Lara Frater's Blog, page 17

No More Turkey Day diets.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! Thanksgiving is the time of year when we celebrate family and friends by eating ourselves silly and getting lots of dieting advice.

I remember Weight Watchers and Thanksgiving. At the time, Weight Watchers was still using their exchange system and your goal for Thanksgiving depended on what day of the week was your first day. For years my night was Thursday and first day of a new menu was Friday. Thanksgiving would always be the last day of the week, so in order for me to be "good" I had to save all my extra exchanges and free calories for the big day. The entire week, I had to limited myself to exact portions, so I could save my precious extras for Thursday.

On the big day I was ready. I had saved my extra calories and exchanges. I know I probably went a little over, but my turkey portion was bigger than a deck of cards, covered by a little more than 1 teaspoon of gravy and stuffing. Maybe four breads and two fats instead of three breads and one fat. But all an all I thought I had been perfectly restrained.

The problem happened the next day. The entire week was restrained eating and Friday was a whole new day.

To binge.

The exchanges, the free calories, and painstakingly measured portions flew out the window as I binged mightily on cold turkey and my favorite stuffing. At the time, I'd be very happy to eat an entire box of stove top. I didn't really eat the food so much as inhaled it, and I craved so strongly I felt I no longer had a will of my own. I was on WW from ages 16 to 20. Four years of bingeing the day after Thanksgiving. Afterwards I felt ashamed like I had done something wrong, that I could control myself if I wanted too (after all, look how well I did on Thanksgiving). The leader at WW always told us that after a binge (she called it "going off the program"), we were supposed to immediately return and start anew. But considering how much I ate, how much would be left for the week? Just water and vegetables? Because I binged on my first day of the new week, I felt ashamed until the following Friday. I loathed myself for being unable to stay in control.

Now, I celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once with Friends on Wednesday night, once on Thursday with family. Both days I will have traditional thanksgiving fare including my favorite stuffing and this is how I will handle it:

There will be no points, exchanges or guilt. I will eat, enjoy my meal and have a good time with the people around the table. The holiday no longer means counting calories or points, eyeing my food, making sure my turkey slice were no bigger than a deck and a half of cards. I have absolutely no idea how many calories were consumed. My only guess is a lot. (My favorite response to "Do you know how many Calories are in that?"  "Yes, a million.")

Linda Bacon's book Health at Every Size and any book about eating disorders would call Weight Watchers not just a diet but restrained eating. My body, soul and mind did not get the food they really wanted and rebelled. Had I had my normal fill on my WW Thanksgivings, there would have been no bingeing the next day.

So this Thanksgiving, how a wonderful time, don't fear your food and don't feel guilty over seconds.

 

Opposite Land

Two recent ads featured the same fat model. The first has the caption "Did your wife scare you last night?" The other features a fat model with an x next to her and a thin model with a check. Having never heard of this company, I thought it was a gym because both models were wearing similar clothes, but then after reading an article in Jezebel, it was explained that the company is personals for people who want affairs. The fat model is supposed to be the wife and the thin model is the woman the husband is to cheat with. The fat model in real life goes by the psedonym "Jacqueline"  and runs an erotica site for people who like big women.  Her image was used without permission. (The personal ad company claimed she made money off it, so it isn't considered exploition or hatred.) 

I'm pretty sure that any man married to Jacqueline, meant to marry a sexy fat woman and not a woman with a body that doesn't even look human. No, I'm not saying being thin isn't human, I'm saying the thin woman in the ad is so poorly shopped that she looks like a worm.  So if you want to cheat on your fat sexy wife with a worm, please be careful of WTD (Worm Transmitted Diseases). And if Cheatin' Hubby knocks up the worm lady, will he support their children or sell them to a freak show? Perhaps the husband was being sympathetic to the worm woman, maybe he secretly desires her worm shaped form and this superficial society would look down on their worm/man affair.

But aside from atrocious looking ads (possibly created by The Worm People from Planet Wormatron), I'm pretty sure this ad should be the opposite. Secret fat admirers may be more interested in cheating on the trophy wife with a sexy fat woman. Going once to a forum on fat sex, the speaker mentioned her erotica site had been pulling in about million a year. I'm pretty sure Jacqueline is pulling in some decent money.

I'm pretty sure she will be around long after this personal ad company is gone.  

Show me the money

A recent NYT article shows an alarming number of potential conflicts of interest in US health care guidelines especially to do with obesity, cholestoral and hypertension. 

The Institute of Medicine reports recommended that those with industry conflicts of interest should generally be excluded, or limited to "a distinct minority of the panel."

At least eight of the 19 members of the obesity panel have financial ties to a phalanx of private business interests, records show. GlaxoSmithKline, maker of Alli, an over-the-counter product, has made payments to four of them. Four have financial ties to Allergan, maker of the Lap-Band stomach device. One is paid to speak or advise 11 companies with obesity products. And others consult for companies like Nestlé or Weight Watchers. Dr. Ryan disputed the number of conflicts but would not elaborate.

