Fat Chicks Rule

Eating Disorders

For 17 years I suffered from disordered eating. I wasn’t anorexic. The Diets I followed usually came to about 1200-1600 calories. Only on occasion did I starve myself but it never lasted. My body would rebel and bingeing would follow soon after. Bingeing wasn’t about eating crap food or enjoying rich food. (As I mentioned last week, fat people are allowed to have splurges). Binge eating is eating a lot of food with no enjoyment and ignoring hunger cues. No one told me any of these behaviors were bad or unhealthy. I was given kudos to any weight lost and I was chastised for my binges.

A study in Pediatrics discovered that even teenage girls with normal weight are showing signs of anorexia. Although the study was small, it found that these signs increased between 2005 and 2009.

In her study, which included 99 teens aged 12 to 19, Whitelaw found only 8 percent of the patients had EDNOS-Wt in 2005, but more than 47 percent of the patients had it in 2009.

The cause, they think, is an obsession with fatness.

The reasons for the apparent increase in these patients is less clear, but both Sim and Whitelaw said it is likely a combination of increased awareness of the problem and an increased focus on obesity.

 This study was small but I bet if they looked at a larger amount of girls including girls of all sizes, they'd see the same behaviors. We’ve made obsession with fatness a national pastime and we push impossible ideals with rail thin airbrushed and photoshopped models. We tell fat kids they will die before they are 30, are diseased, and the worst thing in the world is to be fat. I’m not surprised that eating disorders are becoming more widespread.

Silence the Diet Voice

I plan a careful diet (little d) because certain foods don’t agree with me, namely corn (especially corn syrup), gluten, cabbage, tomatoes, and some nuts. I do my best to eat whole foods in a well rounded variety. Trolls don’t believe me when I say most of my diet (again little d) contains fruits, vegetables, lean meats, beans and whole grains. I often get unwanted advice to lay off the chips, pizza, and ice cream.

 

You see, as a fat person, I’m never supposed to ever have dessert or snacks not deemed suitable by the Diet Police. Even one cookie is the reason I’m fat. Meanwhile a thin person could eat the same as me and not be chastised (except maybe being told they will become fat). 

 

I happen to love chips, pizza, and ice cream. They don’t really love me. So I eat them in moderation. My husband makes me homemade pizza, with gluten free crust,  and lots of veggies and pesto sauce.

 

Three days out of the year this goes out the window. It’s when my family and I got to Lancaster, PA, home to Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, amazing buffets, and family style dinning (meaning you share the table with other people).

 

Here I splurge. Feasting on buttered noodles, Swedish meatballs, chicken pot pie, real mashed potatoes, roast beef and for dessert Baked apple ala mode and white chocolate covered strawberries. I paid for some of this later with bad indigestion.

 

The problem is that when I am indulgent, my quieter but still the diet voice chastises me. It's worse than any internet troll because it belongs to me. As I get more accepting of my body, and that food is food whether healthy or not, the voice isn't as loud but it is still there. Other former dieters may have this same voice because food was made to be either good or bad. Bad food or even eating “too much.”

 

There are ways to silence this voice. First off you can tell it to shut up when it rears its ugly head. Do not feel guilty about splurging or eating the “wrong thing” Learn the difference between enjoying good cooking and a great meal and binge eating. (Binge eating is eating passed the point of fullness with no enjoyment.)

 

Just because you're fat, it doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to enjoy food.

Restating the obvious.

Short blog today and no Blog post next week, I will be on vacation.

If you read my book, the introduction is all about my my dieting history.

Somehow I managed to resist dieting pressure until junior high but starting at around 12 or 13, the dieting began.  Everything from commercial diets to DIY. I stayed on this wagon of weight cycling and doing different diets until 2002 when my last diet jeopardized my health. (I’m sure the rest didn’t help either.)

Research was recently presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB). In this they found that younger a girl went on a diet, the more likely of negative health outcomes later in life.

The younger a woman was when she started her first diet, the more likely she was to use extreme weight control behaviors like self-induced vomiting, misuse alcohol, and be overweight or obese when she reached her 30's.

Essentially being told you're fat and need to diet made the young woman fat. Thankfully, I never became bulimic or an alcoholic. I did however gain weight from the dieting/binge cycle.

 

Open Letter to Carol Weston. XXXL is ok.

Due to life, I was unable to respond to directly to this letter by Carol Weston which talks about how horrible the childhood obesity epidemic is. Apparently It wouldn't have mattered because the New York Times printed no rebuttals from the fat community.

