Minnesota Starvation StudyII

Yesterday I talked about the Minnesota Starvation Study done in the 1940s by Ancel Benjamin Keys, Ph.D., which examined the results of starvation on a group of 40 healthy young men, as discussed by Sandy Szwarc, of Junkfood Science in her post, How we've come to believe that obesity is caused by overeating. In that post, I looked at some of the physical effects of starvation/dieting and examined my own dieting experience with what Dr. Keys discovered. Today I want to look at the psychological effects.

But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were the most profound and unexpected. So much so that Dr. Keys called it “semistarvation neurosis.” The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating in their hunger.

The act of restricting food and the constant hunger “made food the most important thing in one’s life,” said one of the participants. “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating, said David M. Garner, PhD., director of River Centre Clinic in Sylvania, Ohio, in Psychoeducational principles in the treatment of eating disorders (NY: Guilford Press, 1997). It was actually Dr. Keys’ research that first evidenced the role of dieting in increasing risks for eating disorders.

The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.” This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically.

Think about these results for a moment. And then think about them again. And then think about the degree to which the government is involved in promoting the idea that we are in the midst of an "obesity epidemic." And the concern of governments all over the world with childhood obesity.

Today's political landscape requires that we be informed and capable of critical thinking. Remembering that the subjects Dr. Keys worked with were on 1,600 calories a day and that most reducing diets are 1,200 calories or less a day. That once the calorie restriction part of the study was complete, the subjects naturally ate 4,000 calories a day and that when dieters find themselves eating over 2,000 calories a day they panic about the "binge" eating they are doing and try to put themselves back on their diets. That the Minnesota study subjects wanted to regain the weight they had lost and dieters do NOT. How many dieters ever get back to a state of psychological health? How many are ever really capable of their best critical thinking and deepest thought? How many are in a state to pay close attention to what the government is doing?

At the very least, this national obsession with weight is reducing not our waistlines but our vigilance. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't think that anyone is purposely seeing if they can get us to starve ourselves into a state of apathy about the direction our government is going. But isn't it convenient for them?

And I do believe that the diet industry, which brings in over $66 billion a year, lobbies strongly for obesity measures from the government to increase their profits. And I also believe that if anyone is aware of the rest of this, if they know just how uncritical dieting makes the populace, it doesn't bother them in the least.

Recruitment poster courtesy Sandy Szwarc, Junkfood Science

Minnesota Starvation Study I

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science posted How we've come to believe that obesity is caused by overeating on February 7. This is a review of the historic Minnesota Starvation Study by Ancel Benjamin Keys, Ph.D., of starvation and its aftereffects. During World War II, it was evident that the millions of people in Europe who were being starved would need knowledgeable care when the war was over. Dr. Keys recruited young men who were conscientious objectors, healthy both physically and psychologically, to undergo three months of starvation on 1600 calories a day (substantially more than most dieters live on) meant to reproduce the diets of people in war-torn countries, for three months. Out of the hundreds of volunteers, he chose 40. Healthy young men, who were willing to starve so that others could be fed. The men were followed through a full year of recovery.

Among the things discovered when the men were allowed to eat as their bodies dictated after the starvation segment of the study:

• It was not possible for them to recover on 2,000 calories a day.
• For up to six months, they ate up to 4,000 calories a day.
• They regained every pound lost, plus 10%.
• The regained weight was more fat and less muscle than the weight they had lost.
• Eventually, they stopped gaining and naturally returned to their original weight.
• "Overeating" was evident only as long as the men were below their normal weight.

Considering these facts puts the diets I've been on and the rebound eating I've done in an entirely different light. In the first place, I don't think that a single one of the over 35 diets I've been on was as high as 1600 calories a day! The first diet my mother put me on was 900 a day. Of course it was only for 9 days, but still -- 900 calories. I was once put on an herb tea fast by a doctor, that had no calories a day for whatever length of time it took to lose 60 pounds. It was rare for a diet to be as much as 1,000 calories a day. Eventually my metabolism had adjusted to dieting starvation to such an extent that I couldn't lose weight on anything more than 800.

Until I totally stopped dieting, I only twice went more than six months without going back to dieting to re-lose the weight I was regaining. The first time was when I was 16 and went to live with my great-aunt, and spent two years eating normally; the second was for eight years in my late 30s and early 40s. In both cases, my weight stayed steady. I ate what I wanted and did not gain anything in that time. Those were the only times between the age of 12, when I began to diet, and the age of 58, when I gave it up for good, when my weight wasn't yo-yoing. The only times when whatever I took out of the closet and put on would fit the way it had the last time I'd worn it. I did not balloon out of sight.

I never allowed myself to eat 4,000 calories a day on a constant basis. Rebounding did include what I considered "binges" of about 3,000 calories a day, but the part I thought of as the diet was usually followed by gritting my teeth and holding my eating to about 2,000 calories a day. Once, a doctor "helped" me to diet and maintain my weight loss by adding 100 calories a day each week until I reached the point where I was beginning to gain weight, at which point I was supposed to have discovered my life-long maintenance calorie needs. I don't remember what that was, I don't think I ever got to that point before I lost my will power and broke out, and then, of course, went on another diet.

Although I knew that my first diet was only for nine days, before too many years had passed, I was dieting toward a goal weight, and had no idea how long it was going to take. And, each diet took longer. Three months was as nothing.

Every time I ate more than I thought I should, or gained any weight back, I felt guilty. I hated my lack of will power. I cursed the raging health of my body that was trying to get me out of starvation and get me safe. The normal, healthy need for calories to rebuild what I had starved off was seen as perverse and proof that I was a bad person. By me and by others, like my mother, my doctor, and society at large. The fact that my body fought for health and put that weight back on me was seen by all of us as proof that I was a bad person.

By the time I had stopped dieting, I was twice the weight that I had been when I started. My body has probably lost any hope of ever figuring out what I would have weighed had I not dieted and getting me back there.

And, of course, the world and I believed that I had been overeating. Hell, when I ate more than 1,200 calories a day I thought I had been overeating. That there was something fundamentally wrong with my moral fiber.

If you have ever dieted, how do these facts add up in light of your experience? If you have ever known anyone who has dieted, how do you see their experience now?

Recruitment poster courtesy Sandy Szwarc, Junkfood Science

Smokeyville Towers

I mentioned that Julie and Richard had all sorts of construction toys when they were little. There were the standards, like Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs and Legos and Erector sets and various other block sets and building things I've since forgotten.


They had a huge Lego set, the largest sold at the time, which never looked like this because I'm a little compulsive and I would go in and sort the blocks by color into the little compartments. I didn't expect them to keep them that way, but it pleased me when they opened the box to see everything laid out in order. Like my thread board. Like Sheldon cleaning Penny's apartment.

One of my favorites was the Crystal Climbers. They were so pretty, with their transparent colored pieces.

