Forever A Fangirl

Healthy Weight Week, Jan. 21-27

Most of this article just completely blows my mind. Just one horrifying example after another about self-destruction and how society encourages it.

Are you sick of advertising that portrays American women as excessively thin, hollow-eyed, and self-absorbed?

by Francie M. Berg

If so, you may be happy to know that during Healthy Weight Week, Jan. 21-27, health providers across the country emphasize the value of maintaining one's own natural weight, rather than losing weight.

The year 2006 was not reassuring. It was a year in which fashion industry moguls admitted that a size zero is no longer thin enough for them: they demand models in size double zero, negative zero, and even negative two. The death in Brazil last November of model Ana Carolina Reston, who reportedly carried just 88 pounds on her 5-foot-8 frame, and three other self-starvation deaths in quick succession within a few weeks in that country, caused an uproar, but little effective change. While the city council in Madrid, Spain, did start a small rebellion, banning models with a body mass index under 18 from the Madrid Fashion Week runways, a move that reportedly would bar up to 40 percent, model agencies deny their models are too thin. They reject regulation of any kind. We just wouldn't use someone who was really underweight or too thin, says Sarah Doukas, Kate Moss's agent.

Dieters weak from hunger can be found anywhere. In New York, subway authorities recently announced that fainting dieters are among the top causes of train delays. Between Oct. 2005 and Oct. 2006, sick passengers caused about 400 delays each month or some 12 to 14 delays every day. Most of these were dieters who faint from dizziness, said Asim Nelson, transit emergency medical technician.

However the media continue to emphasize the risks of obesity and downplay any risks of underweight, in spite of national studies that dispute this logic. Research at the National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Apr. 2005), reveals that the risks of obesity have been much overstated, and that in fact fewer deaths are associated with overweight than with underweight or with so-called normal or "healthy" weight.

This hysteria over weight is causing tragic problems for children and for people of all sizes. Instead, we want to help them move ahead to improving their health in positive ways,² says Francie M. Berg, a licensed nutritionist and adjunct professor at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, whose organization Healthy Weight Network started Healthy Weight Week 14 years ago.

Berg contends that whether a person enjoys good health or not is more a matter of lifestyle than weight. During Healthy Weight Week people are encouraged to improve health habits in lasting ways: to live actively, eat normally and nutritiously, relax and feel good about themselves and others. It's a time to celebrate the diversity of real women, as well as men, and to help them shift focus from failed weight loss efforts to being healthy at their natural sizes.

One of the week's events is Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day, on Tues., Jan. 23. The 18th Annual Slim Chance Awards are announced, spotlighting the four worst weight loss products. This year's winners:
PediaLean, a fiber capsule for children that can clump into an obstructive mass in their throats and stomachs; Isacleanse, said to remove [nonexistent] toxins and pollution from your body; ChitoGenics, claimed to block sugars, carbohydrates and fats; and the Magic Ear Staple, stapled into the cartilage
of your upper ear to suppress appetite. (For past awards see
http://www.healthyweight.net/past.html> )

Health experts are only beginning to realize the risks people take in efforts to reshape their bodies to thin ideals. These risks range from abdominal pain, faintness and depression, to bone loss, heart arrhythmias and sudden death, says Berg. Her recent books Underage and Overweight and Women Afraid to Eat, articulate the damage done to children and women by current approaches to weight in our society.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Diet

1. Diets don't work – dieters don't lose weight in a lasting way.

Dieting causes short-term weight loss, continuing no more than six months, followed by weight

regain. Often more weight is gained than was lost. (Studies show dieters are more likely to become

overweight than people who eat normally.)

2. Dieting can cause lasting injury and even death.

Sudden death from electrolyte imbalance or heart arrhythmia is a real risk. Each year dieting

is related to severe health damage and deaths in the United States.

3. Dieting disrupts normal body processes.

Rapid weight loss puts the body in a stressful, defensive state. The body tries to defend itself against

weight loss, decreasing metabolism, heart rate, temperature, and sexual function, as well as

intellectual, emotional, and social activity.

4. Dieting causes weight cycling (repeated weight loss and regain).

Research shows weight cycling is associated with higher death rates.

5. Dieters often feel tired, lightheaded, and have difficulty concentrating.

They may lack essential nutrients, including high quality iron, zinc, protein, and calories.

6. Dieting leads to binge eating, overeating, and chaotic eating patterns.

Dieting disrupts normal eating. By definition, dieters override internal signals of hunger and satiety,

so they may no longer know when they are hungry or when they are full.

