Fat Chicks Rule

Yet another useless Weight Loss Drug

No blog post next week, I will be away.

Weight loss drugs have a history of not working and/or causing dangerous and deadly side effects. This new one coming down the pipe doesn't look any better.

This new pill Gelesis100 (I kind of wonder what happened to Gelesis1-99) temporarily expands in your stomach, in theory making you eat less. Results have been disappointing. The pill caused a people to lose 6.1% of their body weight compared to the placebo of 4.1%. The makers, of course, call it a huge victory over the fatties!

Oh and they also had to diet while using it.

The study involved 128 overweight or obese Europeans who swallowed a capsule before lunch and dinner along with half a liter, or about 17 fluid ounces, of water. They were also put on a reduced-calorie diet.

And 24% of people who took the higher dose (Is this like a bigger balloon?)

Gelesis executives said that was probably because 24 percent of patients on the higher dose stopped taking the capsules...

Because

...could cause bloating, flatulence, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

Also

But Dr. Daniel H. Bessesen, an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the study, said weight loss of 2 percent beyond that provided by a placebo was “very modest.” “It doesn’t look like a game changer,” he said.

So let's say it again kids, "No diet drug has been proven to work in the long run." This drug mixed with a low calorie diet is the same shit, different day.

And I'm really tired of these pill pushers that assume fat people are fat because we eat too much. Of course starving someone can cause weight loss but studies have shown this doesn’t work in the long run.

 

 

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!

Still not a disease

As I talked about a few months before, the American Medical Association decided that fatness is a disease, whether you're healthy or not. They are ignoring all logic and science. Some fat people are metabolically healthy while in some people fat is a symptom of disease. The gist is they want to try to impose same solution "Make the fat person eat less" that has never worked in the long run.

Why would the AMA do that? Could it be that the Affordable Health Care allows treatment of fatness that includes paying for diets, diet pills, and surgery.

Defining obesity as a disease should encourage more doctors to offer treatments like surgery and medication, Hamdy says. Two new obesity drugs, Qsymia and Belviq, were recently approved by the FDA

Qsymia is an appetite suppressor. It goes back to same fucking "cure" of eating less. And it has a mile long list of side effects. Of course you can say all meds have side effects. They do. However, why take a drug with terrible side effects that won't work? 

And Belvig was proved to not work even before it was released. 

The AMA's classifying the fatness as a disease opens up a lot of money to the diet industry. It will continue to work on the faulty assumption that we must make fat people eat less. The weight loss/gain cycle will continue. 

Even this doctor in this TED video who is  not being fat positive agrees that the issue isn't EATING TOO MUCH but metabolic issues that cause fatness in SOME but not all people.

Essentially stop trying to cure the fatness, instead cure the actual disease.  

Stigma Hurts

This week is Weight Stigma Awareness Week. Weight Stigma often comes from assumptions. The strongest stigma is if fat people just eat less they will be become thin and healthy. It is at the bottom of every cure for fatness: diet pills, surgery, low calorie diets, lifestyle changes are all to make a fat person eat less. Bullies claim that fat people are lazy and lack willpower, the well-intentioned think it's not fat people's fault. Food is everywhere. Except that why don't thin people have the same problem?

Everywhere we are bombarded with hateful messages: (Trigger warning ahead.)

The second? Costco as much as anything else is why the land of the free and the home of the brave is also the trough of the tub o’ lard, our exceptionalism measurable by not only our G.D.P. but also our B.M.I. That’s body mass index, and our bodies are indeed massive.

So says Frank Bruni who has suffered from eating disorders and should know better.

Even when Fat people say enough, we are okay with our size, that no matter what our eating habits are, we don't deserve to be treated like shit, that some of us are healthy and fat, that many of us eat no more than thin people do, we are told we are delusional or making things worse.

Obesity is a class issue, like tobacco. People in every class used to smoke, rich and poor, educated and non-educated alike. But when tobacco was conclusively linked to disease, more and more educated people stopped, until the image of smokers reached a tipping point, and went from “cool” to “loser.”

