Lara Frater's Blog, page 11

The biggest future eating disorders and yoyo dieting show!

As I sit here writing this I have never seen an episode of the Biggest Loser. I suppose one day I'll have to sit through one episode just to say I did. However, every time I go to Hulu (I don't have a TV or cable), I can't bring myself to watch even a clip. 

I've read enough stories to realize it's not only a terrible show but could be dangerous to your health and self esteem. And like most reality shows, it's a race to the bottom. 

Each week contestants face various challenges, overexercising, under eating, temptations. The show does not teach you how to follow your natural body cues. Weight loss challenges are the biggest part of the show. Contestants who lose a lot of weight can win big money at the end. 

The thing is that the Biggest Loser even contradicts sensible weight loss which isn't to lose as much as possible but to take off 1-2 pounds a week slowly. Nutition.gov's weight loss plan involves setting a reasonable and realistic weight loss goal. Six hours on the treadmill just ain't going to cut it for the majority of anyone.   

But the contestants on the Biggest Losers are adults and they can do what they want with their bodies and hey perhaps this fad diet will be better than the other ones?

The problem is now the Biggest Loser is adding three teenage contestants. While they are not actually competing with the adults, or will be eliminated or be starving themselves or overexercising yet. But let's show them they'll be treated as fat adults. And hey! Let's all gawk at the fat kids because thin kids don't have to undereat and overexercise because all thin children are healthy and eat right. No matter how "sensitive" they plan to be to the three kids, this will only be encouraging them to go to the lifetime diet train.  

Meanwhile Eating disorders tend to hit teens and young adults the most. 

Ragan Chastain has petitioned the Biggest Loser's producers to keep kids off the Biggest Loser

Besides which, there’s no proof that this will be good for the kids anyway. Studies clearly show that the techniques used by the show produce ratings-friendly short term weight loss but long-term weight regain in most people. 

I urge you to sign the petition, contact NBC and the most important part tell your friends and your family to stop watching. 

Weight watchers is still a diet

Readers of my blog know I have no love for WW. When I first decided I needed to lose weight, I tried doing my own diet. I showed little success of 3 years of diet foods and OTC diet pills, I moved to WW I believe when I was 16. I had no idea that diets didn't work and thought that if you were fat, you went on a diet, lost weight and everything would be fine. WW didn't ask for a permission slip from my parents but my parents did pay my joiner's fee and weekly fee (at least I got a discount of a whole $2 for being a student). We met in the basement of a synagogue, shared our weight loss successes and our challenges. Every week I was given a fresh booklet to check off exchanges. The team leader was a woman name Rosalie who I believe was one of the rare WW team leaders who lost weight and kept it off. She wasn't famous so she never made it into the ads. 

The time I last did WW, I was 24, had done it a number of times over past eight years. Each time it ended with me gaining the weight I loss plus more. This would be my final time because the first week I followed the plan and gained weight. I never went back. 

As far as diets being bad for your health WW seems like it's not as bad as the other. They often have ads touting it as a lifestyle change. One January, their slogan was "Diets are mean." And a recent article cover WW's CEO touts that it's not about dieting but behavior modication. 

The original Weight Watchers program centered around calorie counting which often led participants to initially lose weight but then later gain it back.

I'm not sure which original program he was talking about. I first did Weight Watchers 25 years ago and there no calorie counting. First it was exchanges, then it was point system then pointsplus, now they have something new called 360. Maybe he was talking about the original plan from the 1970's. 

To me WW is the most dangerous plan because it flies under the rader and gets labeled as the "sensible weight loss plan" rather than crash dieting of other plans. WW sneaks into your workplace, your wellness discounts, your insurance plans. 

Laura Beck of Jezebel literally has my almost exact same WW story. (And I swear I wrote the part about WW before I read the article.)