Julie and Richard would get out all of their construction toys and make these wonderful play scapes across my living room. A Lincoln Log fort, a Crystal Climber castle. Highways of Hot Wheel tracks. Industrial centers of Erector sets. State fairs of Tinker Toys.

A final touch that they added, were dozens of Pringle cans. Since I seldom bought potato chips*, they canvassed the neighborhood, asking people who bought Pringles to save the cans for them.These were added to the project to create "Smokeyville Towers".****

* When I moved out of that house, my mother and sister helped me pack, doing some of it while I was at work. The kids had decided that they didn't need as many Pringles cans, and were throwing out some of them. My mother called me at the office to tell me that I was never going to be thin** if I ate that many potato chips! And when I told Forrest about it, he told me that was what I could expect if I let Mama know anything about my business***.

** Once, when the kids mentioned to her that I had taken them out for banana splits (I, honest to God, had a cup of coffee! Being "good"!), she told me I would never get thin eating banana splits! I hadn't had one in over a decade, but as soon as I left her house I went right out and scarfed one down!

*** I had been so foolish because this was the first time I had lived in the same town as Mama in the ten years since I was 16.

**** Named after Smokey Bear, Julie's true and constant companion since she was 15 months old. She still has a Smokey and the tattered remains of a Smokey that her dog Samantha chewed up.

Photos courtesy:
Tinker Toys, uh.edu;
Lincoln Logs, Gamerevolution.com
Legos and Crystal Climbers, Family Resource Network
Pringles, Pringlestower.invectory.com

What I Learned When I Gave Up Dieting

Here it is, the middle of January, and diet season is in full swing. Everywhere I go, I hear people discussing how they are losing weight this time.* Some are counting one thing, some are counting another. Some are eating the food some program is willing to sell them. Some are modifying their lifestyle. And, of course, Weight Watchers is advertising that "Diets don't work. Weight Watchers does." Totally ignoring the fact that Weight Watchers is a diet and has horrible long term results. Ah, so nice to be free of all of the nonsense. To simply eat when I'm hungry, whatever it is that I'm hungry for, and stop not when the measuring cup is empty but when I'm satisfied.

It does, however, bring back memories of all the yeas when I did diet, when I had these strange rules for how I ate that were supposed to take off the pounds and not let them creep back on. Before I let myself out of the cage and discovered that I didn't have to live that way.

I used to never buy "forbidden foods"** when I did my grocery shopping. I couldn't bring them into the house via car. The rule*** was, any forbidden foods I had to walk home carrying. 20 blocks, ten of them uphill. If I wanted ice cream, I had to really work for it.

Another rule was, only enough for now. Once I got it home, I had to finish it all that episode. I can remember climbing the hill with a muffin, a pint of ice cream, a package of peanuts, and a couple of doughnuts and then eating the whole lot of it in one sitting, although I wasn't hungry after the first. But, I could only eat it if I ate it now, so I certainly didn't enjoy most of it.

I kept my butter in the freezer. If I wanted anything with butter, I had to wait while it thawed. Once I stopped doing this, I discovered that the bread lasted longer! It seems that, when I had to wait for the butter before I could have a slice of sourdough French bread, as long as it was thawed I might as well eat several. Once it was always thawed, I discovered that sometimes I only wanted half a slice!

There were many, many more rules, but since I gave up this nonsense in 2000, I don't remember what they were off hand. However, these days my house is full of formerly forbidden foods, and I have discovered that if there is plenty I have no need to eat it all. Particularly if it is obvious that I can't eat it all, I can eat much less. The more there is, the less I have to eat. Rather like when my mother was in high school and worked in a candy store and was allowed to eat all the candy she wanted. Soon, she was going weeks without any candy because she didn't want it.

When I first gave up dieting, I went out and bought formerly forbidden food like there was no tomorrow. Five pounds each of seven kinds of nuts. All sorts of candy. Chips of every kind. Crackers. Cheese. Salami, spare ribs, bacon. Bread! Doughnuts. Pie. Cake. Ice cream. I brought six gallons of ice cream into my house at one time. At the same time I brought in all the rest of this list. At first I would have five scoops of ice cream with toppings and nuts and banana. Daily. For dinner. Or breakfast. Then it was less. Before very long at all, it was one scoop plain. Now, sometimes I have a single scoop. Sometimes I have two scoops and topping. Sometimes I have a single spoon. Mostly I have none. I go months without having ice cream, because I don't want it. It is the same with all of the formerly forbidden food. I let myself eat it and eventually I didn't want it. At first I gained about ten pounds, since I no longer weigh myself I'm not sure how much, but all of my clothes still fit. Then that weight came back off. I was having a bowl of nuts and candy for a meal. I had spareribs at least once a week for over two years. I let myself have all of the things that I had denied myself for so long.

And then, as I no longer needed to eat all of these things all of the time, I began to discover things I had never known about them before. Like, cheese turns green. Nuts go rancid. Ice cream gets crystals in it. Salami grows white "hair". Bread and doughnuts and crackers and chips get stale. I had never had any of that food in my house long enough for it to spoil, but spoil it does. So, now I buy smaller amounts. Instead of five pounds of cashews, I buy the small can. And often have to throw out most of the can because it has gone rancid.

And, once I no longer needed to eat all of the formerly forbidden stuff, I discovered that I really like tomatoes. I ate some form of raw tomato every day for well over two years. I love produce more than anything else. I stock up on fruit, and it does not go bad. Spare ribs are too fatty for my taste. One day I looked up on the top shelf, and there was a package of Oreos that was over four years old and unopened! Also, a virgin box of almond roca. Unopened and stale peanut brittle.

Amazing. If I'm not trying to discipline myself about food, I don't need the discipline.

Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to be free of food obsessions? To not be afraid of doughnuts and pecans and a slice of bread and butter? To take a couple of slices of my birthday cake home from Kathy and Richard's?

* The fact that it is this time doesn't seem to cause them to question whether or not diets work.
** And the list of forbidden foods was long. It seemed to include everything a person would ever want to eat, except produce.
*** And, boy, did I have rules!

Update
Great minds travel the same roads sometimes. My friend Deja Pseub, over on Une d'un certain age has posted Finding myself through food today. It is well worth reading.

Six Pack Abs Can't Shake Like A Bowlful of Jelly*

Go to Keep Santa Fat and sign the petition to stop this nonsense and let Santa get on with the season. Remember, as the campaign says, "It's not Xmas if he's not XL."

The Keep Santa Fat campaign will donate one pound of food to Second Harvest for every signature on the petition.

