Gonna Strangle Somebody With a Tankini: Killing your swimsuit anxiety in 5 easy steps and why a “beach body” is whatever body you take to the beach.

So I didn’t have the full blown body positive evangelical conversation with my soccer team that night. We chatted a bit and then moved on. But when I do feel drawn into these conversations–usually when it’s my turn to make a self deprecating remark and I refuse–here are a few of things I say, context depending:

1. My body, our bodies, are amazing things. I love what my body can do. This body thrived in pregnancy and childbirth, can bike 100s of kms, can lift a lot of weight, etc etc and so focusing on what it looks like, as judged by mainstream standards of beauty that I reject, seems to look past the most important stuff, the truly miraculous bits about our bodies. (Read more about this here.)

2. Being thin doesn’t seem to help with body shame either. Often it’s my thin friends who are the worst, especially as we age. It’s like they’ve never had to think about these things, to worry about how they look, until now. And I’ve been thinner too and I haven’t felt less anxious or less self conscious at a smaller size. In a weird way it’s worse. In the game of looks, I’m then ‘in.’ and it matters more. Better to be outside of those beauty norms all the way maybe.

3. From a past post, Oh no, skinny face:

“I’m typically not bothered much by traditional standards of beauty and whether or not I match them. Life’s too short. We all die in the end. The people who care about mainstream beauty don’t much interest me much anyway so why should I be concerned with what they think?

“We all die in the end anyway” might strike you as a gloomy thing to think or say. But really once you adjust to that big piece of bad news everything is small potatoes. It’s quite liberating. The joys of philosophy.”

4. And I usually thank the people in my life with whom I’m closest and I say thanks to to the queer community of which I’m a small part. Why that last one? Why the queer community?

To be clear it’s not the ‘hippie hairy herbal tea drinking love your body 70s lesbian feminists’ I’m thinking of, though knowing some of them in my teen years probably didn’t hurt. It’s the ‘queer deliberately outside mainstream beauty norms but still someone’s cup of tea sex positive queer community’ I’m thinking about.

Think ‘kink inclusive, trans inclusive, gender deviants welcome queer community’. And no, it’s not a perfect world. Still lots of work to be done especially on race and on disability. I know.

But the queer community is mostly where I’ve enjoyed learning about the specificity and details of our desires and attractions.

Tracy and I were amused recently to see that someone found our blog searching for “women with big tits wearing neon green bras.” I posted that one on Facebook and one friend commented “neon green?” and another just “bras?”

Details matter.

How is this connected to body positivity and loving the body you’ve got?

Think about it this way, it doesn’t make any sense to think about being attractive simpliciter.  What exactly would that mean? There’s only attractive to particular people.

Whatever you look like I can assure you there’s someone out there who thinks that thing that you have is THE thing to which they’re attracted. In the world of the internet there’s probably even a group for women with big breasts who like to wear neon green bras and the men and women who love them.

So when friends say. I don’t look attractive when I’m this size, my first response is to wonder to whose standards they’re appealing. Who is the person who would like them but doesn’t because they’re too fat?

Mostly when straight women say they just want to look attractive they mean to look attractive to men. But still I wonder, which men?

The desires of men who like women are far more diverse than the world of men’s magazines would ever have you believe. Men whose desires don’t fit-maybe they like hairy legs, or women with crooked teeth, or they’ve got a thing for women with glasses or women in their fifties on motorbikes –are hurt by gender role stereotyping and hetero conformity too.  Don’t believe me about the diversity of heterosexual male desire, read John DeVore‘s The Types Of Women That Really Turn Us On over at The Frisky.

There are men who like fat women, men who like muscles, women who like bald men, men who like men who are really hairy, women who think men wearing socks with sandals are the hottest (okay, maybe not that one) etc. My point is that it’s a wild weird world out there in terms of attraction.

Once you start thinking this way you realize that men who like skinny 18 year old blondes just have a particularly boring, mainstream fetish*. You can kind of accept it, yawn, and move on. Oh, right, youth. Hmm. He likes thin women. That. That’s his thing. Ho hum.

You can even work up to thinking, in an amended version of a common phrase, your thing is not my thing but your thing is okay, and move on.

And if that’s all he likes, you might even feel sorry for him for leading such a narrow, limited life in a world rich with possibility.

And yes, I know this is isn’t the whole story about body image and insecurity. Often it’s our own standards we don’t live up to. And queer people can struggle with body image as well. But to the extent that it’s about worrying that someone will find you attractive, I urge you to put that worry on the shelf, close the door, and say goodbye.

What’s the connection between loving the body you’ve got and fitness? That’s the subject of a future post.

