Lara Frater's Blog, page 8

The Cash Cow -- Moo

I wouldn't know even where to start to estimate about how much money diet industry had gotten from me. From the memberships at Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem, the gym memberships I gave up after 6 months, the diet soda, the diet foods, the diet books. I am guessing somewhere in the range of 2ok probably more.

My biggest consumption was diet coke. Diet coke was my beverage of choice through almost every single diet. From the ages 15 to 27 (Low carb dieting didn't allow diet soda)  I would drink two or three 2 liter bottles a week, not to mention cans and bottles form the vending  machines. I remember my excitement when Coke released diet cherry coke. One of my writing rituals was a bowl of popcorn and a glass of diet coke by my side while I wrote (today it's water or tea.)

I gave up diet coke when my low carb diet said it was a no-no. Except when I wasn't dieting, I would go back to drinking diet coke.

Diet coke was the last dieting product I had to give up. It had been my fair weather friend for so long. It remained with me after I gave up dieting, long after my book was out, long after I preached fat acceptance. I kept it as the one diet product I wanted to keep. I didn't drink it as I once did and I thought about giving it up for good. The last occassion was December 8, 2007. I only know the date I had been in Syracuse visiting friends and taking photos. After a long day with still more to do, I found myself tired. I asked my husband to go out and get me some tea or coffee or something with caffeine. At the time I didn't drink soda because I had made the association between corn syrup and feeling nausaous. He came back with a diet coke not realizing that I was thinking of giving up. I was so tired I drank it. It had been almost a year since I had one.

I couldn't believe how bad it tasted. Did I really drink this regularly for most of my young adult life?  I realized my biggest addiction hadn't been food (once I stopped dieting, the binging on sugar/salty snacks diminished) but diet soda.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a press release that the diet industry is currently worth $109 Billion and is expected to reach 137 billion in 2017.

The North America Weight Loss / Obesity Management Market was worth $104
billion in the year 2012 and is expected to reach $139.5 billion by
2017. U.S. is the largest market, followed by Canada. The market will
grow at a healthy pace in the next five years due to the increasing
number of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and cardiac problems,
increasing personal disposable income, government initiatives to
increase awareness of health and fitness, and technological
advancements.

This market includes: commercial diets such as Weight Watchers, weight loss surgery, pills, wellness plans, nutritional counseling, diet foods, books and yes diet soda. One of the companies highlighted as a big diet industry player is Coca-Cola. (And pepsi too.)

Now why do you think this press release was in the Wall Street Journal and not say the JAMA (It might be, I haven't checked) because dieting is a cash fucking cow. There isn't any money in telling people maybe they can eat a little better or move a little more or that they are perfectly healthy outside the arcane normal weight BMI. Or simple 

Do you think with all these billions that the diet industry really wants to you to be healthy and well? Or do they just want your money?

Workplace wellness, the new diet industry?

As I have mentioned before I have no problem with workplace wellness if it's a voluntary incentive based program such as discounts on gyms, smoking cessation programs, vitamins, and even useless diet programs. I have on occasion taken advantage of some of these programs. The problem arises when the program becomes mandatory or penalty based. I have already mentioned in past posts that stigma never works. I personally know that when I dieted and the weight loss stopped then came back on, it sent me into a depressive spiral where I would eat only junkfood and not move. And I have previously mentioned my biggest obstacle to full wellness has been the amount of time I work. If I just had an extra 2 hours a day I could have time to prepare meals and to exercise more. I've been swimming more this summer and often I have to choose between swimming and making lunch for tomorrow.

The Rand company recently put out a report that workplace wellness is a failure on all parts. Not just reducing weight, smoking and cholesterol but savings. The journal Health Affairs put out a similar study and found that workplace wellness did cut some hospitalizations but did not save money in the long run. 

According to a report by researchers at the RAND
Corp, programs that try to get employees to become healthier and reduce
medical costs have only a modest effect. Those findings run contrary to
claims by the mostly small firms that sell workplace wellness to
companies ranging from corporate titans to mom-and-pop operations.