Yes people with a lower SES are more fat, but it's more likely to do with bias in society rather than poor people eat too much. Being fat is not like smoking. Smoking is a HABIT, being fat is hugely genetic. And if the fat is a habit why do so many people fail to lose weight?

Even "Doctors" think it's okay to shame fat people. In Katz, D. L., Murimi, M., Pretlow, R. A. & Sears, W. (2012). Exploring Effectiveness of Messaging in Childhood Obesity Campaigns. Childhood Obesity 8(2): 97-105 (The article unfortunately is not available unless you subscribe) is filled with praise for programs who shame fat children. Many of the quotes are disgusting but I will share one.

Sears: Good medicine means encouraging children and giving them the tools to get lean. An occasional child might be pushed over into anorexia, but I think the situation that you mention in Seattle is an overreaction and represents unwarranted fear.

Guess what? Teenagers who were formerly fat were found to suffer from eating disorders.

These problems may not be diagnosed quickly, because parents and doctors "think it's a good thing that these teens have lost so much weight," said lead researcher Leslie Sim, an assistant professor of psychology and an eating disorders expert at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Rochester, Minn.

I have mentioned before that some of the worst habits I've ever picked up came from dieting. The worst being the dieting/binge cycle. Thankfully I never do less than at 12oo cal diet but I did a lot of crazy things to lose weight. I think of all the people who starve themselves or have weight loss surgery and consume less calories than a normal person needs. Why isn't this considered anorexia? Just because they are fat?

Stigma also affects health greatly. Not just from the stress of being bombarded with messages that you are less than human if you are fat, but bias in even getting your health care.

Obese people are less likely to survive cancer, and one reason may be a surprising inequality: The overweight are undertreated.

Doctors often short them on chemotherapy by not basing the dose on size, as they should. They use ideal weight or cap the dose out of fear about how much treatment an obese patient can bear. Yet research shows that bigger people handle chemo better than smaller people do.

I have written before about doctors refusing to treat fat people or giving them surgery and treatments needed. I even spoke once to a supersized woman whose doctor refused to give her an lifesaving operation (the story has a happy ending, another doctor did the surgery).

When are "Doctors" and "Journalist" going to listen? Stigma against fat is stigma against the fat person. It will lead to poor health care, eating disorders and stress.

I have a social disease

For days I couldn't believe my ears. My anger was so strong that I had to take a breath before I could say anything. 

The American Medical Association, in their infinite "wisdom" despite warnings from their science advisory board against the decision has doomed (trigger warning) all fat people with a BMI of 30 and above, regularless of their health, as having a disease. 

You can teach aerobics classes, swim, walk, run, eat your vegetables, only eat 2000 cal a day, be in perfect health but if your BMI is 30 and above, you have a disease.

Granted some diseases can cause you to gain weight (such as sleep apnea, diabetes, PCOS and hypothyroidism) and some diseases can cause you to lose weight (hyperthyroidism, cancer, some autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's and Celiacs) but in these cases being thin or fat aren't the disease they are a SYMPTOM.

Abigail C. Saguy points out: 

Yes, there are certain health risks associated with having an elevated BMI, such as Type II diabetes and heart disease. More broadly, a higher BMI is associated with a greater risk of cardiometabolic abnormalities, as measured by blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, glucose, insulin resistance and inflammation. Nonetheless, almost one quarter of “normal weight” people also have metabolic abnormalities, and more than half of “overweight” and almost one third of “obese” people have normal profiles, according to a 2008 study. 

 My biggest issue isn't AMA's stupidity (actually it is), but that in the end they will push the same cure that doesn't still doesn't work and that is Dieting (Big d), diet pills and surgery.  In the end that this will lead in more pressure for fat people to get surgery, take diet drugs, do commercial diets such as Weight Watchers. Even though none of these have been proved to work and help in the long run for the majority of people (sure you're always going to find people who went from fat to thin and stayed that way, but they are the exception not the rule.)

This all goes back to one thing, the billion dollar industry. It really is the money. The biggest medical association saying obesity is a disease and giant check to the dieting, pharma, and bariatic surgeons.

