Fat Chicks Rule

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.

Eating right and exercise is controversial.

I had to suffer though my first (and hopefully only) episode of Dr. Oz. I know very little about his show or him other that is he is a doctor (a heart surgeon), author (of the obnoxious YOU on a... series) and he dispenses advice on a daily daytime talk show. (I will withhold my rant for how inane daytime talk shows are). Also thanks to Weight Watchers for sponsoring the show. Now I know who butters Dr. Oz's bread. (Should I say instead "Who adds low fat soy milk to Dr. Oz's high fiber cereal?")

So Dr. Oz had on Dr. Glenn Gaesser who wrote Big Fat Lies. Dr. Gaesser is one of the earliest pioneers to say that it was not fatness per se (i.e., weight) but poor lifestyle that can cause "Obesity related health problems." (I'm not being biased here because Dr. Gaesser had written two other books encouraging weight loss.) Dr. Oz considers Dr. Gaesser's message of  being able to be fit and fat as controversial and "dangerous".  But Dr. Oz's message is more of the same: fatness, all fatness will kill you (unless you do his super duper diet plan. More of that later).

If you want to make Americans fatter, put them on a diet.

Dr. Gaesser bought up something on the show, that I have mentioned before: Weight Cycling. Weight cycling is personal to me, as I have gained and lost the same 30-40 pounds about five times. Weight cyclingcan cause cardiovascular and metabolic disorders (the same diseases that Dr. Oz would blame on being fat.)

Dr. Oz mentions as a heart surgeon that all his obese patients have heart problems. Ragan Chastain of Dances with Fat in her video rant mentions that being a heart surgeon, his sampling of fat people would not be all fat people but merely ones who have heart issues. Fat and thin people have heart issues. And fat people are more likely to survive heart issuesthan thin people. Ragan also points out how often Dr. Oz used anecdotal evidence on the show as opposed to Dr. Gaeser who cited research 11 times. Dr. Oz did so once . . . and it was his own research.

Dr. Oz's diet is the prehistoric diet i.e. a plant based diet, often pushed by vegetarians and Michael Pollan. It happens to be much the way I eat except soy which gives me a headache. Should I stop? If I was following Dr. Gaesser advice, I wouldn't. In fact I would attempt to increase my exercise. If I followed Dr. Oz, the lack of weight loss would discourage me for continuing.

Which plan is really more controversial?