fattypatties

In the early Summer of of 1987, I took a job with Manpower at Honeywell in Clearwater, Florida. I was assigned to be a secretary for one of the program engineers in the Shuttle division. I learned a lot about aerospace engineering and how governments built space programs. By April 1, 1988, I was given a permanent job as the Project Administrator of the Space Station program. It was a very different idea then. The space station being built now is scaled down from the hopes of the late 80s. My job was to liason between all the engineers and our customer, McDonnell Douglas. By October of 1989, I was laid off in a major "down-sizing" in the company (over 5000 employees company wide, many more cuts were to follow).

In many ways I was proud of my small contribution to the space program. As a kid, I remember the moon landing vividly and I remember a 6th grade science teacher who challenged us to think about space and what it meant to our little planet.

I cried when I watched the video above. I was inspired by our space program and now it seems like it will go the way of all other great American dreams. It will be commodified and sold off to high bidders who will then fashion it as a profitable toys instead of highest aspirations. I spent the week watching old Star Trek episodes and thinking to myself how different the future is from what it was imagined. Star Trek of the 60s makes frequent references to the space program of the 1990s and early 21st century. Most of its references are laughable and seem silly in light of what really has happened.

Some of it is a good -- I mean we were supposed to have had a great World War III with a mass eugenics program and millions, if not billions, dying (check out the first appearance of Kahn in Space Seed for more details. But we also were supposed to be united as a planet and venturing out into deeper and deeper space by now. And we have not.

As a sociologist, I am aware of some of the problems with how the space program developed. The language of the "final frontier" is fraught with colonialism, ethnocentricism and xenophobic references that go unexamined. I know money is needed for more pressing problems and that many progressives fear the space program as much as they do our military industrial complex. There is a definite connection. The builders of the space station almost all have military divisions. And, of course, Reagan's star wars programs of the 1980s were both silly and frightening.

But, dammit, I miss the naivety of the early space program. I miss the feeling of pride and wonder. I miss the visions of a possible future where major human conditions could be solved and equality was the natural outcome. I watch the early Star Trek episodes and I want to live in a place where people are equal. Okay, there is a lot of sexist stuff, but for the 60s, having women in positions of power and working on ships was radical.

So this past week has been a bit emotional for me. Wednesday, July 20th, was not only the 42nd anniversary of the moon landing, but also it would have been my son's 22nd birthday. Thursday, July 21st, was the end of the Shuttle era and there isn't really a whole lot in the works as Congress spends its time posturing over the so-called debt crisis and NASA officials are all smiles about the comming "commercial era."

I feel old. It doesn't help that this coming Thursday, I will turn 54. I miss so many things and I am saddened by the world as it is because I had a vision of what it could be.

But I do know that it can be better. My favorite line from Apollo 13 comes early in the movie, when Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) is talking to his wife Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) right after the moon walk:

"From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go"

We could decide again. All we need is the vision.

A friend of mine gave me a card that still sits on the fridge. On the front it says "dare to be naive." Over the years I've contemplated a myriad of meanings for the card. This is the meaning I'm contemplating tonight.

The world is absurd, and yet, I am naive enough to want to find its meaning.

I naively think that when people say they want freedom, they know what that means, that trying to contain or control the chaos usually results in less freedom.

I naively think that people will take me at face value. But a false dichotomy grips this land called America. "If you're not for us, then you're agin' us." Can't I just be "for" something without having to take up a whole side. I don't fit. I don't want to fit into this neat box. I like fractals.



I naively think that in order there is chaos and in chaos there is order.

I naively think that I am a free person and that holding an idea that overlaps with one side of this artificial, false divide does not limit me from holding an idea that overlaps with the other side. I am free to have my own side, as I see it.

I naively think that my having a brain is a good thing. Apparently, the world sees it as an inconvenience.

I hold little power. I have no money. My opinion does not count and is not sought. Others decide for me. I am constructed by others and then made to suffer the consequences of the construction as if it were my own doing. I am naive enough to believe I might get to have say in my own identity.

This culture, this place, this 235 year old experiment is falling apart because of this false divide. Turns out that a house divided against itself just collapses.
I am naive enough to think something better might emerge from the implosion (maybe that's just what Vegas taught me).

You may be wondering what triggered this contemplation and its underlying anger, disgust and sadness.

Nothing and everything.

I'm naive enough to speculate and wait around to see what's next. I am naive enough to believe that there has to be a better way.

This month, I am participating in a ReVolution! -- Every Monday in January I plan to write a blog post here about my life and how Health at Every Size℠ has changed my life for better. This is the third installment of five.

HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE℠ AND GETTING OLDER


When I first decided in late 2000 to quit dieting once and for all, I was chronically ill with what I thought at the time was lupus (and have since learned was probably sub-clinical hypothyroidism). For the most part, these symptoms were chronic but not debilitating on a daily basis. I had flare-ups but had settled into routines that seemed to work. I had some sort of pain almost daily but usually dull pain and with regular exercise and eating good food and getting plenty of rest, I felt generally healthy.

I spent the first couple of years re-learning my hunger and satiation cues. I had dieted so much that I literally did not know when I was hungry or what my hunger felt like. In the past, I depended on outside cues to tell me when to eat and how much to eat. This was a process of mindful eating and, frankly, trial and error. I often waited too long at first, feeling ravenous when I finally sat down to eat and then finding I ate so fast that I was full long before I realized it. I slowed down my eating, learned to savor food and learned how to identify hunger before it was starvation.