I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was 12*. I attended with my mom because she always wanted to lose weight, and I was a fat kid, so it made sense. Of course, I'd been on other diets before, but this one was different, this time I would succeed through six easy meals a day and a healthy new interest in jogging. The weeklyexercise in terror meeting involved sneaking into their offices in a local mall 

In the end Weight Watchers isn't a lifestyle change or even healthy eating. Whether you count points, exchanges or apples, it still limits the amount of calories you can eat making it a diet.  

Knees please

Fat and thin people can get knee issues that require surgery, either repairs or total replacement. Many fat people have been turned down for knee surgery. Fat activist Nancy Goddess had to have gastric bypass surgery in order to fix her knee. 

A recent study from New York's Hospital For Special Surgery has said that fat people have the same outcomes as thin people when it comes to knee surgery. 

"As long as they are medically appropriate for surgery, even obese people can have excellent results from joint replacement. Obesity, in and of itself, should not be viewed as an absolute contraindication to joint replacement," said Lisa Mandl, M.D., M.P.H.., a rheumatologist at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), in New York City, who was involved with the study.

I find it very disturbing to be denied a quality of life surgery. And guess what? Even fat people need their knees because the majority of us exercise and have to walk around day to day.

Her finding: 29% had been exercising for six months, 39% regularly exercised and 25% thought about exercising. Only 12% said they had no intention to work out. (Yes, those numbers add up to 105%. We're assuming they rounded up.)

I don't know how doctors think that fat people will lose weight if they don't have working knees. 

 

Fat, Happy and Fly like the Wind!

Scientists in Canada have discovered that those with the dreaded horrible obesity gene have yet another added benefit of being protected from depression.

But the genetic findings challenge that thinking, Meyre said, since those with the genetic mutation predisposing to obesity were protected from depression.

I don't like to be called a mutant. Just because a gene makes you undesirable from the mainstream doesn't mean it's a mutation.  On the other hand, without genetic mutations, we'd still be unicellar beasties living in slime pools, so I guess I can live with it.

Here is yet another benefit of being fat. Of course if you're depressed don't gain weight. This just means that if you have genetic disposition to be fat, you may also have protection against depression. 

Speaking of depression, exercise has also been proved to help with depression. It release happy fun endorphins. Just because you are fat does not mean you don't deserve it.  

In Denmark, a racer is doing a 132 mile trek. Jarmo Pitkanen also happens to be fat and he wanted to do the race to show a he can be fat and finish it. 

But by completing the multiple-day competitions as an obese athlete, he is doing a small part in changing the perception of overweight athletes, doctors said, although most physicians have long warned that obesity can lead to an array of health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

One thing mentioned in the article is that Pitkanen tries to gain weight before doing competitions so he'll be fat when he finishes. I don't agree with that, because I've always been an advocate of eat well and move and let your weight fall where it should. However, it show that body size shouldn't matter when it comes to fitness. 

“Fat doesn’t play as much of a role in fitness as people think,” said Dr. Linda Bacon, a physiologist and member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “Some people who are really fat exercise regularly. We see top athletes perform well in fat bodies. Times are changing. The population has gotten bigger, so we’re going to see more fat athletes out there.”

Not everyone can do a 132 mile trek or in my case the mile swim race I hope to do in the summer, the most important thing is we listen to our genes and be as happy as we can. 

 

Eating season.

In the US, this Thursday week is Thanksgiving and the official start of eating season. This is the season where the halls of Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers are empty. It probably doesn't matter to them because they are planning new ad campaigns to tell you they aren't diets, and that because celebrities can lose weight, so can you.  

Their job isn't to help you be healthy or even really lose weight but to make you feel bad about yourself so they can make a big pot of money at the end of the diet industry rainbow. They want you to fail because tht means that you'll be back every single January.

When I first did Weight Watchers, I didn't restart in January. I was one of the weird folks who would start during eating season. The big rush came in January or right before summer. 

To me it seemed you wanted to diet in the fall. This was the time of the worst temptations. Halloween candy, Thanksgiving Turkey and unlimited Christmas parties. You wanted to go through the holidays without gain.  I also liked the nice small quiet meetings, soon to be shattered by the massive crowds the first week in January. January was also the usually time that my body was pissed over not having enough food and began to rebel with binges. I went to Weight Watchers on Thursday and I became used to Thursday night binge day. 

