Fat Chicks Rule

If you haven't already signed, please do. The Biggest Loser is a horrible show and needs to end. https://www.change.org/p/nbc-cancel-biggest-loser-now?recruiter=2417907&utm_source=petitions_share&utm_medium=copylink

Dear Fat People

Dear Fat People,

Have you been told today you're beautiful?

You are.

You are a beautiful, valued, and productive member of society.

What you eat is your own business.

Your health is between you and your doctor.

The people whose opinions matter: You, your nonjudgmental friends and family and the Fat positive community who loves you unconditionally whether you are eating healthy, eating crap, dieting, have heart disease, have diabetes or are running marathons.

The people who's opinions don't matter: Unfunny comedians who don't know the different between a funny fat joke (Weird Al's "I'm Fat") and an unfunny one.

Just a reminding you in case I haven't said it enough. You are a beautiful, smart, and wonderful person. Value the people who love you.

Please don't allow click-baiting unfunny opportunists to ruin that.

Love Lara

Fat Chicks Rule!! XXOO

New Diet: Deny Drugs you need for Drugs that Don't Work.

The worst doctor I ever saw was an endocrinologist. I went to her thinking that I might have a thyroid condition as I was tired all the time. 

When I finally got into see her, I began to give her the talk about my dieting history, only to have her interrupt to insist I be tested for diabetes. When both my sugar levels and thyroid came back normal, she blamed my fatigue on being fat. (Apparently carrying around weight makes you work harder and tire out faster.)

Another horrible endocrinologist out of Boston is Dr Caroline M Apovian (I will refer to her as "Dr. A" from now on)  who has a horrible idea. Take potentially needed prescription drugs away from fat people until they lose weight with lifestyle changes and weight loss drugs.

I am not kidding.

Use of approved weight-loss medications is endorsed for people with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m and above or at least 27 kg/m with one or more comorbidities. The document "shifts the paradigm" by advising physicians to target the obesity itself first and thereby diminish its related complications — such as hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia, and hypertension — rather than aiming first to treat the comorbidities caused by the excess weight, she said.

Which means to me if you have hypertension, you should just have a stroke if you refuse to take diet pills (which is ironic considering that diet drugs in the past have caused heart disease related deaths.)

Now I'm not against trying actual lifestyle changes first before taking medications. I lowered my cholesterol with dietary changes and an increase in exercise, and if you watch America the Beautiful 2: the Thin Commandments, the director also avoided taking certain medications by becoming an active bike rider. In my case and his, indicators improved with miniscule weight loss. 

This is not the case with everyone, and sometimes people have to take medications. Dr. A not just against using medication for high cholesterol, hypertension, or hyperglycemia, she's against mental health drugs that make you fat.

For patients already taking insulin, sulfonylureas, thiazolidinediones, beta-blockers, or certain specific selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like paroxetine — all of which can lead to weight gain — the document provides advice on how to taper patients from those medications and switch them to alternative agents that don't increase weight.

In my opinion, changing around a person's mental health drugs so they don't get fat is dangerous and a malpractice suit waiting to happen.

But what Dr. A does have for you is  diet pills.

"Medications do not work by themselves, but they can help people maintain a healthy diet by reducing the appetite. Adding a medication to a lifestyle modification program is likely to result in greater weight loss," said Apovian, who is also professor of medicine and pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.

And why is Doctor A. peddling dieting and diet drugs?

Dr Apovian serves on advisory boards for Amylin, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Arena, Nutrisystem, Zafgen, Sanofi, Orexigen, and Enteromedics. She has received research funding from Lilly, Amylin, Aspire Bariatrics, GI Dynamics, Pfizer, Sanofi, Orexigen, MetaProteomics, and the Dr Robert C and Veronica Atkins Foundation. Disclosures for the coauthors are listed in the article.

Changes

Hello all,

I've decided to take a short break from blogging until January to work on National Novel Writing Month and a few other fiction projects. Not to mention the holidays.