7. Dieting leads to disordered eating, and is the primary precursor for eating disorders.

Many experts believe the high rate of eating disorders in the U.S. is due in part to high numbers of

people restricting food and becoming chronic dieters.

8. Dieting causes food preoccupation.

People who diet spend more time thinking about food and eating. This "drive to eat" when food is

limited is believed to be a survival trait against starvation.

9. Dieting diminishes women, and increasingly men and children.

Dieting focuses attention on appearance, rather than character, talent, or personal fulfillment. And

unfortunately, dieting mothers become role models for dieting children.

10. Dieters put their lives on hold, "waiting to be thin."

Instead of playing the anticipation game, accept and respect yourself and others. Live the life you

want now. Develop a healthy lifestyle, and let weight come off as a result, or not. Live actively, eat

well, and feel good about yourself. You deserve the best – right now.

______________________________________________________________________________

Adapted from "Top 10 reasons not to diet," in

Women Afraid to Eat: Breaking Free in Today's Weight-Obsessed World,

by Frances M. Berg. Copyright 2006, 2001, 2000. Healthy Weight Network. All rights reserved. This special feature may

be used as a handout or in nonprofit newsletters for educational purposes only and when printed with this citation. It

may not be reprinted in books or publications for sale or on the Internet without written permission from the publisher.

Healthy Weight Network, Hettinger, ND 58639 (www.healthyweight.net).

Currently listening : Rather Ripped By Sonic Youth Release date: By 13 June, 2006

Elizabeth Edwards's Weight: WHY DO YOU CARE?!

EDITED ON 8/3

Sadly, I called this one a few days ago when I first saw Elizabeth Edwards--full length--at the Democratic National Conventions. Many people it seems, cannot think of anything intelligent to discuss about the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, so they make ugly jokes and do search inquiries into her weight.
Someone in the search query above wants to know her height--perhaps a kinder-hearted soul who suspects Elizabeth is very short and doesn't carry her weight well.

Elizabeth Edwards is fat.

So WHAT???

Most likely she is smarter and richer than you. She's been highly successful and respected lawyering out of the State's Attorney's Office, doing tons of charity work, and running the foundations established in her deceased child's memory. She suffered through the accidental death of her 16 year- old- son Wade, and though Wade's younger (by about 2 yrs., I guess) sister survives, Elizabeth later went on to give birth to a child in her late forties, and again at age fifty, "in order to bring joy back" into the Edwards's family life. She also appears to be a very supportive spouse in a loving marriage (as one of my blogger friends pointed out in his comment following this post).
If she, after the insanity of campaigning, settles in and loses weight, will you like her then?
'Cos she'll still be smarter, richer, and probably nicer than you.

The So-Called Fat Epidemic

Been meaning to post something about the very plain-spoken, sensible researcher (and analyzer of so-called research) Professor Paul Campos. I've followed this man's writings for the last decade. This article, in the Q and A format, makes for easy skimming, allowing a glimpse of what this guy is saying and why you should put your preconceptions and misconceptions and just out-right prejudice against FAT away for a couple of minutes and READ:

Keep Yer Flab On
By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted July 15, 2004.
The so-called fat epidemic is a product of upper-class white hysteria that demonizes everyone who does not fit a certain body type.

We're at war and the enemy is obesity – or so warn the doctors. U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona has declared obesity "the terror within because it is every bit as devastating as terrorism." It allegedly affects nine million children and two out of three adults, and claims the lives of 400,000 Americans every year.

It takes a brave man to speak out in favor of flab today – and that man is Paul Campos.

The Obesity Wars are nothing but a big lie about fat, says the author of a provocative new book titled "The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Health is Hazardous to Your Health." Campos argues that Americans are in fact only a mere 15 pounds heavier than we were 20 years ago. What have become more stringent in that duration are public health standards for ideal weight, which now define the vast majority of us as "overweight" or "obese" – and that includes Hollywood icons like Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

What's more, according to Campos, there is no documented relationship between weight loss and health. He claims that medical studies that link obesity to wide range of diseases, including heart disease and cancer, are misleading and often self-serving. The result is a cultural hysteria that uses a dangerous and pervasive myth to demonize all – especially poor people of color – who do not fit the shrinking standards of the ideal body weight.

Campos talked to AlterNet from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Your central claim is that major epidemiological studies show little or no link between weight and health, be it risk for cancer or heart disease. That sounds kind of kooky to a lay person.

For the vast majority of people in the United States, their weight does not give you any meaningful information about their likely overall health. You can look at the roughly 75 percent of the population that has a Body Mass Index (a measure of your weight relative to your height) between 18.5 and 32 or so. That entire range, which represents about 80 pounds for an average height woman (5 ft. 4 in.), you will not see any significant variation in terms of risk (of contracting a disease).