Some further reading:

10 Ways To Be A Body Positivity Advocate

*A footnote, in a blog post, sorry. I debated whether or not to use the word “fetish” here but I decided to stick with it. We typically use “fetish” to mean a sexual taste or predilection outside the mainstream. He has a foot fetish. She has a fetish for popping balloons.  Whatever. But the fetishization of youth and thinness is so mainstream as to disappear from our view. It’s what’s normal against which other tastes are judged. I think it’s time for that to end. Let’s, non-judgmentally, call the preference for youth and for thinness what it is.

body image · diets · weight loss

Raspberry Ketone, Pure Green Coffee Extract, Garcinia Cambogia, Weight Loss, and the Fallacy of Appealing to Authority

Tracy I20 Comments

My usually skeptical husband forwarded me an email message late last week with the subject “weight loss.” It contained a short video of Dr. Oz endorsing pure green coffee bean extract as a miracle weight loss potion.  My husband’s question to me:  “what do you think?”

The clip I watched showed an enthusiastic Dr. Oz with the creator of the product.  Oz declared it a weight loss miracle.  When I went back to the link a few days later, the link led me to something different. This time, Dr. Oz was interviewing someone about a different weight loss miracle:  Garcinia Cambogia.  Apparently it’s also an amazing fat burner! Like pure green coffee bean extract, this product is supposed to result in weight loss without any changes to diet or activity.

Neither the green coffee bean extract page or the garcinia cambogia page would let me leave them without not one but two pop-ups asking me if I was sure I wanted to leave that page.

Dr. Oz has also spoken highly of “raspberry ketone.”  Available in pill-form (because you’d have to eat NINETY pounds of raspberries to get the appropriate “dose”), raspberry ketone is no less than “a fat-burner in a bottle,” according to Dr. Oz.

His website states that “research has shown that raspberry ketone can help in your weight-loss efforts, especially when paired with regular exercise and a well-balanced diet of healthy and whole foods.”  I love the addendum “especially when paired with regular exercise and a well-balanced diet…”

I think I will stick to the regular exercise and healthy whole foods and save myself the $180 for a 90-day supply.

Most reviews of these products that I’ve read have questioned the research.  A Globe and Mailarticle notes that the study on which the main claims about green coffee bean extract were based involved very few participants. Moreover, participants also lost weight during the placebo phase of the trial.

A Canadian Livingarticle on raspberry ketone notes that so far mice have been the only research subjects. Both articles quoted credible MDs claiming that, surprise, surprise: There are no magic solutions!

From the Globe and Mail: “Usually when studies break the physical laws of the universe, there’s usually something wrong with the study itself,” said Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, medical director of Ottawa’s Bariatric Medical Institute, who writes Weighty Matters, a popular blog on nutrition issues.

I haven’t linked to Dr. Oz’s website and I am not going to say a lot more about these products. Both his site and the products are easy to find on the internet.

What I do want to say is this: there is a well-known fallacy that we learn about in philosophy called “the appeal to authority.”  Appealing to authority is not a good strategy for those seeking truth claims. Just because some authority like Dr. Oz said it’s true doesn’t mean it’s true. Of course we do not need to dismiss the claims of experts. Good science is based on sound studies that have undergone peer review and are based on approved methodologies and ample evidence.

Unfortunately, Dr. Oz is not an expert in most of what he goes on about. And yet he is accepted as an authority by countless people. His stamp of approval on some product or health claim is taken as gospel by many people.  It boosts sales the way Oprah’s endorsement of books used to (perhaps still does) have undue influence in the publishing industry.

This is not to say that everything he says is false. It is only to say that just because he said it doesn’t make it true. We need more evidence than that.

But the medical community has long told us that there are no magic pills for weight loss. Dr. Oz’s claims about these miracle weight loss products are just plain irresponsible, given his level of influence.

I’ve heard all sorts of claims about this and that miracle food or product. When I was a teenager, people took caffeine pills to lose weight. As an undergraduate, smoking cigarettes was the thing.  At one time or another, the special powers of cabbage, grapefruit, and bananas took centre stage in the weight loss culture.  Now it’s more likely to be raspberry ketone, pure green coffee bean extract,  or garcinia cambogia.

And I haven’t even touched on fad diets like eating for your blood type (based on totally ungrounded claims), the lemon-cayenne pepper-maple syrup-water detox, or any variant of a low carb/high protein plan (my first diet—circa 1980—was the Scarsdale diet, a high protein low carb plan that people loved because you got to eat “plenty of steak” for dinner).

If healthy and sustainable weight loss is what you are seeking, none of these supplements or plans will work. They are not sustainable ways of eating for the rest of your life.  And like the claim about raspberry ketone, pair anything with regular exercise and healthy eating and you’re good to go.

No magic and no surprises. As Globe and Mail reporter Carly Weeks says in her evaluation of raspberry ketone, the bottom line hasn’t much changed: “While the promise of the synthetic compound sounds alluring, the best way of losing weight hasn’t changed: It’s still diet and exercise.”

I would only add that “diet” shouldn’t be taken to mean “diets,” those restricted eating plans designed to lose weight. Diets don’t work.  In this context we should understand “diet” to mean simply the way we eat on a regular basis.  We talk a lot on our blog about why weight loss alone is not a great measure of fitness and why we’re not big fans of dieting. Also here and here.

Just to reiterate:  “Dr. Oz said it” is not a reason on which you can base a strong conclusion. In philosophy we call that an appeal to authority, and it’s a fallacy.

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.

body image · weight loss

On feminist philosophy and weight loss

Sam B11 Comments

There isn’t a lot of feminist literature on the experience of losing weight and keeping it off so I was very happy to read Ann Cahill’s paper “Getting to My Fighting Weight” published in the Musings section of the journal Hypatia (25 (2):485-492, 2010). It’s a very gentle piece of philosophy, light on prescription, rich in personal experience and narrative.

I love the idea of  “fighting weight” as a concept that goes beyond boxing and martial arts though I admit that’s what I originally thought Cahill’s piece would be about. I expected a piece on “making weight” or “weighing down” the way one does for fitness competitions, races in light weight rowing, and martial arts competitions.

Cahill also notes there isn’t a lot of feminist work out there that is positive about the experience of losing weight and staying at the new weight.  One possibility of course is that this phenomenon is so rare. Estimates vary but most agree that only about 1 in 20 people who lose weight keep it off for more than five years. Most feminist literature looks at weight loss as part of the larger effort to control women’s lives by imposing an impossible regimen of dieting, self monitoring, and self regulation.

The philosophical literature which Cahill cites will be familiar to many of us. Most feminist philosophers of my generation will have read, in grad school, the two B’s: Bordo and Bartky. Bartky’s 1990 book Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression and Susan Bordo’s 1993 book Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body were the first feminist philosophy works that discussed the political dimensions of women’s efforts regarding our appearance and the high cost we pay for this concern.

Bordo’s book came out the year I graduated but I read some of the articles that went into it along the way. Bordo’s writing about eating disorders was the first time I’d thought about dieting’s effect on women’s lives in the context of feminist philosophy.

Maybe for younger scholars, Cressida Heyes’ work will have played this role. Heyes’ terrific 2006 paper, “Foucault goes to weight watchers” is also published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia (21 (2): 126–49).

Cahill is a beautiful writer and I love her language when she talks about reconciling her decision to lose weight with her feminist values:

“I realized that maximizing my ability to move, quickly, effectively, strongly, was entirely conducive to my feminist aspirations and
activities. I wasn’t aspiring to skinniness or frailty, just the opposite: I wanted to bring strength and vigor to whatever struggle I chose. I wanted to get to my fighting weight.”

I don’t know of any philosopher who has set out to write principles that ought to guide our efforts at weight loss. Cahill doesn’t do that exactly either but she does describe the principles she chose and why they mattered to her. I admire the guidelines she adopted, on feminist grounds, to guide her weight loss journey. In short, there were to be no changes that couldn’t be permanent, no classes of foods off limits, no special or different foods, and no displays of food denial. I liked reading about her choices and how she approached them as a feminist and as a philosopher.

Instead, Cahill dropped weight through the methods of food journaling, calorie tracking, and exercise. Both Tracy and I have blogged about our different reactions to food tracking here on our blog. Tracking and the Panopticon was Tracy’s post on this subject which I followed up with Another Perspective on Tracking. It was interesting in the weeks that followed that post to hear which side of fence our friends lived on. “I’m with you, I track everything,” said one friend, while another agreed with Tracy that the process was “nasty and oppressive.” Everyone had done it and we all had a view.

One of the more philosophically interesting parts of Cahill’s project was how others saw her results.

“I might have called it getting stronger, or deepening my bodily flourishing, or becoming more intentional about the intersection of my material existence and my material culture. But in the context of contemporary culture, what I had done was ‘‘lost weight,’’ and people’s reactions to that weight loss were a fascinating part of the experience.”

Cahill strikingly writes about the downsides of losing weight. Like me, she isn’t so happy with the phenomena I call “skinny face.”

One thing that may have made Cahill’s experiences different from those of many of us is that she came to her plan without a history of body loathing and dieting. Prior to this it sounds like she didn’t even weigh herself regularly. And even now she doesn’t dislike her former, larger body. That’s so lovely and rare.

“I don’t look back at photos of myself from a year ago and shudder. That was a different body that I lived, with its own set of possibilities, practices, and abilities. And there are certainly cultural contexts where that body would be more useful and conducive to my survival than the one I’m living now. Come the apocalypse, those extra pounds would come in handy.”

I did wish Cahill spent more time addressing the dreaded D word, “diet” and I wanted to hear more about how she’s been keeping the weight off. I’ve been down her road of significant weight loss (a few times actually) but I’ve never succeeded in staying at the lower weight. At times I also wanted to hear her draw more general conclusions and principles but Cahill sticks wisely with philosophical reflections on personal experience.

If you’re a feminist interested in the phenomenon of weight loss and you have access to the holdings of a university library, I strongly recommend that you go read Cahill’s Musings piece. For the rest of you, well, this is why I care so much about open access publishing. The beautiful and important work of feminist academics ought to be more widely available, not locked away behind the firewalls that guard the ivory tower or the paywalls that guard the publisher’s websites.

And if you’re like Cahill, someone who has lost weight and kept it off, do her experiences accord with your own? I’m both personally and professionally curious.