Dear Ms. Weston,

Can I call you Carol?

Like my peers, when I was a kid, I ate a lot of junk and highly processed food. The 1980’s was a big time to eat out of boxes, and soda, pizza, and candy were plentiful. In school every time there was a birthday, each kid would get one cupcake. I wasn’t into pizza until I was nine and then I couldn't get enough. For lunch, I usually went home to a sandwich or a can of soup, but once a week, for $2 I was able to get a slice, a small soda, and four things of candy (The candy lasted me most of the week). My peers were also stuffing themselves with pizza, candy, and soda. When I was nine something else happened, I started to get chubby (Maybe you're right, maybe it was the pizza) but I suppose I was still safe in your book, Carol, as I was still XL but not XXXL (Because after XL you cease to be human.)

However in the 80’s, there wasn’t any concern about the self-esteem of kids and teens.  I was fat and told to diet. No one mentioned dieting didn't work. And when I started, it took 17 years to stop. Meanwhile my thinner peers were ignored, weren’t told to skip pizza and the soda. We were told the basics of good nutrition, but the fat kids were singled out to change the way they eat.

A lot has changed since the 80s. It is not acceptable to put a child on a diet. And the general consensus is that dieting doesn’t work. It is also became less acceptable to call your child fat. Even if they are fat.

However there is still a massive push to be thin or else. Like me, fat kids are still singled out for their weight where thin kids aren’t. (Or told that if they eat that way they’ll get fat.) Fat kids are the reason schools don’t have cupcakes, pizza or soda (Please keep in mind, I’m pro healthy foods in school and regular gym, but I think an occasional cupcake, pizza or soda is not a big deal.)

You say you’re against dieting but you pressure kids to lose weight. What do you think a fat girl will do with your information? What do you think happens when she see signs like this?

Do you think she’ll laugh as she eats her pizza and gulp down her soda? You tell kids to lose weight but every way to do it doesn’t work for most people. You single out fat girls for eating pizza and not walking. They are the ones that are going to diet, they are the ones who are going to go on the binge/dieting cycle.

Instead let’s have healthy nutritious food and fun exercise for all children, not just fat ones. Let’s teach them to love their bodies whether it be XS or XXXL.

 

Ditching BMI for All.

A recent study has said people considered “underweight” have a death rate 1.8 times higher than “normal” weight people. Us fatties were only 1.2-1.3 times higher (yippie?)

 

After reviewing more than 50 previous researches, researchers of a new study have found that excessive thinness is also not good for health. Clinically underweight people have a higher risk of death than obese individuals.

Are we going to break out the term: morbidly thin? Are there going to be Diet programs to help the poor, unfortunate, and stupid thin people, who can't help but not eat?

Are we going to have a national program to help the morbidly thin somehow get to magic BMI number 18.5?

No-- because a campaign like that would be ridiculous.

Or would it?

 

Recently, Yale student Frances Chan was forced to gain weight because the university health center Yale Health deemed her as having an eating disorder as her BMI wasn’t past the magical number of 18.5. (Yale later dropped it, I assume because they realized how ridiculous it was.) I’m not quite sure what Yale’s obsession with weight is but apparently Chan wasn’t the only student forced to gain weight or leave school. I just know when I went to college the school seemed to care about our academic achievement rather than our personal lives.

 

Even if she had anorexia (which she doesn’t, she’s naturally slender), forcing an anorexic to gain weight doesn’t cure the eating disorder.  In order to get Yale Health off her back, she ignored her natural hunger cues, overate, and didn’t exercise.

 

If someone goes to the doctor, they should not get a weight lecture, especially if they aren't there to talk about weight (in Chan’s case she was having a lump checked). The only time a doctor should talk about your weight is if you lose or gain it rapidly.  While Yale and other schools need to have outreach to students because eating disorders tends to hit college age women, there is outreach and then over reach. Like with many fat people, Frances Chan’s health was judged solely on her BMI.  

 People have different body types and BMI says nothing about their health. Being as healthy as you can trumps weight loss/gain.

...but for the people who have been losing the battle of the weight, if they can at least become fit, then they can have a very good prognosis and good overall health.

What happens when there is weight loss/gain?

When I gave up dieting, I wasn’t fully into size acceptance. I realized dieting didn’t work and if I continued, I would wreck my body even further.