So you're saying that there is no difference in terms of overall health between someone who would be considered "obese" with a BMI of 32 and someone who has the "normal" BMI of 20.

There are two points here. One is that for the vast majority of people, weight simply isn't going to tell you anything relevant about their health in and of itself. And second that among those groups that do show some meaningful correlations with health, we need to unpack the extent to which the weight is causal or merely a marker for other things, such as poor nutrition, socio-economic status, weight cycling brought on by dieting etc.

If a person with a BMI of 32 has a significantly increased health risk but is far less likely to have health insurance than someone with a BMI of 25, what is really relevant here? The BMI or health insurance?

So you do make a distinction between weight and a healthy lifestyle. Eating well and exercising is important to good health but it is not necessarily connected to weight loss.

Absolutely. The war on fat is based on the assumption that if people have a healthy lifestyle they'll be thin. Now we know that's not true. Now we don't know the extent to which it's not true – i.e. what percent of the population would be "overweight" or "obese" if they had a healthy lifestyle – but we know it's a very significant percent.

One of the things I've found exasperating about this issue is that many of the people who are making these claims are themselves "overweight" or "obese." So their own bodies literally embody a contradiction of their own claims.

Have we always made this connection between being thin and being healthy?

There is a long and complicated cultural history here, but here's the short version. In the first two decades of the twentieth century there was a strong aesthetic swing toward an ideal of thinness. The notion was first pushed forward by Christian Dior, the French fashion designer. It caught on and in the United States you saw the flapper phenomenon of the 1920s.

What happened essentially is that this cosmetic preference became transformed into a medical judgment through a complex process, where doctors began giving credence to this new cultural preference for thin-ness. The guy who played the biggest role is Louis Dublin, the head of actuarial statistics for Metropolitan Life Insurance in the 30s and 40s. He became absolutely convinced that people who were thin would have the best health, even though he had no data to back this up at all. But he constructed these height/weight tables and gave countless speeches to medical groups advocating that idea. The medical establishment then picked up on this notion and ran with it.

What happens in these kind of cultural processes is that cosmetic preferences get medicalized and then moralized. So it's not only that we like thinness because it is fashionable but it becomes that thinness is actually good for health. And what's more, if we're not thin, it's our fault and we're bad people. It becomes a moral good.

That process has been going on in the United States for about 75 years and it's produced the current moral hysteria.

And these standards for what constitutes thinness have become progressively more demanding as well. Even a decade ago, by cultural aesthetic standards, being 5 ft. 5 inches and 125 pounds was considered thin. Today, you'd have to be 110 pounds to qualify.

The goalpost is constantly being moved. What was considered thin 75 years ago would be considered fat today. Marilyn Monroe, for example, would have to play fat roles in Hollywood today.

The whole diet culture is a form of eating-disordered thinking – a form of anorexic ideation, to use the technical term. To be 5'5" and think that you'd be better off if you were 110 is a form of anorexic thinking. So when you get all this nonsense from these public health officials bombarding us with messages about how we're eating ourselves to death, what we're getting is the message of an anorexic culture being advertised to the nation as a whole.

Everybody is now supposed to have the obsessions that are typical of upper-class white people with strong control needs and perfectionist tendencies – and who project those tendencies on to their bodies.

Demonizing Fat in the War on Weight

I admit that what caught my eye about this article was the references to scholar Paul Campos, whom I've respected as a historian and dogged voice in the wilderness in re: fat for many years. Ten years ago, I was a fat activist in the active sense. I was quite large and healthy, other than being "obese." As my readers know, I developed a non-fat-related heart condition due to a virus five years ago and have since had to modify my food intake and exercise regimen in an effort to extend my life. At the time of my foray into the world of heart disease, I had given up dieting and bingeing and was maintaining a steady weight--unlike the previous decades of "yo-yo" dieting behaviour--which study after study reports is more damaging than just remaining at one weight. My psyche was less bruised too, when I normalized being fat. I had felt much shame and endured a lifetime of taunts and disparaging looks from strangers and "concern" from the medical community and friends. When one takes into account the "dangers" of being fat, one must look at the situation in a much more comprehensive way than the numbers on a scale or an index of fat chart. We are much more than that as individuals. Boiling it down to over simplicity does no one any good in the goal that should unite all factions on fat--optimizing one's health. ----------------------------------------------

