Fat Chicks Rule

Lying to create an epidemic

As of now, there has never been a diet drug that has worked in the long run. Many have dangerous side effects (including death). That being said, apparently the drug industry feels that they may give up on obesity drugs if the FDA would stop being so rigid on them.

They point to obesity drugs, where Arena Pharmaceuticals, Orexigen Therapeutics and Vivus have hit roadblocks in gaining approval for their diet pills because of potential safety concerns.

I say the FDA isn't rigid enough. Diet pills don't work, and have dangerous side effects. This is something the drug industry needs to give up on. Diabetes is slightly different. A pill that would cure diabetes would be wonderful, but according to Consumer reports, current diabetes medications are no better or safer than the ones they replaced. 

On to (or should I say back to) other liars, my favorite topic of the last three posts, namely fat hating Children's Health Care of Atlanta (CHOA). They are under more fire this week for using healthy fat actors to portray poor disease ridden obese children.  (There is also a story about NYC diabetes ad that photoshopped off a healthy person's leg.) Perhaps because they couldn't find any fat actors who had these diseases. 

Bioethicists and health communicators say untruthful testimonials in public health campaigns are wrong, even if their messages are, in a broad sense, advertisements. Falseness in these ads loses the public's trust, which is critical in public health initiatives, experts say.

Even pro-weight loss groups such as the Rudd Center disapproves of the ads.

Georgia’s “Strong4Life” campaign to address childhood obesity is a well-meaning but likely counterproductive attempt to address one of the most important public health priorities in our country. It is critical to address childhood obesity, but the Strong4Life campaign takes a misguided approach that may inadvertently worsen obesity and harm the very people who are most in need of help.

This highly visible and well-financed campaign ($50 million) intends to motivate parents and children to take action on childhood obesity by using images and testimonials of obese youth (hired actors) who are portrayed with “warning” messages...

I also want to thank them for pointing out the 50 million dollar price tag. In 2009, it was estimated that 11 percent of Georgia's children had no health insurance. I'm pretty sure that 50 mil would help cover that gap. Of give the money to me and I'll start a non-for-profit insurance company called FatCo whose sole purpose would be to give health insurance to people deemed "not healthy enough for insurance".

They have also come under major fire by the  Size acceptance community who have taken them on with a campaign called "I stand" Stand4kids, which I mentioned it briefly last week when the Tumblr site was only a handful of photos. SInce then, it has grown by leaps and bounds to over a hundred photos and more are being added each day. 

And in other news about liars, fat hating Whole Foods who claims you can be thin, healthy, and beautiful if you only eat from their store has said the mean nasty government (and yes the USDA needs to be more forceful on GMO crops) is forcing them to carry GMO foods. 

And I stand for my fat! Because fat is part of my body, it is a part of me. To hate it is to hate myself.

*Disclaimer the b/w image and background were photoshopped. However the fat people in the ads are fat and the thin people are thin. Quotes underneath are 100% truth. 

 

Paula Deen, the fear of food and CHOA's lies.

I happen to like Paula Deen ever since I heard her on Wait Wait Don't Tell me (She nailed all three of her questions about Tofu). Where she had some good advice about her Krispie Creme burger. Only one serving per lifetime. (I have yet to do my one time.) I am saddened to hear that she has diabetes and even more saddened to hear about attacks on her by another chef (Anthony Bourdain) for her high fat diet (Bourdain's only qualification toward being "healthy" is that he is thin; this former drug addict is also  an unapologetic drinker and smoker, also Bourdain's recipes are filled with fat as well. Both chefs make their foods from scratch.)

She was vilified in Salon that her own cooking caused her diabetes. Paul Campos has written a good essay why that probably isn't true. 

What also saddens me is the increased fear of food. Comfort food, soul food, celebratory food, all food considered bad for us has become of limits, even in moderation. If you eat comfort food, you are psychologically damaged. Kids can't touch any cupcakes at school party because if they are fat they are bad for eating it, if they thin they might become fat.  Even cheese has been vilified (warning on the link, it's filled with fat hatred.) We have made food the enemy. Unless you have a food allergy, food is nothing to fear. Food can be amazing, even the stuff that you can only have once per lifetime, even the stuff no one in their right mind should be eating. Learning to enjoy food takes away any sinful associations, allows your body and your mind the freedom to analyze what they need.

Dieting takes that decision away. 10 years after my last diet, I still haven't fully returned to eating normally, I still can't enjoy good food the way I want. I still can't savor it without guilt, and I still have trouble slowing my eating out of fear the food will be gone.

Now to the people that hate fat children about who I wrote previously.  First off, every single child in the ad campaign are actors. Surprised? I'm not. (It's an advert, people!)