I don't think having almost half a panel with a conflict of interest is fair and unbiased. Why do the foxes decide what's good for the hen house?  With the massive push on fat people to get surgery, take drugs, go on commerical weight loss plans, should the guidelines be pushed by people who make money off this? Especially when weight loss in the long has a high failure rate.

Please remember that Americans spent 60.9 BILLION dollars on dieting last year. That's quite a nice piece of pocket change. And weight loss surgeries which are pushed as easy quick fixes cost up to $25,000 and is now at 5.7 Billion dollar business. (The link will open to a word doc.)

Potentially corrupted guidelines can lead to healthism.  Like these companies who are trying to  charge fat people more for their health insurance, whether of not they actually costing more.

So now more employers are trying a different strategy - they're replacing the carrot with a stick and raising costs for workers who can't seem to lower their cholesterol or tackle obesity.

Meanwhile a study shows that you do in fact have a hormonal reaction after dieting that causes you to eat uncontrollably sometimes to at least a year after dieting. Great, thanks. I only figured that out about 20 years ago.

The findings suggest that dieters who have regained weight are not just slipping back into old habits, but are struggling against a persistent biological urge.

The study of course doesn't indicate we should stop pressuring people to diet but that they need to create long-term strategies to counteract this change may be needed to prevent obesity relapse. In other words, lose weight and then we swear to God we'll try to create a drug to stop your body from thinking it's starving.

And yes, one of the study's authors had financial ties to Nestle.

Vampires and scarier stories

First off, Happy Halloween!!

Halloween is my favorite holiday. It tends to start what is referred to as "eating season." Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner (and OMG leftovers), Christmas dinners, Hanukah Latkes, holiday parties and drinking at New Year's. Weight Watchers (WW) meetings are as desolate as Shirley Jackson's Hill House. (And just as creepy.) Weight Watchers loves this time of year, not that they are getting much business but they are guilting new and returning customers to return to WW in January to refill their coffers. 

This Halloween, I will have chocolate. This Thanksgiving I will have my Turkey dinner. I will eat anthing I darned well please at holiday parties. I will continue to exercise, I will continue to eat normally (perhaps a little more than usual at social occassions) between festivities, and in January I will not return to Weight Watchers. I will continue to exercise and eat as healthy as possible as I do every day of the year, and I won't beat myself up for it. 

What does this have to do with vampires? Bad vampires are none other but fad diets created by the diet industry. They suck not our blood but 60 Billion dollars from Americans' pockets by promising us false hopes of a thinner better life.

Better vampires appear in Lynne Murray's Falstaff Vampire Files. Murray always has fat main characters in her novels no matter what the genre (mystery, supernatural, romance). Although I am not a big fan of the vampire genre as it seems everything is a rip off of Angel, Blade, and the most icky Twilight. I find the drama overly emo. I like Buffy/Angel for the humor included but I am also a fan of the classic vampire, Dracula. Murray's book pays homage to Dracula (including naming her her characters, Mina, Lucy and Van Helsing) and also with humor of the main vampire character:  fat and charming John "Jack" Falstaff (yes, based on Shakespeare's Falstaff). She also pokes at the emo vampire genre with three people so desparate to become vampires that they call upon the "Others", mysterious life stealing formless vampires who seek only to kill. Unlike Falstaff and his friends who feed and leave their victims alive. The book is narrated through a series of notes, and recorded messages (similar to the Dracula novel) both giving insight to the characters and moves the story along. 

So if you are looking for a good supernatural read with many fat main characters, check out this book.

And if you want to read something even more scary, check out this story of a woman purposely gaining weight to qualify for weight loss surgery. The lady Stephany Sears has the same height as me and originally weighed about 35lbs less than I do. She's at the lower end of "the BMI obese" scale and part of a clinical trial to see if lower weight fatties should qualify for the surgery. I'm less scared for her (I really hope she doesn't have the major side effects, or additonal surgeries, or death) than I am that the surgery will become a normal standard for weight loss for people of every sizes.

Again Happy Halloween. Do not fear the candy bucket!

A movie we all need to see

I saw the premiere of America the Beautiful 2, the Thin Commandments. If it is playing in a theater near you, go see it. If it isn't, email your local theater asking to show it and spread the word. 

In his previous movie, director Daryl Roberts investigated American's obsession with beauty, and the industry that obsession supports. (That movie is available as a DVD or online purchase through Amazon etc., and Netflix has it as an instant play feature).

This film, Roberts' second, is about American's obsession with thinness and dieting. Over the course of 85 minutes Roberts shows his personal experience concerning food, eating disorders, HAES, weight related issues, politics of dieting, and his own habits. 