LINK  By DINITIA SMITH Published: May 1, 2004

Almost every day, it seems, there is another alarming study about the dangers of being fat or a new theory about its causes and cures. Just this week, VH1 announced a new reality show called "Flab to Fab," in which overweight women get a personal staff to whip them into shape. But a growing group of historians and cultural critics who study fat say this obsession is based less on science than on morality. Insidious attitudes about politics, sex, race or class are at the heart of the frenzy over obesity, these scholars say, a frenzy they see as comparable to the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism and even the eugenics movement. "We are in a moral panic about obesity," said Sander L. Gilman, distinguished professor of liberal arts, sciences and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of "Fat Boys: A Slim Book," published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. "People are saying, `Fat is the doom of Western civilization.' " Now, says Peter Stearns, a leading historian in the field, the rising concern with obesity "is triggering a new burst of scholarship." These researchers don't condone morbid obesity, but they do focus on the ways the definition of obesity and its meaning have shifted, often arbitrarily, throughout history. Mr. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, has written that plumpness was once associated with "good health in a time when many of the most troubling diseases were wasting diseases like tuberculosis." He traces the equation of obesity and moral deficiency to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In 1914, an article in the magazine Living Age, for example, stated, "Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime." Mr. Stearns cites it in an essay he wrote for the aptly named "Cultures of the Abdomen," a collection to be published by Palgrave Macmillan next November, edited by Christopher E. Forth, a senior lecturer at Australian National University, and Ana Carden-Coyne, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, in England. During World War I, Mr. Stearns writes, some popular magazines actually said that eating too much and gaining weight were unpatriotic, presumably because of concerns about food shortages. In "Fat Boys," Mr. Gilman describes how plumpness used to be associated with affluence and the aristocracy, while today it is associated with the poor and their supposedly bad eating habits. Louis XIV padded his body to look more imposing. During the French Revolution, obesity inspired a rallying cry, "The People Against the Fat," he says. And whereas once the fat man was generally seen as hypersexual, like Falstaff, now he is seen as asexual, like Santa Claus...

In Mr. Stearns's view, 19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. "I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations," he said in an interview. "Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence," Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism...

Other contemporary scholars see a more dangerous underside to the current campaign against fat. Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, argues that obesity is used as a tool of discrimination, citing disturbing similarities to the eugenics movement, with its emphasis on "improving" the species. Obesity in America is "primarily a cultural and political issue," Mr. Campos writes in his new book, "The Obesity Myth" (Gotham), due out this month.

"The war on fat," he argues, "is unique in American history in that it represents the first concerted attempt to transform the vast majority of the nation's citizens into social pariahs, to be pitied and scorned."...

In what may turn out to be his most controversial claim, Mr. Campos writes: "

Contrary to almost everything you have heard, weight is not a good predictor of health. In fact a moderately active larger person is likely to be far healthier than someone who is svelte but sedentary.

" To bolster his argument, he cites several studies, including one published by the Cooper Institute, a private research institution in Dallas. Most medical experts warn of the dangers of fat, but Mr. Campos disagrees. "There is no good evidence," he writes, "that significant long-term weight loss is beneficial to health, and a great deal of evidence that short-term weight loss followed by weight regain (the pattern followed by almost all dieters) is medically harmful." He said in a recent interview: "The current hysteria about body mass and supposedly devastating health effects is creating a stratification in the society of power and privilege based on a scientifically fallacious concept of health. What we are seeing with this moral panic over fat in many ways is comparable to what we saw with the eugenics movement in the 20's." Kathleen LeBesco, associate professor of communication arts at Marymount Manhattan College, also asserts that at the root of the current slimness craze is an effort to stigmatize certain groups. Mr. Stearns has charted the way women in general gradually became the targets of obesity campaigns. The 19th-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton was praised for her "mature figure," he says. "Feminist leaders who were more slender were reproved," Mr. Stearns writes, perhaps because of "the traditional linkage between thinness and discontent."

Then, around the 1890's, suddenly, women were being urged to diet. "Fat began to be obsessively discussed," Mr. Stearns writes. The Gibson girl was rendered as slender, and the weight of Miss America in relation to her height decreased from the 1920's on.

The emphasis on slenderness in women was no accident, Mr. Stearns says. At the same time women were being urged to lose weight, the ideal of motherhood was declining and women were able for the first time to express an appetite for sex. "Dieting was a way, again, to express virtue and self-control even in a changing sexual climate," he writes. And while there are many causes for obesity — cheaper food, more aggressive marketing, bigger portions in restaurants and, of course, increasingly sedentary habits — Mr. Stearns says that gaining weight is still seen as a moral issue, "a sign you were lazy, lacked self-control." He notes that the French have been more successful at weight loss than Americans, partly, he says, because weight loss in France is based on aesthetics, not morality.