In December 2002, I got pneumonia and became very weak. It was months before I could walk without gasping for air. I found a great program that started me working out in water with paddles and eventually I was doing 20 minutes on the treadmill and weight training in the gym. I became stronger and my metabolic health was excellent (blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, pulse rate, etc.). AND I didn't lose weight or gain weight.

By the Spring of 2004, I felt the healthiest I had in years. I was still dealing with arthritic symptoms and flare-ups but not as often and not as severe. When we went on the road in The Ample Traveler, I felt good and maintained that feeling for some time. I turned 47 that summer.

It was easy to believe in Health at Every Size℠ under those conditions. When I wrote Taking Up Space with Carl, I was confident and had no doubt that this was a better way of living than the 30 years I spent fighting my body's natural tendency to be bigger.

I sprang my foot in 2004 and had nerve damage that left me walking with a cane, but even that didn't slow me down or shake my confidence. I had so much experience with chronic conditions at that point, that it became just one more thing to care for with my body--an annoyance, but my view of health had long since changed into an understanding of relative health rather than a set criteria. So I felt I was the healthiest I could be with chronic conditions.

Then I turned 50 and the "other biological clock" for women started. I became menopausal, I started having metabolic problems and I went through a rough period with Health at Every Size℠.

The same conditions that are supposedly connected to fatness are connected to aging, especially in women going through "the change." I began to doubt my choice to not diet and spent many days thinking through the whole process. I felt alone in some ways because I had fat-acceptance friends who were talking about how healthy they were and I knew I was not healthy. In fact, it felt like at the time that I was turning into the poster child for all the conditions that they were bragging they didn't have. For a while I kept quiet. I didn't write here and I didn't reach out. I didn't diet, but my reason for not trying to lose weight was that I was thoroughly convinced that it would not work, that I wouldn't lose any weight. I had been down that road and it made me sick and I didn't want to get any sicker. But I wasn't sure about the new road and whether I'd feel better.

I did reach out to some private groups eventually and I began to see that fat women who were going through menopause and who had type 2 diabetes and other metabolic problems were using HAES℠ to help them deal with their conditions. I started reading about these conditions and discovered that there were strong indications that the dieting I had done for 30 years as well as the aging process probably contributed to those conditions.

Let me be clear about another aspect of this. It didn't help that I had little access to health care due to no insurance and it didn't help that I am an underpaid teacher who has to work several jobs to supplement my income in order to be able to teach. Stress doesn't help. Stigma doesn't help. Fear doesn't help. Isolation doesn't help.

So about 2 years ago, upon realizing that many of my health problems, including the chronic conditions that started in 1997, were probably from hypothyroidism,I had another epiphany like the one I had in 2000. I had been misdiagnosed because of the societal and cultural attitudes about fat. In 1997, when I first got sick, I had chronic fatigue. I couldn't sleep well. I caught one infection after another. I was oversensitive to light and had rashes from exposure. I had an abnormal ANA count. I felt like I had the flu all the time with my joints and muscles aching. It wasn't hard to understand why the doctor thought it was arthritic and sent me to a rheumatologist, who, like most specialists, diagnosed me within her paradigm. Thus, lupus.

Except there was one symptom that I ignored and my doctors ignored: I gained 90 pounds in about 6 months. At the time, my paradigm and my doctors' paradigm was calories in/calories burned. I was eating less because I was too sick to eat much, but I went from someone who rode a bicycle everywhere she went (lived 3 miles from school, so at least 6 miles on school days, probably about 30 miles a week total) to someone who was bed-ridden. It seemed obvious that was the reason for the weight gain.

However, rapid weight gain is a symptom of hypothyroidism and no one even explored the possibility at the time. Hypothyroidism mimics lots of other conditions, especially so-called "check-box" conditions like lupus (positive diagnosis for lupus comes from presence of 4 out of 11 symptoms plus elimination of other possibilities).

So as I face an aging body, I've come to realize that my aging process is affected by several factors: hysterectomy (not ovaries) at age 38, untreated hypothyroidism, and years of yo-yo weight gain and pushing my metabolism and immune system to its limits.

In the past year, armed with this new understanding of HAES℠, one that doesn't depend upon me being perfectly healthy to demonstrate its effectiveness, I have become more pro-active in my health care.

First, I bought a wrist cuff to monitor my blood pressure. This has resulted in a significant reduction of my blood pressure meds and a personal realization that my blood pressure and pulse are heightened when I go to the doctor. I take my basal temperature in the morning to monitor the hypothyroidism. I check my blood sugar often. I am faithful in taking my medications and supplements, including menopausal support. I use assistive devices without hesitation because they improve my stamina and overall health.

And most importantly, I continue to practice intuitive eating and try to move my body as best I can. I do not diet. I do not weigh. I do not worry about my body size. The truth is that under thyroid treatment I think I may have lost a little weight (judging from how my clothes fit), but that is an effect of taking care of my thyroid and not intentional.