As Marilyn Wann says:

This year, Americans will waste $66 billion on weight-loss products. The "weight-loss" industry is a misnomer: nearly everyone regains lost weight and up to two-thirds gain back more than they lost. Repeat customers are the business model of the weight-regain industry — an industry that expands every year, even during recession. (Which wouldn't happen if their products worked, right?) 

Marilyn has a petition urging the AMA to change their decision.

 

WLS isn't cheap

Lately there has been signs all over the NYC subway toting a weight loss surgery group that claims 6000 happy customers, virtually scarless and a happy man or woman who has lost 65 or so pounds and now is happy, dresses better and slender. Their website has nothing that I can find about long term success or side effects. All they have for pre-op is psychological evaluations and hints for post op nutrition. No mention of follow up surgeries, sepsis, malabsorption, and death. Not just from the surgery but WLS patients have a higher rate of suicide.

I know people who have WLS and the results so far have been good (or at least minimal side effects), bad and deadly. Shelley Bond of ASDAH posts about the illnesses she developed after WLS in her blog post here.

What sort of costs am I talking about just for me, who hasn’t had to have any subsequent surgeries or hospitalizations? Prior to surgery—and since my mid-20s—I’ve been treated for hypertension. Post-surgery, my blood pressure never really went down, and over the years my BP meds have changed and increased, all of which involved many doctor visits and medications.

I didn’t have diabetes at the time of surgery, but I developed it about a year ago, which surprised me: I didn’t know it was possible to get diabetes sometime after having WLS. This disease involves specialist visits every quarter, along with many fine drugs and monitors and testing strips. And diabetes comes with its own set of possible side effects which can be costly and life-changing, resulting in surgeries, hospitalizations and expensive medical equipment. Diabetes appears to be a pricey disease for the insured and the insurer.

I can't force a person not to do it, but I can write about the sham that this group touts to make it seem like WLS surgery is the simple and fun! I once heard a joke about fat people who get WLS as taking the easy way out. And I groaned. This surgery isn't easy.

In the nutrition section of the WLS group they talk about having to learn healthy eating to keep your weight loss. What they don't mention is that you will have to eat less because your body won't be able to handle it.

Being fat is often blamed for everything, all diseases, all high health care costs but if you want to talk about the bottom line for WLS, the only people getting richer are the surgeons, it's not only not dropping health care cost, in the long run it is going up. 

Surgical patients had lower healthcare costs in the first year after surgery, averaging about $1,000 lower per case, according to Jonathan P. Weiner, DrPH, of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and co-authors. During the next 2 years, bariatric surgery was associated with significantly higher healthcare costs. In years 4 through 6, costs stabilized but remained higher in the surgery cohort for 2 of the 3 years.

So for those who have decided they wanted weight loss surgery please understand it isn't fluffy bunnies. It is a serious surgery on a major organ that can cause terrible side effects and death. And it requires serious life changes that you must always adhere to. 

 

New England Journal of Medicine - Don't help.

Recently the New England Journal of Medicine came out with a "Study" showing seven myths and six assumptions about "obesity" Although not a single one is a myth or presumption about fatness, say how the obesity epidemic is overblown, how being fat doesn't affect your mortality except for the supersized, or how everyone ignores the rise of dieting came with the rise in fatness. Instead every single one is about weight loss/ dieting. Some of it is fairly harmless like sex only burns about 14 calories compared to 300, or that breast feeding doesn't make your kids thin. Please don't stop having sex or breastfeeding because of this study as both have health benefits. Others aren't as helpful, that gym classes don't make you thin. That's right they don't, regular exercise for most people despite their size makes them healthy, not neccessarily thin. 

Normally I would say this is a positive article because it shows that healthy habits don't actually mean weight loss. 

Until I got to one of the myths.

Within weight-loss trials, more rapid and greater initial weight loss has been associated with lower body weight at the end of long-term follow-up

Essentially the "Myth busted" is that rapid weight loss works better than steady weight loss. The authors point out that some people have been successful at it. Depends how you define success. In 1999-2000, I was a success. I lost 35-40 pounds (I was still fat) in about 6 months and while I never got to a goal weight, I kept the weight loss for another year. But a year after that I was back to my original weight. A number that I've hovered within 10 pounds of for the last 10 years. I never said people can't lose weight, I said they can't keep it off in the long run. Whether they lose it slowly or quickly. 

Rapid weight loss can lead to gallstones, and loss of vitamins and minerals.  Most rapid weight loss comes from very low calorie diets either liquid diets or weight loss surgery which means you aren't eating enough for your body to function properly. 

I think Marion Nestle hits the nail on the head on the reason for this "study".

"I think it’s weird.  I don’t get it," said Marion Nestle of New York University. "I can’t understand the point of the paper unless it’s to say that the only things that work are drugs, bariatric surgery, and meal replacements, all of which are made by companies with financial ties to the authors. " She noted that the researchers who signed the paper also provided a long list of companies they have been paid to work with. 

If you read the affliations, you get big food, big pharma, and the diet industry. As mentioned last week, the diet industry is expected to make 66 billion in 2013.

Not surprising that they want you to not eat healthy food and exercise (To be honest they don't actually say that) and instead to take drugs, get surgery, and go on crash diets. 

 

New diet drug: Bulimia.

No blog post next week as I will be away.

Here on the market is new device to make your fat issues go away. It’s called the SuckIt 3000. In order to you use this device you have to have one criterion: be fat (it doesn't matter if you are healthy or not). If you are slender the SuckIt3000 is not for you. It is socially unacceptable for a thin person to have bulimia (thin people with bulimia get interventions and Lifetime TV specials). It is however social acceptable for fat people to have bulimia. (Fat people don’t worry, instead of a Lifetime special, you get the hit TV show The Biggest Loser!)

What the SuckIt3000 does is stick a tube into your stomach (either through magic or a surgical incision) and after you eat, the tube will suck all the food vaccum cleaner and into your handy dandy vomit purse.

Then all you have to dump those contents in the toilet or nearest trash receptacle. Don't worry you won't feel humiliated. Fat people love to be shamed! 

Think I'm joking? Well last year this very device was approved for use in some EU countries and they are also looking for an approval in the US. No it’s not called the SuckIt3000 but it is in fact a surgical incision into your stomach where a tube is place. That tube sucks up food into a container which you then dump into a toilet.

Rebecca Jane Weinstein covers this horrible device in an article in XOJane. 

I imagine that this aspiration port will be a sexy new accessory with my bikini on the beach, and intimacy will be greatly enhanced by the hole in my stomach where food pours out (what a chuckle we’ll get during a romance accident). I will feel nothing but pride in my new appearance when I have to get up from the table in 20 minutes to aspirate, and everyone will be so enamored by my hot new bod that no one will blink an eye when I carry my aspiration bucket to that new trendy joint while I am wearing the perfect little black dress (which I guess I will have to remove for aspiration purposes –- but who knows, the latest runway fashions may include an aspiration-port-cut-out).  

In the end this means one thing, it's okay to be anorexic or bulimic, tortured with crazy surgeries, but only if you're fat. 

 

Still the worst diet in the world.

A few years ago, proponents of weight loss surgery (WLS) toted that it cured diabetes. 

Other research has found that bariatric surgery cures Type 2 diabetes in a majority of patients studied...

Said a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times. 

Of course the same author wrote another article that gave these stats:

As many as 86% of obese people with Type 2 diabetes find their diabetes is gone or much easier to control within days of having weight-loss surgery, according to a meta-analysis of 19 studies published earlier this year in the American Journal of Medicine (78% of patients with a remission of diabetes and 86.6% with remission or improvement). But experts still aren't sure why obesity surgery helps resolve Type 2 diabetes or how long the effect might last. And they disagree on how big a role surgery should take in treating the illness.

Remission is the absence of disease symptoms but does not mean cure. WLS can put your diabetes into remission.

But how?

