Lara Frater's Blog, page 7

Stigma Hurts

This week is Weight Stigma Awareness Week. Weight Stigma often comes
from assumptions. The strongest stigma is if fat people just eat less
they will be become thin and healthy. It is at the bottom of every cure for
fatness: diet pills, surgery, low calorie diets, lifestyle changes are
all to make a fat person eat less. Bullies claim that fat people
are lazy and lack willpower, the well-intentioned think it's not fat
people's fault. Food is everywhere. Except that why don't thin people
have the same problem?

Everywhere we are bombarded with hateful messages: (Trigger warning ahead.)

The second? Costco as much as anything else is why the land of the free
and the home of the brave is also the trough of the tub o’ lard, our
exceptionalism measurable by not only our G.D.P. but also our B.M.I.
That’s body mass index, and our bodies are indeed massive.

So says Frank Bruni who has suffered from eating disorders and should know better.

Even when Fat people say enough, we are okay with our size, that
no matter what our eating habits are, we don't deserve to be treated
like shit, that some of us are healthy and fat, that many of us eat no more than thin people do, we are told we are delusional or making things worse.

Obesity is a class issue, like tobacco. People in every class used to
smoke, rich and poor, educated and non-educated alike. But when tobacco
was conclusively linked to disease, more and more educated people
stopped, until the image of smokers reached a tipping point, and went
from “cool” to “loser.”

Yes people with a lower SES are more fat,
but it's more likely to do with bias in society rather than poor people
eat too much. Being fat is not like smoking. Smoking is a HABIT, being fat is hugely genetic. And if the fat is a habit why do so many people fail to lose weight?

Even "Doctors" think it's okay to shame fat people. In Katz, D. L., Murimi, M., Pretlow, R. A. & Sears, W. (2012). Exploring Effectiveness of Messaging in Childhood Obesity Campaigns. Childhood Obesity 8(2): 97-105 (The article unfortunately is not available unless you subscribe) is filled with praise for programs who shame fat children. Many of the quotes are disgusting but I will share one.

Sears: Good medicine means encouraging
children and giving them the tools to get lean. An occasional child might be
pushed over into anorexia, but I think the situation that you mention in
Seattle is an overreaction and represents unwarranted fear.

Guess what? Teenagers who were formerly fat were found to suffer from eating disorders.

These problems may not be diagnosed quickly, because parents and doctors
"think it's a good thing that these teens have lost so much weight,"
said lead researcher Leslie Sim, an assistant professor of psychology
and an eating disorders expert at the Mayo Clinic Children's Center in
Rochester, Minn.

I have mentioned before that some of the worst habits I've ever picked up came from dieting. The worst being the dieting/binge cycle. Thankfully I never do less than at 12oo cal diet but I did a lot of crazy things to lose weight. I think of all the people who starve themselves or have weight loss surgery and consume less calories than a normal person needs. Why isn't this considered anorexia? Just because they are fat?

Stigma also affects health greatly. Not just from the stress of being bombarded with messages that you are less than human if you are fat, but bias in even getting your health care.

Obese people are less likely to survive cancer, and one reason may be a surprising inequality: The overweight are undertreated.

Doctors
often short them on chemotherapy by not basing the dose on size, as
they should. They use ideal weight or cap the dose out of fear about how
much treatment an obese patient can bear. Yet research shows that
bigger people handle chemo better than smaller people do.

I have written before about doctors refusing to treat fat people or giving them surgery and treatments needed. I even spoke once to a supersized woman whose doctor refused to give her an lifesaving operation (the story has a happy ending, another doctor did the surgery).

When are "Doctors" and "Journalist" going to listen? Stigma against fat is stigma against the fat person. It will lead to poor health care, eating disorders and stress.

No Blog Post

See you next week.

Here's a lovely picture of fat Wonder Woman.

Maybe we're just normal.

I remember when Leptin was touted as the hormone that would cure fatness forever. There would be drugs to fix fat and you would become slim, trim, and be able to live like a first class citizen. 

When it turned out that Leptin wasn't the fat hormone but the starvation hormone, and  only worked in a small amount of people it, vanished as a miracle cure. Although if you search Leptin in Google, you'll find a bunch of leptin diets.

Now the new leptin is gut bacteria. Researchers took gut bacteria from two twins, one thin, one fat and injected it into lab mice . 

Researchers found pairs of human twins in which one was obese and the other lean. They transferred gut bacteria from these twins into mice and watched what happened. The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

The thin mice were then adored about their mouse peers as being healthy despite all the cheese they ate. 

The next step, transferring thin people's shit into fat people.

“I’m very excited about this,” he added, saying the next step will be to try using gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.

