New film: Fat

A filmmaker named Jennifer Jonassen sent me a link to this trailer for a new documentary, FAT, due out later this year. I think it looks pretty interesting. What do you think?

When meds make you fat, part 2

I don't know how I missed it, but this week's New York Times "Well" column covers the same territory as my last post.

Head on over there, if you haven't already, and add your comments to the mix. You'll find a few that make you want to bang your head, but more that are genuinely confused and curious. They could use your expertise. :)

Finally, some good news about fat

This blog post from Tara Parker-Pope discusses a study on the kinds of factors that affect how we visibly age. Make sure to look at the compelling slide show that goes along with it. It's a fascinating look at pairs of twins where one looks considerably older than the other. The study results suggest that smoking, sun exposure, depression, and weight loss all contribute to looking older.

The "obesity tax"

I thought about posting on this a few days ago, when Governor Paterson first proposed a tax on non-diet soda, and decided that other folks had tackled it ably, so no need.

Tonight, as I was listening to yet another commentator go at this issue on NPR, I thought about my friend P., who became diabetic a couple of years ago, stopped eating sugar altogether, lost 30 pounds, and nearly blinded herself cooking with Splenda. She used it in a dish she cooked on the stovetop and leaned over the pot at just the wrong moment. Splenda, it seems, contains chlorine, and apparently some of that chlorine is released during cooking. P. got a faceful of it and went temporarily blind. Luckily she got her vision back.

I thought about the long-running debate over whether aspartame (the artificial sweetener in Equal and NutraSweet) causes cancer. Well, actually, it does cause cancer in lab rats; the question is whether its carcinogenic properties extend to humans, and at what levels/doses. When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother and pretty much every grown-up woman I knew kept a little enameled or cloisonne pill holder in their purses. I used to beg my grandmother to let me use the tiny tongs that came with hers to drop sacccharine pills into her after-dinner coffee. My grandmother died of lymphoma, probably more closely related to her years of smoking than to her saccharine intake. Or was it?

I think Governor Paterson's tax has more to do with New York State's budget deficit than anything else, but I still have to wonder whether he thinks it's better to risk blindness or cancer than fatness. Remember that study where nearly 90 percent of people surveyed said they'd rather be blind than fat? I guess Governor Paterson has his finger on the public pulse after all.

"You look great! Have you lost weight?"

I went "home" for the weekend last week--back to Madison, where I lived for 16 years. It was great to see old friends, neighbors, acquaintances, etc., and very emotional, too. It takes time, lots of time, to forge friendships. This year is rather a lonely year in Syracuse.

It was great to see those friends, but I really wish so many of them hadn't commented on my weight. The consensus seemed to be that I was looking better than usual so I must have lost weight. This conflation really, really bugs me. Why is a weight loss always associated with looking good?

I went to the doctor today and got on the scale for the first time in probably 6 months. Yes, I have lost a couple of pounds, but not, as one friend suggested, "a ton of weight!" For someone my size--five foot one and a little, 161 pounds--a couple of pounds makes little visible difference.

"You look good because you're happy," my husband pointed out. That's right. I'm engaged and invigorated by my new work and by the challenges and curiosities of making a home in a new place, and it shows.

I look forward to a day when looking good and losing weight are two separate and distinct ideas. And when we think twice before mentioning them in the same breath.

Naturally fat?

This comment, made in response to an earlier post, seems to epitomize so much of the anti-obesity attitude that I thought it deserved its own post:

Of course there's nothing wrong with being fat. I don't get why fat people get offended when we say that obesity is dangerous. We're not talking about people who are fat. We're talking about people who are dangerously obese. You remind me of the naturally skinny girls who get offended when people speak out against anorexia nervosa and complain, "Why does everyone hate skinny people? Wah!"

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being naturally fat or naturally skinny. But if someone is deathly thin or morbidly obese then it is a real problem.