I am not the spring chicken I once was and I am angry that much of my health was taken from me by cultural standards and socialization that has made my aging more difficult. But the answer cannot lie in now buying into that thinking. I believe with all my heart that if I tried to lose weight now, I would make matters worse. I believe with all my heart that dieting is not good for the health. I believe with all my heart that I dieted my way into disability and early aging.

I believe with all my heart that if I had known and practiced Health at Every Size℠ when I was younger I would be a much healthier 50+ woman.

I tell my story often because I hope it serves as a lesson for others. I told Sarah on the podcast this week that I was excited to see so many young people involved with fat acceptance because they might be spared the years of dieting and the effects of that dieting.

I think that history will look back on this period as barbaric when it comes to dieting and weight loss. We have abundance and resources and instead of celebrating and sharing that abundance, we have created generations of people afraid of food, afraid of our own bodies.

I have come to realize how strong my body is. I have abused this body and fought this body for years and it perseveres and even improves with love and care. As I have researched what dieting does to a body, I have come to realize that I could be dead now from many of the things I did in the name of "getting more healthy."

So let me affirm, right here and right now, that I may not be the usual poster-girl for HAES℠, I should be, because HAES℠ has saved my life and has made me stronger. Health is relative and has a multitude of factors contributing to one's daily constitutions. But given what I've had to fight and what barriers I've faced and what damage I've staved off, I am healthy at my size.

This month, I am participating in a ReVolution! -- Every Monday in January I plan to write a blog post here about my life and how Health at Every Size℠ has changed my life for better. This is the first installment of five.

DIETING MY WAY INTO DISABILITY


For the majority of my life, Mondays were the start day. Every diet, exercise or personal improvement kick I tried started on a Monday. Monday was a day of atonement for the weekend.

Don't get me wrong. I was not someone who blew the diet on most weekends. No, when I put my mind to it, I stuck to the project. If I had never regained the weight I've lost on diets, I would have disappeared several times over by now. My problem was never "will-power." Almost every weight loss effort I did ended with illness. I would be working hard and losing weight and then I would come down with a kidney infection or low potassium or pneumonia. OR I would get very close to the goal weight and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't lose the last little bit.

So with each successive attempt, I got more dysfunctional. I tried laxatives, diuretics and diet pills to help with the last little bit. My body would rebel and start gaining. I've gained weight eating nothing but celery and grapefruit.

I get a kick out of stupid projects like Super Size Me where the person tries to prove that eating nothing but fill-in-the-blank will lead to all sorts of symptoms. I ate so many lemons in a 4 week period one time that my face turned bright red and I had to take cortisone shots to get the inflammation down. I ate so many carrots one time that my finger and toe nails turned orange.

Then I turned 40 and nothing I did made me lose weight. My last few diet attempts were extremely discouraging because I was starving myself and over-exercising and not losing weight. I had yo-yo'd so many times that my survivor abilities were honed to perfection. I could subsist on virtually no food at all.

I suspect my story is not that unusual. I suspect that this is the plight of someone like me whose genetic make-up is determined to survive. My non-smoking older relatives have all been fat and have all lived well into their 80s and beyond. My great-grandfather weighed 300 pounds when he died. He was 99-years-old.

I'm what my husband calls "farm-fat," hard working-salt-of-the-earth fat people who need the extra muscle/fat mass because they work hard at daily chores. I suspect that if I had lived in a fat neutral world I would have accepted this early on and I would be a lot healthier today. Probably not as fat, but still fatter than the average.

But I didn't grow up in that world. I grew up in a world that demanded I lose weight from the time I was eleven years old. With puberty, I put on 20 pounds and that is when the panic began. I attended Weight Watchers at age 12. My yo-yo dieting started early and went on for nearly 30 years.

My message, which I tried to convey in our book, is that I dieted my way into disability.

Let me say that again: I am DISABLED TODAY BECAUSE of MY DIETING HISTORY.

I think this is important to say because the prevailing message is that dieting will spare you from disability and chronic illness. But my metabolic problems occurred first and then the weight came on. (see next week's entry for a discussion of cause and effect).

Health at Every Size℠ is an approach that emphasizes health not weight. Weight or BMI is a poor indicator of health with little medical or scientific support. At the beginning of this century, I consciously gave up dieting and weighing myself. I threw out the scale and have only allowed myself to be weight 3 times in the past 10 years and only paid attention to what I weighed once. I started on a journey to eat when I was hungry and stop eating when I was full (some times called "intuitive eating"). I started moving for the fun of it rather than to lose weight. Judging from my clothes, I have not gained or lost significant weight during that time.

The biggest benefit has been the time I have for other things. During the past 10 years, I have finished my Ph.D., wrote a memoir, made several films, co-produced a radio show, ran 3 different companies and taught at a Community College. Mondays are a renewal day for me still, but it is a day when I look back on things I accomplished the week before and things I want to do this week. NOT a day of regrets or self-loathing.

Am I healthier? Yes and no. It turns out I've done a lot of damage. I got sick in 1997 with what I thought was lupus and what I now believe was hypothyroidism. Before HAES℠ I had good days and bad days. After HAES℠ I also have good days and bad days. Turning 50 was not a good time for me. I got all the fun menopausal, hormonal, post-50 metabolic pain-in-the-butt challenges outlined in the textbook and, of course, had to re-work through all the issues of weight and comfort-in-my-own-skin.

But this I believe with all my heart: If I had not found HAES℠, I would be dead by now.