* Keep Santa Fat.com

Portrait of Saint Nick courtesy of Keep Santa Fat.com

Inside Every Fat Woman

Kate Harding on Shapely Prose has posted The Fantasy of Being Thin, in which she discusses how putting things off until we are thin wreaks havoc on the lives of fat people. Talking about the discovery that what we think getting thin will do for us is totally change everything about us that we don't like into things we wish were true and the revalation that it won't, she says

The reality is, I will never be the kind of person who thinks roughing it in Tibet sounds like a hoot; give me a decent hotel in London any day. I will probably never learn to waterski well, or snow ski at all, or do a back handspring. I can be outgoing and charismatic in small doses, but I will always then need time to recharge my batteries with the dogs and a good book; I’ll never be someone with a chock-full social calendar, because I would find that unbearably exhausting. (And no matter how well I’ve learned to fake it — and thus how much this surprises some people who know me — new social situations will most likely always intimidate the crap out of me.) I might learn to speak one foreign language fluently over the course of my life, but probably not five. I will never publish a novel until I finish writing one. I will always have to be aware of my natural tendency toward depression and might always have to medicate it. Smart money says I am never going to chuck city life to buy an alpaca farm or start a new career as a river guide. And my chances of marrying George Clooney are very, very slim***And of course, the dark side of that is that being fat then became an excuse not to do much of anything, because it wouldn’t be the real me doing it, so what was the point? If I wouldn’t find the right guy until I was thin, why bother dating? If I wouldn’t have a breakthrough on the novel until I was thin, why bother writing? If I wouldn’t be the life of the party until I was thin, why bother trying to make new friends? If I wouldn’t feel like climbing a mountain until I was thin, why bother traveling at all?***The thin person inside me finally got out — it just turned out she was actually a fat person*. A reasonably attractive, semi-outgoing fat person who has an open mind and an active imagination but also happens to really like routine and familiarity and quiet time alone.

That was never who I expected to be — it was just always who I was.

I love that -- the person inside of me all along was a fat person! Yes! The person who was fighting to get out all this time was a fat person! A fat person who loves and laughs and glories in the world. A fat person of many talents and great dreams. A fat person who is good at many things and very nice to look at in many ways. ME dag nab it. Me! Who finally realized that I had no reason to hate my body or apologize for not being thin. That I am sufficient just as I am and need no excuse to exist. No diet to show that although I'm not there yet, I'm trying. Although I'm a fat woman I'm not a bad fat woman**.

And I'm so glad that the fat person who was struggling to get out, the woman who could accept herself and get on with life, didn't give up on me over all those decades of my thinking she was a thin person.

* Emphasis mine.
** A bad fat woman is one who eats. If you diet, you are just a thin woman trapped for some reason, for some period of time, in this foreign body. One day, like the sweatshop workers in The Wiz, you will unzip the fat suit and out will come the real you. A good fat woman. A thin woman.

Photo: ABC News.com

Attacking Fat Kids

I was not a fat kid. Until I was 12, when my mother decided that since we were the same height we should be the same weight and put me on a diet to lose three pounds, I never thought about my weight. Well, when I was ten and 5 feet even and 100 pounds even, I thought that was kind of cool and tidy, not because of how slim I was but because the numbers made such a fine pattern -- age, height, weight all at the tipping point. Actually, in those halcyon days, I was rather pleased with how I looked. Except for the freckles. There was a time there when I wanted to get rid of the freckles. But, mostly, I really liked how I looked. I had auburn hair and brown eyes and enough sense to know that was freaking great. There might have been moments when I would have liked to be glamorous, but mostly I was content with my Girl Scout looks. I was, after all, a tomboy, and so glamour would not have suited me very well. Even if I had it, the scabs on my knees, the sunburn on my nose, and the snarls in my hair would have moved me out of that category.

So, I have no personal experience with being teased for being a fat kid. Actually, I have no personal experience with being teased about my looks at all and never while I was in school, up through graduate level, did any of my classmates or teachers mention my size or act like I should be any different than I was. But I remember how fat kids were teased, even back in the 40s when I started school and the "obesity epidemic" was far in the future, even in the days before there was a weight loss industry to sell us all on the idea that there is something wrong with our bodies and they have the magic cure that we only have to pay them for to enjoy. Even then, fat kids had it tough.

Today, fat kids have a much harder row to hoe. Preschoolers, shown pictures of various children which include children of all races, some handicapped, and asked which child they would like for a friend don't choose the fat kid. Even preschoolers are so afraid of being fat that some of them are putting themselves on diets. Four year olds, instead of beaming with delight when they see themselves in the mirror, have started sucking in their guts.

The other thing that my personal history and the reading I've done in the last ten years have taught me is that once you become obsessed with your weight you are in for hell. Eating is a self-conscious act. You hesitate to be the first one who admits to hunger, because as a fat person you aren't entitled to be hungry. You don't go to the pool because people will see just how fat you are. You try everything you can think of to get rid of the "extra" weight. And, since our body sizes are pretty well determined by our genes (want to be thin? have four thin grandparents.), if the weight comes off, it comes back on again. Eventually, you gain back more than you lost. There is one study UC Berkeley, 2004 that suggests that the younger you start to diet, the fatter you will become. The same study found that the more diets you've been on, the fatter you become.

Now, if you were a weight loss corporation and if you had no ethics beyond the bottom line, what would be the best way to build yourself a permanent customer base? Yep, get the kids to start dieting at younger and younger ages. Since it doesn't work, convince them rebound weight is their fault until they have messed up their metabolisims beyond hope and they are caught.

Personally, I'm just enough of a skeptic to think that there is no accident that the focus has been aimed at childhood obesity. First, you set the level so low that only the truly frail don't qualify, and then you hype it all over the place.

Sandy Szwarc, at Junkfood Science has recently posted a number of articles dealing with this subject.

In Such a deal, or is it? Sandy talks about a workplace wellness initiative that targets not just the weight and life style choices of the employees, but also of their children.

IBM has teamed up with Weight Watchers, a fellow member of the National Business Group on Health. It’s easy to see how Weight Watchers will benefit by such compulsory participation of 128,000 IBM employees in a Weight Watchers’ branded program...one that will simultaneously bring up an entire generation of weight-absorbed future customers. But IBM has not disclosed what’s in the deal for them. Even if such a program worked, by the time any health benefits might materialize, the children will long since be off on their own and no longer on their parents’ insurance plan.

The money may be enough to coerce some workers let their employer decide what their family eats, where and when they eat, and how often they exercise and what type of exercise they do. But using children is especially insidious, because what isn’t being said is that this childhood obesity program is an experimental pilot project with absolutely no evidence that it will prevent child obesity, let alone improve their children’s health. In fact, all of the evidence to date has shown similar programs to be ineffective for improving children’s health — such as changing their blood pressures, glucose tolerance, fitness, ‘cholesterol’ levels or rates of childhood illnesses — or change long-term obesity rates. But they do leave young people vulnerable to body-image problems and life-long dysfunctional relationships with food and eating.

Sandy looks at the results of two long-range studies on obesity programs for children at One size childern.

Although both studies found null results, the authors suggested that more intense and continuous interventions might be necessary.