I had to double check to make sure the article wasn't the Onion. New York Times? Check. Written by Gina Kolata check. Based on a study in Science, check. 

Zoe Williams of the Guardian points out the crazed obsession  with "curing" fatness as a moral issue:

Other people's weight became all our problem when we started a) calling it an "epidemic" and b) totting up how much it costs the NHS. This is illogical.Malnutrition costs the NHS significantly more and yet no moral judgment accrues around people who are too thin or, for reasons of incapacity, aren't being fed properly by the people who should be caring for them...

 

Except there is one more issue. The mice with the thin bacteria were put on diets. 


The team also showed that a “lean” microbial community could infiltrate and displace an “obese” one, preventing mice from gaining weight so long as they were on a healthy diet.



Diets usually work in the short term. This is no different than diet pills. All of them require you to also do a low calorie diet and pills will help you lose a little more weight. But none have proved to work in the long run.

Sometimes it gets tiring to be experimented on. To be given pills, surgery and shit in hopes that I conform. Instead of treating all disease as  weight loss, why not look into actually curing the disease?

UCLA and Duke are late to the HAES Party

UCLA school of nursing has done a study showing that fat and thin children when doing lifestyle changes rather than dieting improved their health with very little weight loss. 

"These findings suggest that short-term lifestyle modifications through changing diet and exercise can have an immediate impact on improving risk factors such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Christian Roberts, an associate research professor at the UCLA School of Nursing and the study's lead author. "This work underscores the need to focus on changing lifestyle as opposed to focusing on body weight and weight loss.

Duke, instead of the usual banter of either get thin or die or lose just 5-10% is now on the "Just maintain." 

"Many people go to great lengths to lose weight when their doctor recommends it. They may try a series of diets or join a gym or undergo really complex medical regimens. The complexity of these treatments can make it difficult for many to lose a sufficient amount of weight," said lead author Gary Bennett, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience and global health at Duke who studies obesity prevention.

Neither are exactly Health at Every Size (HAES™). Duke completely misses the boat by still focusing on weight rather than health.  While both bring  us closer to HAES as the removal of weight as a health indicator, the weight factor is still there especially with the Duke study. People sometimes gain weight from stress, aging, hormones, and certain medications. For the UCLA study, it assumes that being unhealthy leads to being fat (Although there is a little disclaimer that perhaps it is metabolic issues that cause fatness not the other way around). 

Unhealthy lifestyle factors that begin in childhood, such as physical inactivity, lack of exercise training, and diets that are high in refined carbohydrates and fat, contribute to both the development of obesity and other chronic diseases, but it is unclear whether obesity itself or the associated lifestyle factors are underlying causes of cardiovascular and metabolic dysfunction and the related development of chronic disease.

Instead of telling people to just maintain, or lose a little or focusing on weight at all, they need to remove weight completely as a health indicator. This means that everyone, fat, thin, young, old, learns to listen to their body, give it the foods it needs (without a moral implication of it i.e. good vs bad foods), and love it without worry that it doesn't fit in the ever changing society norms.

No post, positive picture

Different Worlds

No
Blog post next week. Second vacation coming up!

 

While
doing research on plus size shopping for my book, I walked into a store looked
at the outrageous prices, saw the look the sales woman gave me, the What the fuck is this fat woman without trimmed
eyebrows doing in my store? and walked out. I hadn't been savvy yet of recognizing
places by sight that don't have plus sizes. I'm sure if I had been buying
something for a thin friend the sales clerk would have rather listened to nails
on a chalk board than serve me.

 

Recently
Oprah Winfrey,, who most of the planet knows, for some reason was not recognized in a store in Zurich. Oprah was
looking at handbags, asked for a pricy one, when a clerk insisted she look at
cheaper items. 

 

If
I was ever mega wealthy, I wouldn't shop in stores that wouldn't have given me
the time of day now and I would never buy a $38,000 dollar handbag unless it
was an actual Bag of Holding (For non-gamers the bag of holding can hold large
amounts of heavy items including swords, foods, mounts, potions, gold etc,).

 

Oprah
felt that this slight was racial bias; Heidi Moore of the Guardian felt it was also due to her size.

Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so
is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman's size and her
socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher
weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours,
lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors
that may affect food choice and metabolism.

 

I
think that these attitudes towards fat people aren’t necessarily poor food. If
I was looking for a retail job, who do you think would hire me? The high end
boutique or Walmart? Oprah’s talented, smart, beautiful, sand avvy, but she cannot be
the only fat  black American woman who is. (She is the only black face in
Forbes' Richest Americans list coming in at 152.)  As Moore points out:

 

Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has
no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique,
all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight.

You are all beautiful

Written on a bathroom wall.

What's in a name?