Because of HAES℠,I have approached my health problems as health problems, not "lifestyle, self-blame" problems and they are slowly getting solved. And I remind myself that many thinner counterparts who are over 50 experience the same challenges I do. It is called aging.

So, I may not be the poster girl for HAES℠, but I am a believer. And I hope that anyone reading this will consider this way of life instead of the yo-yo life I've lived. I suspect I won't live to be 99 years old like my great-grandfather because of the ways in which I fell prey to societal beliefs about weight and health. I grieve this often and have a lot of anger about it. But I do know this. I will live longer for having given up those beliefs.

I wish you long-life and health. Stay tuned next week for more on my Life with HAES℠.

I've been a little out of sorts for the past three days. It's probably nothing. I worked on two big projects immediately after teaching a summer intensive course so I basically spent about 6 weeks running full blast with little rest. It is not unusual for me to deflate a bit after such a busy time.

But when I do, I get a little down about the world. I try to keep that to myself. After all, it is probably more physical than anything else. So why make a big deal.

But it is also a time of introspection and pondering about things. Yesterday, I watched a documentary called The Age of Stupid and today I watched a documentary called For All Mankind. An interesting pairing. The first is about global warming and how we are ignoring the danger signals and proceeding to a point of no return. The second was a look back at the moon landings, narrated by several of the men who have actually walked on the moon.

I am old enough to remember the moon landing and how positive it made me feel about the world and country I lived in. I was aware of other things at the time as well, though both my assessment of the moon and my awareness of troubling social stress like the Vietnam War and racial tensions were naive. I was 11 years old.

But I do remember that I had hope.

I'm not so hopeful any more.

In fact, my feelings about the world around me are usually a high level of skepticism coupled with an overwhelming sense of sorrow. I have found in the ensuing 42 years that the position of disbelief is usually the truest position to take. I just frankly don't think much happens at face value anymore. There is always an agenda.

Of course when Kennedy made the above speech there was an agenda then as well. And it wasn't the explicit agenda. The cold war was on. The race to the moon was as much about military and ideological dominance as it was about exploration and expansion. It was inspirational but it was also devious.

Still, I think the quality has changed some how. I don't think our "leaders," if you want to call them that, rarely bother to cover up their motives or seek to take any kind of high road. We live in an uninspired age.

Yeah, I had a little hope when Obama gave wonderful speeches. But his words have not been met with action. That is partly because Washington and maybe the country (who can tell with the media lies) is deeply divided. But it is also because Obama is a politician first and foremost. We do not need politicians right now. We do not need politics right now.

There are some who would write for the next line that we need reason, but I do not even believe we need reason.

We need soul. We need to understand our nature and the nature of our planet and to feel the damage that our greed, hate and callousness are creating. We need to breath with the earth and feel her pain. We need to get out of our cities and look at the stars and understand our place in the cosmos. We need to feel the full impact in our guts and know that something must change and must change soon.

If I were Mother Earth, I think I'd be putting my collective children into a major "time-out" right now. It isn't that there are not things to be done. We should be doing things. We should be changing things.


But we are not:



We continue consuming, drilling, exploiting, and "expanding wealth" as if no piper was coming to demand payment.

But the piper is sounding the warning and the payment is not far away.

WE could make different choices.

I say "WE" but more and more I feel disenfranchised from that "WEness."

I do not feel the power.

In fact, I see very little in politics or in society that is being devoted to anything more than posturing. Those few of us who want to really see change are co-opted by politics or ignored.

It was present in the Age of Stupid video. I do not live in a large house, drive a large car or consume at anywhere near the level of my fellow Americans. I do not have the smallest ecological footprint, but I do not have the largest either. Yet the filmmakers chose to illustrate how much Americans were out-consuming the rest of the world by putting various cartoon fat bodies up. Yes, no matter what I do for the ecology, the greenies don't want a fat American on their side. Obama's escalation of the War on Obesity represents politics as usual. It is popular on the left to demonize fat people while crying loudly about other "isms." Never mind, the inherent contradiction of promoting one form of hate while claiming to fight another. Never mind, the promise of a different kind of politics while still using "war" both literally and figuratively in just the exact same way as those who came before.


Being disabled doesn't help either. As someone who runs into barriers every day of my life, I am keenly aware that technological advances mean nothing without a will to act and build. The "WE" often does not include the weakest among us.

So when I say "We Choose..." I really mean our so-called Leaders choose. I don't mean politicians, btw, when I say "leaders." I mean the people with power, the Power Elite.

The Power Elite chooses.

Can something be done about all this?

Well, yes. The "can" question is not the "will" question though. WE can do a lot. WE can make up our minds to go to the moon and put the resources towards that end and then get there. WE can end war. WE can end poverty. WE can live more in harmony with our environment.

But WE will most likely not do so.

Unfortunately, the we in the next sentence does include me and you: WE will pay a price for ignoring the truth. We will pay that price even if we knew the truth and were not heard by the Power Elite.

I wish I had an answer for the rest of us. I wish I could figure out what exactly those of us who see the impending disaster could do to get the powers that be to change. But today, right now, I feel like a passenger in a car who knows we should be putting the brakes on and is putting her foot through the floorboard trying to make it stop when it is the driver who has to brake. My imaginary brake won't save us and we are going to crash. It is a slow-mo feeling of impending disaster and a strong sense of helplessness.