But, of course, doing more of the same won’t work, either. Nor is it surprising that no obesity prevention or weight intervention program to date has been able to demonstrate effectiveness in changing obesity rates among children or teens long-term. That’s because, as we know, the science has shown for decades that the natural diversity of sizes among kids, as in adults, isn’t about what they eat or the exercise they get. Thin kids may eat like horses, while fat kids like birds and it doesn't much change their natural sizes in the end. As a group, fat and thin eat the same. No dietary or activity factor among children explains the differences in their sizes.

In Fat camps for tots, which looks at the new British idea of sending toddlers and babies to fat camp to learn good eating habits, and perhaps take off a little weight while they are there,

Let’s look at the evidence in support of such claims and interventions for babies and toddlers:


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Remember the Scholastic magazine? The one we got in school that was full of grade appropriate information and just for us? The one we still see in the doctor's waiting room? Well, it ain't our Scholastic anymore, folks. Sandy looks at the shameful use to which this once benign icon of childhood is being put in This is scholastic achievement?

From the “What are they teaching our children?” file comes another school-based childhood obesity initiative with no sound basis in science. Worse, it teaches children to fear healthful foods they need and teaches prejudices against their heavier classmates.***Many parents and grandparents remember Scholastic publications as educational, inspiring and fun ways for kids to learn about the world. This is not the Scholastic they remember.***The Food Detective game invites kids to click on the “AFD Case Files” of various “Suspects:” children who are supposedly behaving badly. The fat little 10-year old girl is Emily. The game tells kids that Emily is fat because “she eats too much and needs to learn portion control.” The food detective sets up a security cam in her house “to catch the culprit in the act” and she is shown gobbling nonstop a table of fattening foods and a chart shows her eating a whopping 4,550 [kilo]calories.

We could stop right there, of course, as the evidence has shown time and again that fat children eat no differently than thin children to explain the natural differences in their sizes. This game does nothing but teach children to condemn fat children for gluttony, while instilling the harmful false message in fat children that they must be eating “too much.” But the calories being ascribed to the 10 year old fat girl are beyond absurd and illustrate just how uncredible these lessons are. According to NHANES, 6-11 year old girls eat an average of 1,889 kilocalories a day (plus or minus 43 kcal) and the “educational message” in this game bears no resemblance to the facts.

Other children’s “Case Files” promote equally unsound and prejudicial messages. A heavy little boy named Michael is called a “sofa loafer” and his fatness is blamed on spending too much time on the computer and playing video games and eating bad foods. Another popular myth of fat children. And a little boy, Cole, is supposedly a weakling because he eats junk food. You get the idea.

And finally, You're fine just how you are. and read her touching post on trying to be what you are not. The Allan Faustino T-shirt graphic, left, is enough to break your heart.

Obsessing

Know any people like this? Folks who focus on the world through the lens of weight? I used to be one. For most of my adult life I weighed every morning. Felt guilty and incomplete if I hadn't. And I had all these insane rules about that. Had to do it nude. Had to put my contacts in so the glasses wouldn't add anything. Had to use the bathroom before so I'd be as light as possible. Didn't put my hand lotion on until I had weighed. Now, how much do you suppose hand lotion could weigh? Is there a scale in the world sensitive enough to register it? If there is, could a person stand on it without breaking it?

The other side of that coin, is figuring out how much exercise I'd done for the day. Pedometers. Stop watches. The little meter on the exercise machine. Figuring out if I had exercised enough to allow me to have a few calories more.

Oh, and the third side -- counting those calories or points or carbs or whatever when they went in. Adding fiber to things so that they would fill me up sooner and transit the system faster, taking some extra calories along with them. Fat blockers. Starch blockers. Let's not talk about having Milk of Magnesia before I ate -- that did make me limit the number of times I ate because I hated the taste, but it just increased the volume at each meal, since I wasn't going to get out that bottle again any time soon, so it balanced out.

Do you have any idea how good it feels to be sane at last? To have a healthy relationship with food? To have time and energy to think about other things?

Something New

Joy Nash of Fat Rant has done another Fat Rant, called Confessions of the Compulsive. Watch it. Enjoy it. Know why I love this girl.

The Comfortable Road

I've been listening to Hal Holbrook's "The Best of Mark Twain Tonight" and he talks about smoking. Among the things he says is that the first time he gave it up, when he was 10 or 11, because he had heard that smoking could take ten years off of his life. He got scared and gave it up one day -- for two or three hours. But he realized that the decade would not be worth living without smoking in it, and that was the end of that.

I understand that. The last diet I actually went on, I was hungry all the time. Since I wasn't eating much, even at meals, I left the table still hungry. If I was concentrating on something I might not be thinking of food, but too often I was. Every minute that I wasn't actually eating, I was resisting eating. Even when I was eating, I was resisting eating other things and more. It was ok during the day, when I was at work, because I was pretty busy and food was only available at lunch. But the evenings were hell. I discovered that if I chewed on ice it wasn't so bad. I was going through three trays of ice cubes a night, and weekends I couldn't get it to freeze fast enough.

And I remember thinking, very clearly, that if this was what it took to be and stay thin I honestly didn't think it was worth it. So I might live 20 years longer -- who wants to live 20 years of obsessing about all the food you can't eat and chewing ice?

And the most amazing thing is that when I gave up dieting, I no longer obsess about food. If I think I'd like to eat, I do. And food just isn't on my mind so much. Later on the same CD, Holbrook quotes Twain as saying, "If you can't get to 70 by a comfortable road, don't go."

I'm So Jealous

Jill at Brilliant At Breakfast posted this and I had to copy it for you.

Why, oh why didn't I have this attitude all those years when I was hating my body and feeling guilty every time I ate something not on the list and trying to be someone else* and generally miserable with food? How joyous this woman is! How at ease with herself! How comfortable at the table!

I gives me great comfort to know that there are some young women who are finding acceptance of their own bodies, who are recognizing that it is genes and not sin that dictates their waist size, who can eat and not feel either fear or guilt. I have decided that this is my anthem.

*Well, not really trying to be someone else, I have always really liked who I am, but trying to be in someone else's body.

The Scarlet O

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he of the pathetic critique of "Sicko" that resulted in:

Moore said his staffers backed up the film's facts to Gupta before the report aired and that Gupta aired it knowing his facts were wrong.

has done it again.

This time he is all a'twitter because doctors are, in his words, "hesitant to put the scarlet O on a patient's chart."

What a curious usage. Does he consider obesity the equivalent of adultery? Does he think that if we aren't branded we won't know we're fat?* Is he afraid we are getting away with something?** Or that without that O on our med charts doctors are apt to think we are thin and not harangue us about our weight the next time we come in with chicken pox?

And I have to wonder. Has this man actually read "The Scarlet Letter"? Is he at all aware that it is about a woman who, despite the fact that she is less than perfect, is still a good woman and the hypocrisy of the society that has branded her? Does he know that his suggestion says more about the state of his soul than the state of our bodies?

