Fat Chicks Rule

Claim denied

Short post today as I was away the entire weekend.

I have a handful of friends who either have no health coverage or limited health coverage. Their biggest issue isn’t being fat (some of them aren’t) but affordable access to life-functioning drugs.  I am very pro setting up universal health care. There is no reason a person shouldn’t go without the treatment they need without bankrupting them. I think the Affordable Health Care Act is a step in the right direction but it isn’t enough and there are issues concerning the treatment of fat people. 

Screening and counseling for obesity has to be covered with no patient cost-sharing (co-payments, co-insurance or deductibles) by most insurers under the preventive services benefit of the Affordable Care Act, says Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the national trade association representing the health insurance industry.

 This is a waste of time and money. No diet program has been proved to work for the majority of people in the long run. This is merely extra business for the diet industry.

Right now it’s just being offered. Companies like CVS, Michelin tires are showing that soon it will be mandatory to lose weight. 

Exercise elitism

I’ve written before that I got fat at nine. I don’t remember much about the thin years except I hated gym with a passion. Even before I was fat I was uncoordinated and clumsy which meant being teased during team sports. This grew worse as I got bigger and started developing. 

However away from team sports I excelled at biking. On the bike any obstacle was a personal challenge, hills, dirt, mud and NYC traffic. I took the bike everywhere, even one time rode 20 miles from Queens to Long Island with some kind of bizarre idea I would ride to Jones beach (I didn't make because I didn't have a clue how to get there.)

I have biked since I was a thin little kid to a fat young adult. I still had two left feet, and did not get much better with sports that required good hand/eye coordination.   

The Boy Scouts in their infinite wisdom have decided to ban any boy with a BMI over 40 from participating in their every four years Jamboree and those who are 32 to 39.9 can only attend it a camp medical staff deems them okay to exercise. 

Many will rightly point out that BMI is a notoriously bad measure of fitness, especially when applied to teenagers, whose body compositions can fluctuate relatively rapidly as a natural part of growing up. Though the BSA has not released the number of those barred from attending, should we assume that perfectly capable scouts are being excluded because of an imprecise number?

The Boy Scouts message  doesn't fit into the "help people" of their motto. They are putting people into categories without knowing their fitness. They are assuming a boy with a BMI over 40 must be unfit and that boys with a BMI of 32-39.9 must deemed fit or unfit. Whereas if you are under 32, you are considered fit and healthy. They are telling fat boys who live in anti-fat society that they cannot exercise unless they lose weight. 

Katja Rowell of the Huffington Post Points out better ideas:

First and foremost, Scouts could incorporate different levels of challenges to be more inclusive of both fitness level and special needs. (Scouts cite that they have had over 100,000 participants with a range of disabilities, with efforts "directed at keeping such boys in the mainstream of Scouting.") Since the facility cost 350 million dollars, you would think they could offer comprehensive options.

If I had been a boy I wouldn’t been discriminated against because until my 20's my BMI was below 32. However going back to the thin me, I wouldn't have been able to perform a lot of the activities. 

The essentials of the events seemed not to be much of a fun challenge but moral decision based on arbitrary number that doesn't prove fitness. 

The Cash Cow -- Moo

I wouldn't know even where to start to estimate about how much money diet industry had gotten from me. From the memberships at Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem, the gym memberships I gave up after 6 months, the diet soda, the diet foods, the diet books. I am guessing somewhere in the range of 2ok probably more.

My biggest consumption was diet coke. Diet coke was my beverage of choice through almost every single diet. From the ages 15 to 27 (Low carb dieting didn't allow diet soda)  I would drink two or three 2 liter bottles a week, not to mention cans and bottles form the vending  machines. I remember my excitement when Coke released diet cherry coke. One of my writing rituals was a bowl of popcorn and a glass of diet coke by my side while I wrote (today it's water or tea.)

I gave up diet coke when my low carb diet said it was a no-no. Except when I wasn't dieting, I would go back to drinking diet coke.

Diet coke was the last dieting product I had to give up. It had been my fair weather friend for so long. It remained with me after I gave up dieting, long after my book was out, long after I preached fat acceptance. I kept it as the one diet product I wanted to keep. I didn't drink it as I once did and I thought about giving it up for good. The last occassion was December 8, 2007. I only know the date I had been in Syracuse visiting friends and taking photos. After a long day with still more to do, I found myself tired. I asked my husband to go out and get me some tea or coffee or something with caffeine. At the time I didn't drink soda because I had made the association between corn syrup and feeling nausaous. He came back with a diet coke not realizing that I was thinking of giving up. I was so tired I drank it. It had been almost a year since I had one.

I couldn't believe how bad it tasted. Did I really drink this regularly for most of my young adult life?  I realized my biggest addiction hadn't been food (once I stopped dieting, the binging on sugar/salty snacks diminished) but diet soda.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a press release that the diet industry is currently worth $109 Billion and is expected to reach 137 billion in 2017.

The North America Weight Loss / Obesity Management Market was worth $104 billion in the year 2012 and is expected to reach $139.5 billion by 2017. U.S. is the largest market, followed by Canada. The market will grow at a healthy pace in the next five years due to the increasing number of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and cardiac problems, increasing personal disposable income, government initiatives to increase awareness of health and fitness, and technological advancements.

This market includes: commercial diets such as Weight Watchers, weight loss surgery, pills, wellness plans, nutritional counseling, diet foods, books and yes diet soda. One of the companies highlighted as a big diet industry player is Coca-Cola. (And pepsi too.)

Now why do you think this press release was in the Wall Street Journal and not say the JAMA (It might be, I haven't checked) because dieting is a cash fucking cow. There isn't any money in telling people maybe they can eat a little better or move a little more or that they are perfectly healthy outside the arcane normal weight BMI. Or simple 

Do you think with all these billions that the diet industry really wants to you to be healthy and well? Or do they just want your money?

Workplace wellness, the new diet industry?

As I have mentioned before I have no problem with workplace wellness if it's a voluntary incentive based program such as discounts on gyms, smoking cessation programs, vitamins, and even useless diet programs. I have on occasion taken advantage of some of these programs. The problem arises when the program becomes mandatory or penalty based. I have already mentioned in past posts that stigma never works. I personally know that when I dieted and the weight loss stopped then came back on, it sent me into a depressive spiral where I would eat only junkfood and not move. And I have previously mentioned my biggest obstacle to full wellness has been the amount of time I work. If I just had an extra 2 hours a day I could have time to prepare meals and to exercise more. I've been swimming more this summer and often I have to choose between swimming and making lunch for tomorrow.

The Rand company recently put out a report that workplace wellness is a failure on all parts. Not just reducing weight, smoking and cholesterol but savings. The journal Health Affairs put out a similar study and found that workplace wellness did cut some hospitalizations but did not save money in the long run. 

According to a report by researchers at the RAND Corp, programs that try to get employees to become healthier and reduce medical costs have only a modest effect. Those findings run contrary to claims by the mostly small firms that sell workplace wellness to companies ranging from corporate titans to mom-and-pop operations.

Workplace wellness is a 6 billion dollar industry and growing. Like the diet industry it makes a lot of money with poor results. And like the diet industry I see it growing despite evidence it doesn't work. (I'm still waiting for blaming to fat people for being non-compliant.)

 It's hard to push back against this. Saying no to dieting doesn't hurt you financially (If anything you save money by not doing these programs that almost always end in failure) but saying no at work might mean a penalty. There is also a huge issue because the poor are often the ones who suffer more health issues and a penalty would affect them even more. I know people who ration their health care because they can't afford it. Asking them to pay extra would result in their health getting worse not better.

Again I am not against incentives. I would like to see those continue. I would love if my job had a yoga class.

Truth is fiction

I have mentioned a few times that being fat  often means being vilified or victimized.

The American Medical Association which are supposed to represent doctors arbitrarily decided that anyone with an BMI of 30+ has a disease even if they are asymptomatic (they may be counting flab as a symptom, I couldn't say). They victimized fat people as people who can't help it. They're sick, their bodies are broken and diseased. And those poor, innocent, and stupid fat people need to "cure" their disease by taking pills or getting surgery that may or may not have lethal side effects and don't work for most people in the long run.

Last week, noted actor James Gandolfini died at a young age. Someone on one of my fat email lists wondered how long it would be before his weight was blamed for his death.

Not very.

Normally stupid articles like this, I dismiss as crappy journalism but there was something about it that just pissed me off. Perhaps because it manages to vilify and victimize fat people at the same time. First she blamed James Gandolfini for his own death (obviously hiding the fact she has a medical degree.)

I know nothing about the actor other than his roles on the screen. For all I know he he was eating bacon three times a day with a fifth of scotch. Or he had congenital heart disease. Or he wanted to live fast die young and leave an attractive corpse. Or was it because he smoked. I'm sad to see him go but I'm tired of hearing the moral assumptions placed on fat people. 

Next she victimized fat people. Blaming their poverty and lack of education for not knowing how to eat properly.

"No doubt some have a biological tendency to put on weight, but it is clear that obesity is related to low education and low income."

This was the sentence that irked me the most. Coming from that stupid professor's ugly comment. I feel marginalized. The AMA just give me a disease, the professor said I was lazy and this "journalist" just said I was stupid. It's no wonder that fat people are often thought of a lazy, sick and stupid.