More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Linda Bacon
Read between
October 28 - November 25, 2023
I studied the cultural issues, which taught me the “why” behind my body image issues. I came to understand that the shame I felt about my body was part of the North American female experience, reflective of a cultural pathology regarding a woman’s appearance.
It saddens me that shame and anxiety regarding the scale and mirror overshadow most people’s enjoyment of food, their comfort in their bodies, and their full development as individuals. Many of us have a disturbing preoccupation with food and an intense fear of being fat. Instead of eating for enjoyment and fuel, we regard food as our enemy, as a test of our resolve and willpower—and even of our moral superiority. Instead of moving for the sheer joy of feeling our bodies and our power, we view exercise as a workout, our penance for eating or weighing too much. Instead of putting our energy
...more
Because every authority and institution urges us to fight fat, weight control is no longer merely a public health issue, but a moral imperative. From every pulpit of weight control we hear a singular message: Follow my plan, you’ll lose weight, improve your health, become a better person, and have a happier life. Dieting has become such a major force in our cultural landscape that most people view weight control as the normal, right thing to do. While exercising may not be as common, we are all certainly aware that we should exercise and feel the guilt of not doing enough.
the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.
Because really, what’s beneath your weight-loss quest? Isn’t your ultimate goal to feel better about yourself, to feel love, acceptance, vitality, or good health? That’s the Health at Every Size promise. You can feel better about yourself. You can feel loved, accepted, and vital—and you can improve your health—regardless of whether you lose weight.
We don’t trust our own judgment anymore. External rules, such as belief systems about good foods, bad foods, or appropriate amounts or times to eat, drown out our innate ability to respond to setpoint cues.
We hold very tenaciously to our beliefs that “fat = lazy” and “if people would just get off their butts and get moving, they’d be much thinner.” The problem with these ideas? There’s no evidence to support them!
While numerous “aids” may support short-term weight loss, there is no convincing evidence that anything can help you maintain weight loss over the long run without the risk of seriously compromising your health.
People are misled about the extent and severity of the health risks associated with being fat and told that bariatric surgery is a solution. It’s not. It would be more appropriately labeled high-risk disease-inducing cosmetic surgery than a health-enhancing procedure. And unlike a diet, you usually can’t abandon it when you realize you made a mistake.
It’s hard to understand the justification for intentionally damaging healthy, functioning organs and voluntarily assuming the risk of death and “complications.” Apparently, the rationalization is that the dangers of carrying “excess” weight are much worse than the dangers posed by the treatment. Yet the evidence just isn’t convincing.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if bariatric medicine shifted its focus to helping fat people get or stay healthy rather than thin?
Ironically, the 1970s also marks a time period when more people turned to dieting.2 As discussed previously, dieting is another likely contributing factor to our collective increase in calories, as restrictive behavior frequently triggers overeating in the short term and may cause the body to preferentially store more body fat in the long term.
Bottom line? You don’t need food rules to guide your choices. You don’t need to fight your desires. All you need is to respect your body, by listening and responding to its signals. Information about how foods affect you can support your process of tuning in to your body and feeling ever more at home.
As you learn about how foods affect you, always remember: As valuable as academic research may be, your intuition is much more effective in guiding you to feed yourself well.
What I am suggesting is that a high-fiber diet helps you feel satiated on fewer calories.
There’s one nutritional concept that seems to make a healthy relationship with food particularly difficult, and that’s the idea that some foods are good while others are bad. Labeling a food good or bad stops you from questioning and discovery. If you label a Twinkie as bad, you are not able to observe its effects on you, and you lose the opportunity to learn from it. On the other hand, if you maintain a neutral attitude, you can watch your response to that Twinkie.
So, in answer to the question, “Is [fill in the blank] bad?,” the response is, “Of course not.” We simply need to respect it. Let it teach us whether or not we want to indulge or when enough is enough.
Always keep in mind that foods are not inherently bad: Moderation—which you’ll find happens naturally once you learn to tune into you internal hunger cues—not avoidance, is all you need. Extremism won’t be more effective—and is likely to even work against you.
a corporate leader who willfully makes a decision to prioritize public health over profit can be sued by shareholders for breach of legal obligation.
The CDC didn’t just overhype a crisis, they helped invent it. With only 26,000 victims, we don’t have an obesity/overweight epidemic; our epidemic is one of fearmongering and ignorance.
There is a growing movement that seeks to reclaim the term “fat” as a descriptive term, stripped of its pejorative implications.
NAAFA argues, rightfully so, that fatness is a form of body diversity that should be respected, much like diversity based on skin color or sexual preference.
Weight bias among health care practitioners is well-documented269, 270 and life-threatening.