* "Fat? Who me? Are you sure? And here I thought buying clothes in the women's section meant I was old enough to drink!"

** "I had no idea I was dating a fat woman! She wasn't wearing her O!"


Betty's comment: Does this O make me look fat?

Addiction

Angela at Eclectic Recovery visited and commented on Friday's post, The Last Diet, which caused me to visit her and read It's Your Choice, about different roads to recovery from addiction.

Addiction is bondage. Whether we're addicted to drugs, alcohol, a person, food, sex or the internet , the most precious thing we lose is our freedom. Living in a self-made prison is like being a hamster on a wheel, running and running and never getting anywhere, always looking for the way out through the same door that got us in. If we're lucky, we begin to realize that we've caged ourselves into a cycle of destruction that will eventually lead to our demise. If we're lucky, we'll take the steps necessary, whatever they are, to free ourselves from the hell that has become our life.

As I commented on Angela's post, I really centered on the fact that, for me and many others, the addiction is not, as conventional wisdom has it, to any kind or amount of food, but instead to dieting. It was when I gave up dieting that I began to recover. I didn't get thin, I'm not genetically programed to be thin, and 46 years of messing with my metabolism has left it unable to return me to my original genetic programming, which was probably to be curvy and get more so as I aged. But, I have not gotten fatter. All of my life, except for an eight year stretch when I realized that dieting wasn't working but not why and gave it up, I had been yo-yoing. Weight did seem to be, just like other addictions, a "progressive disease" that increased even when I wasn't "overeating." Later I realized, after I had tried to get thin again for a number of years, that I had stayed the same weight for those eight years. I mean, I knew it at the time, and I attributed it to not dieting, but I didn't know it in my bones. I didn't focus on the fact that not only did I weigh the same at the end of that time, my weight had been steady for the entire time. No yo-yo. I didn't really know that it wasn't just that I wasn't one of the 2% - 5% of the population who can diet weight off and keep it off, dieting was the addiction. That was the truly freeing realization. The amazing recognition that what I had been doing to cure the problem had been the problem. The clarity to see that between that first rather innocent diet at 12, which had consisted of eating 900 calories a day of healthful food and nothing else for nine days, and considering living on fruit juice and water for six months, the dieting had become much more bizarre, and that was what Angela refers to as

like being a hamster on a wheel, running and running and never getting anywhere, always looking for the way out through the same door that got us in

At the time I had my Aha! moment with the grapefruit juice, I had been attending Overeaters Anonymous for several months. Shortly after I came to my realization, just after I had read "Overcoming Overeating" by Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter, one of the stars of our OA meeting told a story about how she had been abstinent, which for her meant no sugar and no white flour and less than 20% of her daily calories from fat, for 25 years. And one day she ate a candy bar. And within a week, she was buying candy by the bags full and purging, a thing she had never done before. And she realized that although she hadn't been practicing her addiction for 25 years, it had, indeed, progressed. And I had another Aha! She had been practicing her addiction very hard indeed for that 25 years -- no sugar, no white flour and less than 20% fat. And when she strayed from her addiction, she returned to it with severely increased rigor. From deprivation to purging. The thing that had frightened her was the purging, but she hadn't put the pieces together the same way many nutritionists and obesity researchers do.

The Last Diet

I've mentioned that I was put on my first diet at 12* because I weighed three pounds more than my mother. I dieted off and on from then until I was 16, when I went to live with my Great-Aunt Julie. Auntie didn't believe in putting girls on diets, so I was off of them until I decided I wanted to lose some weight right before I went to college. From then on, I did at least one diet a year, and as time went on they became more frequent. As time went on, they became more draconian, since I was past "needing" to lose three pounds.

My last diet was in 2000. I had been on a number of increasingly crazy diets over the previous three years, each one followed by the inevitable trampoline rebound. So, in about February of 2000, I was planning to go to California that fall for vacation, and I wanted to be thinner so I could play hide and seek with Maya more easily.

I decided that if I went on a fruit juice fast, that would take off a lot of weight and Maya and I could do lots of things that I hadn't been able to do with her before. So, there I was with a calorie counter, figuring out which juice had the fewest calories, when I heard myself think, "and if I cut it half and half with water, that will go even faster."

That was when I knew that I had lost my mind. That the idea of living on fruit juice cut half and half with water was not a thought that a sane person would have.

And that was the last time I was tempted to diet. In that moment of epiphany, it was over. In seven years, I've not done that again. Not that once in a while I don't think about it -- but the thoughts are on the order of, "too bad dieting doesn't work, because I would like to be smaller." Not once have I been really tempted to ever do that again. And, in the years since, I have become very educated about the truth about dieting and weight. I have learned the things I only wish I had known at 12, the things about bodies and genetics and depravation reactions. I've learned to see the money that is to be made by making people hate themselves and convincing them that you have the answer that will make their body, and therefore their life, just right.

* This is the before picture for my second diet, at 14.

Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your ever lovin' Granny points you to other people's really good stuff. And, as you can tell from our fat little signpost, today we are dealing with weight.

I wasn't going to say any more about this study, having posted If You Can Catch It, giving a light hearted take at the nonsense involved (because when I tried to address it seriously I couldn't keep my language decent and Maya reads this blog on occasion and has excellent reading skills), and linking you to Shark-fu's equally light hearted take on it. However, like Sandy Szwarc, below, I find that this study is turning up everywhere. The fact that it should be laughed out the door doesn't seem to be occurring to anyone who isn't a fat-activist. I'm finding that the more I think about it, the hotter I get. I don't like being the target of bias, and the fact that for so many years I bought into it myself just makes it that much worse. It isn't enough that I'm fat, unhealthy, gluttonous, slothful, and a bad person, now I'm also responsible for both a collapsing health-care system and the weight gain of my friends. If I bought into this stuff (or as much of it as was around at the time) when I was younger, how are fat children going to react? Are they going to be shunned even more than they are today? Will they stop getting invitations to birthday parties because their little friends and the parents of their little friends don't want fat being spread to them? Will their parents, in the hope of helping them to have a social life, be even more driven to put them on the diets that science says will eventually make them fatter? Too much. So, I am linking you here to three recent posts which really examine it in depth.

Kate at Shapely Prose has looked at it in two posts. The first, Fat Is Contagious

2) Obesity, according to this study, is more socially transmissible from one man to another than one woman to another.

Does this jibe with other research that suggests women are much more invested in social networks, more communicative with their friends about personal issues and, not for nuthin’, more susceptible to mirroring their friends’ eating behaviors when they do eat together?

***4) As I understand it, spouses did not “affect” each other as strongly as even geographically distant friends.

This goes back to point 1. Are we really meant to believe that people in one of the most intimate possible relationships, who communicate daily, eat together, and share umpteen “lifestyle” factors, are less likely to “transmit” obesity to one another than friends who live on opposite coasts? What is it that makes you fat, then? If we believe it’s diet and exercise, how is it conceivable that people who live together do not affect each other’s diet and exercise habits as strongly as pals who rarely see each other? And regardless of what they’re claiming the direct cause of obesity is here, do we really believe that people are more susceptible to the opinions of distant friends than their own spouses?

***
So the whole premise that justified this review of another study’s data — that we, as a country, are SO MUCH FATTER than we used to be — is basically horseshit. There’s that.

Finally, it sounds like what they’re really afraid of is people telling their friends it’s okay not to diet. If that’s what’s actually happening here? I hope it becomes a goddamned epidemic.

The second post of Kate's I want to direct you to is Warning: If You Read This, You Might Get Fat

Now, I do stand by what I wrote, which was that we don’t know how to make a naturally thin person fat. I was thinking specifically of the prisoner study, where a bunch of men ate ridiculous amounts of food and stopped exercising in order to deliberately gain weight, but the weight gain didn’t last; as soon as they went back to eating normally, they went back to right around their original weights.***What that study does point to is the existence of a stubborn natural weight range in every individual. Anyone who’s dieted and gained it back (i.e., pretty much everyone more than 5 years out from the last diet) will recognize an incredibly familiar pattern in the prisoner study — it’s the reverse of what we’ve lived out, but the elements are all the same. They tried to push their bodies beyond their natural weight ranges, and their bodies resisted mightily. Their metabolisms changed to account for the changes in diet and exercise and try to force them back into their natural weight ranges. And as soon as they stopped the unnatural diet, their bodies returned to what was normal for them.

That’s exactly what happens to dieters.

But because it’s a weight range we’re talking about, and because dieting is akin to starvation as far as the body’s concerned, when dieters go back to normal, they often end up fatter than they were — presumably at the top of their natural weight ranges. Dieting, as a rule, not only doesn’t make you permanently thin — it makes you fatter.

***Now back to the important point here: this fact that I overlooked offers one simple, plausible explanation for the “fat is contagious” findings: friends recommend diets to each other. And diets ultimately make people fatter. And if those people started out at the top of the “overweight” BMI category, dieting could very easily have pushed them into the “obese” one.

It’s unlikely that that fully explains the correlation they found — but frankly, it’s a much more plausible theory than the one that has fat people calling each other up and saying, “Hey, you know what? I overeat and never exercise, and I feel great! You should try it!”

Sandy Szwarc, at Junkfood Science has also addressed this "study" in her post Oh, What A Tangled Web We Weave.

I wasn’t even going to write on this “study” because it elicited nothing more than thinly veiled hate speech and was such junk science I was certain no one would take it seriously.

I was wrong.

Within hours of the press releases, a massive, well-orchestrated marketing campaign was off and running. By dinnertime yesterday, Google noted 300 nearly identical articles had been published about it and there were 500 by this morning. Television and radio reporters have been gushing over it, with MSNBC reporting that having a fat friend can make you fat and be downright dangerous for your health.

***Let’s not beat around the bush. The key message of this study was to justify and promote the social shunning and discrimination of fat people.

Not one health or medical writer, even at the most prestigious consumer or medical publications, has critically reported on this study or even appears to have read it. Not one has made a critical examination and pointed out its unorthodox methods, its findings that conflict with known science and known biological mechanisms, or the flawed and contradictory findings within the study itself. Not one.

*** We are to believe, it seems, the media images that we’ve all gained gargantuan amounts of weight, rather than the average 7 - 10 pounds actually evidenced over recent decades among our increasingly diverse population, as reported by Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York.

***Medical writers at publications such as MedPageToday were equally credulous, giving physicians the action point: “Explain to patients who ask that this observational study found that the likelihood of a person becoming obese is heavily influenced by obesity in their friends, siblings, and spouse.” ***No need to go on, as you’ve heard all of this, too. But what you haven’t heard was that this paper wasn’t actually a study, researching people using recognized, proven sound medical research methodology.***They made no efforts to give any physiological explanations for these implausible findings or how long-distance relationships might be more associated with obesity than genetics. Nor, did they have any data on the closeness of the friendships or how often people were in contact with their supposedly fattening friends

Forgetting that their study was a data dredge looking for correlations, which is unable to ever demonstrate causation,

***This study illustrates the difference between politics and good science. The reporting and responses from media and medical professionals have illustrated the difference between prejudice versus knowledge, understanding and compassion. There is absolutely no credible science to support stigma against any group. You cannot “catch” fat from associating with a fat person anymore than you can catch “black” from a black person.

What the science knows about obesity “should be sufficient to end the opprobrium of the obese,” said Dr. Friedman. “To end the stigma of obesity, the scientific community must communicate more effectively a growing body of compelling evidence indicating that morbid obesity is the result of differences in biology and not a personal choice.”

The public trusts medical and journalism professionals to give them reliable information to help them. Over the past 24 hours, that trust has proven to be undeserved.

Since Kate and Sandy have said this so well, I hope I won't feel driven to say any more about it myself. I do have to say, though, that this study reminds me of nothing so much as The Bell Curve.

If You Can Catch It. . .

By now you probably have all heard of the newest study that shows that fat is contagious? That if your friends gain weight, you gain some too -- not as much, but some?

When I read this, the first thing that occurred to me was, "Well, now I'll see who my real friends are. Anybody who stays my friend after this is really my true friend." I mean, would I have the courage to stick with someone who could give me the 21st century equivalent of leprosy? If I had known that the way to be comparatively slender was to avoid fat people, would I have been friends with some of the people I know and love? Hell, would I even hang out with myself, had I only known?

Which led to fantasies of masses of fatties, walking the highways with bells to warn the thin that they should not approach. Having to beg because no one would allow us to get close enough to the thin people to work.

But, Shark-fu, at Angry Black Bitch had an entirely different take on it. In Upon Discovery of Skinny Ass Robustus, she states

Well, that changes everything about my approach to the size of my ass. Out with the “sometimes foods” and in with manipulating frightfully thin people into friendship so this bitch can catch a good case of Skinny Ass Robustus!***Happy, happy, happy…and joy times three!

Okay, so I need to locate frightfully thin people for my party. But wait! Some of my friends are frightfully thin. If thin is a virus…and you catch it from friends who are infected with thin…then why the hell is a bitch not frightfully thin?

Oh, I get it. I must not have been properly exposed to Skinny Ass Robustus!

Mayhap I should throw a Skinny Ass Robustus party the way parents throw a Chicken Pox party?

Should I Laugh?

This man, John Pinette, poses a moral conundrum for me. I have two of his DVDs and two of his CDs. (I like to listen to to comedy CDs and play Mah Jong on the computer right before I go to bed. It sends me to bed calm and laughing, no matter what else has happened in the world that day.) I love him. But, should I? Is he inviting people to laugh at him rather than with him? Is he making fun of fat people? Or, is he finding the humor in fat and playing with it? Almost all of his humor is aimed at himself, and since his most salient characteristic is his size, he does a lot of jokes about eating and the predicaments his size gets him into. Is this different than the jokes Chris Rock makes about growing up poor and black? Is John's routine about his friends taking him places (skiing, water skiing, white water rafting, water parks) to see what will happen to him because of his size different than Chris telling us he could guarantee an A in school by writing about Martin Luther King?

I don't know, and I would like to. Having battled fat-hatred most of my life, I wouldn't want to add to it. And yet, he is soooo funny. And part of the reason he is so funny is that he is talking about things, in the extreme, that any person who is or has ever been fat expeiences, if only to a lesser degree. He brings laughter to some of the moments that we would otherwise have to cry about. Things used to be easier before we all became so enlightened, you know?

Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your lovin' Granny points you at somebody else's really good stuff, and today it's about size.

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science, tells us that "An article in New Scientist magazine accuses fat people of causing global warming and killing polar bears:" in Blame Fat People.

In fact, among the many disconnects in the reasoning in the New Scientist piece, one comes from Roberts' own research! He and colleagues in London previously published a study on inner-city children in the UK, for example, that found most children (69%) walked to school and only 26% travelled by car, but it was the poorer children who walked more than the richer kids. “Attendance at a private school, family car ownership and longer distances to travel to school were the principal determinants of car travel,” he and colleagues said. In another 2003 report on pedestrian safety and overcrowded roads, he also said: “Poor kids walk much more than rich kids, who tend to spend a lot of time in the car.”

Yet it’s poorer children who tend to be fatter.

And speaking of size, AlterNet.org's, Joshua Holland looks at Are You One of The Shrinking Americans? It seems that we are no longer the tallest industrialized country in the world, indeed we are now shorter than the residence of all Western European countries.

The United States also has far more concentrated wealth than any of its European allies. That means that while we are, on average, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we also lead all the advanced economies in poverty. Poverty limits access to both healthcare and good nutrition.

More importantly in terms of average height is childhood poverty. Here, the United States stands alone among the advanced economies with a stunning figure: eighteen percent of American children -- almost one in five -- live in poverty. No other industrialized country comes close -- it's about five times the child poverty rate in Northern Europe. Again, nutrition and access to healthcare both vary with family income for children just as they do in adults.***The key finding of the study is is not that we are shrinking in absolute terms, it's that we're falling behind relative to our wealthy cousins. Europeans have grown in height as much as the rise in their average incomes during the 20th century would predict; Americans have not.

And it's not just height. Among the 20 most developed countries in the world, the United States is now dead last in life expectancy at birth, but leads the pack in infant mortality -- forty percent higher than the runner-up -- and in the percentage of the population that will die before reaching 60.***"those countries with higher social expenditures -- as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP -- have dramatically lower poverty rates among children."***"[T]he political economy of the health-care system, education, transfers to the poor, and government policy toward equality (hence taxation policy) all matter" in determining average height, say the researchers.

These are policy matters that are usually understood as ideological, as left-right issues. In one sense they certainly are, but they're also questions of gearing public policy to the long- or the short-term, and we seem to prefer short-term approaches. Investing in our children's health and well-being may not pay off in terms of lower taxes next quarter or next year, but it might allow them to walk a bit taller a generation or two down the line.

Over at Big Fat Blog, there is an article looking at size and public policy from a different angle, New Zealand Doctors to Fat Immigrants: Stay Out

In a stunning display of discrimination, doctors in New Zealand are promoting the idea of screening immigrants for their weight and smoking habits. The reason? Lots of unhealthy people are putting a burden on the healthcare system there and since a lot of people there are also fat, they're getting a bad rep.

And let us end with this wonderful production of Joy Nash -- Fat Rant. How I wish that I had known what she knows when I was her age. I could have saved myself so much grief.

I have to say, that when she found the double 0 in the dress rack, I was amazed. I thought a 0 was as small as they could go. And, she has a blog of her own these days, called, oddly enough, Fat Rant. And meantime, "choose two thin parents."

Signposts to SanityThis Scares Me

An occasional feature in which your ever lovin' granny points you at other people's really good stuff. Please note that the signpost chosen for today leads down a green and twisting trail, indicating a need to follow the twists and turns that the money takes.

Yesterday on Junkfood Science, Sandy Szwarc posted an article which frightens me. Doctors — forced into becoming lifestyle police. I am directly quoting her a great deal, because the way the pieces come together is important; since I don't quote her first mention of RWJF, I'll tell those of you who might not know that she is referring to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the "philanthropic" arm (worth $8.99 billion) of Johnson & Johnson, the health care products company. And while you read this, keep in mind that the current Surgeon General has targeted obesity as a major health problem and has been issuing press releases touting disproven numbers of premature deaths caused by obesity and ignoring the fact that fat people outlive thin ones.

If government agencies and the American Medical Association get their way, doctors and pediatricians will be compelled to police the behaviors of children and families to make sure they comply with the obesity initiatives of the world’s most influential interest groups***As predicted here, they first recommend the definitions be changed so that children are labeled as “obese” and “overweight” using BMI percentiles*, rather than the long-standing recognition that such classifications are inappropriate for growing children and teens***Every well-child visit is now to include a qualitative assessment of eating behaviors, which must include identifying how often the family eats meals away from home, consumption of sweetened beverages, portion sizes, how often and what children and teens eat for breakfast, how much fruit juice is drunk, how many fruits and vegetables and foods high in fat or calories are eaten, and the frequency and types of snacks.***Labwork for these heavier children, even those without risk factors, is to include lipid (“cholesterol”) profile, fasting glucose and a slew of other biomedical tests.*****All children and teens, of “normal” BMI ranges should be assured to be in compliance with the obesity prevention guidelines as it delineated.***

Additionally, all children and teens with BMIs above the 85th percentile must receive special intervention by a primary care provider or healthcare professional trained in weight management**** and behavioral counseling.***But children or teens with any risk factors and who are not successfully losing weight, or all children above the 99th percentile*****, are placed in the “Tertiary care protocol.”