I will admit that I did pick up some good habits from my dieting years (but it doesn't make up for the bad habits). The first is drinking water, the second is trying to be healthy (in my dieting days to me diet meant health), no matter what part of the year it was.

These two habits stuck with me and became stronger. Right now for the most part, I drink water or tea and that's it. 

The second, the being "good" no matter what said with me, and strengthened with Health at Every Size. You see I did eat Halloween candy, will eat more than I should at Thanksgiving, eat, drink and be merry at the holiday parties but I will continue to eat my vegetables and move. 

You see while dieting during eating season, once I went off the diet that was it. I stopped exercising and eating healthy foods. Because dieting was all or nothing. 

Golda over at Body Love Wellness gives some good tips for surviving the holiday season, dealing with "Helpful" relatives, enjoying your holiday food, and learning not to stress completely out.

And speaking of diets, every year the Healthy Weight Network has the slim chance awards. Awards for the worst of the worst in dieting. Last years winner was HGC. And they are open for nominations. 

So this season, keep your healthy habits by enjoying your holidays without worry about gain or loss.  

Dieting really doesn't work.

I am a firm believer in what works. When it comes to medicine, I have friends who say alternative medicine doesn't work, and I have friends who believe that regular medicine is worse for you. I have a belief in what works with the least amount of side effects whether it be regular or alt. medicine. 

Dieting is an example of something that doesn't work. It has never worked for me and about 95% of other people who have done it. 

It doesn't help you lose weight. If anything it helps you gain weight. 

... brain scans reveal that weight loss makes it harder for us to exercise self-control and resist tempting food. Worse still, the more people diet, the stronger these effects can become, leaving some almost doomed to being overweight as a result of their attempts to become slim.

Essentially dieting wrecks your body, makes you more hungry, and gives you more of an urge to overeat, slows your metobolism so it's easy to regain. 

And it doesn't work to improve health outcomes in diabetics. 

A large federal study of whether diet and weight loss can prevent heart attacks and strokes in overweight and obese people with Type 2 diabetes has ended two years ahead of schedule because the intensive program did not help.

There is IMHO a belief that if you become fat you will get type 2 diabetic. And yes it is true that many fat people have diabetes. The notion is if you are fat and diabetic you should lose weight to control your diabetes. (Sorry thin diabetics, we can offer you no advice.) Any time Diabetes is mentioned, weight loss advice soons follows. No one things that hey maybe it isn't fatness that causes diabetes but the other way around. Ignored are the fact diabetes is highly genetic. For some people may be able to go on a diabetic diet (small case, i.e. not for weight loss) and increase their physical fitness. While some it won't work for at all.

When it comes to public health policy regarding weight and health, the aphorism that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result has never seemed more appropriate. -- Paul Campos.

 

Starving

(REPRINTED FROM AN IGIGI COLUMN)

A few years ago I read “The Great Starvation Experiment” by Todd Tucker.  It was about “the Minnesota Starvation
Experiment” done in the 1940’s run by Dr. Ancel Keys.  In it 36 conscientious objectors were willing to starve
themselves for 24 weeks, so that Dr. Keys could learn more about hunger. How it
worked, what is was, and how people who were in the process were more or less
likely to behave.

While
starving the men invariably became preoccupied with food.  Some men suffered from terrible
edemas.  Four men were removed from
the study due to their reactions: the first dreamt of cannibalism, then went on
a massive eating binge (food, not people).  When confronted with this, he first threatened to kill
himself, and then threatened to kill Dr. Keys.  The second failed subject went on a massive eating binge
without even being aware of it until after it was over (although he was not
removed from the study because of that. 
They removed him for peeing blood.) The third subject was caught
stealing food and eating out of the garbage, the fourth was accused of cheating
when he stopped losing weight.

Those were merely the ones removed
for presenting extreme behaviors. Of those who remained, one chopped his finger
off and another repeatedly started fights.  They all lost muscle mass, felt depressed, had trouble
exercising, and becoming aroused. 
After the study was finished, 10 men decided to get involved in a follow
up study.  When they were finally
allowed to eat freely and unsupervised every one of them went on a massive
binge.

Here’s
a fun challenge: take a guess as to how many calories these were the men were
allowed to consume each day: 500, which would be complete starvation according
to the U.N.? 900, which was about what the Nazis thought was enough for slave
laborers?  Nope. In Keys’ study the
men were consuming about 1,500 calories a day give or take. Scary monsters,
huh? If 1,500 calories a day is enough to turn an otherwise healthy happy human
male into a slavering zombie, can you imagine what someone taking in only 900
or 500 calories a day must be going through? What must it be like to be really hungry?

After
the establishment of the Nuremberg Code (which banned torturous medical
experiments), no one thinks that an experiment like this one would be allowed
to happen again.

Except
that it is still going on today and shows what can only be called full and
willing participation by all involved. 
I’m talking about commercial diets.  According to Consumer Reports the average amount of a major
diet is 1500 calories.  Liquid
diets and weight loss surgery can go even lower (about 800 calories); Weight
loss surgery is forced starvation because there is a limit to how much food the
stomach can take before the body has a bad reaction to so much food. Which is
bad enough, but actually paying $20,000 or more to volunteer for this is just
plain crazy.

People
consuming these low amounts of calories suffer the same symptoms as the men in
Keys’ study.  Even if they are
fat!  The last time you dieted,
don’t you remember that you thought about food all the time or that you were
too tired to do anything you enjoyed? 
Every diet I was on I remembered that all I thought about was food.  Nothing was more important than my next
meal.

Chuck the diet, the diet
mentality and weight-based health. 
Embrace Health at Every Size (HAES).   Don’t fall for false promises, overnight success
stories, celebrities or any BS that the diet companies put out that they aren’t
really a diets. (Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are DIETS).  Dieting or changing your lifestyle plan
solely on the purpose of losing weight will only end in failure. 

Skinny Minnie

Short post today as I was away for the weekend and didn't have time to work on a post. Also since I'm a big fat fattie fat, I am currently keeping my house from flying away in this little storm called Sandy. 

When I was little I was obsessed with Disney especially Mickey and Minnie (I have a picture of me when I was 7 holding Mickey's hand in a death grip.)

I never thought about Minnie's body at all. She was an anthropomorphized mouse. She had big round ears, a pretty polka dress and stylish shoes.

Apparently the department store Barneys who I think are legally obligated to remove fat people from their premises is showing a three minute ad in which Minnie dreams that she is a size 0, 5'11 fashion model. This apparently will be happening to other Disney characters. Eating disorder specialists have condemned the ad as encouraging eating disorders among children. 

Barney and Disney's response:

"We are saddened that activists have repeatedly tried
to distort a lighthearted holiday project in order to draw media attention to
themselves," Disney and Barneys said in a joint statement to the News.

Ragen Chastian has a petition to change this and it has at last count had almost 137,000 signatures. Are these signers all opportunists? Or are they just concerned about a CHILD's cartoon character being turned into the narrow and unrealistic portral of women?

 

Ten Ways to Love your Body.

October 17th is Love Your Body Day

Do you love what you see when you look in the mirror?

Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries work hard to make us believe that our bodies are unacceptable and need constant improvement.  Advertisements reduce us to body parts -- lips, legs, breasts -- airbrushed and touched up to meet impossible standards.  The media tell women and girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem. Is it any wonder that 80% of U.S. women are dissatisfied with their appearance?

10 ways to love your body

1 Do not ever disparage your body. Don't tell it it's inadequate,
ugly, not the right size, old, blemished, or not worth of love. Your body is
the only one get. treat it with respect, no matter what condition it's in. 

 2. Give your body the nourishment it needs. Too often the diet
industry and "Obesity" experts assume all fat people eat junk foods and drink
soda. They ignore dangerous dieting practices and under-eating. They seem to
care more that a teen has a burger for lunch than another one who has only
carrot sticks. Eat what your body needs to function at its best. 

 3. Compliment your body in the mirror, even the "flawed" part. love your big nose, your c-section scar, your flabby jelly rolls. 

4. Whenever you say something bad about your body, immediately apologize and give it a compliment. There is no excuse for rudeness.

5. If a friend or loved one complains about their "flaws", let them know that they are beautiful.  

6. Give your body the physical activity it needs. For the most part your body needs some exercise. This could
mean just a walk around the block or a marathon run. Learn your body's limits and don't
hurt it.

7. Make a body positive website, blog, facebook, Tumblr or Twitter. Share this list. or make one of
your own. Think of other suggestions to love your body. Engage in body positive activities. Start or go to a body positive group. 

8. Don't let anyone else disparage your body. We can tell strangers to fuck off, but maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea for grandma. Tell loved ones gently that you don't like
that kind of talk and don't want to hear it again.

9. Don't wear make up or clothes to cover your flaws. Wear them
proudly. Even models are heavily made up before shoots. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Change your perfection to realism. 

 10. Give your body a big hug and say that you love it. 

 

Hollywood Fat

Almost four years ago I chucked cable TV. I'd long since gotten my news from online papers and picked and chosen my TV  and movies from streaming sources. 

Fat women and men make up about two-thirds of the US population according to fearmongers yet you wouldn't know that from TV and movies. In most mainstream movies and TV (except for artsy, foreign, or comedy shows), the actors, usually just the women, are conventionally attractive like they cut from the same mold. They are usually slender, tall and made up. For example there is a recent movie called Seven Psychopaths that has seven people appearing on a movie poster. Five are men and two are women. The five men are gruff, not glamourous and distungished . The two women might as well be twins as they look perfectly the same. It's ironic because Gabourey Sidibe also appears (I'm not sure in what capacity, she seems like she's a dog sitter) but her name isn't headlined and she doesn't appear in the poster. 

When I was working on my book and researching movies and TV that featured fat actors,  I found roles for fat people were limited to background, side characters, or comedy only. If they were the main character they were dieting (Fried Green Tomatoes), hated themselves (Fat actress), it was a foreign or artsy film (Zuckerbaby),  poor quality (More to Love) or nuts (Misery). 

Flashforward eight years later where the NY Times has an article about female comedians who are fighting back against the pressure to lose weight. 

Self-acceptance has become a new form of defiance on
television, especially among younger female comedians. Partly that’s because
it’s refreshingly unusual. There’s little comic shock value left in profanity,
obscenity or intolerance, but it’s still quite rare and surprising to see a
woman not obsess about her waistline.

The majority of these performers are "Hollywood Fat" and the only true discrimination they might face would be lack of roles in mainstream movies and TV. They can still buy clothes at almost any store, probably won't get a lecture from doctor, or be told they are diseased. Rebel Wilson, the only one who might fall into the latter category, is a spokesperson for Jenny Craig. 

I'm glad to see actors that don't fit into the typical Hollywood cookie cutter. Mindy Kating is a very talented writer, a very funny lady and I think maybe the only Indian actress on television now that the horrible show Outsourced was cancelled.  However things still haven't changed since I first researched my book. Fat actors are still background and side characters, if they are seen at all. The movies are almost always comedies. If the fat character it is the main character it's either a comedy, or the main character is emotional disturbed. For example Precious is a wonderful movie starring two amazing actresses but both are poor and uneducated. Mo'Nique's character Mary had sexually abused her daughter and is a stereotypical welfare queen. 

Real change happens when we see a variety of actors on the screen and tube that are different sizes, different colors and from different backgrounds. One of the reasons I gave up cable was there was nothing on but the same cookie cutters. 

Speaking of movies, a good one is coming out about fat men becoming sumo wrestlers. Oh it's from Israel and a similiar movie was done in the UK 12 years ago.

So no real change to Hollywood fat.