So first of all, please tell us how to distinguish between "naturally fat" and "morbidly obese." What is "naturally fat"? Is it the-amount-of-fat-I would-have-had-if-I'd-never-gone-on-a-diet? Is it 5 pounds "overweight"? 20? 50? Is it the same for you as it is for me? Is it fat that comes from eating avocados and almonds as opposed to chocolate cake and ice cream? Who decides what constitutes natural fat vs. unnatural fat?

I'm fascinated by the semantics around this issue. Morbidly obese = morbidity = a death sentence if you're fat. When's the last time you heard anyone called "morbidly skinny"? And yet semi-starvation can certainly kill you.

Personally I don't know any "naturally skinny girls who get offended when people speak out against anorexia nervosa." Someone who is thin but not eating disordered typically wouldn't be offended by this. Someone who's eating disordered, either diagnosed or subclinically, might well be offended because the nature of anorexia is to be ego-syntonic. They identify the illness with themselves and will defend it to the death--their own. They can't help it; it's a symptom of the disease.

I hope my readers will weigh in (so to speak) on this one. I'd like to know what you think.

"She's as big as a house!"

I spent last weekend at a reunion of my extended family. I've spent very little time with my family over the last 20 years. Many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins still live in the same little square of suburban south Jersey where I grew up. I moved away at 16 and never lived in the vicinity again.

And since my grandparents died--my grandmother 18 years ago, my grandfather 5 years ago--I haven't seen the extended family very often. We get together at funerals and weddings, and that's about it. Last weekend my aunt and a cousin planned a reunion of the very large extended family, so it was the first time in a while I saw many of the relatives I grew up with.

For the most part the weekend was wonderful--except for the fat talk. I knew there would be fat talk; there always is, with my family, most of whom are not fat, all of whom are very conscious about fat.

Among other things we created an epidemiological chart showing diseases in the family. Everyone was encouraged to list those that affected them. I wrote "eating disorders" and "anxiety" on the chart. My cousin L. happened to be standing nearby when I'd finished. L. has been fat for much of her life--anywhere from 20 to 120 pounds overweight. She's extremely judgmental about weight (most of all of her own, of course) and brings up the subject often.

L. has two daughters, both grown now. One of her daughters had bulimia as a teenager, or so I thought. I've always liked my cousin A. a lot, and was sorry she wasn't at the reunion. I turned to cousin L and asked, "A. had bulimia, right? How's she doing now?" (Cousin L. knows about my daughter Kitty's anorexia.)

Cousin L. (angrily): She said she had bulimia, but I never saw any evidence of it, and I'm a clean freak. I think I would have seen it.

Me: Why would she say she had it if she didn't? And didn't she end up in the hospital with a burned esophagus at one point?

Cousin L.: Well, all I can tell you is that she's big as a house right now. Big as a house.

Me: (just looking at her, saying nothing)

Cousin L.: It's a shanda the way she's let herself go. I've lost a lot of weight recently, and so has J. (her other daughter). Doesn't she look great?

Me: I wish A. had come to the reunion. I'd like to see her.

Cousin L.: (walking away) Big as a house. It's terrible.

This conversation pretty much embodies my family's attitudes toward eating disorders and weight--and, I daresay, the attitudes of many. Eating disorder, shmeating disorder, right? We don't take that stuff seriously. It's all a put-on, a game, a manipulation. But fat--now that we take seriously. Being fat is a crime. You shouldn't leave your house if you're too fat. You wouldn't want anyone else to see you.

And that's why I live a thousand miles away from my extended family. And always will.

A headline I couldn't resist

Obesity Researchers May Need Jaws Wired Shut

Warning: There's an egregious fattie picture accompanying this article--not headless but with eyes rolled back in ecstasy? abandon? seizure? as the fork is lifted. But there are some pretty good lines in here.

Fat matters

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that my family used the Maudsley approach to help our 14-year-old daughter recover from anorexia. (Here's a link to the whole story as published in the New York Times Magazine.)