One of the children, an articulate, sixth-grader named Chloe McSwain, from Sandy Springs, Ga., is portrayed as “Maritza.” At the beginning of a black-and-white 30-second spot, she stares right into the camera.

“My doctor says I have something called hypertension,” she says. “I’m really scared.” In white block letters, “SOME DISEASES AREN’T JUST FOR ADULTS ANYMORE,” flashes across a black screen.  In real life, Chloe, 11, actually doesn’t have hypertension, according to her mother.

 Meanwhile Doug Hertz a trustee (Not a doctor or medical profession but the local beer guy) of Children's health care of Atlanta. (CHOA) has defending their ads claiming that everyone is ignoring the issue. Except I've been reporting stories since this blog's inception how weight loss is constantly pushed on children. Hertz claimed It is not about a child’s weight; it is about increased risk of illnesses once seen only in adults. These include hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and liver problems, to name a few.

If it isn't about weight, why are the ads filled with fat kids, disturbed that they are fat?

Oh and CHOA, take note, Georgia has to two biggest polluters in the Country, the worst one is 60 miles from Atlanta. Maybe CHOA would like to focus on other health issues, say Asthma? But I suppose it's easier to pick on fat kids that take on a dirty plant.

I leave you with a far more beautiful and positive image

 

 

Healthy Weight Week

Press Release

By the third week in January, New Year diets are dumped, the rebound binge is over and people are looking for balance to get their lives back on track. They can find it in the 19^th annual Healthy Weight Week that begins Sunday, promoting lifestyle habits of wellness for people of all sizes and shapes.

“It’s a time to say ‘I’m okay and so are you.’ Let’s stop dieting and get on with living in normal healthy ways,” says Francie M. Berg, MS, licensed nutritionist and adjunct professor at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, who chairs the event.

Healthy Weight Week features two sets of awards. Adele, the young British singer, topped the Women’s Healthy Body Image Awards. The Slim Chance Awards for worst diets of 2011 went to a 23-year-old self-made millionaire, HCG hormone treatment, Sensa weight-loss crystals, and a plastic bracelet set with hologram discs.

During Healthy Weight Week, people are encouraged to improve habits in lasting ways by eating well, living actively and feeling good about themselves and others. For more information see www.healthyweight.net/hww.htm
##

CONTACT:
Ronda Irwin or Francie M. Berg
701-567-2646
Healthy Weight Network
402 South 14th Street
Hettinger, ND 58639
www.healthyweight.net

Take action today against SOPA & PIPA https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

Off to the woods

On vacation today, so no blog post. I will be snowshoeing in Vermont in highs expected to be 10.  Glad to have the extra padding. 

 

Georgia becomes a school yard bully & another study for HAES.

Early last year, I criticized a "Health" organization in Atlanta, Georgia for ads that both victimized and villainized fat children. I've have bought up before that fat people are either victimized for not knowing any better or villianized for delibrately becoming fat. Most health care agencies tend to use the victimization mentality. If only those poor stupid fat people would understand healthy eating and exercise they would be healthy and slender!

However this organization seems to have decided to keep the negative ads and it seems they have now taken a step further into full scale bullying of fat kids.  Ads such as this one (I have used a cut version from the Huffington post as I don't want to show the full ad):

For some reason, this caption disturbed me the most. 

I have been fat since I was 10 years old. I am now forty, still fat, happily married, in a good job and independant.

I am still my parents little girl. 

What I do know is the worst diet in the world wasn't Weight Watchers or Atkins or Slim Fast or Nutrisystem or (I got a bunch more) but the stigma diet. Playing devil's advocate here for a moment.  I wouldn't start another diet unless I was motivated. So I never started one when I felt ashamed. Feeling shame made me not want to bother dieting, or lose weight or do anything because I was a monster and not worthy.

I'm not the only one who thinks of this as outright bullying. Paul Campos pointed out in his Daily Beast article: 

Oh heavens no: we certainly don’t want to shame anyone!  After all, we value, and indeed treasure, human “diversity” in all its forms—except, apparently, body diversity...

...Even if we put aside the difficult question of how you can avoid shaming and stigmatizing people if at the same time you’re claiming that their bodies are diseased as a consequence of behavior that’s within their (or at least their parents’) control, there are other problems with the theory that it’s useful to inform fat children that in this culture it’s not considered desirable to be fat.

Harriet Brown points out

Efforts like this one emphasize the idea that weight loss is a matter of personal responsibility, and they demonize fat children and teens in the name of helping them. How do kids feel when they see kids who look like them being targeted as not OK? They already know it’s bad to be fat; in one recent study, children as young as three showed a strong preference for thinness over fat, and made comments like “I hate her because she has a fat stomach” and “She’s fat and ugly.”

I firmly believe to the creators of these ad campaigns don't care about children, they hate fat people. There is a change.org petition against these ads, if you haven't signed it, please do.  And it's a waste of 50 million dollars when I would much rather it be used to, say, take care of Georgia's children. 

And studies have shown these "inventions" do not cause weight loss. 

 Waters' group aimed to update a 2005 review that found many pediatric obesity interventions were not able to reduce weight gain but were successful in promoting a healthy diet and an increased level of physical activity.

So an "intervention" causes healthy habits but no weight loss, is it a failure.

Meanwhile if they really really wanted to help the children, they might look at some research. For example check this study out, look at that conclusion:

Conclusions: Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.

Is anyone here tired of my comparing HAES to weight based health? Because I have one more.

Strong4life = shame, eating disorders, stigmitization, humilation, marginalization and stress.

HAES = Eating right, movement, healthy ingrained habits, body love, oh and significant decreased mortality.

From Radical to Realism! ReVolution Time!

It’s a new year. And many are pledging the same boring resolutions of 2011, to lose weight! To become thin! (or thinner!), to use that treadmill covered with cobwebs! To fork over money to my old gym! To refill the seats at Weight Watchers! Cut those carbs, count those calories! Lower those fats! 2012 will be the year of a whole new me! There is a reason now you are bombarded with diet ads. They know one of the biggest resolution is to lose weight. Weight Watcher's current slogan is "Believe because it works."  The New York Times begs to differ. 

A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. 

Instead of those same tired resolutions we make each years (and yes, you should call your mother more often), let’s try something radical and different, reVolution. Let’s make changes at any time for the good of yourself and others. Dieting and intentional weight loss doesn't work for most of us in the long run. So why keep repeating these failures?

Revolution comes from real change. The only real change you might get from a diet is eating disordered.  Although critic often say the fat acceptance movement are just fat people "giving up" but we aren't. What we are giving up that the thin cookie cutter ideal is a lie. We are giving up that food and movement is the enemy. 

Health at Every size shouldn't be as radical as it is and it shouldn't be dismissed. The idea of eating healthy and normal foods and doing movement you enjoy and letting your weight fall 8777745wherever it is supposed to be isn't radical, it should be normal. Diets are the ones that are abnormal. They teach us healthy is only when you diet.  Associations of health with dieting means if I'm off the diet, I shouldn't do anything healthy.

HAES shouldn't have to be a revolution, because it is something we can do, everyday.  

Defending Michelle Obama

In the past I have been a critic of Let's Move and still am. I have no problem with encouraging healthy eating and movement for children. I am for making tasty nutritious lunches in school and schools having enough money to offer gym classes and sports. I do not agree that it should be done to eliminate all fatness. For one thing, there will always be fat children, and two encouraging children to adhere to a thin ideal will only lead to body and eating disorders.

Recently a Republican Congressmember Jim Sensenbrenner criticized Mrs. Obama's rear end. Let's forget for a moment that Ms. Obama is the first lady of the US, a Harvard educated lawyer, a former dean and all she is now is a typically woman, judged by appearence rather than accomplishments. 

I could also mention how choosing weight based rather than health based for Let's Move and Healthy Eating Initiatives opened her up to attack if her body wasn't a thin ideal.

I could mention how Jim  Sensenbrenner is not a slender reed himself. 

But I won't. Because this isn't about Let's Move, or who's fit or not, this is about fat hatred. Fat hatred against Michelle Obama, fat hatred against Jim Sensenbrenner. Fat hatred against all fat people by using fat as something horrific, something insulting and the worst thing you can ever be.  It's time to stop, it's time to remove the negativity out of fat, time to stop insulting each other based on weight because we can do better as people and a society that to use insults based on how a person looks. 

 

 

WW, Nutrisystem and Jenny present: Dieting, Dieting and more Dieting!!

Dieting season is almost upon us! Soon everyone will be signing up for gyms, diet programs or just decide it's time to finally get rid of the weight. This means it's time for flashy ad campaigns for the diet industry to guilt you after you might have eaten too much this holiday season. This means another year of starting "good" and ending "bad."

However I like to  start with a good story, one that I already covered, the FDA is coming down hard on the lapband.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it has taken action against eight California surgical centers and the marketing firm 1-800-GET-THIN LLC, for misleading advertising of the Lap-Band, an FDA-approved device used for weight loss in obese adults.

But here's a story that made me throw up a little in my month. A fluff piece appearing in the New York Times gives the diet industry some free advertisment by covering three former fat divas and a basketball player (because men haven't yet reached the level of body dissatisfaction women have)  who not only want to you to join the dieting trio of Weight watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem,  and lose weight but want stop hunger too.  And I am shocked, shocked to find Weight Watchers supporting Dr. Oz's weight loss program. 

THIS holiday season, three of the country’s biggest diet companies are turning to three well-known divas to deliver public-minded messages about obesity and its opposite, hunger, along with the customary exhortations for people to begin shedding pounds as soon as the year’s festivities end.

Hunger and food insecurity is of course an important issue even here in America and donating food (year round not just Christmas) is excellent. There are, in fact, many studies indicating that people who are food insecure (especially woman and girls) tend to be fat.  So I guess hunger and fatness are NOT polar opposites.

I think one of the best ways to stop hunger is to not diet, and to take money you would normally spend on diet programs and give it to actually stopping hunger.

Speaking of hunger and dieting. A new "study" about Weight Cycling indicates that if you are a mouse and weight cycle (actually eat a high fat diet followed by a low fat diet) you'll be okay.  So mice, it is okay to eat high fat sometimes just make sure you also eat low fat.  I haven't seen this study yet. A pubmed search indicated one of the authors  had lots of studies on mice,  Weight cycling is not about how your body reacts from doing a high fat diet and then moving to a low fat one. It has to do with losing and gaining a large amount of weight repeatedly. All this proves again that if you are a mouse, don't eat a high fat diet. Other real indicators of the study may be that healthy eating, not weight loss fixes health indicators. Or that eating high fat 50% of the time won't affect your health. 

Also I see your study and raise you one done on human women that indicates a higher death rate among weight cyclers.  Here is another one done on middle age men. 

(Quick edit, I've fixed the link to female weight cycle study to it is linked to the full text version. If you scroll down to results, you will read this: "Weight cyclers gained significantly more than non-cyclers during the follow-up period (11.3 lbs for severe cyclers and 9.0 lbs for mild cyclers) compared with 5.8 lbs for non-cyclers (p <0.001). In age-adjusted models severe cyclers in early and middle adulthood had a higher mortality rate (RR=1.32, CI 1.15–1.51) than non-cyclers, but mild cyclers did not differ significantly from non-cyclers (RR=0.91, 95% CI 0.82–1.01)"  The study authors then indicate that they adjusted the rates based on the subjects BMI at age 18.

Let's go back to HAES again: eat right, exercise, love your body, and let your weight be what your body decides. Or let's all be like mice, and be subject to stupid laboratory experiments like eating low-fat.   

SOW: Or the same old way

Sleep Apnea is a sleep disorder in where you stop breathing for a few seconds several times during the night depending on severity. Immediate results include poor sleep and daytime drowsiness. Sleep apnea happens to be one of the few "Obesity related diseases" that isn't caused by being fat but you can become fat because of it. 

In the long run, sleep apnea can cause heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. All of these are considered "obesity related diseases".  (I also think it many "obesity related diseases" fat is the symptom not the cause).  Studies have even looked into the "obesity epidemic" being caused by a rise in sleep disorders (Not just OSA but generally not getting enough sleep. How many people do you know who sleep when they are tired and wake up without an alarm?).

How can lack of sleep possibly make you fat? There can be a multitude of reasons: lack of energy makes  for the lack of movement, a need for high calories energy, or  it can possibly have an effect of hormones and metabolism.

So what does this have to do with the title of this blog: The Same Old Way. The same old way is this, blaming everything on fat and curing everything with weight loss. Even though sustained long term weight loss for the majority of people can't be done. And when they say weight loss, it really is fat to thin, not fat to less fat. Many sites tote the "Just losing 10% of your body weight will help". If it did, why continue to use the arcane BMI tables? What they mean is lose 10% of your body weight and kept losing 10% until you are thin. 

The same old way regards an eight year old kid who weighs 200lbs be taken from his family and placed in foster care, for failing to lose weight. Our society says 200lbs eight year old must mean the mother (always the mother) is force feeding him ding dongs. An eight year old weighing 200 pounds is nowhere near the norm even for fat kids. When I tried to measure his weight into a child BMI calculator put out by the CDC it told I wasn't putting in accurate measurements. So maybe doctors and social workers should look beyond blaming Mom and forcing kids to embrace the diet mentality. Perhaps they should look into metabolic or other medical issues such as one the kid has been already diagnosed with: Sleep apnea.  

And for this poor kid. He's going to have to live with the stress of being fat in a thin obsessed world, always pushed to lose weight or else and being ripped from his family and forced to live with strangers.  I see eating disorders in his future.  Oh but I forgot, better the kids have eating disorders than be fat.