Entries from May 2007 ↓

Over at the Sydney Morning Herald they have an article about reality TV show Teen Fit Camp (hastily renamed from Teen Fat Camp). It starts off with a big, defensive disclaimer about how it’s not like The Biggest Loser at all, blah blah blah.

I’m not going to watch it. I can already tell from the article that it will be full of agonising, hand-wringing moments (accompanied by soft sad piano music like at the end of The Incredible Hulk no doubt) where the teens confess their sins and their desire to be normal.

“They will eat just 1,200 calories, less than 20g of fat and exercise the equivalent of 10,000 steps a day.”

Besides from this starvation-level diet crap (how is eating 1200 calories a day, while exercising, about healthy eating at all? What in the fucking fuck is that all about, I ask you) again it completely misses the point about fat kids (and adults) and their self-esteem and body image.

We learn the dream of Gemma, a 110kg 16-year-old, is to wear a bikini on the beach and to have a boyfriend.

It doesn’t take long for Sam to break down when he says: “I don’t care if I went home and gained 200kg and died.”

Obviously the solution here, according to the proprietor of the fat camp, is that they should lose weight, and then all their dreams will come true. Your suicidal ideations will melt away with the pounds, and boyfriends and bikini shop sales assistants will come flocking.

I can tell you that sure as hell ain’t true. Sure, you feel good for a while, people are congratulating you and giving you positive reinforcement for conforming to societal ideals, and then you find out men are still men, even thin girls hate their bodies in a bikini, and you still have to deal with all the other problems life throws at you even if you’re a size 8. And then, as with 85-98% of all weight loss attempts, you start gaining weight again: that’s a good one for drowning you in feelings of failure and self-doubt and guilt, blaming yourself for not being able to fight against normal biological forces. (People who’ve had gastric bypass surgery, where they disconnect/remove/mutilate your GI tract, still end up re-gaining a lot of the weight they lost. That’s some powerful biology.)

And Gemma? I think I weigh about as much as you and I have a boyfriend. A lovely lovely boyfriend, and before him I had other boyfriends just like my slim friends. And you’re 16. Boys are generally idiots at 16. The secret to getting a boyfriend or girlfriend is to avoid anyone who says they’ll only go out with you if you lose weight. You don’t want someone like that, trust me.

Craig cites a study which says obese adolescents have a similar outlook on life to that of terminal cancer patients.
But he says that once they get a taste of a healthier life, their mood dramatically alters.
“Once they’ve lost 10 to 20 kilograms it becomes a different world,” Craig says.
“Consider being 16-years-old and 50kg overweight, it means you’ve been failing at controlling your weight for as long as you can remember, and for you, it’s a failure in your life.
“It’s very hard to make that change and it’s an unreal expectation for you to be excited about making that change. So that’s the first and most important hurdle.”

Shut the hell up, Craig. Ever consider that fat teenagers have an outlook similar to terminal cancer patients because people are incredibly cruel, society tells them fat people are worthless and ugly, and positive fat role models are few and far between? How about encouraging them in some path that isn’t ultimately futile (i.e. weight loss) and praising the results? Maybe one of these kids is a brilliant, talented musician. Maybe another is a maths whiz.  Maybe they’re not “failing at controlling [their weight]“, maybe that’s just the body they have. Maybe they do eat lots of junk food, but so do lots of thin teenagers. Maybe they’d like to learn good cooking, schools don’t seem to teach Home Ec these days, maybe their parents don’t know how either. Maybe the girl who wants to wear the bikini could take up Middle Eastern dancing or we could tell her about Big Burlesque. Maybe they could let the kids talk to some fat people who aren’t living in stereotypically abject misery and let them see that there’s life for fat people beyond calorie counting. Fat people with husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends, interesting careers, wonderful friends, talent. Wait, I forgot, no fat people have those things! Not until they lose weight, anyway, adipose tissue smothers everything apparently.