I have also found my weekends have become so busy that I don't have the time or effort I can normally put into my blog posts.

I will still actively post to Twitter, so please follow my twitter feed is you don't already.

When I return to blogging, it will probably be a twice monthly blog post. Not necessarily on Mondays but anytime I see a news item I want to write about.

I have really enjoyed the last ten years of writing a weekly blog and especially interacting with the readers.

ASDAH Conference Call for Proposals

No Blog Post this week as I am very busy. But please participate in the ASDAH conference which will be in Boston Next Year (And I hope to be there).

 

2015 ASDAH Educational Conference Theme & Call for Proposals

With the 2015 ASDAH Educational Conference set to take place July 17-19 in the heart of downtown Boston at the Boston Park Plaza hotel, the Association for Size Diversity and Health is excited to announce its conference theme:

Difficult Conversations:

Building Relationships in the HAES® Community and Beyond

With an increasing number of challenges facing the HAES community, both internally and externally, it’s time to remove the barriers that hinder the conversations that will strengthen ASDAH’s work, resolve and mission of spreading the Health At Every Size® message. Therefore, the entire conference will be devoted to discussions around the difficult conversations ASDAH and the HAES community needs to have.

ASDAH is seeking proposals for presentations and workshops at the conference. For the first time ever, and to ensure that crucial voices are not silenced, presenters are not required to be ASDAH members.

 

Please visit the ASDAH website (http://bit.ly/asdah-2015) to learn about the different kinds of topics and areas that the ASDAH Conference is hoping to cover, though, remember that presentations are welcome in subjects not on the list. All presentations should include consideration of relevant elements of diversity for wider application in multiple environments – one of the difficult challenges already facing the HAES community. See the website for the different elements submissions should include.

Please email submissions to Dr. Jenny Copeland ([email protected]) for review no later than December 15, 2014. Please contact Dr. Copeland with any questions.

ASDAH looks forward to seeing you at the conference!

Slow, Fast, or Steady, diets don't work.

No blog post next week. I will be away.

I've done all kinds of diets including lose weight slow and lose weight fast ones. They all ended up the same way. I'd regain all the weight plus more. Eventually I dieted myself to an extra 70 pounds.

A study in Australia showed that dieters who did crash diets (a very low calories one) not only lost more weight but stuck with it longer, compared to the ones who did plans with slow weight loss. Essentially in the race to lose 12.5% of your body weight, crash diets won!

However, the new study shows that "achieving a weight loss target of 12.5 percent is more likely, and drop-out is lower, if losing weight is done quickly," Purcell said.

12.5% is 15lbs if you weigh 200 lbs.

But before you makers of crash diets pat yourself on the back, the study found out one other thing.

 People in both groups regained about 71 percent of their lost weight by the end of three years, regardless of how fast they had slimmed down, the researchers said.

The gist is a crash diet resulted in quicker weight loss than a slow and steady one but 71% of both diets caused weight regain of all their weight within three years (and I bet that percentage will be higher within five years).

 Diets do not work in the long run for most people. It doesn't matter if you do it slow, fast, or on alternative Saturdays.

Beautiful vs. Marketing Beautiful

October 14th was Love Your Body day.

 

This summer I wore a bikini top. I was inspired by another fat woman who also wore one. I did it for a lot of reasons. Mostly to prove I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I didn’t wear it to be an object or to be sexualized. I often wonder where the line is between not being ashamed of your body and being sexualized.

I recently saw Darryl Roberts' third America the Beautiful movie, this one subtitled The Sexualization of Our Youth. In the movie Darryl explores many issues mostly turning people (mostly women) into sex objects. He covers different issues that might be to blame, child beauty pageants, advertisements, teen sex on television, porn, but the big issue really is women believe they have no self-worth unless they believe they can obtain what they see in a magazine. Being an object makes you a thing not a person.

