Tag: Body of Truth

Fat-shaming: Stop. Just stop.

Following up to my last post about Harriet Brown’s Body of Truth, here’s another reminder of our society’s last acceptable prejudice. Racism still exists, but our society no longer will accept it, and we call it out whenever it appears in the news or the cultural consciousness. Our treatment of and attitude toward homosexuals is something that’s changing and is addressed frequently. Debate over policies is still complex, but how we treat individuals should be pretty clear: just be kind. Don’t name-call. Don’t lump into a category. Don’t assume.

But we’re still in the very early phases of ending the name-calling and shaming over fat. About once a week, it seems, some celebrity or other makes assumptions and puts their foot in their mouth about people who are overweight. Cheryl Tiegs stupidly assumed a couple of things in February about model Ashley Graham: One, that Graham isn’t healthy. Two, she assumed her waist size was 35 inches or more, giving her the basis for saying Graham can’t be healthy.

Here’s what happened: Graham’s waist size was revealed to be 29.5 inches. It’s perfectly within the range of what experts say is healthy (although, let’s be real … doctors really know far too little about weight and health, as Brown writes in Body of Truth, for one). And Graham works out regularly. She seems to be taking care of herself. As she said to the Daily Mail, “There are too many people thinking they can look at a girl my size and say that we are unhealthy. You can’t, only my doctor can!” (I’m guessing she’s lucky enough to have a doctor who sees the big picture of health and hasn’t pushed her to lose weight.)

And the fat-shaming of today comes from Australia, where a fitness expert just assumes that all overweight people must be unhappy. One, it is possible to be overweight and happy, and two, her remarks and attitude likely contribute to people who are overweight feeling dissatisfied with themselves simply because of their size. It’s been shown time and time again that making someone feel bad about themselves, guilty, shameful, etc., will NOT lead to them taking steps to take better care of themselves, such as incorporating some better eating habits and exercising regularly. It may motivate briefly, but in the long haul, they’ll just give up and say it’s impossible. The best motivation to help someone truly take care of themselves for life is to help them feel they are worthwhile as people; therefore, they deserve to take the time and energy to take care of their physical bodies.

One thing that needs to become more common knowledge among doctors and all of us is that fitness is a huge indicator of health. More people should get out and exercise more. Yes. But there are plenty of people who exercise regularly who are not thin. (And on the flip side, there are plenty of skinny people who have never exercised, and on top of that, they eat food that no one would call healthy. But they get a pass in others’ eyes because, hey, they APPEAR healthy, since our society still only equates health with thinness.) And we should be working to get more people fit. But it doesn’t need to be in pursuit of being thin. It needs to be fitness for its own sake.

Let’s just stop the fat-shaming. Let’s stop assuming overweight means miserable and unhealthy. Thinness does NOT automatically = healthy, and fatness does NOT automatically = unhealthy. Fat people are not necessarily unhappy, lazy, or unmotivated. They are people. And how do we treat people? With kindness. As whole, worthwhile individuals.

 

Get the skinny on our society’s obsession with fat

body of truthI’ve decided I’m going to make reading this book a once-a-year activity. Body of Truth is just that helpful. When I read it a year ago before it was even published, I dog-eared pages as I devoured it in just a day or two. I made my husband read it. THIS, this, is what everyone needs to know. I read it again this week in a day, dog-eared more pages, and considered making my husband read it again.

Read my review of the book on Rated Reads.

Now, I was able to keep my review to a reasonable length, but I’m going to write more about the insights I gained by reading Harriet Brown’s book. And I’ll have to split up the info into a few posts so it won’t get weighed down (ha ha). Today I’m just going to address the damage that is done by dieting. And let me tell you, that is one of the takeaways of this book that has me the most furious.

