Fat Chicks Rule

Result Still Not Typical

Weight Watchers Centers all over are preparing for the January rush. Every January people guilty due to overeating during the holidays will make it their New Year's Resolution to lose weight. Even though they did exactly the same last year. After they ditched their diet the previous year. Maybe they made it to March or even to Halloween. The halls of Weight Watchers usually empty after that because in reality WW isn't a lifestyle change but a diet. Something you can't stick to during the holiday months.

During my dieting years, I actually stuck with WW for the holiday season. Granted I had figured out patterns where I could binge eat, namely Thursday night right after the meeting. I think I managed to lose weight on WW only because I started when I was 16 and hadn't yet damaged my metabolism.

Now, I don't diet come January or through the holidays. Yes, I eat more. I won't deny that. I have a lot more parties to go to. There are leftovers, gifts of desserts, and after Christmas sales. What I make sure I do is to keep up my healthy habits. I make sure I eat my vegetables, I make sure that I move and I don't care if I've gained weight or not.

Resolutions to be healthier don't have to start on Jan 1 (or in dieter's cases Jan 3, after all the junk food is gone). When you want to do something for your body. Do it right now. In fact I'm just about to get it a cup of water.

Have a Happy New Year! Remember Results Not Typical. 

 

I see you in the mirror

Pick up almost any book by a fat person about their diet history, it will be almost the same story. Even books like Diary of a Fat Housewife where the author was "victorious over fat" has the same story of the diet cycle. This cycle involved going on a diet, losing weight, feeling "great" and then slowly the diet would fail. The person would regain the weight plus more and feel terrible about themselves. Every time I read these stories, I saw my own. I found I had higher self-esteem the more weight I lost. When the loss would stop, I would become depress and hate myself.

I'm always annoyed that studies showing fatness being worse than Hitler  don't include a dieting history. Maybe they might find chronic dieting to be the culprit of many "obesity-related diseases."
My own diet history had almost everything I read in other books, except I never got prescription diet pills or had WLS. Perhaps it was because at the time I was under the glass ceiling of size 16. Size 16 and under meant you should continue dieting, but it's not as serious because you don't have death fat. Death fat is where fat because unacceptable and dangerous, whether it is or not. I was fat but not death fat and doctors didn't push pills on me (instead I used OTC ones). Their treatment was often lectures on going on diets with no real practical advice on getting healthy. The stories I read about fatties with the dreaded death fat were similar to mine but the dieting was often more extreme. For example this woman who had "Death fat." Her story is similar to mine as we both hated our bodies. But she never accepted herself and did anything she could to lose weight including surgery that nearly killed her (Warning it is graphic).

I weigh 165 now, and that's still too much for me. I have become much more comfortable with my personality and just being me, but I only really feel at home behind a computer, where I can hide my body. I don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable in my own skin. I still hate my body, every day. I still have all the internal demons of 28 years of everyone telling me I was wrong for looking the way I looked, and that I was less of a woman, and worthless as a person, because of how I looked.
The sad part is her story it is remarkably similar to one written at least 30 years ago in Shadows on a Tightrope about a woman who got WLS not for her health but because she couldn't live in a fat hating world anymore.

Everyone have a lovely holiday and a Merry Christmas or just a nice day. Remember the best present you can give yourself is loving your body!

Why I walked towards HAES™

In 2002, I stopped dieting. For 17 years, I lost weight, then gained weight, plus more. I believe dieting caused my weight gain. When the diets failed me, I always ended up around the same number: 235. All attempts to change that set point either through “sensible eating plans” or crash diets had failed miserably.

All diets (including the sensible eating plans and the crash diets) had the same issues. I'd get bored, hungry, and obsessed with my food. During low-carb dieting, I dreamt about eating bread. On all diets, my self-esteem plummeted when I didn't lose weight. When the weight loss stopped, I would stop doing any healthy habits.

When I stopped dieting, I had no idea how to eat. I hadn't eaten intuitively since I was a child. When I was a kid, I ate candy but I also loved carrots, peppers and cucumbers and ran and biked like a maniac. I didn’t become aware of my food until I gained weight and the adults began chastising me for any junk food I ate.

Now I had to figure out how to eat healthy and move for my body rather than weight loss. I had to make sure that I didn't vilify foods. I had to ignore the scale for the first time in 17 years and eat and exercise not based on what it said.

Recently a pro-weight loss blog posted an article from an "anonymous commenter" claiming that those who preach HAES (tm) have disordered health, whatever that means, and that people who preach HAES is only meant for fat people.

The "community" has become less about health at any size. It has become "Only healthy at larger sizes". It was noted that people who gained weight for health reasons were OK (that intentional weight change is acceptable). People who benefited from weight loss, however, were villains, lying, or anomalies. (Their intentional weight change is bad, offensive, and "dangerous") Health concerns for people at smaller sizes were/are irrelevant.

I am a member of HAES community and I have find that while HAES tends to be more for larger people (As they are the most affected by the dieting/binge cycle), HAES is weight neutral. So if you happen to be anywhere on the BMI ruler: 17, 40, 37, 23 or 25, It’s not about losing or gaining weight, it’s about eating and moving for your body and loving yourself. The whole idea of HAES is to continue these good habits whether or not there is weight loss or gain.

Or maybe it’s because HAES is not a money maker.