That sense of helplessness won't keep me from screaming: "Look Out! Stop!" But ultimately it is not my call. Ultimately some other people are going to have to do something different. Ultimately they will have to make a choice and the consequences of that choice will have a deep impact.

I do have hope. I have the hope of someone who knows what it means to hit a bottom and learn. I fear for us as a species. There was a saying among 12-step programs -- "Don't let your bottom be lower than death."

I believe in Mother Earth. I think she will find a way to restore balance. I believe she will re-order what needs to be re-ordered. I can hear her motherly voice. "We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way."

Please, let's choose the easy way.

MICHAELA HAD SUCH A LARGE RESPONSE THAT THE SURVEY CLOSED IN A LITTLE OVER 3 DAYS! -- SHE SAYS THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT!

============================

Michaela Null, a doctoral student at Purdue University is looking for individuals who are interested in volunteering to participate in her study on the "embodiment of size-accepting fat women, with attention to the ways in which gender, race, orientation, and body size intersect" (from her website):

If you are interested in volunteering to participate in an interview, I ask that you take an electronic informational survey, which will take approximately 5 minutes. Please go here and complete the informational survey. After all survey data is collected, participants will be selected for interviews, which will be conducted in-person, by phone, or via internet video chat, and will last between an hour and an hour and a half.

Participation is voluntary and participants must be at least 18 years old.

This project has been approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board, which protects human subjects of research. I will provide confidentiality to all volunteers and participants will be referred to by a pseudonym in all research documents.

If you have any questions regarding this study, you can contact me at mnull@purdue.edu. For more information on me, you can access my university profile. You can also contact Professor Eugene Jackson, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, at jacksone@purdue.edu.

Sincerely,

Michaela A. Null, Doctoral Student in Sociology, Purdue University

The Obamas are following the Clintons down the road of Health Care Reform and while I had hopes that it was not true this time and I've been impressed with how much further they have gotten, I'm have a feeling of deja vu all over again. I fear that if the stalled health insurance reform does ever get restarted again, it will end up being exactly what the monied interest in health care want: mandatory purchase of health care without or with few restrictions on profit-making at the expense of our health.

But what really is giving me the willies is last week's "Let's Move" campaign "targeting childhood obesity." Does anyone remember the timing of the "Shape Up America"? There stood Hilary Clinton standing behind C. Everett Koop near the end of 1994 while he announced that what America's health care needed the most was for doctors to tell their patients to lose weight like no doctor before 1994 had ever suggested to a patient that weight loss was a good idea. Wait. 1994! Hilary Clinton! Could it be that this was a smoke screen to take the focus off her and her husband's failure to fight the monied interest and give Americans a universal health care system?

Now we have a stalled health care reform that has been watered down to create the same racket we have with car insurance, except that living is something we have a right to and driving a car is a privilege (remember the Declaration of Independence? LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). So either way, I smell smoke and I see mirrors -- don't look over here where deals have been made with the profiteers. Let us misdirect your attention to the horrors of fatness. Except this time, we'll add the good old, "do it for the kids" line and that way you don't have to worry about the fact that after 16 years of telling Americans to diet and most Americans trying to diet, we still have fat people. What's worse, we managed to kill a bunch of people from the drugs and surgeries in the name of losing that fat along the way.

My more liberal friends are taking a gentle approach. They see something well-meaning-ed in Michelle Obama's motherhood and are gently asking her to consider alternatives. I'm not so inclined to let her off that easily. There's too much data and too much history and too much context to just assume that she is miguided. This is the same ole, same ole and I think it's time to shout from the roof tops: "The Emperor and (the Emperess, in this case) have NO CLOTHES!"

But I don't want to stop there. I do not like negative politics and I do not want to echo the Nopublicans in their negativity about everything these days. So on the off chance that Michelle Obama is sincere in her desire to make life better for the next generation and the generations to come, let me put 7 practical and feasible alternatives on the table that would be better at improving the lives of our children than putting them on a diet and making them exercise to the point that they forget how much fun it is to just play:

7 PRACTICAL IDEAS THAT WOULD MAKE LIFE BETTER FOR GENERATIONS TO COME

1. SAFER FOOD AND DRUGS

Our food system is superior in many ways, but the ever growing greed in food production is leading to more and more mishaps from contaminated food to preservatives that are bad for us to frankenfood to the lack of basic foods in poorer neighborhoods with less nutritious foods in their place. In fact, I suspect that many of the sins laid on the doorsteps of "obesity" have more to do with safety of our food than it does with how much we are consuming of it. In addition, more and more people are dying from their medications, including children. Reform at the FDA is needed and I haven't heard one word out of the administration regarding this.

2. SAFER PLAYGROUNDS AND STREETS

Children still grow up in areas where staying at home and watching television helps them live longer than being out in a playground or playing in the streets near where they live because it is dangerous to be in the streets. (Last time I checked, gunshot wounds or being assaulted were not good for your health.) Schools are closing earlier and earlier. In a world where ecommuting and working at home is more possible than ever, we are still insisting that the 9 to 5 work day is optimal and thus we have latchkey kids with no place to go and no safe adults to be near. This is not a matter of playing police. This is a matter of it takes a village to raise a child. Our communities are not child-oriented. They are profit-oriented. If we wanted to create a village where children could move, they would move. Children do not need to be told to play. When they are safe to do so, they move. And by the way, targeting fat kids is going to make this worse, not better. Bullying kids that are different is one of the ways that the streets are unsafe. Blaming fat kids for their health problems is going to fuel those differences and give ammunition to those bullies. In fact, it turns the federal government into one of those bullies.