Workplace wellness is a 6 billion dollar industry and growing. Like the diet industry it makes a lot of money with poor results. And like the diet industry I see it growing despite evidence it doesn't work. (I'm still waiting for blaming to fat people for being non-compliant.)

 It's hard to push back against this. Saying no to dieting doesn't hurt you financially (If anything you save money by not doing these programs that almost always end in failure) but saying no at work might mean a penalty. There is also a huge issue because the poor are often the ones who suffer more health issues and a penalty would affect them even more. I know people who ration their health care because they can't afford it. Asking them to pay extra would result in their health getting worse not better.

Again I am not against incentives. I would like to see those continue. I would love if my job had a yoga class.

Truth is fiction

I have mentioned a few times that being fat  often means being vilified or victimized.

The American Medical Association which are supposed to represent doctors arbitrarily decided that anyone with an BMI of 30+ has a disease even if they are asymptomatic (they may be counting flab as a symptom, I couldn't say). They victimized fat people as people who can't help it. They're sick, their bodies are broken and diseased. And those poor, innocent, and stupid fat people need to "cure" their disease by taking pills or getting surgery that may or may not have lethal side effects and don't work for most people in the long run.

Last week, noted actor James Gandolfini died at a young age. Someone on one of my fat email lists wondered how long it would be before his weight was blamed for his death.

Not very.

Normally stupid articles like this, I dismiss as crappy journalism but there was something about it that just pissed me off. Perhaps because it manages to vilify and victimize fat people at the same time. First she blamed James Gandolfini for his own death (obviously hiding the fact she has a medical degree.)

I know nothing about the actor other than his roles on the screen. For all I know he he was eating bacon three times a day with a fifth of scotch. Or he had congenital heart disease. Or he wanted to live fast die young and leave an attractive corpse. Or was it because he smoked. I'm sad to see him go but I'm tired of hearing the moral assumptions placed on fat people. 

Next she victimized fat people. Blaming their poverty and lack of education for not knowing how to eat properly.

"No doubt some have a biological tendency to put on weight, but it is
clear that obesity is related to low education and low income."

This was the sentence that irked me the most. Coming from that stupid professor's ugly comment. I feel marginalized. The AMA just give me a disease, the professor said I was lazy and this "journalist" just said I was stupid. It's no wonder that fat people are often thought of a lazy, sick and stupid.

I have a social disease

For days I couldn't believe my ears. My anger was so strong that I had to take a breath before I could say anything. 

The American Medical Association, in their infinite "wisdom" despite warnings from their science advisory board against the decision has doomed (trigger warning) all fat people with a BMI of 30 and above, regularless of their health, as having a disease. 

You can teach aerobics classes, swim, walk, run, eat your vegetables, only eat 2000 cal a day, be in perfect health but if your BMI is 30 and above, you have a disease.

Granted some diseases can cause you to gain weight (such as sleep apnea, diabetes, PCOS and hypothyroidism) and some diseases can cause you to lose weight (hyperthyroidism, cancer, some autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's and Celiacs) but in these cases being thin or fat aren't the disease they are a SYMPTOM.

Abigail C. Saguy points out: 

Yes, there are certain health risks associated with having an elevated BMI, such as Type II diabetes and heart disease. More broadly, a higher BMI is associated with a greater risk of cardiometabolic abnormalities, as measured by blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, glucose, insulin resistance and inflammation. Nonetheless, almost one quarter of “normal weight” people also have metabolic abnormalities, and more than half of “overweight” and almost one third of “obese” people have normal profiles, according to a 2008 study. 

 My biggest issue isn't AMA's stupidity (actually it is), but that in the end they will push the same cure that doesn't still doesn't work and that is Dieting (Big d), diet pills and surgery.  In the end that this will lead in more pressure for fat people to get surgery, take diet drugs, do commercial diets such as Weight Watchers. Even though none of these have been proved to work and help in the long run for the majority of people (sure you're always going to find people who went from fat to thin and stayed that way, but they are the exception not the rule.)