  

Fat? Fit? Myth? Or Something else.

I mentioned last week another study proving fit and fat. Literally on the heels of that study was another one that the media including NPR screamed "No, that's wrong. If you are fat down the line you will die of something."

This new study said that fat (only those with 30 BMI or over) people who were metabolic healthy were 24 percent more likely to be metabolically unhealthy 10 years later.

Of course when the media picks it up, they assume this must mean that you cannot be fat and fit. 

Except.

The study didn't include physical fitness. The study didn't take into account fat people who were physically active. This means that they don't know if metabolically healthy fat people stayed that way if they were physically active. I have mentioned before on this blog that there are barrier to fat people exercising. Bikes aren't weight rated, fat people get starred at the gym, fat people exercising are told they aren't "Graceful" or how miserable we look.

That means NBC's headline -- "New Research Disputes Fat But Fit Claim" -- is simply wrong because the meta-analysis didn't take physical fitness into account, so "fat but fit" (where fit means being physically fit) was never actually tested.

The study also didn't include chronic dieting. Every single fat person I know (And I know a lot) except for one has a history of dieting. Before I did the Atkins diets, I was metabolically perfect. After Atkins my cholesterol went up to 232. To the point I had a doctor want to put me on drugs for it. Only through healthy eating and exercise was I able to bring it to almost normal with  no weight loss. I find it terrifying that dieting history is often overlooked or ignored when doing studies on fatness.

"The study is silent on the health impact of pursuing weight loss, because it does not compare people who were fat who lost weight to people who are still fat," she (Deb Burgard) wrote. In fact, she continued, fat people who repeatedly try to lose weight are more likely to yo-yo diet, or weight-cycle, than they are to maintain weight loss permanently. And because weight-cycling has been linked to cardiac disease and other problems, overweight people who are metabolically healthy could increase their risks of the very diseases they tried to avoid in the first place if they lose weight and gain it back again.

It all goes back to the Flegal and similar studies. This study proved that people with normal and overweight BMI had the same risks. 

NPR's is just inaccurate; in fact, the meta-analysis showed that overweight, healthy people's risks were so similar to the control group's risks that the difference was statistically insignificant.

 This study only strengthens the Health at Every Size argument. You can make countless studies showing fat is evil and bad but with no method of weight loss proved to work in the long run for most people, it would be better to focus on increasing physically activity.  Another study shows a change of healthy habits not weight loss is responsible for improvement in health indicators.

What’s more, the few health benefits they found appear to be the result of participants adopting specific healthy habits such as exercising and eating more fruits and vegetables. Weight loss—or lack thereof—was apparently not the defining factor. 

I much prefer when "Obesity experts" focus on reducing stigma. You shouldn't have to be thin to exercise and you shouldn't have to eat less than what your body needs. 

Workplace wellness still doesn't work

The mainstream diet industry is having financial difficulties as more people are realizing that they are a waste of time and money. Unfortunately people are turning to DIY and fad diets which also haven't been proved to work, but are at least cheaper.

One place that seems to be making money is workplace wellness. Granted, it too, is a waste of time and money, but it like the diet industry, has bamboozled HR managers with the same empty promises. It seems to have promised to make the workforce slim and trim and lower health care costs despite the RAND's report that this is not even a little true.

Now workplace wellness has gone a step further: you will do this "voluntary" dieting or exercise or face penalties. It doesn't matter if you (a) regularly exercise, (b) eat healthy or (c) have nothing physically wrong with you, (d) have tried every single method to lose weight only to lose weight, gain it all back plus more. This time it will be financial penalties that will try make the failed programs work. You will be thin or else. Despite that yet another study came out showing you can be fat and fit.

They found that fitness levels, not weight, predicted whether or not a participant had died in the study's intervening years. Unfit people, regardless of their weight, had twice the risk of dying during the study than fit people, and overweight and obese people who were fit had similar mortality risks as fit, normal weight participants. Another way of putting it: thin, unfit people had twice the mortality risk as obese fit people.

Workplace wellness eliminates your right to have a life outside of work and it's extremely discriminatory as poorer people tend to have a higher BMI and may not have access to healthier foods and gyms (I know that when my salary went up, I was able to afford more organic food). Try telling a working mother that she has to find 30 minutes per day to walk or pay $300 more a year.  And even if she does manage to find the time, if she doesn't lose weight, she'll still have to pay $300 or more.

“Employers are at risk of creating a wellness system that is used not to improve health, but to discriminate against those with obesity in order to improve their bottom line,” stated Dr. Tsai. “Employers should avoid BMI targets as the basis for any financial penalty or incentive, and instead reward employees for engaging in specific behaviors. Corporations need to encourage employees to maintain healthy eating habits, increase exercise and participate in weight management programs.”

To me this is all a big trick to make money for workplace wellness companies and for employers to get rid employees that are deemed "unhealthy" and shift their costs away from them and unto their employees. 

Meanwhile there is no proof that shaming and penalizing a person will making them lose weight and keep in off.

But there is proof it makes things worse.

Participants who experienced weight discrimination were approximately 2.5 times more likely to become obese by follow-up (OR = 2.54, 95% CI = 1.58–4.08) and participants who were obese at baseline were three times more likely to remain obese at follow up (OR = 3.20, 95% CI = 2.06–4.97) than those who had not experienced such discrimination.