3. STOP POSTPONING PAYING THE BILLS UNTIL THEY GROW UP

Deficit spending is putting a burden on the next generation and the ones after that. I'm not just talking about government debt. We had a major meltdown of the "credit industry" 2 years ago and our response was to patch it up and keep it. We have been sold a pack of lies about credit, especially long-term debt. Debt used to be something we entered into until the crops were harvested and then we paid it back with an eye on savings in bumper crop years. Now we are told it is okay to buy our toys on credit. The wake up call is that some day it has to be paid. We hit the snooze button instead of making the hard decisions. That has delayed the collapse of an unsustainable system, not fixed it or bailed it out. All of these things means that it is just going to be a bigger problem for our children. If we really loved our children we'd be re-examining this entire economic system and making some deep and abiding changes in our economy.

4. SPEAKING OF DEBT, GET RID OF BORROWING FOR STUDENTS

Nothing screams "I hate my kids" more than student debt. We put pressure on kids to go to school. We design jobs so that a high school education isn't good enough. Then we make it impossible for them to pay for that schooling without first putting themselves in debt. They leave the starting gate with a burden to carry. This burden makes them wage slaves, pure and simple. Now we are adding to this burden by making it impossible for them to finish the "4-year" degree in 4 years. Overcrowding and cutting back on teaching continues to create a system where students will have to borrow more to finish that degree.

5. SPEAKING OF EDUCATION, MAYBE TEACHING SOMETHING OF VALUE

Student debt isn't even the biggest problem in education. With the "No Child Left Behind" legislation we have made schools less about learning and more about test-taking. Our educational system is creating automaton sheeple, not critical thinking citizenry who question systems in order to improve them. If we really wanted life to be better for our kids we'd teach them how to think about their lives and the social systems within which they live so that they could improve things. Nothing belies the fear that adults have of their kids' brains than the way we do education and nothing points out the lie of "doing it for the children" than this fear. If we truly want them to have a better life than we have, then we should prepare them to be reflective thinkers instead of sheeple.

6. STOP STARVING THE CHILDREN

The real tragedy of the "Let's Move" campaign is the extent to which America's children still are suffering from malnutrition, starvation and lack of food security. Children are dying from lack of food and we are emphasizing starving the ones who have food? How crazy is that?!?

7. REAL UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

It is long past the time for America to provide health care to its citizens. Children growing up under the "for-profit" health care system are not going to be as health as they would be if they were able to see a doctor without fear of breaking the family bank. There are plenty of preventative measures that will ensure they grow up health that have nothing to do with the size of their bodies that need to be available universally. The hodgepodge, committee-fied bills that are being "reconciled" in committee right now are not going to cut it without a public option. As long as health care is a "for-profit" enterprise, money is going to be more important than our children.

Let's be clear about some things:

I voted for Obama. I did not vote in 2000 or 2004 presidential elections because I saw no viable candidates for whom to cast my vote. I liked Obama's message of change and wanted to give him a try. I had hope that he might be different and I think there are some ways that he has been different.

But I am not as pleased as I hoped I would be and this latest campaign weakens my hope even more. This is nothing new. This is business as usual in Washington and all those things he said in his campaign about continuing down the path of business as usual will come true, even if it is cloaked in the language of change.

We pay a price for those things we believe that are not true. Taking public resources and emphasizing weight loss for children is going to have a heavy price tag. We are going to raise a generation who fear their own bodies, who stigmatize fatness and fat people and who will spend their adulthoods sorting out food issues instead of solving more important challenges. In addition, spending these public resources on this means that we take away resources from more important challenges facing us now. We pay now. They pay later.

We do need a change. The "Let's Move" campaign is not change.

Well the good news is that I haven't had hives a lot, the black cohosh & progesterone cream are helping (not totally, but the hot flashes are down to only a couple a day and not constantly) and I have more work than I know what to do with.

The bad news is I find myself neglecting the fun stuff like writing here and journaling at home and taking a moment to care for myself or spend time with my husband. Oh yeah, and, well, more work doesn't seem to equal more money. But what's new with that.

Here's the big news of the month. My husband finally had a doctor tell him what's been wrong for the past year. He has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It is good to know what it is. It is good to finally have a doctor take him seriously. But after the initial relief of having a name, we are now coping with the fact that this isn't going to go away easily and the quick karma that comes with fibromyalgia.

I was diagnosed with this condition in 1997. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of research and I've learned to understand my own body better. In the past couple of years I've come to understand the underlying conditions that led to my condition -- specifically, I have come to believe that the source of much of my problems has been hypothyrodism. I was originally diagnosed with lupus and had many of the symptoms associated with lupus when I started getting ill. But now that I am testing positive for hypothyroidism and have read more and discussed the situation with my doctors, I think the lupus was a misdiagnosis. I believe I had subclinical hypothyrodism.

Our conditions lead me to ponder two big stigmas in health care & health research in this country.