In Maudsley, parents take charge of their child's eating while they're in recovery. So it was up to my husband and me to devise meal plans for our daughter. Like most anorexics, she needed a lot of calories each day to gain weight--upwards of 4,000 calories a day during one phase of recovery. Because the act of eating was so terrifying and difficult for her, and because, like most anorexics, she endured many stomachaches, our strategy was to get as many calories as possible into the smallest volume of food.

What this meant, practically, was that our daughter ate a lot of high-quality, high-fat and -protein foods: Almond butter. Ice cream. Mac and cheese. (Some of our favorite recipes are here.)

Now this study confirms our instincts about what to feed our daughter. Fat, it seems, matters a lot when it comes to recovery from anorexia. Recovering anorexics who ate higher-density (translation: higher fat) foods were less vulnerable to relapse. I could speculate about why, but the bottom line is that for true recovery, you've got to eat fat. Lots of it. Not just x number of calories, but high-fat calories.

Fat can make the difference between true recovery and a lifetime of suffering.

Fat matters.

The virtues of a high-fat diet

Since fat has been demonized so consistently in the media lately, I thought it was worth reporting this study on the link between diet and seizures.

For children with seizures, eating a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates can significantly reduce the number of seizures they have. Which, when you think about it, is a fascinating bit of information.

People in recovery from anorexia need a lot of fat in their diets to restore normal brain functioning. Something I told my daughter over and over while she was recovering was that her brain needed fat in order to work properly.

It's true.

Fat karma

This study, reported in the New York times, confirms what some of us have known for years: Fat cells, like other matter, cannot be destroyed. Each adult has a certain number of fat cells, and that number remains constant throughout your life. When it comes to anything to do with metabolism, the body seems to be very efficient at seeking out and maintaining a state of homeostasis.

E.A. Sims' famous Vermont Prison Studies found that prisoners who were fed 75 percent more than normal gained relatively little weight, and quickly returned to their normal weights when their normal eating resumed, we've understood this mechanism. Notice that the word their is highlighted, because, as we know, there is no one weight that's "normal" for everyone.

So it's not surprising to find that the number of fat cells in an adult human remains more or less constant. But you can bet your sweet tooth that corporations--I mean obesity researchers--are going to keep scrambling to find ways to change that magic number.

So far, every effort we've made to futz with metabolism has either been unsuccessful or backfired and created more harm than good. Maybe we'd do well to take a more Buddhist approach: Your fat karma is unalterable, at least in this lifetime.

Thank you, Canberra Times

for publishing this opinion piece about the connection between anti-obesity hysteria (my word, not theirs) and eating disorders.

Thank you for pointing out the real and tragic human anguish behind eating disorders. Thank you for daring to question the tactics, if not the content, of campaigns against fat.

And thank you for this last line:

. . . let us not forget to protect the innocence and confidence of a child's innate self-image.

Amen.

Some of the right moves (maybe) for all the wrong reasons (definitely)

That was my initial reaction to the news that a British ban on marketing "unhealthy" foods during children's television programming is now being looked to as a model by other European countries.

The rationale behind the ban was that it would--can you guess?--help fight obesity in British children. It's a testament to the pervasiveness of fatphobia: Only the O word could be a strong enough incentive to go up against the powerful free-market forces that throw commercials at kids.

Under normal circumstances, to suggest that maybe we don't need to turn kids into little consumers is something like saying you're a commie pinko who doesn't believe in capitalism. (Which I don't, but that's another story.) But when you brandish the O word, it seems, even the junk food marketers hang their putative heads in shame and back off. A little.

That this comes in the context of a British government ad campaign to fight obesity that has no idea what it's doing is hardly surprising. In fact, the ad campaign is a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with the war on obesity in the first place.

Conflicts over how exactly to execute this campaign abound. As the New York Times reported yesterday,

The government, for instance, wanted to be able to keep junk food brands from using the [newly developed anti-obesity] logo, but the food industry wanted to leave that decision to marketers.