 

Too many women (and we are now seeing it more and more in men) hate their bodies. They see them as too fat, too old, too flawed. They look at magazines, movies and ads that say they are gross. They are told they would only be better if they used this make up, this diet product, or these clothes. And then when they buy these products and they don’t make them look like a model, their self-esteem plummets and eating disorders skyrocket. A recent study has shown that eating disorders can start as early as elementary school.

 

To conduct their studies, Prof. Meilleur and colleagues studied the psychological, sociodemographic and physiological characteristics of 215 children between the ages of 8 and 12 with eating problems…

 

 

…The team found that 95% of the children had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4% were afraid of putting on weight and 46.6% described themselves as "fat."

 

This is more than just trying to look nice, keeping yourself groomed, tossing on a bikini top because you think you look good in it. This is about trying to obtain something a marketer decided is sexy and pretty. Beauty isn’t what you see in on the fashion pages, beauty comes from within.

No Blog Post this Week! Taking a break.

The Non-Diet Diet

You will not find Weight Watchers calling itself a diet, even though its main focus for you is not only losing weight but eating less calories than your body needs.
 
Many diets try to trick you by not referring to themselves as a diet. They may call themselves a lifestyle change, or they may seem not to focus on weight loss but there site is covered weight loss tools and their plan is usually the same: less calories.
 
A new gimmick diet is out called Eat Like a Woman. Apparently it has nothing to do with eating more calcium or folic acid if you're pregnant. No, it you eat a certain wa- the female way--you too will lose weight and keep it off.(actually it's supposed to be a Mediterranean diet which does have heallth benefits, but not proved to be a long cure for fatness)
 
Except that it's still BS. It's just another fad diet pretending to be something else. Eat Like a Woman's slogan is Never Diet Again. Until you you get to the page about the book where it reveals (Horns playing)

Finally a Diet Designed for You.
 
I would laugh this off at another BS diet, if it wasn't for the name. Women are always told they need to eat less. They are given less calories than men, told to eat less as they get older. And now there is a diet program supposedly tailored just to them.  

I say enjoy food, enjoy how it benefits your body and soul and eat like a human.

Row, Row, Row your Boat

Happy Belated Weight Stigma Awareness Week (It was actually last week).

Growing up I was picked last for all team sports. Even when I was thin, I had terrible coordination. Everything got even worse when I gained weight. This made me hate team sports. I would often do my best to get out of it, feigning illness as often as possible.

When I was in eighth grade, I had a great teacher who refused to let me back down from learning volleyball. I sucked it at, couldn’t serve over the net, couldn’t hit the ball back. My teachers and my classmates didn’t make fun of me. They encouraged me to keep practicing. The result, I never became a great volleyball player, but I got better. And I loved playing.

I subscribed to NPR via facebook. They recently posted an article about heavier kids losing weight when they took up rowing. Of course the focus of this program was to help fat kids lose weight.My only hope is the rowing continues when the weight loss stops.

I try to avoid reading comments but I thought about posting my annoyance that the focus was on fat kids rather than rowing for ALL kids. Then I saw this comment:

"You're going to need a bigger boat."

Even though the rowing was focused on weight loss, the article mentioned about the stigma of having fat kids finding a place to exercise

There was no comfortable place for 17-year-old Alexus Burkett in her school’s typical sports program of soccer and lacrosse and basketball.

“They don’t let heavyset girls in,” she says.

I have mentioned before that when fat people exercise we get a damned if we do and damned if we don't attitude towards us. We're told to get off the couch and go for a run and then told we run too slow or too sloppy. We're told we can't run, can't dance, can't play, or play team sports.

“I know I need to be active, but please don’t make me play school sports!” That’s what exercise physiologist Sarah Picard often hears from her young clients at the OWL.

Movement is very important to the human body. Studies have shown exercise benefits people regardless of size. But this is pointless if we shame people away from having regular exercise.