This all goes back to one thing, the billion dollar industry. It really is the money. The biggest medical association saying obesity is a disease and giant check to the dieting, pharma, and bariatic surgeons.

As Marilyn Wann says:

This year, Americans will waste $66 billion on weight-loss products. The "weight-loss" industry is a misnomer: nearly everyone regains lost weight and up to two-thirds gain back more than they lost. Repeat customers are the business model of the weight-regain industry — an industry that expands every year, even during recession. (Which wouldn't happen if their products worked, right?) 

Marilyn has a petition urging the AMA to change their decision.

 

The Tankini

So it’s
getting on summer (Although it doesn’t feel that way in NYC), and blog posts
will be shorter and there will be no blog posts on the following dates: 7/29, 8/5,
8/12, 8/26th. Normally I might take a summer break but fat
hatred doesn’t. If I don’t
post those days it’s not because I had a combo heart attack, diabetes, MS,
plane crash, global warming catastrophe, I’m going to be on vacation, enjoying
good food and fun exercise.

Last Sunday
was the Big Fat Flea (Formerly the Fat Girl’s Flea). My favorite fat positive
annual event. (Love it to be a bi-annual event, hint, hint). This year I paid
$25 to get in a half hour early. And for $53 I walked out with: 2 pairs of
pants, an awesome torrid dress, a hippie shirt, beads for my niece, sunglasses,
a bathing suit, a swimming shirt, and tankini top. (I now have more tops than
bottoms.)

Recently I joined an
outdoor pool  and despite the weather have been swimming 2-4 times a
week. Unlike the once a week I was doing at the pool from hell. This meant a
bathing suit upgrade from the 3 regular and one emergency bathing suit (the
emergency suit was fraying.)

So off I went
to Marshalls which has been going downhill for a while. I don’t
blame Marshalls for the fact that two piece bikinis vanish after size 12, or
that thin women’s bathing suits look like string and fat women’s a full-on
evening gowns but I do blame them for their lack of inventory. Once we get pass
the fat ceiling of size 16, selection and quantity becomes horrendous. I
understand that not all fat women want to wear tankini, bikini and some even
like the skirts but we are 2/3 of the majority, why do we have to get crap. All they had in my size was a few one piece dresses. I found one bathing suit,
saw the long line and figured I might do better at Sears next door.

I did. Even
though I call Sears the store of the most returns. If Sears
didn’t have a better selection of bathing suits, I would tell them to stick to
appliances.

Sears had
tankinis, one pieces and skirts. But the tankini bottom and tops were sold
separately and even with a half-off sale the pieces were $25 double than what the were in Marshalls. I ended up buying $125 worth of bathing suits. I'm not against spending more to get good quality, but I had a feeling that in one or two years I would be replacing them.

I thought about waiting for the flea to get my bathing suit but the one thing the flea doesn't have is quality control. It is all based on donations.

Doesn't mean I'm disappointed. I never am. I always find a great piece (This year being the Torrid dress) At the flea I got a bathing suit, a top and a swim shirt for $15. Two of them were from a sample sale and never worn. I also feel like I'm a person at the flea because I know that the organizers are looking out for us. They want shoppers to go away with that one or more great article of clothing.

 

About great achievements.

Sometime after I earned my first Master's degree in Education, I had a thought. Here I was achieving a graduate degree that only about 8 percent of the US population have done. My thought was I could achive this, so why can't I be thin? After all there only about an 8% chance of losing weight and keeping it off, why should it be harder than getting a master's degree?  

My first Masters had been difficult. I twice thought about dropping out. I got two low grades, I had second thoughts about going into teaching and later it turned out the thesis adviser was barely letting anyone graduate (She was eventually replaced and I finally finished.) Writing the thesis itself took all my free time and I lived in the library. 

But all I thought about after this incredible accomplishment is why I couldn't get thin. 