First, is fatness. No one regarded my gaining a considerable amount of weight in a small amount of time in 1997 as a sign that my thyroid was growing weaker. It was decided then that because I was in pain most of the time and had lost the energy to ride my bike the 20 miles a week that I had before, that my lack of exercise led to the 90 pound weight gain in 5 months. Looking back with more critical eyes (it wasn't until 2000 that I started questioning so-called medical science regarding weight), I now realize that probably didn't make much sense. Because hypothyroidism is connected with weight gain it is under-reasearched and under-treated.

Second is gender. Deciding that because something is predominantly diagnosed by one gender or another it becomes a "woman's disease" or a "man's disease" is problemmatic, espcially if doctors remain misinformed. It took 4 months for me to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It took Carl 12 months to have the same diagnosis even though his symptoms were much more clearly defined and obvious (especially in retrospect). Expectations of pain and manhood along with the decision that fibromyalgia is a woman's condition really got in the way of what is a very simple diagnosis--a touch test of 18 points on the body. It was a year of negative tests and being told he was just "getting older" before a doctor did the test. The eventual diagnosis took less than 2 minutes.

As we contemplate health care reform in this country, a lot of debate has taken on a "blame the victim" tone. I actually heard a doctor today say on "Talk of the Nation" that health care professionals would take better care of their own bodies if they weren't so busy taking care of lazy people who do not do what they should to prevent their health conditions. Yep, doctors are too busy doing important stuff to eat right and exercise, but the rest of us are just lazy. I turned off the radio at that point, screaming a few explitives.

Stigma doesn't help anyone. Lifestyle and prevention methods have their place, but they are not the solution nor the problem. Stigma will do more to kill than these other issues and the answer isn't to shame others into a better lifestyle.

Plus Model Magazine interviewed Peggy Elam, the owner, operator, editor and publisher extraordinaire (yeah, I'm biased) at Pearlsong Press. A great interview with lots of good information about Health at Every Size. Peggy is also the host of a weekly radio show called, unsurprisingly, The Health at Every Size Show, which is simulcasted via Radio Free Nashville, every Monday at 11am ET.

So in the article, Peggy mentions something I have never seen before (guess I drop out of sight for a couple of years ago and good stuff goes one without me): Fat Hatred Bingo and Fat Hatred Bingo 2. Oh yeah, and this week alone, I made Bingo on both cards. It's fun. You should try it too!

And this is why Carl and I were happy Paul wrote the preface to our book:

America's Moral Panic Over Obesity

PREFACE

I knew it was going to happen...

The health care reform debate has finally got around to blaming fat people for the nation's health problems.

I've been avoiding thinking about this and writing about this because, well, it's tiresome. This is something that I see so clearly and it is obvious that the majority of Americans (and really the rest of the western world, or at least, English speaking world) just can't see. I hate the disconnect. I feel like I've seen and I've written clear and concise arguments over and over again only to have the exact same questions asked and the exact same rebuttals made. These questions and rebuttals are phrased in such a way that it is obvious the person posing them has not heard/read and/or understood a word on the clear and concise argument.

Ever spent time with a three-year-old who has discovered the word "why"? You speak and the response, no matter what you say, is "Why? Why? Why?Why? Why? Why?Why? Why? Why?Why? Why? Why?Why? Why? Why?" By the end of the "conversation" you are thinking "Why do I bother?"

Or in the words of Mugatu (Will Ferrell) in Zoolander: "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills."

So with this extremely impatient introduction let me make an argument for why the last thing health care reform needs to do is try to make people lose weight and why Health at Every Size (HAES) is the best preventative care option for containing health care costs AND making our country healthier.

TOP 7 REASONS FOR
MAKING HAES THE ONLY PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY ON WEIGHT

7. Almost every method for losing weight ends in weight gain.

There is no viable way for taking weight off and keeping it off for the vast majority of people. In fact, there is ample evidence (pun intended) that dieting and weight loss schemes may be one of the reasons that Americans are larger than they were 20 years ago.

6. Almost every method for losing weight has led to dire health consequences in long-term health outcomes.

Most weight loss schemes, including so called "sensible" ones often lead to poorer health outcomes for individuals who temporarily succeed at them. Drugs are often pulled off the market within a few years of introduction due to disability and death caused by them. WLS has some of the highest mortality and comorbidity rates of any surgery done on a regular basis. Severe calorie restrictions and various appetite suppression schemes cause all sorts of short-term and long-term health problems. Not only is there no proven way to lose weight permanently, there is no proven safe way to lose weight.

5. There is precious little evidence that being fat CAUSES any disease

Yes, there are correlations. But there are correlations between being male and certain diseases and no one is advocating castration for cures. There are correlations between being of African descent and certain diseases and no one is advocating skin lightening as curative. Three conditions must exist to show cause and effect:

First, the cause has to take place in time before the effect. Since figuring out when a disease started (diagnosis is always after the start of a disease), it is often impossible to know which came first, the weight gain or the disease.

Second, a change in the cause should produce a change in the effect. This correlation has been established on a population level. We have gotten fatter over the same period of time that we have, as a group, experienced more heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and so forth. But establishing the population correlation isn't the same as establishing individual correlations. For example, little evidence exists that losing weight in a particular individual leads to a change in their health conditions, especially when we consider the third condition to establish cause and effect.