How much better would these teens feel meeting someone like Beth Ditto instead of being trotted around on national TV as objects of pity and disgust? How much better if they could just know that the concept of ‘health at any size’ even existed? How much better if people like Craig got a clue and minded their own business instead of exploiting fat hatred to make money and gain TV publicity?

Much, much better.

Damn them all to hell. And the diet pushers. I was going to write about some of the weight loss crap I saw on the news sites today, but it was all so stupid. Every single one of them is premised on the idea that fat people just can’t control their appetites and/or are too idiotic or recalcitrant to get physical activity and just do what they’re told.

Incredibly, mind-bogglingly insane.

So read Sandy Szwarc’s latest post on the massive marketing campaign for Alli, the OTC version of Orlistat. It’s more like a misinformation campaign. It’s more like a campaign for an anti-wrinkle cream, because it has about the same efficacy.

Mandolin posted at Alas, a Blog on how when oppressed voices speak up they are seen as loud and attacking: as fists. The post is about women mostly, and race, but it applies to fat people too. Sort of.

Fat people are so worthless that that their criticisms aren’t even seen as fists, just some laughable defence of their laziness and gluttony. The lone guy in the women’s studies class might say (as Mandolin wrote) “Don’t kill me for this, but…”, but if a fat person is speaking up about fat oppression they don’t even bother with that.

Fattie: Fat people don’t actually sit around on the couch all day eating chips and soda, you know. Medical studies show genetics…
Non-fattie: You just don’t want to put in the effort. Eat less, exercise more and you’ll be thin!

Fattie: I challenge the assumption that fat is unhealthy and necessarily ugly.
Non-fattie: Hahahahahaha. Fat is ugly, you’re just too dumb to eat properly.

Fattie: Fat people can be fit, I just cycled 23 miles and I have a martial arts black belt.
Non-fattie: Liar. If you did you wouldn’t be fat.
Other non-fattie: You’re still unhealthy anyway. I bet you have diabetes.

This attitude grows ever more tiresome each time I hear or see it. Hmm. Maybe fat people’s “fists” are seen as so massive they can’t even be acknowledged. The elephant in the room, indeed.

The diet and weight loss industry and, it seems, most health professionals are heavily invested in the magical thinking that seems to be the source of the idea that long-term weight loss is possible for anyone. Despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, they continue to promote weight loss as the “solution” to “obesity”: a case of True-believer syndrome.

The latest weight-loss “breakthrough” in the news is Biologically tailored diets to beat obesity. Essentially, you should have your insulin checked and eat low-carb (low cal of course) if you have insulin sensitivity, otherwise stick with the low-fat kind of diet. Well, no kidding that people who have insulin/blood glucose problems may well have better health if they avoid lots of carbohydrates. I could have told you that.

But here’s the actual results from the study:

For those with insulin concentration at 30 minutes above the median (57.5 microIU/mL; n = 28), the low-glycemic load diet produced a greater decrease in weight (-5.8 vs. -1.2 kg; P = .004) and body fat percentage (-2.6% vs -0.9%; P = .03) than the low-fat diet at 18 months.

The young adults in this study lost a whopping 5.8kg (12lbs) in 18 months. Let’s come back in another 18 months and then at 5 years and see what’s happened.

The main point I want to make here is that this is what counts as “success” when you look up such medical studies. 1lb – 10lbs over 6 – 18 months. This is at distinct odds with what is expected of the fat person who is instructed to lose weight by their doctor, or joins one of the commercial diet scams (because they all are). “You’re 60lbs too heavy! I want you to lose at least 35lbs.” Beleaguered fat person dutifully and sincerely and with all the willpower in the world begins on recommended diet plan, oops, lifestyle change, say, for the sake of argument, one “tailored” for them as in the above study.