The first degree was a nightmare. I ended up never using it. I really didn't like teaching and I had trouble finding work. 

So I got another Master's degree this time in Library Science. Getting was much smoother than the first one. When it was time to do my thesis, I was ready. I found two partners who wanted to finish in one semester. We all worked full time. So every single weekend and some weekday nights the three of us would hole up in a study room at the library and work on our research for hours. Imagine that, having the discipline to give up weekends (at the time I was recently married) to finish this paper. 

During this degree, I was a "successful" dieter. I had being doing a low carb diet for almost a year, I had lost 40 pounds and kept it off.  Eventually I stopped losing and started gaining. But for a while I thought I had it all: the education, the husband, and the weight loss.  

Recently a visiting NYU professor tweeted: Dear obese PhD applicants: If you don't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation.

The tweet was taken down quickly but the damage was done. The "professor" had to quickly backtrack his words, probably fearful of losing his job. 

It's funny of all the unwarranted dieting advice he signalled out that fat people cannot stop eating carbs. Earlier tweets indicated he is a fan of the paleo diet fad (I can write an entire blog post about how incorrect it is and how our Paleo ancestors ate mostly vegetarian.) 

I have previously written that when  I gave up carbs completely, I got very ill. Even in the earlier low carb diets I did where the carb count was higher, I had heart palpitations, reflux disease, constant thoughts of food, dreams about cheating. I became pre-occupied with food, always thinking about the next meal. It turned out that low carb dieting is yet another low calorie diet. 

I have to wonder how I managed to find the strength and discipline after all this dieting to finish two masters degrees. 

And if you want to see more fabulous fat people with advanced degrees, click here. 

The 12 doctors

This is not a post about my favorite TV series Dr. Who and the sadness over the 11th Doctor Matt Smith leaving.

This post is about a study that shows fat people changing doctors more than thin people.

Overweight and obese patients are significantly more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to repeatedly switch primary care doctors, a practice that disrupts continuity of care and leads to more emergency room visits, new Johns Hopkins research suggests.

This made me think of my own history. I realized that over my lifetime I've had 3 different dentists and 3 different gynocologists but a whopping 12 primary care doctors. I dropped five of them for either pressuring me to lose weight and/or assuming I had "fat-related diseases".

Doctor#1: At 10, he was the first doctor to give me the fat talk.
Doctor #2: I asked him how to lose weight, he told me to eat less. 
Doctor #3 & 4 were the first doctors I chose on my own and  dropped because I moved. At the time I didn't really see doctors unless I was sick and I think I saw these two a total of 4 times over 2 years. I don't remember if they ever brought up weight, but if they did, I probably told them I was dieting.
Doctor #5 didn't bother me about my weight but I moved again. I remembered that he  refused to drain a scary blister on my finger.
Doctor #6 was recommended by a thin friend as being holistic, except that I found that when she would go, he would recommend alternative medicine first and for me prescription drugs. 
#7 and 8 were a husband and wife team. I left them when they kept insisting that I do something about the high blood pressure I never had.
#9 said my fat was the reasons my veins collapsed.
#10 recommended weight loss surgery (Also ironic that Dr. Who #10 is my least favorite doctor.)
#11 was okay because by now I was into size acceptance. I left because I found a new doctor who could do blood tests on site. (#11 is still my backup).
#12 is the doctor I have now. He's weight neutral. He occasionally mentions my weight but he never refuses to treat me or push me to lose weight. 

It's hard to find a doctor these days who doesn't parrot the diet industry and say all you have to do is eat less and exercise and you will be thin or has bad assumptions about fat people. A recent study showed 1/3 of medical students in North Carolina are biased (subconscious or otherwise) against fat people.

More than one-third of the students had a moderate to strong bias against obese people, as measured by the test, whereas only 17 percent had an anti-thin bias. Two-thirds of the students were unaware of their anti-fat bias.

With statistics like these, no wonder Fat people are doctor shopping which is yet another barrier to our health care.  

I have some advice to try to avoid this but it may not happen. The doctor who recommended weight loss surgery was weight neutral.

#1. Your new doctor needs the fat talk. That's the talk where you tell him or her that you are aware you are fat, you don't wish to talk about weight-loss and you are following HAES (Bring Linda Bacon's book or study to show the doctor). When I told Doctor #12 that, he said "Okay." And he's been my doctor ever since. Once I saw a specialist I once saw interrupted my fat talk, and blame my ailments on being fat. I never went to her again. 

#2 For every doctor you got to keep copies of all tests done. Keep them in a binder or folder and if you need to move doctors, at least you have a medical history to give them. 

#3 Educate your doctor. I taught my chiropractor about Health at Every Size.

#4 Consult Fat Friendly Health Professionals to see if anyone is in your area.

#5. A good doctor may not be weight neutral but they shouldn't refuse to treat you unless you lose weight.

Finally while I have enjoyed Matt Smith as Doctor Who, my favorite is #3 Jon Pertwee.

5000 steps to the new diet scam

I recently found out there are talks to change my health care provider and to introduce penalty based incentives to prove you are healthy enough for health care.  (A plan similar to needing to be thin to use the gym.) One of the penalty incentives floating around was that the person had to prove they exercised.

I had to snicker about that one. I do most of my exercise on my own and I wondered how I could prove it. Have my husband follow me around with a camera? 

 

What they really mean is the increasing costs of providing health care are cutting into profits. If we can get rid of people who may potentially get sick and have to use more health care, that increases profits. It's the sort of logic only an MBA can love. 

When people had to choose between paying up to 20 percent more for health insurance or exercising more, the majority of enrollees met fitness goals one step at a time via an Internet-tracked walking program... 

In other words, your job owns your life if you want affordable health insurance from them. If you are deemed "unhealthy" (i.e. fat or a smoker)  your life will be looked into even after you punch out. 

Blue Care Network created a buzz when it implemented one of the largest-scaled financial incentive programs in the country by requiring adults who were obese and in the Healthy Blue Living program to enroll in a fitness program to qualify for lower out-of-pocket health care costs. Enrollees could choose between several programs, including Weight Watchers and WalkingSpree, which uses a digital pedometer to upload walking data on a wellness tracking web site.

Transation: if you're a thin person who eats poorly and doesn't exercise, you won't lose your free time or your right to privacy and you don't have to pay anything extra. And if you are a smoker who lies, then you do can enjoy the affordable medical benefits of being thin. Sorry to say I can't pass for thin. And all the healthy habits I incorporated into my life after I stopped dieting will be meaningless because I am still fat. 

This has nothing at all to do with health. These companies don't care if you get healthy, they care about making money. They want to make sure they have cheap labor that won't get sick.

And Weight Watchers. That's what they consider healthy? A DIET program that has an average weight loss of 6 pounds. Where are the long term studies proving Weight watchers and WalkingSpree will make people thin in the long run? (Hint, there aren't any.)

These workplace wellness programs save such small amounts of money, it's better to just keep things they way they were. There's no privacy or penality issues in offering discounts on gym memberships, offering fitness class and so on. I don't care if you can get a discount on Weight Watchers, I just don't want to be forced to join it to keep my health insurance premiums from skyrocketing. 

The report's conclusions about the financial benefits of workplace wellness programs are also grim. In theory, the programs should reduce medical spending as employees become healthier and thereby avoid expensive conditions such as heart disease, cancer and stroke.

In fact, workers who participated in a wellness program had healthcare costs averaging $2.38 less per month than non-participants in the first year of the program and $3.46 less in the fifth year. Those modest savings were not statistically significant, meaning they could have been due to chance and not to the program.

The issue here isn't making employees healthy, this is a continuation of the dieting scam. For the last 30 years Americans have been dieting and gaining more weight. And they are starting to get to the point that people are becoming more accepting that not everyone belongs in the 19.5 - 24.5 BMI cookie cutter. Even thought dieting is still a 60 billion industry, most of it is DIY dieting which means that people just might be looking at dietary changes rather than weight loss.

So if people are no longer dieting, then I guess we'll have to be forced to. 

Sorry! No blog post this week, join me again on Monday.

Sorry! No blog post this week, join me again on Monday.

Loser's Club

While researching my book, I
did some reviews of national stores on the local level. This included
dragging my friends to many mall trips. Mostly I looked at the bigger
department stores and the smaller plus size stores. I already knew
that most of the smaller stores especially the trendy/chic ones
didn’t carry plus sizes or like H&M carried had them in
microscopic ghettos. One place I went into, I looked at the high
prices and the tiny sweaters and walked out without a word.

On one mall trip, my friend dragged
me over to the very good looking male model in front of Abercrombie
and Fitch (A&F). The model was a sweet young man who was nice to
me the fat girl and my friend with a thin body and nerdy glasses.

I didn’t go into A&F because I
didn't have to ask if they had plus sizes. The buff men and thin
women adored on the store made me realize this store was for thin
people only especially thin women. I’ve many times been dragged
into thin people only stores where I noticed women’s clothes rarely
go to large and men can go to XXL meaning these stores cater to fat
men by accident because they really want muscular ones.

The CEO of A&F has said
they don’t make clothes for fat people because they make clothes
for cool people and fat people are not cool. “In every
school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the
not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the
cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great
attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our
clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary?
Absolutely."



Believe
it or not I admire his honesty. Almost all of these
stores aimed at the young and trendy carry small sizes and I don’t
mean just Junior Miss sizes, I mean small sizes. Even stores with
sizes up to 16, such as the Gap are a rare animal with an abundant
amount of extra smalls. These stores fear that if fat people wore
their clothes it would no longer be considered trendy except
forgetting that 2/3 of the people of the US are considered fat. I
assume the inflated prices marketed to niche stereotypes is enough to keep them afloat.
 

But I was talking about A&F. I
could point out all the terrible things they have done : the
sweatshops, Discrimination,
the Sexualization of pre-teens  and their refusal to donate excess clothes to poor people. 

Instead I will talk about not being
in the cool club. At no time in my life was I ever in the "cool"
club. I don't have styled hair, do my eye brows, get regularly
mani-pedis, I barely shave, I don't wear trendy clothes (I wear
clothes because I like them), only occasionally wearing some freakier
outfits because I need a change. My worst offense is refusing to try
to lose weight.

You see, being trendy, the fitting
in into a tiny cookie cutter, is something I have always refused to
do. I refused to be told what to like or wear. Sure clothing shopping
has become a disaster and I'm certain I've lost getting a job being a
hairy fat-ass, but I despise the idea of being someone I'm not. I've
gotten several troll comments that I play sour grapes, that I really
want to be thin but it isn't true.

Not only A&F is labeling the
"uncool" kids but the people who wear their clothes as
vapid, mean bullies which I am sure they are not. I don’t believe
it of the nice male model outside the store. He is not vapid, I am
not a label.

Of course just because this fool has
no power over me, doesn't mean he can say mean things without
consequences.

But (Robin, author of the A&F
book the quote comes from ) Lewis says it's a model that may not fit
the future. Plus-sized shoppers now make up 67 percent of consumers.

"I think the young people
today want cool, but as they define it themselves," Lewis said.

From Dove's "Real Beauty"
campaign - highlighting real women - to H&M's inclusion of
plus-sized swimsuit model Jennie Runk, many other brands are
embracing that individualism and making their clothes more
accessible. For example, rival retailers H&M and American Eagle
both carry sizes up to 16 and 18. The largest at Abercrombie &
Fitch is a 10.

I urge people of all sizes not to
buy anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, no clothes, no accessories,
nothing. And if you have A&F clothes, be sure to donate them to
the poor or a fat chick. I might wear one of these tiny tee shirts as
a tank tube.