Fat Chicks Rule

Health care and exercise for the healthy and rich only.

I decided to rejoin a pool in my area. New York City is notoriously short on pools. However, they do offers recreational memberships to use their facilities. When I first joined, it was $75 a year to use a facility with a pool.  When I decided to rejoin, I discovered that prices had gone up. By how much you think? 10%, 20%? No, it went up a whopping 100%.  Pools were now $150 to join. I can afford it. I can also afford the Y, I can afford any fru-fru gym (not that I would join to be laughed at. OMG a fat woman is exercising how dare she?!)

I'm thinking that in this economy, $150 ain't gonna happen for poor people. Poor people who are constantly bombared with sin taxes, told they are too stupid to understand proper nutrition and exercise. (At least the rec centers are free for kids.)  Except that a recent study shows that poorer people do not in fact buy fast food and take out. It is too expensive.  Put people in dire poverty, you don't see people eating well, you will see food insecurity and not a lot of time for movement. The fact is movement, regardless of weight loss is good for you.

However, it has been shown that exercising individuals, who do not experience any overall weight loss still decrease their risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease

Some Businesses  would like to start charging extras in your health insurance if you smoke and fail to quit or if you're obese and fail to become unobese.

No matter the characterizations, it means that smokers and others pay more than co-workers who meet a company’s health goals.

I'm going to have to take Devil's advocate here with smokers, because they start the slippery slope. No one wants to pay for someone's lung cancer if they smoked, right? But how far will that go? You start with smokers, move on to fatties, then perhaps move on to people who genetically have health issues or people who live in cancer or asthma clusters. How much should a company know about a patient's general health? 

Fat people  suffer from stigma everyday, they are bombarded to do diets that don't work and are always assumed that they eat too much, don't exercise and that they really don't want to be healthy (And many fat people ARE healthy but would be forced to lose weight to save on their health insurance) 

Now if my insurance rates went up because I can't get to my random arcane BMI number, I can afford to pay it. A poor person might decide it would be better to go without. Health care is there to keep you alive, to keep you well. I'm not a big fan of my health care company, but I get discounts on vitamins and gym memberships. At a previous job, my health insurance gave me $100 for going to the gym fifty times in six months (a sum which I collected three times). Companies seem to think that health care coverage, and exercise and food is for the "healthy" and wealthy when it's supposed to protect the populations most vulnerable. 

No More Turkey Day diets.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! Thanksgiving is the time of year when we celebrate family and friends by eating ourselves silly and getting lots of dieting advice.

I remember Weight Watchers and Thanksgiving. At the time, Weight Watchers was still using their exchange system and your goal for Thanksgiving depended on what day of the week was your first day. For years my night was Thursday and first day of a new menu was Friday. Thanksgiving would always be the last day of the week, so in order for me to be “good” I had to save all my extra exchanges and free calories for the big day. The entire week, I had to limited myself to exact portions, so I could save my precious extras for Thursday.

On the big day I was ready. I had saved my extra calories and exchanges. I know I probably went a little over, but my turkey portion was bigger than a deck of cards, covered by a little more than 1 teaspoon of gravy and stuffing. Maybe four breads and two fats instead of three breads and one fat. But all an all I thought I had been perfectly restrained.

The problem happened the next day. The entire week was restrained eating and Friday was a whole new day.

To binge.

The exchanges, the free calories, and painstakingly measured portions flew out the window as I binged mightily on cold turkey and my favorite stuffing. At the time, I’d be very happy to eat an entire box of stove top. I didn’t really eat the food so much as inhaled it, and I craved so strongly I felt I no longer had a will of my own. I was on WW from ages 16 to 20. Four years of bingeing the day after Thanksgiving. Afterwards I felt ashamed like I had done something wrong, that I could control myself if I wanted too (after all, look how well I did on Thanksgiving). The leader at WW always told us that after a binge (she called it “going off the program"), we were supposed to immediately return and start anew. But considering how much I ate, how much would be left for the week? Just water and vegetables? Because I binged on my first day of the new week, I felt ashamed until the following Friday. I loathed myself for being unable to stay in control.

Now, I celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once with Friends on Wednesday night, once on Thursday with family. Both days I will have traditional thanksgiving fare including my favorite stuffing and this is how I will handle it:

There will be no points, exchanges or guilt. I will eat, enjoy my meal and have a good time with the people around the table. The holiday no longer means counting calories or points, eyeing my food, making sure my turkey slice were no bigger than a deck and a half of cards. I have absolutely no idea how many calories were consumed. My only guess is a lot. (My favorite response to “Do you know how many Calories are in that?"  "Yes, a million.")

Linda Bacon’s book Health at Every Size and any book about eating disorders would call Weight Watchers not just a diet but restrained eating. My body, soul and mind did not get the food they really wanted and rebelled. Had I had my normal fill on my WW Thanksgivings, there would have been no bingeing the next day.

So this Thanksgiving, how a wonderful time, don’t fear your food and don’t feel guilty over seconds.

 

Opposite Land

Two recent ads featured the same fat model. The first has the caption "Did your wife scare you last night?" The other features a fat model with an x next to her and a thin model with a check. Having never heard of this company, I thought it was a gym because both models were wearing similar clothes, but then after reading an article in Jezebel, it was explained that the company is personals for people who want affairs. The fat model is supposed to be the wife and the thin model is the woman the husband is to cheat with. The fat model in real life goes by the psedonym "Jacqueline"  and runs an erotica site for people who like big women.  Her image was used without permission. (The personal ad company claimed she made money off it, so it isn't considered exploition or hatred.) 

I'm pretty sure that any man married to Jacqueline, meant to marry a sexy fat woman and not a woman with a body that doesn't even look human. No, I'm not saying being thin isn't human, I'm saying the thin woman in the ad is so poorly shopped that she looks like a worm.  So if you want to cheat on your fat sexy wife with a worm, please be careful of WTD (Worm Transmitted Diseases). And if Cheatin' Hubby knocks up the worm lady, will he support their children or sell them to a freak show? Perhaps the husband was being sympathetic to the worm woman, maybe he secretly desires her worm shaped form and this superficial society would look down on their worm/man affair.

But aside from atrocious looking ads (possibly created by The Worm People from Planet Wormatron), I'm pretty sure this ad should be the opposite. Secret fat admirers may be more interested in cheating on the trophy wife with a sexy fat woman. Going once to a forum on fat sex, the speaker mentioned her erotica site had been pulling in about million a year. I'm pretty sure Jacqueline is pulling in some decent money.

I'm pretty sure she will be around long after this personal ad company is gone.  

Show me the money

A recent NYT article shows an alarming number of potential conflicts of interest in US health care guidelines especially to do with obesity, cholestoral and hypertension. 

The Institute of Medicine reports recommended that those with industry conflicts of interest should generally be excluded, or limited to “a distinct minority of the panel.”

At least eight of the 19 members of the obesity panel have financial ties to a phalanx of private business interests, records show. GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Alli, an over-the-counter product, has made payments to four of them. Four have financial ties to Allergan, maker of the Lap-Band stomach device. One is paid to speak or advise 11 companies with obesity products. And others consult for companies like Nestlé or Weight Watchers. Dr. Ryan disputed the number of conflicts but would not elaborate.

I don't think having almost half a panel with a conflict of interest is fair and unbiased. Why do the foxes decide what's good for the hen house?  With the massive push on fat people to get surgery, take drugs, go on commerical weight loss plans, should the guidelines be pushed by people who make money off this? Especially when weight loss in the long has a high failure rate.

Please remember that Americans spent 60.9 BILLION dollars on dieting last year. That's quite a nice piece of pocket change. And weight loss surgeries which are pushed as easy quick fixes cost up to $25,000 and is now at 5.7 Billion dollar business. (The link will open to a word doc.)

Potentially corrupted guidelines can lead to healthism.  Like these companies who are trying to  charge fat people more for their health insurance, whether of not they actually costing more.

So now more employers are trying a different strategy - they're replacing the carrot with a stick and raising costs for workers who can't seem to lower their cholesterol or tackle obesity.

Meanwhile a study shows that you do in fact have a hormonal reaction after dieting that causes you to eat uncontrollably sometimes to at least a year after dieting. Great, thanks. I only figured that out about 20 years ago.

The findings suggest that dieters who have regained weight are not just slipping back into old habits, but are struggling against a persistent biological urge.

The study of course doesn't indicate we should stop pressuring people to diet but that they need to create long-term strategies to counteract this change may be needed to prevent obesity relapse. In other words, lose weight and then we swear to God we'll try to create a drug to stop your body from thinking it's starving.

And yes, one of the study's authors had financial ties to Nestle.