At first I worried I would gain an enormous amount of weight (this turned out to only be about five pounds). As I got more into size acceptance and loving my body, I was able to accept the occasional weight gain and loss. (Neither were dramatic. I went from a size 20 to a 22, and then back to a 20.) You may find that some changes will affect your weight: medications, exercise, stress, hormones, or dietary changes (Not for weight loss).

How can you deal with these fluctuations? When I was a dieter, I had an easy formula:

Weight loss =love myslf
Weight gain= hate myself.

The diet I was most "successful" on, I lost 40 pounds and kept it off for 2 years. I never got thin, but the day I fit into a size 14 (mind you, I couldn't breathe but they fit), I was excited and happy for the rest of the day, convinced that thinness was just around the corner (turns out it was just the same old story, weight regain and bingeing).

When I gave up dieting and started to learn to love my body, I felt I had the right to that self-love from getting into a size 14. But I also had to figure out how to make my life so as not to be defined by a number.

It was easy in the beginning because my weight stayed the same. But as the hormones of getting older kicked in, my pants got tighter. I bought new pants but I had to figure out a way to not hate myself.

The first thing I did was end negative fat talk. This is when you look in the mirror and tell yourself "OMG, I'M FAT” like it's a bad thing. You need to look at your reflection and tell yourself "OMG, I'M BEAUTIFUL!" “OMG, I LOVE YOU, BODY!”

If you catch yourself telling your body bad things, tell that voice to shut up. Loving yourself is the most important thing you can do.  

It's important that if there is weight gain to not go back to any kind of dieting. HAES and Intitule eating means you listen to your body cues. Forcing your body to eat less than needs is devastating instead of nourishing it.
 
On the other side is weight loss. Maybe you got sick and now your pants are loose. You still love your body but you may feel a little extra self-esteem, especially when other people around you compliment it. I deal with that two ways: I hunch my shoulders like I don't care or I try humor: Thanks! It was a stomach virus/mono/tapeworm. The most important thing is to still love your body and not to feel like you betrayed it for feeling a surge of self-esteem that years of dieting probably programed into you.
 
Still go to your mirror and tell yourself. I love my body no matter what!

 

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. 

 

Maybe we're just normal.

I remember when Leptin was touted as the hormone that would cure fatness forever. There would be drugs to fix fat and you would become slim, trim, and be able to live like a first class citizen. 

When it turned out that Leptin wasn't the fat hormone but the starvation hormone, and  only worked in a small amount of people it, vanished as a miracle cure. Although if you search Leptin in Google, you'll find a bunch of leptin diets.

Now the new leptin is gut bacteria. Researchers took gut bacteria from two twins, one thin, one fat and injected it into lab mice . 

Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

The thin mice were then adored about their mouse peers as being healthy despite all the cheese they ate. 

The next step, transferring thin people's shit into fat people.

“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.

I had to double check to make sure the article wasn't the Onion. New York Times? Check. Written by Gina Kolata check. Based on a study in Science, check. 

Zoe Williams of the Guardian points out the crazed obsession  with "curing" fatness as a moral issue:

Other people's weight became all our problem when we started a) calling it an "epidemic" and b) totting up how much it costs the NHS. This is illogical.Malnutrition costs the NHS significantly more and yet no moral judgment accrues around people who are too thin or, for reasons of incapacity, aren't being fed properly by the people who should be caring for them...

 

Except there is one more issue. The mice with the thin bacteria were put on diets. 

The team also showed that a “lean” microbial community could infiltrate and displace an “obese” one, preventing mice from gaining weight so long as they were on a healthy diet.

Diets usually work in the short term. This is no different than diet pills. All of them require you to also do a low calorie diet and pills will help you lose a little more weight. But none have proved to work in the long run.

Sometimes it gets tiring to be experimented on. To be given pills, surgery and shit in hopes that I conform. Instead of treating all disease as  weight loss, why not look into actually curing the disease?

UCLA and Duke are late to the HAES Party

UCLA school of nursing has done a study showing that fat and thin children when doing lifestyle changes rather than dieting improved their health with very little weight loss. 

"These findings suggest that short-term lifestyle modifications through changing diet and exercise can have an immediate impact on improving risk factors such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Christian Roberts, an associate research professor at the UCLA School of Nursing and the study's lead author. "This work underscores the need to focus on changing lifestyle as opposed to focusing on body weight and weight loss.