The movie starts with Roberts getting a doctors appointment (the first in 10 years) where he is diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, and was at risk for diabetes. After refusing medication due to his lack of health insurance and learning that possible side effects include erectile dysfunction, Daryl searches for weight loss solutions. The obvious first stop involves looking into a gimmicky diet, then raw foods. Then in a montage of shots, he tries Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and the Cookie Diet. All of which cause him to lose weight and gain it back. Then instead of dieting, he starts exercising regularly.

He touches on issues of weight bias, including his sister, unable to get IVF unless she loses weight, a good friend obsessed with what she eats and how much she exercises, a woman who swings back and forth between anorexia and bulimia, Plus size model Anansa Sims (daughter of model Beverly Johnson), and dancer and blogger Ragen Chastain who explained that her doctor wanted her to "walk more" after which she had to explained she danced about 20 hours a week. Sims' journey is particularly harrowing: a big girl who desperately wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps, she lost weight consistently at the orders of her coaches. No matter how much she lost, it was never good enough for the modeling world. Her answer:  she regained all the weight and found success as a plus size model.

When Roberts returns to his doctor after taking up biking (he was at our screening and said he is still riding) he hadn't lost much weight but he had no trace of his diagonsed illnesses and had perfect blood pressure. Ragen Chastain who she claimed is at the top of the obese scale is also metabolically healthy.

While this doesn't prove anything because it is only two people who happened to be both healthy and moving regularly. I don't know what Ragen eats but Daryl still eats junk food although he supplements with more vegetables, but here are two people where exercise, not dieting, made them healthier. Shouldn't be looking more to encourage movement rather than losing weight? Shouldn't we stop labeling people by their size?

And here is a not so great picture of me with the director.

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Love your body in more ways than one.

In honor of NOW's Love your Body blog Carnival, I'm posting today instead of my usual Monday about ways to love your body.

I've decided to do something difference in this post. I spent my 20's loving a thin body that wasn't mine. In my thirties, I worked on loving the body I have, fat and all. But now as I enter my forties, I face another body challenge: I have to learn to love my middle aged body.

As I get older, I find that I can't eat, sleep, or even move as I once did. Normal aches and pains from strenuous movement don't go away as quickly as they used to. Sometimes my arm hurts when I sleep on it wrong. And staying up late no longer means 3am but midnight.

Mid-life means foods you used to eat no longer agrees with you. The coffee you needed to get you through the day causes indigestion, energy drinks give you the jitters, and tea makes you pee fifty times a day. It means finding gray or white hairs on your head and freaking out over each one.

For advertisers, it's a cash cow because  nothing is worthwhile unless you are young and thin. Since science hasn't found the fountain of youth, the goal for the middle aged is to try to LOOK young using plastic surgery, hair dyes, and of course no middle age weight gain.

If you already love and accept your fat (or thin) body, accepting middle age may be easier than you think. I have posted on this blog on occasion, that I have "Fat days". Days where the diet voice is louder than usual and fat is not the positive word I've come to love. I don't get many "Fat days" anymore. But now to add to this I have "old days." Of course I'm getting older every second, but when I say "Old days" it means failing to love my body for changing, a body that may one day die, something I didn't think about in my youth.  Even in my darkest dieting day I was never one to prefer death over fat. 

I will be honest here. Worrying about new tests for diseases considered rare in my youth are freaking me out. Cancer and heart attacks and menopause and retirement and long term care are freaking me out. Forgetting things I used to recall effortlessly is freaking me out.

In the beginning I plucked one or two white hairs but more came. I didn't run to get hair dye. My boobs are beginning to sag, but I won't get surgery. I have some creases in my face but I won't by age defying cream. There is nothing age defying in that cream. The cream, like dieting, is purely superficial. Dieting won't make you healthy and putting cream on your face won't make you young.

You just have accept age. Accept what it gives you, something more important-- Wisdom. The wisdom to know what is good for yourself. Wisdom to still love your body even though it no longer tolerates dairy, hurts when it rains, or forgets a name. Love your body no matter what it's size, age or disability.  It is what you have and it needs you to love it because it will love you back. Loving and appreciating it will work better than any age defying cream.

Hi all, no blog post tonight but Wednesday instead for Lo...

Hi all, no blog post tonight but Wednesday instead for Love My Body day. In the meantime, go see America the Beautiful 2 The Thin Commandments in area theaters.

Is WLS the only Health care for fat bodies?

Short post today as life has been more hectic than usual.

I wanted to point out the inequalities fat people face in health care. It seems that when it comes to providing weight loss surgery, there doesn't seem to be a lot of roadblocks. Weight Loss ads tout these surgeries as a quick and easy way to lose weight. The billboards don't mention the anesthisia risk or that the stomach is a major organ or that if you have follow up surgeries, good luck getting your insurance to pay for it or to be harassed to join a "not-for-profit" to sue the insurance company to regroup their loses as this poor WLS victim was pressured to do. (Especially since the Non-for-Profit is affliated with the the same clinic who did the WLS, sure they want their 78K for the follow up operation).

He was right to be surprised. PALG isn't just merely a "nonprofit law group" that "assists patients … in obtaining the benefits they are lawfully entitled to receive," as the letter stated. The two attorneys who incorporated PALG — Edmond DeFrank and Robert Silverman — have both done legal work for 1-800-GET-THIN.

At least one place in California realizes that fat people have the right to health care. 

Since obese patients often have special needs in terms of respiratory support, positioning and handling, such advance notification is critical in preparing for and delivering patient care.  For a quality improvement project published in the October issue of AORN Journal, Ms. Graham and colleagues formed a "High BMI Task Force" that aimed to boost safety through staff education, interdepartmental communication, equipment upgrades and attention to respiratory care.

 Not so much for this woman trying to get an abortion. Knowing how hard it is get a legal abortion in certain areas of the US, this woman had to deal with an anesthelogists who possibly didn't know about fat bodies.

Whether you agree or not that fat people are responsible for their weight, everyone has a right to quality of health care not just to make you thin.

Following up to Loving my body, Lapband and New Jersey.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called How Loving My Body Saved My Life about the bad reaction I had to my very last diet, the Atkins diet.  One of the comments I got made me laugh. They could not believe that doing Atkins' induction would cause arrhythmias. And I obviously consumed too much coffee or caffeine pills. Because as a fat person, it is generally assumed we do not know our own bodies. I often refer to this as the victimization mentality. I have mentioned my theory before in this blog how fat people are either villains or victims. Obviously I was too stupid to know the difference between caffeine jitters and and something wrong with my heart. But I  did do something stupid at the time and it wasn't drinking coffee (caffeine was no-no on Atkins, btw) and that wasn't listening to my body.

Speaking of not listening to your body, I previously wrote about deaths from the Lapband in California in regards to ads that made the lapband sound like a ssimple and easy surgery (and has so far killed about five people). Katie Hodges from CA has a petition up for better Regulations for Lap Band Surgery Centers.

State Senator Curren Price Jr. (D-Inglewood) has proposed a bill which would give these private accreditation agencies new authority to stop unsafe centers from jumping from one agency to another with no documentation of their poor safety record. The state medical board would be obligated to document unsafe centers and this information would be available to the public.

I suggest you all sign her petition and if you live in California, email or write Governor Jerry Brown.

And about another Governor, Chris Christie. I am not a fan but I don't care if he's fat. This article points out:

...Christie handled the issue with deft humor, pointing out that the fact he's fat isn't exactly a secret, and mocking Corzine in return for being desperate enough to make an issue of it.

If you attack someone by how they look, you lose the argument. It means you have run out of ideas.

60.9 Billion reasons the industry wants you to diet.

The American Banking and Market Report has released the annual amount Americans spend on dieting.

The number: 60.9 Billion.

Not all at once. 60.9 Billion a year.

60.9 billion dollars. That's how much American men, women, and teens spent on weight-loss products in 2010. Marilyn Wann figured out that 60.9 billion dollars was close to the amount we would save if we ended tax cuts on the wealthy. To put this unimaginable number into some kind of perspective, 60.9 billion dollars could fund any of the following:

A tripling of federal funding for medical research
Universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, with relatively small class sizes.
A national infrastructure program to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, mass transit, water systems and levees.
Twice as much money for clean-energy research
Free college, including room and board, for about half of all full-time students, at both four- and two-year colleges.
A $500 tax cut for all households.

Imaging if your household had 500 dollars. What would you do with it? I might...

Buy my friend without eyeglass insurance new glasses.
Buy a Kaplan course for my niece.
Buy myself a new waredrobe from Re/Dress.
Add two  extra days to my vacation.

Most of money spend was on DIY dieting about 80%, but don't think commercial weight loss programs lost out. They were forcasted to make about 3.14 billion with Weight Watchers leading the way.

Meanwhile just this past weekend an event looked at conventional obestity research and HAES.

HAES's debut at the ADA's FNCE conference in San Diego could signal a paradigm shift in modern medicine's so far fruitless efforts at "weight control." The so-called obesity epidemic may be - if HAES science is right - a misdiagnosis of what ails Americans, entirely manageable through other means. Health at Every Size challenges the value of encouraging weight loss and dieting, and argues for a shift towards weight-neutral outcomes and unrestricted "mindful" eating. 

Two weeks ago I mentioned that there is no money to be made in HAES. I have mentioned that before. The diet industry is based not on making you healthy but losing weight usually with a poor success rate. You can find the tenants of HAES here for free. HAES encourages healthy and mindful eating and fun movement to the best of your body's ability.  Not really a billion dollar industry there, is it?