Short post today and none next Monday since I will be on vacation.

I usually don't like to criticize the fat acceptance movement in my blog. I feel that these are internal issues we can sort out ourselves. 

However, an important issue has come up that I feel I must comment on. NAAFA is considering a name change because of the negative connotations of the word fat. I don't know if they are going to change the name completely or keep the acronym and not say what it stands for. Two reasons have been given for the name change. The first I disagree with but understand and that is calling yourself fat brings out all the 7th grade mentality of critics. Some fat people may be uncomfortable using the word fat or might see it is an insult.

It is the second reason that gives me pause. The word FAT is not getting NAAFA the corporate sponsorship it needs.

Of course it isn't. A grassroots movement meant to change how fat people are viewed does not need corporate money dictating its agenda or memberhip. 

I'm a member of two size positive groups, The Association for Diversity and Health in Size(ASDAH) and the National Association to Advanced Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). The reason why I am a member of both is because they are two different groups with distinct and different goals. ASDAH is the group I rely on the spread the HAES message. To make sure that fat individuals  aren't judged solely on their weight and that healthy people come in a variety of sizes. 

NAAFA was my group that told me it was okay to call myself fat. 

In the NAAFA newsletter section about the name change is this quote:

We cannot continue to bury our heads in the sand and believe this problem will resolve itself. For us to affect change, we must be taken seriously.

Writing this blog I get a lot of trolls. Most of them outright insult me, or tell me stop eating but a large portion of them tell me I'm delusional because I think it's okay to be fat. 

Read more here, here & . 

Claim denied

Short post today as I was
away the entire weekend.

I have a handful of
friends who either have no health coverage or limited health coverage. Their
biggest issue isn’t being fat (some of them
aren’t) but affordable access
to life-functioning drugs.  I am very
pro setting up universal health care. There is no reason a person shouldn’t go without the treatment they need without
bankrupting them. I think the Affordable Health Care Act is a step in the right
direction but it isn’t enough and there are issues concerning the treatment of fat
people. 

Screening and counseling for obesity has to be
covered with no patient cost-sharing (co-payments, co-insurance or deductibles)
by most insurers under the preventive services benefit of the Affordable Care
Act, says Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, the
national trade association representing the health insurance industry.

 This is a waste of time
and money. No diet program has been proved to work for the majority of people
in the long run. This is merely extra business for the diet industry.

Right now it’s just being offered. Companies like CVS,
Michelin tires are showing that soon it will be mandatory to lose weight. 

Exercise elitism

I’ve written before that I got fat at nine. I don’t remember much
about the thin years except I hated gym with a passion. Even before I was fat I was
uncoordinated and clumsy which meant being teased during team sports. This grew
worse as I got bigger and started developing. 

However away from team sports I excelled at biking. On the bike any obstacle was a personal challenge, hills, dirt, mud and NYC traffic. I took the bike everywhere, even one time rode 20 miles from Queens to Long Island with some kind of bizarre idea I would
ride to Jones beach (I didn't make because I didn't have a clue how to get there.)

I have biked since I was a thin little kid to a fat young adult. I still had two left feet, and did not get much better with sports that required good hand/eye coordination.   

The Boy Scouts in their infinite wisdom have decided to
ban any boy with a BMI over 40 from participating in their every four years Jamboree and those
who are 32 to 39.9 can only attend it a camp medical staff deems them okay
to exercise. 

Many will rightly point out that BMI is a notoriously bad measure of
fitness, especially when applied to teenagers, whose body compositions
can fluctuate relatively rapidly as a natural part of growing up. Though
the BSA has not released the number of those barred from attending,
should we assume that perfectly capable scouts are being excluded
because of an imprecise number?

The Boy Scouts message  doesn't fit into the "help people" of their motto. They are putting people into categories without knowing their fitness. They are assuming a boy with a BMI over 40 must be unfit and that boys with a BMI of 32-39.9 must deemed fit or unfit. Whereas if you are under 32, you are considered fit and healthy. They are telling fat boys who live in anti-fat society that they cannot exercise unless they lose weight. 

Katja Rowell of the Huffington Post Points out better ideas:

First and foremost, Scouts could incorporate different levels of
challenges to be more inclusive of both fitness level and special needs.
(Scouts cite that they have had over 100,000 participants with a range
of disabilities, with efforts "directed at keeping such boys in the mainstream of Scouting.") Since the facility cost 350 million dollars, you would think they could offer comprehensive options.

If I had been a boy I wouldn’t been discriminated against because until my 20's my BMI was below 32. However going back to the thin me, I wouldn't have been able to perform a lot of the activities. 

The essentials of the events seemed not to be much of a fun challenge but moral decision based on arbitrary number that doesn't prove fitness.