Duke, instead of the usual banter of either get thin or die or lose just 5-10% is now on the "Just maintain." 

"Many people go to great lengths to lose weight when their doctor recommends it. They may try a series of diets or join a gym or undergo really complex medical regimens. The complexity of these treatments can make it difficult for many to lose a sufficient amount of weight," said lead author Gary Bennett, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and global health at Duke who studies obesity prevention.

Neither are exactly Health at Every Size (HAES™). Duke completely misses the boat by still focusing on weight rather than health.  While both bring  us closer to HAES as the removal of weight as a health indicator, the weight factor is still there especially with the Duke study. People sometimes gain weight from stress, aging, hormones, and certain medications. For the UCLA study, it assumes that being unhealthy leads to being fat (Although there is a little disclaimer that perhaps it is metabolic issues that cause fatness not the other way around). 

Unhealthy lifestyle factors that begin in childhood, such as physical inactivity, lack of exercise training, and diets that are high in refined carbohydrates and fat, contribute to both the development of obesity and other chronic diseases, but it is unclear whether obesity itself or the associated lifestyle factors are underlying causes of cardiovascular and metabolic dysfunction and the related development of chronic disease.

Instead of telling people to just maintain, or lose a little or focusing on weight at all, they need to remove weight completely as a health indicator. This means that everyone, fat, thin, young, old, learns to listen to their body, give it the foods it needs (without a moral implication of it i.e. good vs bad foods), and love it without worry that it doesn't fit in the ever changing society norms.

Dieting in disguise with a side order of bacon.

As I get older, I have noticed that I tolerate certain foods less and less well. Gluten, Soy, and corn seem to be my chief culprits with corn being the worst. Corn will makes me nauseous, get headaches and overall feel oogy. Soy and nuts have the same effect as corn but not as bad.

I figured out long ago that Soy and corn caused issues so I avoided them. I once saw a natureopathic doctor who asked if I would be willing to give up gluten to see how I felt. I told her I had a hard time giving up foods because I associate that with dieting. She asked me to try, so I did.

Given up gluten has caused me to have less heartburn and indigestion. So I decided to give it up, for the most part permanently. The same as I have for soy and corn. It doesn't mean I never have any of the three but I try to avoid them. After cutting them out of my diet (little d), I find that I have fewer stomach issues and headaches, and less nausea.  As far as I know I have not lost any weight. 

There is a disturbing trend right now of people giving up gluten to lose weight. While I'm glad this trend has created a market of gluten free products, giving up gluten isn't dieting. 

Next week is International No Dieting where I will post reasons you shouldn't diet. But this week I want to talk about learning the difference between what is secret dieting vs becoming a healthy eater and listenng to your body. 

This is why I am disturbed by the gluten free trend. Unless you have an adverse reaction to gluten, you should eat it without issue. It's not going to make you thin at all and unless you're gluten intolerant or have celiacs, it is a waste of your money and time. 

“Despite recent popularity, celebrity endorsements and an increase in availability and sales of gluten-free (GF) foods, there is no published experimental evidence to support benefits for a GF diet for the general population,” said Taraneh Soleymani, M.D., assistant professor in the departments of Nutrition Sciences andMedicine and interim medical director of UAB EatRight. “Some GF foods can even be high in fat and calories.” 

Eating healthy should never be linked with weight loss because eating healthy has no guarantee of weight loss or thinness. Sure some people may cut out junk and lose a little weight but changing eating habits most likely will not make you thin. Most of these diets that involve cutting out a certain food group are usually low calorie diets which work on the short term but have proven to not work for most people in the short run 

If you are trying to decide whether this change is for. Am you eliminating one type of food group entirely because it is decedant/Rich/High calories/or guilting over eating it and that you will lose weight if cut it out? You should not be eliminating any food group unless you have an adverse body reaction.  Of course there are a lot of foods out there that isn't healthy for you. Common sense says we shouldn't have McDonalds for every meal. But common sense means thinking about your body and how it functions. I know that if I ate fast food at everymeal, I would get sick quickly but this doesn't mean I should never have junkfood. It just means I need to be intuned with my body, giving it what it needs and occassionally giving it some food that has empty calories because it wants it. 

Golda from Bodylove Wellness somes that up in her blog post about emotional eating. 

I find that, for myself, I feel best if I don’t eat really sweet stuff too often. If I have a real hankering for something, I’ll have it, but in the last few years or so I just don’t get those hankerings that much.