Studies also indicate that fat women may delay or avoid seeking health care for fear of discrimination and receiving an unsolicited weight loss lecture.267, 268
Sounds familiar :(
And of course, stress from the discrimination and widespread hostility directed at larger people may also be a significant contributor to the risks currently blamed on body fat alone.
Historically, more often than not, a larger body was considered more desirable. It was a sign of beauty, health, opulence, sex appeal, and fertility. This current historical moment, during which flesh isn’t appreciated, is a rare anomaly.
The fashion, cosmetics, and diet industries survive by telling us that we are ugly and unacceptable as we are, but if we buy their products we can become beautiful. In other words, they get us to participate in our own oppression!
Health practitioners are among the most insidious players in this fat-hating drama, as they have legitimized the cultural mandate for thinness by reframing it as a health concern. Bariatric surgery poses a particularly egregious example. Ironically, as Eric Oliver astutely points out, bariatric surgeons actually create disease, by damaging a healthy organ, and justify this practice by asserting an imaginary disease, obesity.366
There is an easy way to win the war against fat and reclaim your pleasure in eating: Just give up. Yes, give up. Stop fighting. Instead, turn to science. Specifically, the scientifically proven Health at Every Size (HAES) program.
statistics clearly show that when industry funds research, the published results are much more likely to show beneficial effects than research conducted without industry funding.
Not that private industry would have been interested in funding this research anyway—I mean, there’s no profit to be made if we show people getting healthier with lifestyle change, without worrying about weight loss, or if we show that weight isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to health.
Happier, healthier people feel more empowered and make better choices.
But, you’re probably thinking, why bother if the HAES group didn’t lose weight? Because what’s really important here, as I’ve tried to show you throughout this book, isn’t some nebulous number on the scale; it’s coming to the same conclusions the HAES women arrived at: that weight loss just isn’t as important as they thought. These women discovered that their focus on weight loss had hidden their real quest: a desire to feel better about themselves, to have more vitality and good health, to feel attractive for themselves, not for anyone else. Once they dropped the weight-loss focus, that’s
...more
When you take care of yourself and give yourself what you really want, the need to overeat dissolves.
Once you learn how to take better care of yourself, you will lose interest in eating when you’re not hungry.
our culture accepts dieting and body hatred as normal.
Change comes from valuing and caring about yourself enough to want to improve your life. By first learning to have a positive relationship with your body, even if that body is not “perfect,” you strengthen your ability to make change.
When you’re invested in your thin fantasies, you avoid the opportunity to face who you really are and to try to become who you really want to be. It’s the hope that your life will automatically improve when you’re thin that stops you from taking steps to improve your life right now.
Everyone has a right to respect and happiness in their life, regardless of what they weigh.
It is a sad fact of life that women often bond over commiserating about their flawed bodies or failed diets.
Your body doesn’t represent your core self. You are many more important things beyond your body: Perhaps you are compassionate, intelligent, articulate, and/or creative. Don’t give your body more power than it deserves; it can’t define you. Instead, cultivate a value system that puts appearance in its place and honors bodies for more than their packaging. Your body is valuable because it houses you.
You only have one body and despite how well you live your life, it may never change. Can you afford to hate yourself for the rest of your life?
Instead of thinking about your forty-five-minute walk as exercise, think about it as a gift you’re giving your body so it can become and remain healthy, and so you can continue to live an independent life free of pain. Don’t view it as a way to lose weight; that’s playing right back into the negative thought mode.
The single most powerful act available to you is to own your body—to walk proud and let others see you enjoying your body. Self-love is a revolutionary act!
I firmly believe that in the not-too-distant future, we won’t expect heavier people to lose weight before we view them as part of the beautiful spectrum of human diversity.
Bottom line: Any plan that has you giving over control to someone else’s idea of what you should eat is doomed to fail.
Sensual pleasure is our biological reward for taking care of ourselves. When you eat what you want and allow yourself to truly experience the pleasure, you feel satisfaction and contentment, which allows you to stop eating when you feel full. I’m not just saying this to make you feel good; numerous studies support this: Eating pleasurable food when you have a physical drive to eat won’t trigger consistent overeating in intuitive eaters. Also, if you are consumed with guilt, you don’t enjoy (or even experience) the food. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is true for people with a dieting
...more
Commit to choosing food you love.
Fat is not a feeling! Also absent are “good” and “bad.” These are all judgments about feelings, but feelings just are. If these words come to mind, back up and try to get at the feeling behind the judgment.
When you experience your emotions, rather than numbing them with food, you can realize that you have a choice. You can continue with what is familiar and boring or you can make a change,