Already we're landed smack in the midst of the debate over what, exactly, constitutes healthy and unhealthy food. Which, I need hardly add, the British government is not going to resolve, because, as we keep saying here, there are no unhealthy foods. There may be patterns of eating that aren't so good for you, but we know what happens when you demonize certain foods as "unhealthy": They become ever more appealing and powerful.

This is just one example of the kind of ridiculousness the British government is about to get into. Some of the suggestions in its plan to reduce childhood obesity seem positive, like promoting bicycle riding (great!) and offering cooking lessons in schools (also great, if we're talking about real cooking and not what passes for school cooking, which is opening packets and boxes).

But I find it very telling indeed that it takes the dreaded O word to go up against the monied powers that be. Marketing to children is just plain wrong, folks, whether you're selling Barbie dolls, candy bars, or educational computer games. It's wrong because all advertising is a form of manipulation, and our cultural values didn't use to support manipulating young children. And they still shouldn't.

Meanwhile, the Brits are busy fighting over what the logo for this new anti-obesity campaign should be. I'd love to see what's on the table: A headless fattie with a red line through him/her? A piece of chocolate cake with a red line through it? How about a cutesy marketing jingle about not stuffing your face? Really, the mind boggles at the possibilities.

If only all this energy could be used for good. For making the lives of children and adults truly better, and not just a knee-jerk response to the latest hysteria.

A little question of semantics

When I showed my daughter the NYT piece on the fatosphere the other day, her only comment was, "But you're not fat."

What she meant, of course, was "You're not that fat."

Put me next to, say, Ellen Pompano, and I certainly look fat. Put me next to someone who weighs 400 pounds and I don't look fat. Or I don't look as fat.

Fat and thin are words that exist mainly in relation to each other. At the extremes of each range we can certainly identify them correctly. But in the vast middle, our judgment becomes much more relative.

Semantics plays a role in the current anti-obesity hysteria. For starters, the definitions and rules changed in 1998, when the cutoff for overweight was lowered from 27.3 to 25 on the BMI chart. Bingo--instant overnight overweight for millions.

As Paul Campos has pointed out in The New Republic, the way we talk about fat and thin, oveweight and obese and underweight, is something of a shell game.

Fat qua fat is not the problem. Because, after all, we all have fat on our bodies. What's more, we need fat. Without it, your body doesn't work well and your brain sure as hell doesn't work right. I've seen the evidence up close and personal, and it's not pretty.

Think about it the next time you find yourself saying, "But I'm so fat!" or the next time you look in the mirror. Come back and tell me how it changed your perception.

Et tu, Prevention?

It's been a while since this magazine geek has looked at Prevention magazine. What I remember from the last time--maybe 10 years ago--was that Prevention was a pretty good health-related magazine, with in-depth articles, exposés, thoughtful journalism, and some reader service--the tips and tricks kinds of articles.

This evening I looked it up online; I'd been told there was an article in the current issue I should see. I got to Prevention's home page, and was immediately assaulted by the following headlines:

Kick-Start Your Metabolism!
Flat Belly Diet! Tips to Shed Pounds Fast
Eat Chocolate to Lose Weight
Calculate Your BMI
Eat Healthfully and Fight Disease
Heart-Smart Foods
Melt Fat With Every Step
Lose Up to 15 Pounds in 32 Days
Eat Up, Slim Down

Dear editors: There's more to life than obsessing over fat and weight loss. You'd think, reading this page (and this was just the home page--there's more farther in), that losing weight was the only meaningful measure of health.

Seeing it like this was a visceral reminder of our national obsession, and just how unhealthy it is.

And another Leaden Fork award goes to

all the folks involved with this incredibly tasteless book.


