Lara Frater's Blog, page 13

Looks can be deceiving

As I mentioned before I love to swim. If owned a pool, I would be in it every single day, maybe even twice a day, but I live in NYC which has a pool shortage. The pool I go to is overcrowded and often filled with obnoxious people who don't seem to comprehend other people are in the pool with them. Because of this and the fact I work a 9-5 job, I only manage to get to the pool one or twice a week. In two weeks I will be going to vacation in Vermont near a lake, where I will swim every single day, probably twice a day.  

When the pool is over capacity, I find myself on line to get into a swim lane because they only allow 6 people per lane. Three times when I got to the front of the line, the lifeguard looked me over and said "Slow". (Meaning slow speed lane), and all three times I corrected him that I needed a medium lane. 

Fat = unhealthy is so ingrained in people's head that this lifeguard looked at me and thought I was a slow swimmer.

This is Holley Mangold.

This is Sarah Robles

Both women are Olympic athletes in Women's weightlifting and will be in London. Sarah can bench press 570 pounds and has a good chance at the gold. She lives in poverty and couldn't find a sponsor. 

Meet Sarah Robles. She can lift as much as 570 pounds. In last year's weightlifting world championships, she bested every other American—both female and male. Sarah Robles is going to the Olympics in London this summer. But at home, in the United States, she lives on $400 a month.

Finally media company Solve Media did what Nike, Reebok and all the other loser companies wouldn't do, they sponsored this Olympic hopeful. Risto Sports is also sponsoring Sarah and Holley. 

Holley Mangold is athletic and comes from a family of athletes. She tried different sports including football and swimming before she decided on weight lifting. She weights between 300-390 and is not ashamed of her size

"I want people to be comfortable with who they are, whether they're big or small or have a huge nose and are uncomfortable with it, or are in the ugly duckling stage. Just be happy with who you are and what you've got," Mangold said. "I am a big proponent of trying to be healthy. I don't think anyone should be my-size big, but if you are, you should be happy at that size."

In the pool, the lifeguard may look at them and ask "Slow lane?" 

Fat acceptance isn't delusions.

For 17 years I believed the hype that if I did a diet, a weight loss plan, a lifestyle change, I would become thin, healthy, pretty and outgoing. I did everything, sensible diet plans like Weight Watchers, fad diets like slim-fast, low calorie, low carb, low fat. I went to dull gyms, climbing the stairmaster and walking the treadmill. Nothing worked in the long run. They all ended in the same way, my body not getting enough calories (even the "sensible plans") overrode everything and I began binging. During my yo-yo dieting years, I watched my cholesterol rise and my self-esteem plummet. I developed GERD, and my eating become so erratic and disordered that even almost 10 years since my last diet, I still have food and eating issues. 

Since ending the yo-yo dieting, instead of focusing on weight loss, I began focusing on health. I cut down on foods that my body did not like and which aggravated my heartburn. I refuse to ever join a gym again unless they have a pool.

Yet some people think I am deluding myself. That being proud of myself, my accomplishments and my body is a fantasy. 

Recently there was a first ever fat studies conference in New Zealand. Coverage of the event has been positive and negative.

"One of the reasons we're so fearful and hateful of fat is that we believe we can read people's bodies," Pause told AFP.

"So when people look at a fat body like mine, it tells them I'm unhealthy and that this is a diseased body. It tells them I don't ever exercise and eat nothing but junk."Pause said the reality is that some people are just bigger than others and fat studies highlighted the need for society to accept the fact, rather than constantly judging fat people and pushing them to lose weight." 

This quote from an article from Agence France Presse and picked by Alternet has more positive words from the conference organizers and presenters. 

On the other hand is this article from the Punch which starts off making fun of a fat kids, then explains it's not okay to make fun of fat people but you shouldn't going around accepting your fat because you will die. That's right fat acceptance = death. 

I call bullshit. Being fat is different, because in general it is a precursor to a range of deadly diseases. Being overweight puts people at risk of heart disease and stroke, diabetes and some cancers.

If you read my post last week, I talked about another study that proves people who are fat and healthy don't have decreased mortality (unless they happened to have diabetes and/or hypertension. (I have neither). Of course both diabetes and hypertension is bad for anyone of any weight. 

But which is a delusion?

My past belief that somehow I would join the 5% of people who lose weight and kept it off? That I should subscribe to a system that fundamentally fails most people who try?  That I should make myself crazy going on weight loss schemes after schemes, losing and regaining until I died younger than I should (which I'm sure will be blamed on my fatness)  

Or the belief that I need to feed my body wholesome foods and movement it can handle and let my weight fall where it lies. 

 

Weight alone won't kill you and Disney makes everyone a barbie.

Apparently another study (This one done as a study of other studies, aka a metastudy) found that "extra" weight did not cause a change of morbidity more than any other weight unless the person had hypertension or diabetes, then their risk increased 1.26 %.

However despite this proof that being fat (most likely) won't kill you, even if you are severly fat with diabetes and hypertension, the author of the study still wants to the doctor to tell you to lose weight.

Based on the study, Jerant recommends that doctors` conversations with patients who are overweight or obese, but not severely obese, focus on the known negative effects of these conditions on mental and physical functioning, rather than on an increased short-term risk of death. By contrast, Jerant added that it is important for doctors to talk with severely obese patients who also have diabetes or hypertension about their increased short-term mortality risk and treatment, including weight loss.

So let's get this straight. After analysing mortality studies, you discover that fat doesn't in fact kill (unless you are very fat and have diabetes or hypertension, then your mortality goes up a whole 1.26 percent). Otherwise you will die about the same time as everyone else. Despite this you still have to be bombarded with messages to lose weight and be thin. No one said, "Hey, it's normal for some people to be fat or thin, let's focus on disease prevention instead of weight loss instead!"

Speaking of being thin, one of my favorite movie characters is Urusla, the villain from The Little Mermaid. Sure she was a bad guy, but she was still awesome. She's not only a brilliant , magic-using, octopus, but a big fat fattie. Of course Disney villains are the only place for real body diversity. Every heroine is a Barbie, even non-white ones such as Jasmine, Mulan and Tiana.  Disney villains are fat (Ursula), have flawed faces (Scar) or disfigured (Captain Hook). Most the female villains are strong power woman (A no-no in society).

This is Ursula, she is confident and bold.

This is Ursula slimmed down to sell beauty supplies. 

And Ursula loses her confidence, her boldness, her beauiful curves, her tentacles now a pretty dress and Ursula loses everything that makes her different and original. She is now Ursula Barbie, pose pretty for the cameras. (And also so the designer could use the exact same mold for every doll, if you check out the other Disney villains they look the same). 

The FDA sells out and no fatness is not a disease or toxin but stigma is.

The FDA has approved the diet drug Lorcaserin (Brand name Belviq). In case the name is not familiar, I wrote about its  potential dangers  two weeks ago. As I mentioned before diet drugs and supplements have never worked in the long run and some of them are deadly. My only hope is that Belviq is merely ineffective (consider the low amount of weight loss on the drug, I don't know why anyone would think it could be successful.)

Pharma industries look at fat people as out of control eaters, hence most drugs work to try to reduce the appetite, supposedly making it easier for people to stick to low calorie dieting which doesn't work in the long run either. If your body doesn't get enough calories, it will slow down. 

Pharma ignores genetic components. Some people are fat not because they are diseased or overeaters but merely that is how their body works and it isn't normal or abnormal compared to thinner person's body. Some doctors believe fatness is a disease, while other believe it to be a risk factor for God knows what. (I've mentioned before no matter what evidence is presented and what doctors believe, the cure for everything is weight loss) If fatness is classified as a disease, then it can be treated with drugs and surgery. In this article doctors argue whether fatness is a disease or a risk factor (i.e. we can't win, we are either diseased or have fat related disease.)

Meanwhile in Australia a government agency commissioned a series of ads calling fat people toxic, further stigmatizing fat people. Okay they didn't actually call fat people toxic but they did say we were filled with toxic fat. This article features eating disorders specialist Lydia Jade Turner who mention how ads like this do little to help people get healthy, but can create eating disorders and dangerous dieting: 

Scaring and shaming people about their bodies is not the answer.
"Bullying under the guise of health is not helpful; research shows that shaming people about their body size does not lead to health-giving behaviours."
Ms Turner said anti-obesity campaigns only exacerbated the existing stigma and bullying based on body size.
"With a largely unregulated weight loss industry, many become desperate to escape fat stigma by engaging in weight loss behaviours that are harmful to health," she said.

Lydia and Sarah McMahon have created a petition against the ads. Please sign! Even if you aren't from Australia.

I have been doing a lot of posts lately about how stigma doesn't help people get healthy because it can create an atmosphere of thin or else. (As I mentioned in a previous post, fat people are even stigmatized when exercising) or eating disorders. Eating disorders have become not only common among teens  and young adults, but now it is seen in middle aged women as well. 

The researchers found that almost 4 percent report binge eating, nearly 8 percent report purging, more than 70 percent diet to lose weight and 62 percent say their weight or shape adversely impacts their lives, according to the report published June 21 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

So guess what dieting industry? Your plan worked, you have hooked your customers into the Diet/binge cycle for life and we can thank the government agencies who helped. 

Change the world, not yourself, unless you're fat.

The "documentary" Supersize Me features a scene where Jared from Subway tells an impressionable girl that: "The world doesn't change. So you gotta change for the world."

All I could think is what utter bullshit. First off, just because you are in the minority, doesn't mean the majority is right.  (Of course fat people are the majority in the US). Second, really? If you don't like injustices in the world, you should just join them?

Case in point is this study that discovered fat kids were likely to do worse on math tests. The study's lead author couldn't discover why this was, but theorized that is had to do with stress and anxiety. 

"We know, in general, that children who have poor peer relationships don't do as well at school," she said. "And we also know that children with internalizing behaviors don't do as well. Internalizing behaviors are anxiety, worry, not feeling as if they have a lot of friends and feeling sad. 

  Children with weight problems tend to feel internalizing behaviors and not have good interpersonal skills," she added.

The response to this? Not trying to improving the stigma, not trying to reduce the fat hatred in school, but weight loss.  According to a doctor at North Shore Hospital.

"Obesity isn't just a cosmetic problem," she said. "It has impacts that go from chronic disease to mental achievement, and ultimately to income and a happy, successful, well-adjusted life."

Weight loss, weight loss. The cure for anything. Cancer? Weight loss. Don't know how to change a light bulb? Weight loss. Have anxiety? Weight loss. Can't decide where to wear? Weight loss. 

And it's not getting better. The American Medical Association which is against bullying  except for fat kids is recommending that all schools have obesity classes:

The nation's largest physicians group agreed to support legislation that would require classes in causes, consequences and prevention of obesity for first through 12th graders. Doctors will be encouraged to volunteer their time to help with that under the new policy adopted on the final day of the AMA's annual policymaking meeting.

I'm sure fat kids would love taking the obesity class. It's obvious that all fat people, kids included, don't know they are fat. 

All I can think is our schools are suffering horrific financial crisis and many of them don't offer gym.  Instead of these stupid stigmatizing obesity classes, everything school in the country gets funding for gym. 

Or stop trying to answer everything with weight loss. 

Event at Sarah Lawrence this Tuesday.

I won't be able to make it, but it looks awesome!!

Advocacy, Activism, and Women's History:
A Women's History Salon

Join the conversation! Please join us for a discussion of how the study of women’s history applies to activism and advocacy outside of the academy.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012
6-8 p.m.

Slonim Living Room
Sarah Lawrence College
1 Mead Way
Bronxville, NY

Conveniently located 25 minutes from Times Square via Metro North

How does the study of women’s history apply to activism and advocacy outside of the academy? Be a part of the discussion at a Salon hosted by the Sarah Lawrence Graduate Program in Women’s History. Meet with current and former students and faculty to hear about their scholarly work and interests. Together, we can discuss the relationship between scholarship, work, and life after graduation.

Established in 1972, Sarah Lawrence's Women's History graduate program is the first of its kind in the United States, and its diverse student body proves year in and year out that scholarship in the area of women’s history is alive and well.

contact grad@sarahlawrence.edu

Are we just dollar signs?

There are many excellent life saving and life improving medications out there, drugs that save lives and dramatically improve quality of life. I have many people in my life where drugs have saved their lives. 

Then there are diet drugs. No diet drug has ever worked in the long run and some of them have been proved to be deadly. 

This new drug  lorcaserin seems like it is the same shit different day. The most important point is that it sucks as weight loss drug. 3,200 fat people were randomly given the drug or placebo for a whole year. After the year 55% of the placebo and 45% of those given the drugs dropped out, either because it wasn't working or of they couldn't take the side effects. 

The average weight loss during the first year was about 12 pounds in the lorcaserin group and 5 pounds in the placebo group. During the second year of the study, 68% of people who continued to take the weight loss drug maintained the loss vs. 50% of people switched to placebo.

So your average weight loss is about a pound a month. Congratulations, if you weighed 300 pounds before the study, you now weight 288 which by the way will not end the stigma against you in the doctor's office, the job, the gym, the health insurance companies and you aren't thin.

The second issue of course is the side effects. 

The same safety signals– in particular, lingering concerns about heart valve problems– remain. It is unclear whether new, previously unpublicized data submitted by Arena on the effect of lorcaserin on the serotonin receptor (the source of previous heart valve problems with phen/fen) will move the dial on this issue. One important note of caution here: although no statistically significant increase in risk of valve disease was found by the FDA (relative risk 1.16, 95% CI 0.81-1.67), the reviewer noted that the “upper bound exceeds the 1.5 upper bound requested by FDA to rule out an excess risk of VHD.”

What essentially you have here is diet drug that barely works that works on the serotonin receptor the same as phen/fen . In case you don't remember what phen/fen did, here is a description of PPH

Primary pulmonary hypertension has no cure. If left untreated, the right side of the heart becomes overworked and eventually fails, leading to death. One study showed that 30% of untreated PPH patients died within 3 years of diagnosis. 

So why would Arena Pharmaceuticals push a diet drug that doesn't work and has potientially deadly side effects?

Why? Because of the money that's why. With an FDA advisory panel saying a-okay on approving it, stocks in Arena have gone up about 12 percent. 

Now I hope those who bought stocks in Arena know when to sell. Because my crystal balls sees another fen-phen disaster if this drug is approved. 

One size fits all?

The Great American Obesity Epidemic tends to want force people into a narrow cookie cutter. Every single human being must have a BMI of 18.5 to 24.5. If you dare be at 25, you will die of a combo heart stroke cancer attack! And if your BMI is 30, you are already dead. Except that humans tend to have different numbers, some of them lower than 18.5 and some of them higher and methods to force people into an unnatural number have high failure rates. 

Airbus, in their infinite wisdom finally realized that fat people exist and some of them actually want to fly in seats made for human beings  (Not just fat people) and are making some bigger seats on their planes. Now will the airline industry come to the same conclusion and actually buy the planes? 

Airbus said that if U.S. airlines charged extra for the roomier seats, they could make as much as $3 million extra during a 15-year period.

See this is what's called doing good business. I hear horror stories (usually from Southwest) of fat passengers forced to buy a second seat even after they can buckle up and put the arm rests down or being forced to buy a seat on a connecting or returning flight. I'm sure many fat people will be put off by flying. Now in this case, they can pay a little extra for the room. Which I'm sure is cheaper than buying an entire second seat and also less humiliating than when a fat hating gate agent or flight attendant arbitrary decides you're too fat for your seat.

Remember two weeks ago when I posted about movement and how I wasn't athletic? Well it turns out not everyone benefits from exercise. In fact in some cases, it makes things worse. 

By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.

The good news is this: one, it was only small percentage of the group and two, they mentioned people did rigorous exercise. I have to wonder if the percentages would change if they did low impact movement. 

But this study goes to show that you can't put everyone into the same cookie cutter. 

Stigma using racism doesn't work either.

Last week, a blogger for Tosh 2.0 put up a picture of a fat woman wearing a gold bikini trying to hail a cab in the rain. The person who posted it invited comments. And since Tosh 2.0 is "supposed" to be a comedy, I'm fairly certain the poster Blogger Mike Pomranz meant to put it up for people to make funny captions.

Except for one problem, the picture he used is copyrighted and belongs to the Adopositivity Project, a site by Substantia Jones of her photography that is meant to be show fat women positively.

Within a few hours the blog post was down. No word on Comedy Central about why. I suspect it had nothing to do the intent to not ridicule someone and everything to do with the words: "Copyright infridgement, legal action, lawyers."

From Jezebel

"Folks sharing Adipositivity photos," Jones says, "as is regularly done all over Facebook and Tumblr, aids in the purpose of getting body positive images in front of as many eyes as possible. We dig that. But to steal someone else's copyrighted material in order to use it in purveying bigotry and hate for profit? Not cool." The woman in the photo—who, to everyone's surprise, is an actual human being—is actress/model Janie Martinez. Jones describes the image as "conveying the bliss of being completely happy with your physical self, and boldly so, even in a world filled with ridicule."

There are many sites out where photos of people are put up to be made fun off. Someone caught in an unflattering picture, or doing something stupid. I don't know if this means they should be put up for ridicule. The difference is the Adopositivity Project did not put its lovely photos up for ridicule. They were put up to be positive pictures of fat women.

This article in Everyday Health points out another site meant purely to stigmatize fat people and added racism into the mix. The twitter feed Fat girl. (I'm not going to link it, you can get it from the site) is apparently a somewhat illiterate fat black woman who tweets about what she eats (apparently everything.) The site isn't very funny (BTW I can deal with offensive comedy as long as it's funny). Oh and fat girl isn't a real person but a 10 year old-- I mean 17 year old boy. (Gonna be a while before I'm willing to call him a man or even a guy). 

But Fat Girl is not a she. The real person behind this Twitter handle is a 17-year-old boy from Virginia, a 5-foot-5-inch, 123-pound high school teenager of Asian background who aspires to be a body builder. (Everyday Health has withheld his name because he is a minor.)

First off, I'm not surprised this boy is an aspiring bodybuilder. Every time I do a post against dieting I sometimes get a bunch of commenters from bodybuilders about how I'm the Anti-Christ. Although I still don't get their logic of how my anti-dieting message is somehow anti-body building. 

The stigma here boggles the mind because not only does it create hostility towards fat people by portraying them as beyond the stereotype of out of control eater that if left to our own devices we will eat everything in sight (One of the tweets is “I ate Precious”) but it also creates hostility towards black women.  The Fat girl isn’t just fat, she happens to be black. She happens to have all the stereotypical qualities of a fat black women, i.e., lazy, loud, and stupid.

In the end The Fat Girl may not cause that much stigma because I hope that people see it for what it is, a stupid site done by a dumb kid who doesn’t know any better.  I doubt it will make any fat person look at the site say, “Hey this idiot is right.” 

Movement for thin people only.

I love to swim. It is hands down my favorite exercise. Floating almost weightless is the closest I will ever come to being in space. Not to mention that I am a strong swimmer. 

Am I graceful in the pool? No. I've been fat since I was nine but even before that I was a girl with almost no cooridination and two left feet. I swim laps and  I don't do anything fancy. I am there for movement and to enjoy myself.  I'm not an athelete and I never will be. I could never hit a ball, I barely got the ball over the net playing volleyball. However I find that if I don't regularly exercise I got tired and depressed. 

Dancer Ragen Chastain recently posted how her body was put up to ridicule in a fat hate forum.

They took the heel pull picture that you see on the left and put it beside a thin person doing a similar move – they claimed that because we looked different mine was wrong.  They said that I lumbered and waddled and that I lacked grace, which is interesting because the most common compliment I receive is about how graceful I am.

Attacking Ragen's dancing boggles my mind. Ragen is a a fat person and she is dancing, doing exercise and movement. This is a woman who regularly wins international dance competitions. Fat haters scream how we should just put down that doughnut and go for a run but when we do, we are told we look stupid. We can't win. 

And that stigma about fat people exercising is causing them to exercise less.

“Some stated they were unwilling to participate in exercise because they “expected” that people would “laugh at”, “ridicule” “stare at” or “abuse” them. One participant (a 34 year old female) said that she rarely participated in physical activity, because she felt constantly “on display”.

This was a study in Social Science and Medicine of 141 fat people and found that that about 2/3 of them suffered from stigma. 

As I mentioned before I am Queen of the Klutzes. I don't like to dance. My wedding dance consisted of my husband and I rocking back and forth because I lose count during waltzes. 

However everytime Ragen comes to New York to teach a dance class, I am there. Why? Because Ragen is a fantastic teacher. Not only does she make the room comfortable and fun because there is no judgement or stigma but she makes the moves so easy that I don't lose count. 

But if fat haters had their way, she wouldn't dance anymore. I know Ragen is a strong, very self assured woman who is unapologetic about her fat. I don't see her giving up her life to appease the fat haters any time soon. And she is a damn good dancer.

But what about the other fat people who are not good dancers but love to dance? Should they give it up because they don't look graceful or should enjoy the movement?

Fat haters seem to think we should quit.

So I say fuck fat haters. I will dance like an idiot and swim like whale.