Some suggests it is the extremely low calorie diet WLS forces you to do. Type 2 Diabetes is based on insulin. When you eat a normal diet you release insulin. If you don't eat enough, you don't release insulin and diabetes can "go away." In fact just six weeks of starvation may put diabetes into remission. (btw starvation isn't healthy. A recent study showed it doesn't extend life in monkeys.) 

For the eight week study - published in the June 24 issue of "Diabetologia"- researchers tracked the insulin levels of the diabetics as they ate an extreme 600-calorie-a-day diet consisting solely of diet shakes and non-starchy vegetables. After one week on the diet, the diabetics' blood sugar levels were no longer elevated. After eight weeks on the diet, their bodies' regained the ability to make insulin, essentially curing them of diabetes.

Laurie Klipfel a diabetes educator and nurse who is pro-HAES points out in a blog post:

The immediate drop in calories (more so with Roux En-Y due to both decrease in food eaten and food absorbed) significantly decreases demand of insulin (less insulin is needed for less calories.)  Depending on the supply and demand, this decreased demand may now make the difference between making budget or not.  Therefore there are times the surgery appears to have ‘cured’ diabetes even before weight loss has occurred. Reducing calories in general such as in garden variety weight loss will produce the same effect and look like it “cures” diabetes, when in actuality it too just decreases demand.  Usually with weight loss diets, the drop in calories is not as sudden and drastic and usually weight is lost before benefit is seen. 

A study recently came out that while WLS has put diabetes into remission for some but not for others, the Mayo clinic estimates (based on a small sample of only 72 patients) that 21% of those who diabetes go into remission get it back between 3-5 years.

There are other less extreme ways than mangling your stomach to help type 2 diabetes. Diet (Not a weight loss one, but one related to diabetes), exercise, and stress reduction.

"Curing" diabetes with WLS seems to me the same as cutting off a broken leg. 

 

The good, the bad and the nutty.

The good

This awesome billboard has gone up in Atlanta until the end of may. 

 

The California weight loss clinics I wrote about last September that push lapband surgery as an easy and simple way to lose weight are being investigated. 

The ubiquitous ad campaign and the surgeons affiliated with it are under intense scrutiny. At least three wrongful death lawsuits have been filed, and the Los Angeles County Coroner is investigating one of the deaths. And according to a spokesman at the California Department of Insurance, the agency has initiated an investigation into allegations of insurance fraud.

The Bad

The April issue of Vogue has a story about a mother, Dara-Lynn Weiss, who put her 7 year old daughter on a diet because *gasp* her daughter was fat. Her response wasn't to get her daughter to eat healthier and move more, but an actual diet that included skipping meals  (she didn't allow her daughter to have dinner because she had a big lunch), moralization of food (foods became 'good' and' bad'), and no attempts at moderation. (Her daughter is not allowed pizza at the weekly school pizza day because she ate a corn salad.) The mother herself clearly has issues with food.  Projection, anyone?

I'm not a fortune teller but I think I see anoxeria or bulimia in her future or she might actually be *gasp* fat.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia, Amy Smith the CEO of Jenny Craig Australasia, will be speaking at the  conference for educators for girls. It is igniting a storm of protest. 

On May 25 Amy Smith, the CEO of Jenny Craig, will present to a conference of educators for the Alliance of Girls' Schools (AGSA). Described as a "champion of women's health" by Catherine Misson, Principal of Melbourne Girls Grammar School, Jenny Craig's CEO will be enlisted to "inspire" attendees: what they learn will impact on what they bring back to the classroom.

Already letters from health professionals have begun flooding in, with some voicing their protests from as far as the US and Middle East. They all agree on one thing: Global giant Jenny Craig, which profits from the billion-dollar diet industry, is not an appropriate 'leader' for educators of young girls.

Sign the petition here against it.

The nutty.

From my neck of the woods, New York City Mayor Bloomberg has decided that certain foods can't be donated to the poor and homeless because *gasp* they can't tell if the how much salt, fat and fiber the food has.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels — fresh nutritious bagels — to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict from Bloomberg’s food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters. 

So if you're homeless, hungry and poor in New York, make sure you dumpster dive for some carrots instead of getting some fresh bagels. The bagels might make you fat and we can't have that happening.