How to Get Fat is one of a series of so-called "self hurt" books. We know they're supposed to be funny because of the Dick-and-Jane-style illustrations. Other titles in the series include How to Get Into Debt, How to Drive Like a Maniac, and How to Traumatize Your Children. Now there's a knee-slapper. They're all published by an outfit called Knock Knock, which describes itself this way:

We are Knock Knock, a semi-spanking-new design company with aspirations to greatness. We concoct, manufacture, and distribute witty objects of cosmopolitan panache. . . . Our customers comprise the impish, the dapper, the droll, the young-at-heart—those who feel misunderstood by Santa-inflected wrapping paper and maudlin gilded greeting-card sentiments that rhyme. . . . Knock Knock seeks to integrate art and commerce—creating original, authentic, noncynical products that support themselves in the marketplace so that we don’t have to deal with “clients.”. . . Rather than a product category, material, or target market, Knock Knock’s unifying force is a sensibility. Also, we read a lot.

I'm all for poking fun at ourselves, but this one just doesn't seem funny. The humor here derives from the usual assumption that being thin is a choice and that any idiot would certainly choose it. It's really nothing more than a po-mo diet book.

Should you feel like weighing in on this book, you can contact the publisher at info@knockknock.biz or call (800) 656-5662.

Keep Santa fat and feed the hungry

I have a feeling I've come to this story late here in the fatosphere . . . but no matter. Better late than never. Thanks to littlem for sending me the link to this awesome site.

Sign the petition there to Keep Santa Fat, and the keepers of the site will donate a pound of food to America's Second Harvest.

While you're at it, make your own donation. I hate to think of anyone going hungry, at this time of year or any other.

Would you rather be fat or live another 20 years?

Readers of this blog have no doubt heard about the study* that showed a shockingly high percentage of people would rather be blind, lose a limb, live a shortened lifespan, and suffer other calamities--so long as they didn't have to be fat.

Now a new study may put that fatphobia to the test. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have found that nematode worms who were exposed to one of the tricyclic antidepressants lived up to 30 percent longer lifespans. Their hypothesis: the drug disturbed the balance of chemicals in the brain and created a "perceived, but not real" state of starvation that altered the creatures' natural lifespans.**

Sounds like sci fi, doesn't it? After all, humans have been chasing a longer lifespan since Ponce de Leon hunted for that fountain--and probably long before that. But wait, said the researchers, even if this effect could be shown in people, they're not going to go for it, because that class of medications causes "weight gain and increased appetite."

So someday we really might be faced with a choice between being fat and living significantly longer.

What would *you* do?

*See www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/06-05-16-02.all.html
** See www.news-medical.net/?id=32859

"Mom, I'm too fat!"

These are the words to strike terror into a mother's heart, especially if you've ever dealt with anorexia or bulimia in your house. Every child or teen with an eating disorder says these words at one time or another. They reflect the delusion at the heart of an eating disorder, the distorted perceptions of her/his own body and the anguish caused by those distortions.

I heard them many times in the year my older daughter was sick with anorexia. But this time, this weekend, they were uttered by my younger daughter.

My younger daughter sat with us at the table during the year and a half of re-feeding. She lived through the horror and terror of it all with us. We tried to protect her from the worst of it, but she certainly experienced firsthand the nightmare of living with an eating disorder. This may contribute to the reality that as the sibling of a child with anorexia, she's 8 times more likely to have it than other kids her age.

And we've talked about it. Boy, have we talked. We've talked about unrealistic body images and the media. We've talked about food-as-fuel. We've talked about bodies-come-in-all-shapes-and-sizes. We've talked about health-at-every-size.

I thought we'd talked our way through the dangerous parts and onto the solid shores of reason and understanding.

But the trouble is, as my younger daughter informed me, I just don't understand. I don't understand what it's like to be in 7th grade and be a girl. I don't understand what it's like to be a year or two behind when it comes to puberty, to still have a child's body, a child's shape, in a world full of budding young women.

"They look like this, Mom," she cried one night this weekend, sucking in her stomach to show me. Whereas my younger daughter still has the round shape of a child. She's younger than everyone else in her class, shorter, and clearly going through puberty later.