Mr. Stearns insists he is not promoting obesity but rather arguing that making people feel guilty for being fat is a useless form of weight control.

In describing the contemporary ethos, he said: "If you fail to lose weight you are demonstrating you're a bad person. It's a big burden. Faced with this additional pressure you are even more likely to end up by saying: `The hell with it! I'm going to get ice cream. I am such a bad person I need to solace myself.' "

WHO'S GOING TO GET FAT ON THE OBESITY BUDGET?

C Susie Orbach 2004

This discovery of a new pill to treat obesity and smoking looks like a
godsend to a government groaning under the weight of the obesity
epidemic. By mucking about with the brain receptors that give cannabis
smokers the munchies, the appetite and desire of those who eat and smoke
too much is meant to be curbed.

Perfect, right? Far from it. Rimonabant, the newest in a long list of
drugs trailed by the pharmaceutical companies that are supposed to deal
with the obesity have been found to be ineffective in all respects
except for transferring NHS monies to the ledgers of the pharmaceutical
companies.

It's not only the NHS that's been out of pocket. Millions are spent by
individuals seeking 'cures' for adiposity. In the States, the figures
from 1990 were a $60 billion spend on diet and diet related products.
That rivals the combined health, welfare and social security budget for
the same period. And the extraordinary thing about this vast amount of
money going to the diet industry is that many individuals who are far
from obese, have come to believe that they must constantly diet.

It isn't that we don't have a serious obesity epidemic. We do. And the government is absolutely right to be concerned.

The launch of a consultation exercise is welcome. Obesity can be a killer as well as a source of anguish and pain to the individuals who are caught inside of it. Working out the ways to deal with those who are currently obese and how to prevent future obesity is crucial.

But we also need some caution. Obesity is a political category with some
intriguing players. We demonise overweight so automatically that we, the
public, the researchers, the government, the eating disorders industry,
the food standards agency, the food activists don't question our
responses to it. Obesity researchers have become adept at writing
abstracts for their papers which draw highly questionable conclusions
about the negative health consequences of overweight which are not
supported by the data in the paper itself. Studies that show no
difference between the health risks of overweight and normal weight
populations are consistently ignored or under reported.

Consider the curious fact that in part, the growth of obesity is has to do with a recent reclassification of the size at which we are deemed fat. The body mass index (BMI) has been revised downwards. Overnight, 39 million Americans - plumpish but not at risk - woke up to find themselves defined as overweight.

Paul Campos, author of the forthcoming The Obesity Myth points out that the new BMI puts Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson as "overweight," while Russell Crowe and George Clooney are now obese.

Who profits by this panic about obesity? Let's be sure that those
invited to solve the problem are not part of creating the problem in the
first place. A population defined as overweight when they are not,
becomes distrustful of its own eating and vulnerable to industries which
profit from their distress.

Take the diet industry for one. It thrives on two notions: first that we could all lose a little weight and second, that all diets fail.

Fat Ladies Need Not Apply

Fat Ladies Need Not Apply
New York Times Op/Ed Online
Published: March 10, 2004

Great opera singers who are larger than life — literally so — are part of opera tradition. Long before the supersized voice and heft of Luciano Pavarotti — outstanding even in a field of weighty talent — there was Luisa Tetrazzini, an early 20th-century diva who famously filled open space with a huge, electronically unassisted voice from a zaftig body. Her appetite for rich food was such that a pasta, chicken and cream dish was named for her.

If the name of the American soprano Deborah Voigt is attached to any one thing, it is the title character of Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos." It is her signature role, the one that shot her to fame when she first performed it 13 years ago in Boston. Her Ariadne at the Metropolitan Opera last year prompted Anthony Tommasini, a critic for The Times, to praise her "arching lyrical beauty" and to add, "She was at once truly grand and amusingly self-deprecating, striking deadpan poses that any Broadway actor would envy."

Little of that seems to have mattered to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, which is producing the Strauss opera in June. It replaced Ms. Voigt — a large woman even when her weight fluctuates downward — with a slimmer and lesser-known soprano who not only fit the casting director's vision of Ariadne, but also fit into the little black cocktail dress chosen for the character.

Opera fans are used to extending their senses beyond seeing a body on the stage, which is but one piece in a pageant. It's the musicality that matters.

But as audiences are graying, opera houses are looking for ways to pack in a younger crowd. Casting directors trying to make opera hip may be turned off by "big hips," like those Ms. Voigt admits to owning. In this case, the decision will deny British audiences an opportunity to hear and see a performer who may be at the peak of her powers. Her voice may be perfect, but at least for Covent Garden, she's too big a star.