Should take 4.5 years to lose that 35lbs. But if that fat person went back to the doctor after one year and said “I’ve only lost 9lbs.” you can be pretty sure that there’d be disappointment all ’round: Most conservative weight loss programs are designed around the idea that you should lose 1/2lb to 1lb per week – 26 to 52lbs a year. This goes against all scientific evidence, and that’s not even getting into the sustainability of such.

The diet industry creates big fat unrealistic expectations about what kind of weight loss is possible and desirable in short periods of time. And most health professionals aren’t much better – they often seem willfully ignorant of medical studies that show large amounts of weight loss are rarely possible and sustainable.

Fat people are led down an impossible path to an alleged solution to their “problem” and then blamed for not having enough willpower, intelligence, time, money, nous, whatever – when they “fail”.

There’s another side to these diet studies too. I unfortunately couldn’t find any appropriate graphs, damn my university for not having full-text to medical journals, but often there’s a weight loss and re-gain within the timeframe. So a participant may have lost 20lbs in the first 6 months but then gained back 15. (And still gaining when they ended the study.)

You’ll never hear about that in the news, though.

Helen Lovejoy and Maude Flanders aside, I’m serious.

Fat kids know they’re fat. Really. If it wasn’t some well-meaning but ultimately ignorant doctor, it was Uncle Jim poking their belly, or bullies at school, or (unfortunately) school itself.

I wasn’t fat as a kid. I was rather solidly built but you couldn’t find any squishy bits on me, of which I now have many. If I was a boy, I would have been encouraged to play rugby or some other sport that big boys play. As a girl, a girl who was not slender and delicate, I was just fat. I played netball and tennis and swam despite coaches and PE teachers assuming I would be clumsy and slow. I rode my bike everywhere – it was a small town 30 years ago. Then puberty hit and I put on normal, healthy, womanly fat. At the age of 12 I was a size 6, fercryinoutloud. That ain’t fat unless you’re about 8 inches tall.

But no, this was wrong. I was wrong. I must be doing something bad. I must be sneaking food. I must be lying about going on a bike ride. I was disgusting. Fat-phobic relatives gave me “helpful” advice. They were just concerned about my health. (Hah.) They gave me diet books from 1972 that said fat people didn’t get good jobs or get married or have any fun at all and it was all their own fault and they should be thin at any cost.

Within a few years I was indeed fat. I’d alternately gain the praise of those around me by barely eating anything at all and agreeing about how important it was to lose weight. A week of virtuous anorectic behaviour, a week of binging on whatever food I could get my hands on in secret. Yeah, that’ll screw up your metabolism, especially as a teenager who’s supposed to be growing like stand of bamboo. I still find myself falling into the disordered thinking every day and it’s a hard uphill slog to get out of it – especially when anti-fat anti-obesity hysteria is all around.

Which brings me back to the fat kids. People, just shut up bout weight. Shut. Up. Kids should play and move with great glee and fun and enjoyment, not be rounded up by patronising officials and made to do kiddy aerobics and measured and monitored and questioned about what’s in their lunch box.

The always-interesting Sandy Szwarc has had a series of posts recently about the futility of the “war” against “childhood obesity”, pointing out that kids are being hounded into eating disorders and weight obsession and health obsession, to pretty much no change from the status quo.

This hunting down the fat kids is heartbreaking. It’s bullying. It’s a legitimate, socially sanctioned way for adults to bully children. What else could it be? The evidence that fat is inherently unhealthy is extraordinarily flimsy. The evidence that stress and dieting and focusing on weight and moralistic idealisation of health is unhealthy is strong.

Leave them kids alone.

As far as promoting a healthy attitude about food and eating, Nigella Lawson wins hands down. Jamie Oliver, frankly, is full of himself. They’re both fans of home-cooked meals made with fresh produce, but there the similarity ends.