I don't think other kids are making fun of her for her childish figure. I think this is a case of institutionalized self-loathing. But I don't know for sure. I do know that seventh grade girls diet. A lot. And that they talk about their diets. And they talk, as young women (and some young men) do, about how fat they are.

They talk about how fat their butts and thighs and stomachs are. I know these kids; I've chaperoned them on field trips and come into their classrooms for years. They are not fat. They are not the headless fat children whose photos you see accompanying every media scare on the subject of childhood obesity. They look no different from kids of my generation, except that maybe they're a little taller.

Even if they were fat, of course, it would make no difference.

These children are bombarded with media images of super-thin women and men, and so that body type and paradigm comes to look very normal to them. They watch a lot of TV and movies and they learn to see themselves as sexualized from an early age.

They're bombarded at school with hysterical warnings about body fat and obesity and unhealthy eating. They are forced to watch Supersize Me. They are weighed and their BMIs calculated, in front of other children. Their body fat is "measured" (however inaccurately) with calipers, all in front of other children. They are taught that there's good food and bad food, that some foods are unhealthy, that some bodies are unacceptable. They're taught that you can never strive hard enough to be thin, to exercise, to avoid certain foods.

Some of them develop eating disorders. Maybe they would anyway; there's no way to know. We do know that some kids come hard-wired to be susceptible to an e.d., and that those disorders can then be triggered by environment and other factors. So maybe if they grew up in a culture that wasn't obsessed by issues of weight and body size and shape, they would pass through the dangerous time of adolescence without ever developing an e.d. If they grew up in a culture where it was OK to be who you are--fat or thin, intellectual or street-savvy, funny or serious--they would come out of adolescence loving themselves, not hating who they are.

Maybe this is all wishful, deluded thinking on my part.

I do know that those words my younger daughter said struck pure terror into my heart. That we will be talking about this from every direction I can think of over the next few months and years. That I'll be watching her like a hawk for the first inklings of an eating disorder, watching with terror a lump in my throat, with the memories of my older daughter still fresh, and with the determination to do whatever it takes to save her if she is in fact in danger.

But my god, how I wish I didn't have to. It occurs to me for pretty much the first time how different this would feel is the culture supported me rather than fought me. But in this culture and time, to advocate for, as Ellyn Satter says, a "joyful, comptent relationship with food," is to swim against the current, to fight the mainstream, to be perceived in many ways and places as a nutcase, a fruitcake, a mom-with-an-agenda in the worst possible sense of the word.

I've developed a thick skin. I don't care what the powers that be think. I care only about my children, and other people's children. But it's so easy to buy in to the culture's sick obsession. So easy, in a certain way, to turn to my younger daughter and say, "You do have a little tummy, dear--why don't we go on a diet? Together?" To unwittingly set her up for either a lifetime of physical self-loathing or disordered eating, or the hell of a full-blown eating disorder.

Not today. Not my daughter.

In the category of "We coulda told ya"

comes this story from the International Journal of Obesity, which reports that there's something even worse for you than being too fat or too thin: thinking that you're too fat or too thin.

According to the article,

. . . individuals with overweight or underweight perceptions have an increased chance of experiencing medium (40 per cent and 50 per cent, respectively) and high levels of psychological distress (50 per cent and 120 per cent, respectively).

By comparison, being fat or thin in and of themselves were

not associated with psychological distress.


According to lead researcher Dr. Evan Atlantis from the University of Sydney, "weight perceptions that deviate from societal 'ideals' are more closely and consistently associated with psychological distress than actual weight status, regardless of weight misperception."

In other words, to misquote Maria Muldauer (and to make an unforgiveably bad pun), it ain't the meat, it's the emotion.

Atlantis went on to say, "Our findings suggest that public health initiatives targeting psychological distress at the population level may need to promote healthy attitudes towards body weight and self-acceptance, regardless of weight status."

Yup. We coulda told ya that. But it's nice to hear it from someone in the science community anyway.