I never considered myself a dieter until the past 7 years or so. I noticed myself gaining when I was nearing 40. But I had actually dieted when I was about 12 by reducing a bit what I ate and not eating desserts. I didn’t keep track of pounds, just slimmed a little of “baby fat,” you could say. And then each time after my three pregnancies I breast-fed, counted calories (stuck to 1800 or so), and kept up my regular exercise. I got back down and a little bit more and was looking nicely trim at 33. I kept it up until, yeah, almost the 40s. Then I saw 10 pounds creep on and got a bit panicked (ha!). Then I happened to move to a new state and put on another 10 pounds, then another 10, then another 10. All of a sudden, I was a lot heavier and was feeling much different than I had before as generally an average-weight, trim-ish person. I dieted first by just really counting calories (and going hungry often) and lost 30, but it only held for a year or maybe two. It came back on, and then I started looking at other options. I did the hCG diet (yes, I know, I never DREAMED I’d be the person to do something drastic like that), but it worked and I at least lost almost 20 pounds and felt a lot better really quickly. That crept back on, and I did it again a year or so later. A couple of years ago, my best friend started doing Atkins, so I tried it. It worked and I did well enough to lose maybe 20 or 25 pounds and feel it was worth the work and sacrifice. My daughter got married, then, last year, and all bets were off. I ate, and I ate, and I ate. I was depressed and stressed and just went straight to food. And what do you know, I am now by far the heaviest I’ve ever been. I went back on Atkins for a few weeks in the fall, then something crazy happened, and then I went back on it this last month, then my grandma died. And I am 20 pounds heavier than my heaviest weight ever before.

So not counting the post-pregnancy “getting back to pre-pregnancy weight” work, I have dieted, lost and gained, at least four main times, plus a few more little times, in the past 8 years. I have been successful. I have been tough. I have focused. And then I’ve either gone back to semi-normal eating (not being hungry) and gained back, or I’ve had some eat-a-lot periods. And what do you know, I’m completely normal. Studies show very low rates of “long-term” success, which is at most watched over 5 years, and almost nothing for rates past that time period (3 years is really even the limit of most “long-term” studies). Evidence also shows that not only do people who diet tend to gain back what they lost, but they gain more on top of that.

So if I had never dieted, I’d most likely just be at my previous “heaviest,” but not the 20 pounds more than that that I am now. I might even be 10 or more pounds below that. And I’d have saved myself a lot of unnecessary work, focus and energy that could have gone to something more productive. I don’t know if you’ve been in this situation or not (likelihood is many of you have been), but this realization absolutely OUTRAGES me.

Brown writes this:

(An) oft-repeated lie about weight and health is that dieting makes us thinner and healthier. At the very least, we consider dieting benign, something that can’t hurt us even if it doesn’t really help. But the truth is, dieting is actually harmful for many of us for all sorts of reasons. And it doesn’t make most of us thinner or healthier. On the contrary.

And she says this: a 2007 investigation (as one example) confirmed that diets don’t work. “The mind-boggling element here is that we’ve known diets don’t work for a long time, and so has the medical establishment.” But still society at large, doctors, individuals … we all think they can work if people just are motivated enough, have enough willpower, work hard enough. And that big fat lie is causing us health problems. Just think: doctors who are all encouraging patients to lose weight may very well be making their patients’ health problems WORSE.

Here are some sobering points Brown tells us:

  • “Dieting nearly always makes people heavier over time. In one study of Finnish twins, the more diets people went on, the higher their risk of becoming overweight and the faster they gained weight later in life.”
  • “Dieters tend to have higher levels of cortisol, sometimes called ‘the stress hormone,’ and free fatty acids, and dieters tend to exhibit diminished executive function, (‘strained bandwidth’), maybe because using so much mental energy thinking, worrying, and negotiating about food choices leaves them too distracted to think about much else” — which in turn actually causes us to gain more weight.
  • Dieting actually has been shown in studies to lead to binge eating. It’s not just psychological, either; physiology on various levels causes us to eat more after dieting, reversing all our work (brain circuitry even changes!).
  • ”An ever-growing body of research suggests that weight cycling, or yo-yo dieting, correlates with higher levels of heart disease, impaired immune function, cardiometabolic risk, insulin resistance, triglycerides, hypertension, and abdominal fat accumulation.”
  • Studies have “found correlations between weight cycling and disordered eating, higher stress, lower well-being, and less confidence about food and eating. In other words, the more loops of the yo-yo you go around, the worse you feel about your weight, your eating, your very self.”
  • Each loop of the cycle then is harder. It’s tougher to drop the weight every go-round. Dieting changes metabolism. “People who have intentionally lost weight generally use about 15 percent fewer calories than non-dieters to perform exactly the same activities, which means they gain weight eating fewer calories than non-dieters.” As one research professor told Brown, “We know there’s some sort of derangement of the metabolic pathways, and that has a cascade effect on everything from the hormones involved with obesity to hunger.”

So people who feel fat or have been told they’re fat and need to lose weight feel “incredible shame.” Our whole culture reinforces that. Doctors reinforce that. And it’s not helping anyone. It’s not helping health; it’s not making anyone motivated; it’s not making us feel good; it’s a wicked prejudice that is still allowed. Feeling the outrage yet?

In the next few blog posts, I’ll focus on some of these last ideas and more.