Finally, NO OTHER EXPLANATION has to be available to explain the relationship between the cause and effect. So, in the case of weight loss, since most people trying to lose weight often change diet and/or their physical activity, the actual change in eating and/or exercise may be the more plausible explanation for changes in health associated with weight loss. Since precious few have actually studied or questioned the "cause and effect" aspects of weight with any kind of rigor, at this point we do not really know what the relationship between weight and disease are. We only know that over the past 30 years, people have gained weight and prevalence of certain health conditions have increased. We are far from establishing cause and effect and this is true no matter how many times people get on TV and say "obesity causes..."

4. We know that stigmatization contributes to ill health.

Any "program" that promotes weight loss is stigmatizing fat people. I know that is a radical thing to say, but it is true. Weight loss as a goal means getting rid of fat and it requires a demonization of fat in order to make it a goal. Fat carries stigma in this culture. Weight loss reinforces that stigma. Any public health policy that makes weight loss an overall PUBLIC goal is going to perpetuate stigma. That means even with accessibility, fat people will not receive the proper care they deserve either because some medical professional is going to concentrate on weight loss instead of the health condition OR many fat people, having been shamed or unwelcomed in medical settings is going to put off going to see a health care professional until it is too late. Thus, continuing to stigmatize fat is going to lead to worse health outcomes, not better ones.

3. We do know that exercise has a beneficial effect on individual health no matter what their size.

Health at Every Size promotes the idea that we should be pursuing health NOT weight loss. So here's where I know that the proponents of obesity as health crisis do not really care about the health of fat people and do NOT believe their own assertions about how to lose weight. Most HAES professionals advocate that to become healthy, all individuals should eat well-balanced foods with good macro and micro nutrients and should move their bodies more. Most weight-loss gurus recommend pretty much the same thing -- changes in eating and exercise to achieve weight loss. SO, if the weight-loss gurus believe that these lifestyle changes will lead to weight loss because of the physics of calorie consumption and conduction, why are they worried about HAES? If they are correct and we encourage persons of all sizes to eat well and exercise regularly, then fat people would lose weight, right? Does it actually require the fat persons active measurement of weight to lose the weight? No. If they are right, the weight would go down whether the person is weighing themselves or not. So if I were truly wanting to promote weight loss and I heard that a bunch of fat people were willing to exercise and improve their diets, wouldn't I be happy to just let them do it? Wouldn't I be elated that they got the message? But the opposite is true. Weight-loss gurus are threatened by the HAES movement. I believe that is because most of these people who say they are concerned about the health of bigger people have no such concern. What they want is more money, more prestige and more power for themselves. HAES as a health policy concentrates on providing encouragement for persons of ALL SIZES to take good care of their bodies. Fat acceptance means no more stigma of fat persons, which means that a fat neutral world would encourage healthier lifestyle practices.

2. HAES would mean better health for thin people too

By concentrating on weight rather than health, especially in children, the health habits of many so called "normal" weight and "underweight" persons are ignored. Since size = health indicator is so prevalent, the naturally thin persons often believe they are okay eating what they eat and not exercising. By paying attention to behavior instead of a physical characteristic, all persons will be encouraged to pursue healthier lives.

1. HAES will work to improve health where weight loss will not

There has been one study done in all the years of weight research that actually asks this question about success. Linda Bacon did a 2 year study running two groups, one that dieted and one that practiced HAES. The results were what any chronic dieter could tell you. Those who concentrated on losing weight were in poorer health at the end of the two years. Those who concentrated on improving health regardless of weight, were healthier. One study does not make a conclusive case, of course, but it certainly supports the need for further study and promises hope where most weight loss studies do not.

REAL PREVENTATIVE HEALTH CARE

The question of health care reform is a complex one and I agree that preventative health needs to be a part of the equation to cut costs and to ensure success. Our current system only encourages the financial health of a few at the expense of the rest of us. WEIGHT CANNOT be the ONLY consideration in this debate. In fact, so called "lifestyle" changes, cannot be the only consideration. In addition to a lack of access to health care, factors such as poverty, pollution, violence, food safety, drug safety, health care provider competence, effective vaccinations and stigmatization are just a few of the other things that need to be a part of this debate. HAES could be a key policy that would promote the end of stigmatization on the basis of size and the encouragement of a strong and healthy population. Weight loss, however, will be doomed to failure and in the end will add more costs rather than saving us.

If we want to succeed in creating true health care reform, we need to acknowledge and act upon fact, not fiction. Weight loss as a method of health improvement is a fiction, an often repeated fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. I feel compelled to repeat a quote that I closed with a few entries ago:

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. --Mohandas Gandhi

But I will add this quote as well:

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible. -- Bertrand Russell

From the movie, Apollo 13, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) on the night of the moon landing:

From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go.

40 years ago today, we did this because we decided to do it:



This is why I will miss Walter.

Forty years ago on July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off to the moon carrying the two men who would be the first to walk on the moon. I was almost 12 at the time. It was too cloudy to see the launch from my Florida West Coast home (we occasionally got to see a launch from Clearwater) so I watched it on TV just like most Americans. I remember it being a hopeful time. I thought life was going to be different. It sure didn't work out the way I thought.

Here's the video of the blast-off: