Does This Make Sense?
People do the following things, some by recommendation of their doctors, to be “more healthy”
- Completely cut out entire food groups from their diet.
- Eat highly processed soy-based food 5 times a day and then one meal of protein and vegetables only. Avoid activity.
- Eat only bananas one day a week.
- Eat only processed foods that come out of a plastic bag and that they cook in the microwave.
- Eat candy bars and milkshakes as long as they stay below a certain number of calories or “points” per day.
- Eat little enough that they are hungry all the time. Ignore their body’s signal that it needs nourishment and instead go workout when hunger strikes.
- Take a pill every day whose side effects include: “You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.” I am not in any way making this up – this actually appears on the documentation.
- Eat extremely strictly Monday through Saturday. Binge eat on Sunday.
- Eat food which has replaced natural ingredients with chemical compounds, proven to cause cancer in animals.
- Eat chips whose label indicates that they “may cause anal leakage”.
- Replace two meals a day with a thin chocolate beverage that acts as a laxative.
- Eat only products made with a specific brand of breakfast cereal.
Meanwhile…
- Nobody has been able to prove that anything works reliably for long-term weight loss, but doctors prescribe things as if they work and then blame the patient if they don’t.
- BMI was created by an epidemiologist in the 1800′s to be used as a statistical tool on large populations, and yet we continue to use it as an individual measurement. People come with wildly varying shoe sizes, but our bodies should all fit the same narrow ratio? Unlikely.
- A great many of the studies from which we derive our information about the effects of being “overweight” and “obese” are funded by diet industry giants like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig.
- Weight Watchers defines “success” as maintaining a 5% weight loss. So if you were 5’4 and started out at 212, reached your goal weight of 120, then gained back 82lbs and ended with a weight of 202, Weight Watchers would tell you that you started and ended in the “obese” BMI category and need to pay for more meetings. But Weight Watchers would count you as a Success Story in their literature and commercials.
- The FDA received 23 reports of serious health problems from a diet pill. These report included jaundice, elevated liver enzymes, liver damage requiring liver transplant, seizures; cardiovascular disorders; and rhabdomyolysis, a type of muscle damage that can lead to kidney failure among other things. Because the diet lobbies have done such a good job of restricting the FDAs authority where weight loss supplements are concerned, these reports weren’t enough to take the pill off the market. They weren’t able to ban it until somebody died.
Just think about it is all I’m asking – does it make sense that you’ll be healthier if you’re thinner, even if you do extremely unhealthy things to get there? If that’s the case why not just start a cocaine habit – as I understand it revs the metabolism and decreases appetite. That ought to get you to your goal weight in a big old hurry.
Doesn’t it seem more likely that healthy habits will lead to a healthy body, even if they don’t lead to weight loss? It’s a shame that it’s so difficult to get good information about what healthy choices mean because the diet industry is so busy lobbying to sell pre-packaged foods wrapped up in shame and guilt. That sounds super-healthy.
Studies tell us that people are more likely to maintain health improvements over the long term if they make healthy behaviors their goal instead of a specific weight. There is a mountain of research that shows that regular exercise improves health indicators, even though it doesn’t typically lead to weight loss in people who are obese. Why is that not the topic of discussion? Maybe because it’s not as sexy as a “war on obesity”. Maybe because it would be harder to make assumptions about people’s health if we had to actually know their behaviors instead of making wild guesses based on their size (and where’s the fun in that)? Maybe it’s because the diet industry spends plenty of it’s 60 Billion dollar a year profits to lobby our government to suppress that information?
Who knows? All I know is that at some point you have to take your health in your own hands and I think that the first step is thinking critically about the messages that we are getting, where they come from, and why those sources might say what they are saying. Then the first thing that we can exercise is a little common sense.
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That’s the thing - we have to learn to trust ourselves and our bodies over the media, the diet industry, and those doctors who keep telling us that our health is tied into our weight. We’ve bought into those lies for so many years, and so many of us have ruined our health with yo-yo dieting and WLS, trying to hit that “healthy” parameter that society has said we must meet, when all along we would have been better off listening to what our bodies told us about the foods they needed and moving our bodies in ways we liked. Those things would have improved our health, whether or not they moved the needle on the scale.
For some of us, it’s too late to have that optimal health, we’ve done too much damage that can’t be undone, but while the damage may not be able to be totally undone, we can still work toward the best health we can have in the bodies we now inhabit. And that entails listening to ourselves/our bodies and telling the rest of the world to eat shit and bark at the moon, they don’t know what’s best for us, only we know what’s best for us, and we’ll work for that in our own way and time.
Great post, Ragen. This sums up the hypocrisy of “health talk” perfectly. It’s not about health, it’s about perceived health. Michelle Allison and I just got done with another conversation and we talk about these weight loss videos on YouTube and how dangerous and unhealthy they are. But they’ll sure as hell make you thin!
None of this makes any sense, none of it is healthy and none of it is worthwhile. It’s all a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath and it’s probably the reason why we’re so fucking fat and unhealthy now anyway.
Peace,
Shannon
So much win. Way to go, Ragen.
Fad diets are ridiculous. All they do is set you up for failure. They offer this plan that restricts you for a certain amount of time. Let’s just say that you do one and you loose weight. Then what? Are you supposed to stop the diet which will result in gaining the weight back since you will be back to your old eating bahviors? Or are you supposed to stay on the diet for life and be miserable doing so.
Why can’t more diets just focus on eating nutritious balanced meals, along with encouraging being active. It is really that simple for healthy eating and helping maintaining good phsyical health, and this is not to say that it will make you thin. In many cases yes but not in many others. But weight shouldn’t be the main concern anyways, overall health should be.
This post is incredibly meaningful to me right now, thank you.
My sister has struggled with diets and negative self image her entire life because of the advice of doctors and random comments from family, friends, and strangers about her weight and supposed health. Essays like this and people like you are something I’ve been searching for a long time because I always knew my sisters body looked exactly like it was supposed to.
She and I grew up together and were fed the same things by the same (health conscious) mom and she has ALWAYS weighed 40-60 lbs more than me. The negative comments and “jokes” people would make about her weight have always enraged me because I could see how much it hurt her and I subconsciously knew it was beyond her control. Also it was hard to understand why family members or some random adult even cared about the weight of an active, healthy kid.
Seeing someone demoralize my sister because of something as arbitrary as weight was/is terrible. It’s one very tiny part of her. I don’t understand why these people can’t see that. No matter what people said, I always knew her body was just designed to look the way it did and it’s size and shape did not mean she was unhealthy or bad or open to criticism. The fucked up part is that my beautiful, fun sister has never accepted her body as is and she is constantly following these ridiculous diets and regimens. The supplements and weird drops are scary.
I’ve been reading this site and others like it for a while now and have been trying to get my sister to do the same, but it’s taking some time. Maybe this will be the one that makes her grab her life and live it to the fullest. I hope to God it is because if I’m tired of this bullshit she’s got to be exhausted. Anyway just wanted to come out in the open and say thanks for all the great posts.
PS If you read this sis: You’re beautiful, I love you, and fuck the haters!
Welcome to Fierce, Freethinking Fatties, Cotton. I hope your sister comes to peace with her body and that she is able to learn that health is not dependent upon weight. Do your sister and yourself a favor and get a copy of “Health at Every Size” by Dr. Linda Bacon (only $10 on Amazon). It’s a great foundation for understanding why everything our society accepts as true about weight and health is actually bullshit. And, of course, if you can get her to read Fierce Fatties, that may help as well. There are other great Fat Acceptance sites out there too. Just stick by her side and help her navigate through the misinformation and she’ll be fine, I guarantee it.
And if she has any questions or doubt or fears, feel free to contact me at atchka at hotmail dot com.
Peace,
Shannon
Okay, the link goofed up my comment, but that’s okay.
Peace,
Shannon
Hello Shannon,
Thanks for the book information and encouragement. I’m going to check it out at our library and then buy my sis a copy.
Have a good week and thanks again,
Cotton
WARNING OF POSSIBLE TRIGGERS IN THIS POST: weight loss talk, diet talk, disordered eating talk
Well, there is a proven way to lose weight and maintain weight loss: eat a rigid, calorie restricted diet every day for the rest of your life. I’m not recommending this by any means, although I know at least a couple people who have made this life choice and appear to be happy with it vs. the tradeoff of remaining fat. But as pointed out in a previous post, at least some (perhaps many?) people who maintain a deliberately reduced-weight or low-weight lifestyle have issues with eating and exercise that borderline on the disordered. Case in point: MeMe Roth.
Disclosure: I’m a fat woman trying to lose some weight chiefly because of knee pain due to chondromalacia patella that goes away when I weigh less. Yes, I’ve done the yo-yo diet thing recently, which is how I know that smaller me = less knee pain. But for me the price of losing 78 lbs recently was very high, as it triggered some food fears and subsequent bulimic episodes. Not so often that I met the dx criteria for bulimia nervosa, but I did binge and purge a few times. Obviously a form of disordered eating. And while I lost weight for both the knee issue and to fit into a smaller size wedding dress I had bought online, and while I kept it off for a year and a half, I did regain in the end. So if you feel I’m nuts for trying to do the same thing again….well, I certainly won’t argue with you. I’ve just decided for ME that the potential payoff here outweighs (no pun intended) the real liabilities.
As for the main point of your post: I definitely agree with you that some of the steps that people take to try to lose weight are ridiculous, like loading up on processed crap. Look at the Snackwells phenom; when all of a sudden fat was THE ENEMY, the heavily sugared and largely unappealing Snackwells became the best-selling cookies in the US, outselling the previous #1, Oreos. The take-home message that people got was: low in fat = healthy, even if the low-in-fat food was full of sugar (like Snackwells) or artificial sweeteners or were otherwise heavily processed into something that barely resembled real food. I’m SOOOOO glad the low-fat craze is over, although the low-carb craze wasn’t much better. But at least the lower-carb craze produced some healthier commercial foods, as in the case of the reduced carb yogurts that simply used less sugar in their fruits and flavorings. But even those went off the shelves once low-carb eating fell out of favor.
I attended TOPS weekly meetings for a while, and you were supposed to bring in one healthy snack food with you every week because they had this contest whereby if you were the “biggest loser” for a week you won the prize basket of “healthy” snacks that everybody had brought this week. I won the contest one week, and while some of the snacks were indeed healthy real food — apples and a banana — the rest was this overly processed, artificial sweetener-laden frankenfood, complete with the aura of healthiness provided by the labels: contains lots of fiber! High in protein! I probably offended some people there because I threw most of my “prizes” in the garbage.
LVB,
What you said about there being a proven way to lose weight is a common misperception and the fallback position whenever we question mainstream beliefs on weight loss. The kind of slow-and-steady weight loss you’re talking about is known officially as the Learn Program for Weight Maintenance developed by Kelly Brownell, Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale (I’ll put the link below since it’s for Amazon and may be screwy).
http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Weight-Management/dp/1878513419
It’s essentially that restricted calories plus exercise for long-term weight loss. It’s commonly prescribed by doctors as the “traditional” weight loss approach. It also has a comparable failure rate to all the other fads. This study (full text is available) was for overweight premenopausal women and compared the Atkins, Ornish, Zone and Learn diet programs. As you can see in the results, at 12 months, Atkins did the best with a mean weight loss of about 10 pounds (4.7 kg), while the Learn program averaged 4.85 pounds (2.2 kg) , but they all failed to induce more than a loss of 10% of original body weight, and all showed signs of regressing at 12 months. If this were a three or even five year trial, I’m certain all four groups would have returned to their original weight.
Plus, as the study itself says:
Then there’s this one-year randomized controlled trial of commercial internet weight loss programs. Participants either used eDiets or the Learn manual. Learn did better than eDiets, but only induced a 4% total body weight loss after a year and an average weight loss of 7.27 pounds (plus or minus 9 pounds).
As you can tell by this table, the major weight loss was immediate, then tapers off. I can’t find many long-term trials (which is pretty common).
I think that the ability to adhere to a reduced-calorie diet is dependent upon various genetic factors that we cannot controls, such as satiety and hunger. Some people don’t have strong hunger signals or have sensitive satiety signals, so they are more readily capable of adhering to Learn long term. But the attrition rate in the latter study is 34% and 24% in the former. So, whatever the reason, nearly a quarter of people cannot stick to Learn and the remaining 75% have what they perceive as disappointing results.
The fact is, however, that a weight reduction of 5-10% has remarkable health benefits. But people are told that the health benefit they need is thinness, so they give up despite whatever actual improvements in health they’ve made because they have not achieved perceptible health. That’s the main problem.
If we just encouraged people to eat healthy and exercise, the benefits would be amazing. But when you say “eat healthy, exercise and lose weight” you taint that great advice and put an unrealistic metric on health.
Peace,
Shannon
Agreed that a small weight reduction can have big benefits. The first weight you tend to shed when you lose is in the abdominal region where excess weight is most dangerous. And exercising helps to reduce and guard against excess fat in that region also.
I certainly am not attempting to go thin, but I’d like to lose weight to the point where I was before, around the 170 lb mark and around 31-32% body fat. For my height, that is still “obese”, but I certainly felt very physically comfortable and healthy at that weight.
The first weight you tend to shed when you lose is in the abdominal region where excess weight is most dangerous. And exercising helps to reduce and guard against excess fat in that region also.
I would argue that, while this statement may be true for you, it is not universally true. I suspect that where one’s adipose shrinks or gains volume in the flux of life’s changing circumstances is largely determined by genetics. Otherwise, I could not explain how the bodies in my family hold on to belly fat with such fervor, that in times of great activity and lighter intake, our butts, legs, and hips are sacrificed on the energy altar in order to maintain the status quo of soft pillowy goodness that protects our well-hidden, six-packs!
Welcome to Fierce, Freethinking Fatties QuietOak. I agree with you 100%. Fat pads (the areas where your fat tends to congregate) is genetically determined. I just listened to somebody talking about fat pads or read something, I forget. But it was all about the research behind fat pads (they have actually been able to transplant them to other parts of the body and the fat will grow there instead).
Peace,
Shannon
Ciggies are great for weight loss too! That’s why so many women continue to smoke, because they’re frightened that if they stop, they’ll pack the weight on. And they will, too.
But hey, at least they’ll die thinner than they otherwise would. They’ll die sooner, of course, but thinner.
Actually, cigarette smoking is not so good for weight loss. I think the difference in weight between avg smoker and the avg nonsmoker is only like 15 lbs. But, of course, that doesn’t stop women from believing smoking is good for weight loss, or from not quitting smoking because of fears they will gain weight.
And the cancer risk? Hey, you can lose some *serious* weight if you get cancer!
I think Alexie might be being sarcastic.
If not, well … um. Maybe it’s my Aspie literalness, but taking up a habit that is _proven to kill you_ by studies far better than any of the “obesity panic” crap out there just to lose weight illustrates why I don’t understand most of humanity.
Oh, I’m sure she was being sarcastic. The trouble is that many women actually believe that smoking is better than getting fat.
This is absolutely the best thing I could’ve read today. I have a (dreaded) doctor appointment tomorrow, and as it’s a new doc I’m seeing, I’m sure we’ll be having ‘the talk’. I have yet to be brave enough to say I’m not interested in weight loss, and that not ALL of my health issues stem from my weight. Hoping I can summon the strength tomorrow. Thank you for this!
I also love how the word “cleanse” usually means “keep your ass glued to the toilet for a day because you’ll be crapping your brains out.” NO THANKS! Granted, one can lose 5 pounds or so in one fell swoop doing a “cleanse.” One also runs the risk of putting their electrolytes completely out of balance. Not to mention the abdominal cramps from hell. Any weight loss solution that involves diarrhea is a bad one!
What doctor recommends dramatic, dangerous fad diets? What a farce.
“Nobody has been able to prove that anything works reliably for long-term weight loss, but doctors prescribe things as if they work and then blame the patient if they don’t.”
Eating a balanced, varied diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, get your heart rate up for about half an hour a day… that doesn’t work? That’s all my doctors have ever recommended to me, and I don’t think there’s a better prescription.
UGAschwa,
Have you heard of EatRight program from the University of Alabama — Birmingham? They describe their program as such:
It focuses on low-energy density foods (more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and less meats, cheeses, sugars and fats) and helping overweight people adopt the recommendations that you (and many others) seem to think fat people have never heard of.
Well, there’s a two-year observational study of the EatRight program that followed up with participants after completing the EatRight program, You can read the entire thing yourself here.
Participants were divided into Maintainers (defined as those gaining less than 5% of body weight since completion) and Gainers (those who gained more than 5%). The “successful” Maintainers had a mean starting weight of 199 pounds, ended the program weighing 193 pounds, and two years later weighed 190 pounds. Mean followup time was two years.
That means that after two years of following the EatRight program, they had lost nine pounds of their body weight, or 5% of their starting weight. And this is simply the mean. Consider those who weigh significantly more, say 300 pounds instead of 200. Five percent of 300 pounds is 15 pounds, or an ending weight of 285 pounds… still fat by mainstream standards.
So, while they may have improved their metabolic indicators (the true measure of health), their weight remained relatively high (or what would be considered unacceptably high to those focusing solely on weight).
Ragen’s point (and the point of Health at Every Size) is that you cannot tell by looking at someone’s body whether they are healthy or not, whether they have spent two years on the EatRight program or not.
A medical establishment that tells people that weight is the problem (rather than lifestyle) is instructing those people to lose weight at whatever cost. When the EatRight programs of the world fail to yield the desired weight loss, then they move on to the risky and dangerous fad diets. Patients who are on the EatRight program and lose just 5% have probably made a great positive impact on their health, but if their doctor only refers to the scale to determine health, then the physician is more likely to label the obese patient as noncompliant, as studies of weight stigma and bias among doctors clearly shows.
Take the focus off of weight and put it where it belongs: metabolic health. Then the prescription you recommend will show greater benefits to those who follow it.
Welcome to Fierce Fatties.
Peace,
Shannon