Tertiary care protocol

· Referral to a weight management center to include a multi-disciplinary team to institute diet and exercise counseling, a very low calorie diet, medication and surgery.******<***Not one single clinical practice recommendation is based on credible science on childhood obesity, has anything to do with healthy eating, or has any evidential support. In today’s “pay for performance” world, however, doctors who do not comply with clinical practice guidelines — based on their patients meeting requisite BMIs, behaviors and health risk factor numbers — will see their private and public insurance reimbursements cut.********** The unmistakable aspect of everything RWJF funds, unbeknownst to the public, is that the feel-good reforms are never for programs that actually care for sick people or children, but are always designed to coerce and move towards legislation that governs lifestyle issues, behaviors and societal values; and that increase the power and influence of governmental agencies and managed care, while undermining the choices of individuals and the judgment of doctors, parents and others directly involved in patient care. And with each one, computerized data collection is fundamental.*** It’s interesting that the war on obesity is often compared to that against smoking, because the two targets share surprising similarities, and not just because they’ve both become among the most socially condemned in our culture.***Meanwhile, how many consumers know that Johnson & Johnson is the largest manufacturer of pharmaceutical nicotine products (like Nicoderm, Nicoderm CQ, etc.) in the world, which alone are a $500 million annual business for the company? I didn't and was also surprised to see how squishy the evidence on second-hand smoking being used*** Johnson & Johnson, Inc., with $53.324 billion in annual sales, is also an international giant in weight loss and healthy eating products, selling nutritional supplements (McNeil Nutritionals, LLC), artificial sweeteners (Splenda), diet pills, employer wellness programs (J&J Consumer Companies, Inc. Vida Nuestra), and bariatric surgical devices and lap bands (Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc.). And just this past week, the President and CEO of RWJF, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, finally stepped down from the Board of Directors of Beckman Coulter, Inc., a company with $2.53 billion in annual sales of biomedical laboratory tests — a position she simultaneously held while at the helm of RWJF, ensuring preventive wellness guidelines calling for excessive screening tests.

* By these standards, if I'm understanding this correctly , when Maya was four she would have been identified as obese, since she was so tall that she was off the chart for her age group. She was slender and tall.

** Think of the additional time and expense of these evaluations and tests. If this is to occur at each well-child visit, how that adds up over the years. Fasting glucose tests, as those of us who have them can tell you, are blood tests, preceded by no food and minimal water for 12 hours. For young children who happen to be genetically larger? Be hungry, thirsty, and stuck with a needle? Whether your doctor thinks you need it or not? Let's see how fast we can make chubby children hate going to the doctor.

*** Children within the government's definition of normal are also to be subjected to evaluation of their eating and exercise habits? No children, no families, are to be spared the indoctrination that fat is evil? Aren't the five year olds who are dieting today bad enough? Shall we see if we can add more?

**** In other words, these kids, fat or just tall, will be placed on diets. When studies have shown that dieting before physical maturation not only leads to nutritional problems but also almost guarantees a lifetime of weight problems. When the Berkeley Nutritional Study "of women defined as clinically obese shows that nearly two-thirds of them went on their first diet before age 14 and, as adults, were more likely to be heavier than women who started dieting after age 14."

***** That's Maya, the four year-old who was so tall she was off the chart! To be placed in "tertiary care protocol"!

****** Medication. Perhaps another phen-fen that proves fatal? One that leads to "anal leakage"? Surgery. That's weight loss surgery (WLS), they are talking about here. On children. A surgery with a death on the table rate exceeded only by the quadruple bypass. With a death within 90 days of surgery rate of one in 50! A surgery that results in nutrient malabsorption -- on a developing child! That can result in brain damage! So, while we are looking at the prospect of WLS for children, let me tell you about my conversation with my brother about his bout with WLS. Now, Forrest was over 400 pounds and had a severely enlarged heart. His cardiologist told him it was WLS or he would be dead within six months. And, after the first surgery, he told me that he thought he had made the worst mistake of his life. At the time he told me this, he would have already been dead without it. Every bite he ate, he threw up. Since then he has had a second surgery which doubled the 20" of gut that he had still functioning to 40" (out of 28'), and he is doing much better. He still throws up often enough that his pre-WLS perfect teeth are rotting and he is losing them. Teeth that had never had a single cavity! He throws up if he gets post-nasal drip. He throws up if he eats one bite of bacon. The list of food that he has to avoid is incredibly long and, because he has only a one cup stomach capacity and food only has a two hour transit in his body, he has to pretty much avoid fruit, vegetables, and grains because they don't give him a high enough nutrient load for the bulk. He eats mostly meat. But not fatty meat! Not fats. He takes multiple calcium and vitamin tablets a day -- one of each every two hours. Also, since he has ADD, he must take a ritalin capsule every two hours. Any medication he needs, he has to take every two hours. What if something absorbs faster than that and he gets too much? And the cost of 12 pills instead of one! He does say that it's worth it to be alive, to see his grandchild, to live. But, he also says that if it had not been necessary to save his life, in no way would it have been worth it. Not to look better. Not to feel better -- because he doesn't. He just feels miserable in different ways.

******* In other words, doctors will be paid less if they don't follow these guidelines, no matter what their professional opinion of worth or harm they might do patients..

Sandy leads you to an excellent article on ED Bites, a weight site I was previously unaware of and have subsequently linked in my Size Acceptance blog roll.

Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your lovin' Granny points you at somebody else's really good stuff*


You may have noticed that I've recently added a new blogroll on Size Acceptance. If size is an issue for you or for someone you care about, you might want to explore it. In the meantime, there is a terrific article over at fat fu, Taking Care of Our Healthcare

This is an article from January, but it’s well-worth reflecting on. Apparently fat women are more likely to be undertreated with chemotherapy for breast cancer. For reasons that aren’t totally clear, doctors are more likely to give fat women (and poor women as well) doses of chemotherapy below what the guidelines say they should.

I want to pause on one sentence in particular:

Obesity is controversial as a risk factor for breast cancer; studies haven’t shown that obesity causes breast cancer, but obese women are at increased risk of dying from the disease.

This raises the ominous (if unsurprising) possibility that whatever “excess risk” fat holds, may at least in part be due not to its effect on our bodies, but to its effect on our doctor’s brain.*** * About half (49.5%) of doctors rated fat patients as “noncompliant” About a third rated us as “sloppy” and “lazy.” 44% rated us as “weak-willed.” And 44.5% thought that psychological problems were “very important” or “extremely important” causes of “obesity.”

Translation: Almost half of your doctors will think that your weight is an indicator of your character and mental health. *** * 95% of doctors feel it is “necessary to educate obese patients on health risks” and only 48% thought that “most obese patients were well-aware of the health risks of obesity.”

Translation: given the opportunity, your doctor is virtually guaranteed to lecture you on how unhealthy your weight is, and there’s a strong chance he thinks you’ve never heard of this before.

The article lists a number of other statistics from a recent study of doctors' attitudes towards fat patients. It warrants reading.

There is a new fat friendly blogger, an 18 year old high school senior, XXLA. Those of you with young people in your families with weight concerns, send them to her blog. She is a most sensible young woman.

On Feed Me, there is an article on How cliches hurt us which looks at

What do the obesity epidemic, anorexia nation, and healthy eating all have in common?***Each time you say the words "the obesity epidemic," you're validating the notion that the nation is in the grip of a contagious pandemic of overweight.***I'll start: I think the idea of an obesity epidemic is a sadly unimaginative construct that has little or nothing to do with reality. It's a cover for institutionalized prejudice against overweight people, a trigger for eating disorders, and a big waste of our collective time and energy.

Your turn.

* Note that I've chosen a chunky little signpost this time, because these articles all have to do with size.