As far as I can tell, Nigella’s never spouted off about “the obesity epidemic”, which is big fat bonus points to start. Jamie, on the other hand, staged a photo stunt when he dressed up in a fat suit, munched on a hamburger, and “broke” a scooter because he was hilariously, tragically fat. All in the name of “obesity awareness”, apparently. Like nobody who’s fat didn’t already know it or hadn’t already heard the incessant bleating of the fearmongers.

Jamie, on his TV shows, goes out to buy food and then comes back to a kitchen or studio and cooks it. He says how this or that is really tasty or good for you looks like he really enjoys the process of cooking. But that’s about it. I get no sense that the end product has any meaning beyond “I made this! Isn’t it great?” for him.

Nigella, on the other hand, understands that there’s the cooking, and then the eating, and both are equally important. “The lovely aroma of this reminds me of a seaside holiday with…” – “I remember eating this in front of the fireplace with my mother…” – “I love to make more of this so I can have midnight snack leftovers…”. And so on. Food’s personal. It’s got social, cultural and psychological meaning.

It’s those words hated by dietmongers: comfort food. If you’re feeling depressed, you shouldn’t eat to make you happy, they say. If you’re stressed, go for a walk instead of eating something. You can never eat for anything but “fuel” and “nutrition”. Anything else makes you faaaaaaaaat. (They say.) [*]

What, exactly, is wrong with ‘comfort food’? It’s pretty well-established that stress is far more health-destroying than being fat could ever be. Eating a bowl of your mother’s spaghetti bolognese is better than going for a walk, realising you’re still down, being “good” and doing like you’re supposed to and have a piece of fruit and a glass of water instead and still being down and ending up feeling worse. “But you were just craving carbs!” say those sanctimonious nutrition experts. Well, no. You were craving Thursday evenings when Ma made a big pot of spaghetti bolognese and everyone sat around and watched the favourite TV program and laughed and talked. No piece of fruit and a brisk walk is going to compete with that. The purpose of a feast at Christmas (or holiday of choice) is not for people to demonstrate how much willpower you have by having a small serving of turkey no gravy no potatoes only a small salad thanks. Nor is supposed to be for relatives to comment on how fat you are and shouldn’t you skip dessert, for that matter.

And Nigella gets it.

Jamie calls parents child abusers for letting their kids eat chicken nuggets. Nigella involves her kids in making their own chicken nuggets and knows that sometimes you’re too busy for that so throwing some frozen ones in the oven isn’t going to make them have a heart attack at the age of 18.

There’s classism at work there, too. What’s the difference between foccacia with jarlsberg and prosciutto and sliced bread with cheddar and ham? No, really. There’s nothing fundamentally different nutritionally. But one’s Nice and the other is Nasty. Rich thin people eat one and poor fat people eat the other, stereotypically.

I wonder if Jamie’s two daughters will grow up with a healthy body image and attitude about weight and food. According to the food police, Nigella’s children are in imminent danger: she’s been feeding them pudding made from white bread and full-cream milk right there for all to see on the television.

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[*] I wish I didn’t even have to qualify this, but for the love of Benji, I am not suggesting that food as comfort and psychological wellbeing is anything like compulsive overeating, an actual psychological disorder. Any reasonable person can tell the difference. Dietmongers and food police are not reasonable people, however.

That’s what some fuckwit decided he’d say as he walked past me the other night. It was, apparently, champagne comedy. And, of course, it’s his right to comment on a woman’s body and doubly so because I’m fat and therefore should be grateful that His Maleness deigned to pay attention to the unfuckable woman.

Fat Fu has a post up on how fat girls should be grateful to be raped, according to a London lawyer. Said lawyer also says the rape victim had “slimmed down a lot” since the rape. Who knew? Being raped is a great diet aid! Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety – that’ll help keep those pesky food cravings away.

A shiny new blog. It’s about fat acceptance and feminism, so if you are not a believer in fat acceptance or feminism, go find some wingnut blog to play in instead. I reserve the right to moderate and delete comments deemed unhelpful or spamlike.