Lara Frater's Blog, page 16
January 19, 2012
Healthy Weight Week
Press Release
By the third week in January, New Year diets are dumped, the rebound binge is over and people are looking for balance to get their lives back on track. They can find it in the 19th annual Healthy Weight Week that begins Sunday, promoting lifestyle habits of wellness for people of all sizes and shapes.
"It's a time to say 'I'm okay and so are you.' Let's stop dieting and get on with living in normal healthy ways," says Francie M. Berg, MS, licensed nutritionist and adjunct professor at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, who chairs the event.
Healthy Weight Week features two sets of awards. Adele, the young British singer, topped the Women's Healthy Body Image Awards. The Slim Chance Awards for worst diets of 2011 went to a 23-year-old self-made millionaire, HCG hormone treatment, Sensa weight-loss crystals, and a plastic bracelet set with hologram discs.
During Healthy Weight Week, people are encouraged to improve habits in lasting ways by eating well, living actively and feeling good about themselves and others. For more information see www.healthyweight.net/hww.htm
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CONTACT:
Ronda Irwin or Francie M. Berg
701-567-2646
Healthy Weight Network
402 South 14th Street
Hettinger, ND 58639
www.healthyweight.net
January 18, 2012
January 13, 2012
Off to the woods
On vacation today, so no blog post. I will be snowshoeing in Vermont in highs expected to be 10. Glad to have the extra padding.
January 9, 2012
Georgia becomes a school yard bully & another study for HAES.
Early last year, I criticized a "Health" organization in Atlanta, Georgia for ads that both victimized and villainized fat children. I've have bought up before that fat people are either victimized for not knowing any better or villianized for delibrately becoming fat. Most health care agencies tend to use the victimization mentality. If only those poor stupid fat people would understand healthy eating and exercise they would be healthy and slender!
However this organization seems to have decided to keep the negative ads and it seems they have now taken a step further into full scale bullying of fat kids. Ads such as this one (I have used a cut version from the Huffington post as I don't want to show the full ad):
For some reason, this caption disturbed me the most.
I have been fat since I was 10 years old. I am now forty, still fat, happily married, in a good job and independant.
I am still my parents little girl.
What I do know is the worst diet in the world wasn't Weight Watchers or Atkins or Slim Fast or Nutrisystem or (I got a bunch more) but the stigma diet. Playing devil's advocate here for a moment. I wouldn't start another diet unless I was motivated. So I never started one when I felt ashamed. Feeling shame made me not want to bother dieting, or lose weight or do anything because I was a monster and not worthy.
I'm not the only one who thinks of this as outright bullying. Paul Campos pointed out in his Daily Beast article:
Oh heavens no: we certainly don't want to shame anyone! After all, we value, and indeed treasure, human "diversity" in all its forms—except, apparently, body diversity...
...Even if we put aside the difficult question of how you can avoid shaming and stigmatizing people if at the same time you're claiming that their bodies are diseased as a consequence of behavior that's within their (or at least their parents') control, there are other problems with the theory that it's useful to inform fat children that in this culture it's not considered desirable to be fat.
Harriet Brown points out
Efforts like this one emphasize the idea that weight loss is a matter of personal responsibility, and they demonize fat children and teens in the name of helping them. How do kids feel when they see kids who look like them being targeted as not OK? They already know it's bad to be fat; in one recent study, children as young as three showed a strong preference for thinness over fat, and made comments like "I hate her because she has a fat stomach" and "She's fat and ugly."
I firmly believe to the creators of these ad campaigns don't care about children, they hate fat people. There is a change.org petition against these ads, if you haven't signed it, please do. And it's a waste of 50 million dollars when I would much rather it be used to, say, take care of Georgia's children.
And studies have shown these "inventions" do not cause weight loss.
Waters' group aimed to update a 2005 review that found many pediatric obesity interventions were not able to reduce weight gain but were successful in promoting a healthy diet and an increased level of physical activity.
So an "intervention" causes healthy habits but no weight loss, is it a failure.
Meanwhile if they really really wanted to help the children, they might look at some research. For example check this study out, look at that conclusion:
Conclusions: Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.
Is anyone here tired of my comparing HAES to weight based health? Because I have one more.
Strong4life = shame, eating disorders, stigmitization, humilation, marginalization and stress.
HAES = Eating right, movement, healthy ingrained habits, body love, oh and significant decreased mortality.
January 2, 2012
From Radical to Realism! ReVolution Time!
It's a new year. And many are pledging the same boring resolutions of 2011, to lose weight! To become thin! (or thinner!), to use that treadmill covered with cobwebs! To fork over money to my old gym! To refill the seats at Weight Watchers! Cut those carbs, count those calories! Lower those fats! 2012 will be the year of a whole new me! There is a reason now you are bombarded with diet ads. They know one of the biggest resolution is to lose weight. Weight Watcher's current slogan is "Believe because it works." The New York Times begs to differ.
A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost.
Instead of those same tired resolutions we make each years (and yes, you should call your mother more often), let's try something radical and different, reVolution. Let's make changes at any time for the good of yourself and others. Dieting and intentional weight loss doesn't work for most of us in the long run. So why keep repeating these failures?
Revolution comes from real change. The only real change you might get from a diet is eating disordered. Although critic often say the fat acceptance movement are just fat people "giving up" but we aren't. What we are giving up that the thin cookie cutter ideal is a lie. We are giving up that food and movement is the enemy.
Health at Every size shouldn't be as radical as it is and it shouldn't be dismissed. The idea of eating healthy and normal foods and doing movement you enjoy and letting your weight fall 8777745wherever it is supposed to be isn't radical, it should be normal. Diets are the ones that are abnormal. They teach us healthy is only when you diet. Associations of health with dieting means if I'm off the diet, I shouldn't do anything healthy.
HAES shouldn't have to be a revolution, because it is something we can do, everyday.
December 26, 2011
Defending Michelle Obama
In the past I have been a critic of Let's Move and still am. I have no problem with encouraging healthy eating and movement for children. I am for making tasty nutritious lunches in school and schools having enough money to offer gym classes and sports. I do not agree that it should be done to eliminate all fatness. For one thing, there will always be fat children, and two encouraging children to adhere to a thin ideal will only lead to body and eating disorders.
Recently a Republican Congressmember Jim Sensenbrenner criticized Mrs. Obama's rear end. Let's forget for a moment that Ms. Obama is the first lady of the US, a Harvard educated lawyer, a former dean and all she is now is a typically woman, judged by appearence rather than accomplishments.
I could also mention how choosing weight based rather than health based for Let's Move and Healthy Eating Initiatives opened her up to attack if her body wasn't a thin ideal.
I could mention how Jim Sensenbrenner is not a slender reed himself.
But I won't. Because this isn't about Let's Move, or who's fit or not, this is about fat hatred. Fat hatred against Michelle Obama, fat hatred against Jim Sensenbrenner. Fat hatred against all fat people by using fat as something horrific, something insulting and the worst thing you can ever be. It's time to stop, it's time to remove the negativity out of fat, time to stop insulting each other based on weight because we can do better as people and a society that to use insults based on how a person looks.
December 19, 2011
WW, Nutrisystem and Jenny present: Dieting, Dieting and more Dieting!!
Dieting season is almost upon us! Soon everyone will be signing up for gyms, diet programs or just decide it's time to finally get rid of the weight. This means it's time for flashy ad campaigns for the diet industry to guilt you after you might have eaten too much this holiday season. This means another year of starting "good" and ending "bad."
However I like to start with a good story, one that I already covered, the FDA is coming down hard on the lapband.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it has taken action against eight California surgical centers and the marketing firm 1-800-GET-THIN LLC, for misleading advertising of the Lap-Band, an FDA-approved device used for weight loss in obese adults.
But here's a story that made me throw up a little in my month. A fluff piece appearing in the New York Times gives the diet industry some free advertisment by covering three former fat divas and a basketball player (because men haven't yet reached the level of body dissatisfaction women have) who not only want to you to join the dieting trio of Weight watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem, and lose weight but want stop hunger too. And I am shocked, shocked to find Weight Watchers supporting Dr. Oz's weight loss program.
THIS holiday season, three of the country's biggest diet companies are turning to three well-known divas to deliver public-minded messages about obesity and its opposite, hunger, along with the customary exhortations for people to begin shedding pounds as soon as the year's festivities end.
Hunger and food insecurity is of course an important issue even here in America and donating food (year round not just Christmas) is excellent. There are, in fact, many studies indicating that people who are food insecure (especially woman and girls) tend to be fat. So I guess hunger and fatness are NOT polar opposites.
I think one of the best ways to stop hunger is to not diet, and to take money you would normally spend on diet programs and give it to actually stopping hunger.
Speaking of hunger and dieting. A new "study" about Weight Cycling indicates that if you are a mouse and weight cycle (actually eat a high fat diet followed fat diet) you'll be okay. So mice, it is okay to eat high fat sometimes just make sure you also eat low fat. I haven't seen this study yet. A pubmed search indicated one of the authors had lots of studies on mice, Weight cycling is not about how your body reacts from doing a high fat diet and then moving to a low fat one. It has to do with losing and gaining a large amount of weight repeatedly. All this proves again that if you are a mouse, don't eat a high fat diet. Other real indicators of the study may be that healthy eating, not weight loss fixes health indicators. Or that eating high fat 50% of the time won't affect your health.
Also I see your study and raise you one done on human women that indicates a higher death rate among weight cyclers. Here is another one done on middle age men.
Let's go back to HAES again: eat right, exercise, love your body, and let your weight be what your body decides. Or let's all be like mice, and be subject to stupid laboratory experiments like eating low-fat.
December 12, 2011
SOW: Or the same old way
Sleep Apnea is a sleep disorder in where you stop breathing for a few seconds several times during the night depending on severity. Immediate results include poor sleep and daytime drowsiness. Sleep apnea happens to be one of the few "Obesity related diseases" that isn't caused by being fat but you can become fat because of it.
In the long run, sleep apnea can cause heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. All of these are considered "obesity related diseases". (I also think it many "obesity related diseases" fat is the symptom not the cause). Studies have even looked into the "obesity epidemic" being caused by a rise in sleep disorders (Not just OSA but generally not getting enough sleep. How many people do you know who sleep when they are tired and wake up without an alarm?).
How can lack of sleep possibly make you fat? There can be a multitude of reasons: lack of energy makes for the lack of movement, a need for high calories energy, or it can possibly have an effect of hormones and metabolism.
So what does this have to do with the title of this blog: The Same Old Way. The same old way is this, blaming everything on fat and curing everything with weight loss. Even though sustained long term weight loss for the majority of people can't be done. And when they say weight loss, it really is fat to thin, not fat to less fat. Many sites tote the "Just losing 10% of your body weight will help". If it did, why continue to use the arcane BMI tables? What they mean is lose 10% of your body weight and kept losing 10% until you are thin.
The same old way regards an eight year old kid who weighs 200lbs be taken from his family and placed in foster care, for failing to lose weight. Our society says 200lbs eight year old must mean the mother (always the mother) is force feeding him ding dongs. An eight year old weighing 200 pounds is nowhere near the norm even for fat kids. When I tried to measure his weight into a child BMI calculator put out by the CDC it told I wasn't putting in accurate measurements. So maybe doctors and social workers should look beyond blaming Mom and forcing kids to embrace the diet mentality. Perhaps they should look into metabolic or other medical issues such as one the kid has been already diagnosed with: Sleep apnea.
And for this poor kid. He's going to have to live with the stress of being fat in a thin obsessed world, always pushed to lose weight or else and being ripped from his family and forced to live with strangers. I see eating disorders in his future. Oh but I forgot, better the kids have eating disorders than be fat.
December 5, 2011
Eating right and exercise is controversial.
I had to suffer though my first (and hopefully only) episode of Dr. Oz. I know very little about his show or him other that is he is a doctor (a heart surgeon), author (of the obnoxious YOU on a... series) and he dispenses advice on a daily daytime talk show. (I will withhold my rant for how inane daytime talk shows are). Also thanks to Weight Watchers for sponsoring the show. Now I know who butters Dr. Oz's bread. (Should I say instead "Who adds low fat soy milk to Dr. Oz's high fiber cereal?")
So Dr. Oz had on Dr. Glenn Gaesser who wrote Big Fat Lies. Dr. Gaesser is one of the earliest pioneers to say that it was not fatness per se (i.e., weight) but poor lifestyle that can cause "Obesity related health problems." (I'm not being biased here because Dr. Gaesser had written two other books encouraging weight loss.) Dr. Oz considers Dr. Gaesser's message of being able to be fit and fat as controversial and "dangerous". But Dr. Oz's message is more of the same: fatness, all fatness will kill you (unless you do his super duper diet plan. More of that later).
If you want to make Americans fatter, put them on a diet.
Dr. Gaesser bought up something on the show, that I have mentioned before: Weight Cycling. Weight cycling is personal to me, as I have gained and lost the same 30-40 pounds about five times. Weight cyclingcan cause cardiovascular and metabolic disorders (the same diseases that Dr. Oz would blame on being fat.)
Dr. Oz mentions as a heart surgeon that all his obese patients have heart problems. Ragan Chastain of Dances with Fat in her video rant mentions that being a heart surgeon, his sampling of fat people would not be all fat people but merely ones who have heart issues. Fat and thin people have heart issues. And fat people are more likely to survive heart issuesthan thin people. Ragan also points out how often Dr. Oz used anecdotal evidence on the show as opposed to Dr. Gaeser who cited research 11 times. Dr. Oz did so once . . . and it was his own research.
Dr. Oz's diet is the prehistoric diet i.e. a plant based diet, often pushed by vegetarians and Michael Pollan. It happens to be much the way I eat except soy which gives me a headache. Should I stop? If I was following Dr. Gaesser advice, I wouldn't. In fact I would attempt to increase my exercise. If I followed Dr. Oz, the lack of weight loss would discourage me for continuing.
Which plan is really more controversial?
November 28, 2011
Health care and exercise for the healthy and rich only.
I decided to rejoin a pool in my area. New York City is notoriously short on pools. However, they do offers recreational memberships to use their facilities. When I first joined, it was $75 a year to use a facility with a pool. When I decided to rejoin, I discovered that prices had gone up. By how much you think? 10%, 20%? No, it went up a whopping 100%. Pools were now $150 to join. I can afford it. I can also afford the Y, I can afford any fru-fru gym (not that I would join to be laughed at. OMG a fat woman is exercising how dare she?!)
I'm thinking that in this economy, $150 ain't gonna happen for poor people. Poor people who are constantly bombared with sin taxes, told they are too stupid to understand proper nutrition and exercise. (At least the rec centers are free for kids.) Except that a recent study shows that poorer people do not in fact buy fast food and take out. It is too expensive. Put people in dire poverty, you don't see people eating well, you will see food insecurity and not a lot of time for movement. The fact is movement, regardless of weight loss is good for you.
However, it has been shown that exercising individuals, who do not experience any overall weight loss still decrease their risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease
Some Businesses would like to start charging extras in your health insurance if you smoke and fail to quit or if you're obese and fail to become unobese.
No matter the characterizations, it means that smokers and others pay more than co-workers who meet a company's health goals.
I'm going to have to take Devil's advocate here with smokers, because they start the slippery slope. No one wants to pay for someone's lung cancer if they smoked, right? But how far will that go? You start with smokers, move on to fatties, then perhaps move on to people who genetically have health issues or people who live in cancer or asthma clusters. How much should a company know about a patient's general health?
Fat people suffer from stigma everyday, they are bombarded to do diets that don't work and are always assumed that they eat too much, don't exercise and that they really don't want to be healthy (And many fat people ARE healthy but would be forced to lose weight to save on their health insurance)
Now if my insurance rates went up because I can't get to my random arcane BMI number, I can afford to pay it. A poor person might decide it would be better to go without. Health care is there to keep you alive, to keep you well. I'm not a big fan of my health care company, but I get discounts on vitamins and gym memberships. At a previous job, my health insurance gave me $100 for going to the gym fifty times in six months (a sum which I collected three times). Companies seem to think that health care coverage, and exercise and food is for the "healthy" and wealthy when it's supposed to protect the populations most vulnerable.
