Yeah We FIGURED Exercise Can’t Completely Stop Fat From Making You Sick. Your Point??

Just a quick rage post, everyone. This week you may have found some punchy, alarming news headlines pop up such as “FAT BUT FIT IS A MYTH”. Scary news. Scary fat news. It’s that kind of thing when “journalists” are desperate for material so they dig into recent academic research to pull out a claim out of context that gets everyone’s attention. Bravo. These news stories are alluding to a study out of a Spanish university that concluded people in “overweight” and “obese” BMI categories remained at high risk of cardiometabolic diseases like high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. But in both the articles I read – one from CNN and one from U.S. News & World Report (see below for links) – the study authors reiterate that their findings also show that regular physical exercise lowered everyone’s risk of these diseases regardless of their BMI, corroborating other studies. I’ve written about this before. CNN interviewed a Duke University administrator who cautioned that this is a correlative – not causative – cross-sectional study (one of the easiest ones to conduct). He mentioned that it could be that some “obese” participants started exercising regularly BECAUSE they learned they had new health issues. You can’t know from a study like this.

This brings me to my biggest beef here…. wh- what… who are these articles for? What do you hope to accomplish? They’re setting up a straw man of well you know, you can’t stay FAT and expect exercise to fix any issues your fat may be causing. Wh- who the hell is saying this? The study authors admit exercise still helps. Besides, again, there still is not scientific consensus about what exactly makes people get fatter and how fat influences disease. And, again,

WE DO NOT YET KNOW HOW TO SHRINK FAT AND MAINTAIN LEANNESS AT A POPULATION LEVEL

Both the articles (both of them?) have a wrap-up with some authority claiming that it’s important to be physically active and get or stay lean. Ok, but HOW? Get out of here with this shit. And shame on the writers and editors for including good news somewhere in the text while having misleading titles and introductions that imply the opposite. Save it for the Daily Mail.

Exercise Doesn’t Boost Health If You Stay Obese, Study Finds | Health News | US News

‘Fat but fit’ is a myth when it comes to heart health, new study shows – CNN

You See, It’s FUNNY Because Buying Frosting Is Supposed To Mean You’re A Failure… JK

I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks. I thought it would be worth finishing before the end of the holidays. Enjoy?

One of Colbert’s recent Late Show cold opens is a fake ad for Cinnabon’s pint of frosting.

In the sketch, people at a loss of what left to do to survive the boredom and isolation of the pandemic are seen eating the frosting out of the carton (which is clearly some kind of vanilla yogurt). They are sad. One of them is crying in a bathtub. The announcer’s message is: “give up”. I have some thoughts.

First off there seems to be more than one premise. Are they lampooning big fast food for (literally) capitalizing on people’s anxiety and desperation at the expense of their health, while not helping us solve our actual problems? Or are they fueling the entrenched societal narrative of shame about overeating as if due to weakness? Even if the writers mean to fault the corporations, if the sketch still requires us to agree that binge- or stress-eating processed food is a sign failure, weakness, or lack of control, then I think the joke is not worth making. At the very least, the joke should be better crafted, more on target. I see that the main joke of the Colbert clip is that Cinnabon’s rollout of their signature frosting is a reflection of the state of everyone’s pandemic stress and boredom. It’s not really trying to fault individual consumers OR Cinnabon. It’s more of a suggestion that this is the natural, logical conclusion of a months-long life disruption that’s now spilling out into the winter holidays.

… However, it’s difficult for me to give them the benefit of the doubt, since (goodness, I did NOT want to get into this but here we go) Colbert’s Late Show writers have a history of making jokes about stress eating. They make like… a lot of them. Stephen himself has a long history of doing these bits where he feigns sadness or panic and then digs into some ice cream for relief. A few times he’ll even lament “I’m fat” in a sort of “teen girl seeks support after a break up” bit. And I haven’t even mentioned the many times he takes a passing jab at his own appearance; he tends to view his average amount of athleticism, muscle, and fat as evidence that he’s undisciplined, unaccomplished, and generally not manly (all in spite of the fact that Colbert is a very rich and successful actor). He and his team also write fat jokes about Republicans (most notably Christie and Trump) that draw on stereotypes you can leverage against ANY fat person.

Liberals need to know better than to make arguments that rely on fat stigma, and they should know that, while internalized fat bias is a fact of life, it is a part of the personal-responsibility narrative that lets institutions off the hook and is demonstrably false. It’s hazardous to make jokes that acknowledge how we feel about fat and food, and yet not challenge it.

Happy Holidays

P.S.: I’m only upset because I care about you, Stephen.

People Miss the Whole Point of Political Correctness

Ah, the joy of r/fatlogic.

I already knew what the commenters would write as soon as I saw this. This argument has been applied to other forms of verbal abuse and microaggressions such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and misgendering: you don’t get to decide how someone should feel in response to how you treat them. If someone tells you that the manner and content of your speech causes them to feel uncomfortable, afraid, or sad, the burden had ought to be on you to change your behavior instead of them sucking it up. I generally agree with this maxim, but I don’t think this is the best argument for why people should check their privilege and bigotry. People on the other side of this – usually conservatives and libertarians – claim that feelings are primarily one’s own responsibility (though conservatives are plenty offended by certain things). And people can feel offended about anything. That in itself does not make all feelings logical. Honoring everyone’s feelings as truth would probably amount to cultural relativism when feelings are shared among groups – this dreaded so-called “identity politics”.

I would caution two things. One, it is technically correct to acknowledge that someone has a feeling. Feelings are not under anyone’s control. They are automatic. They can be rational, but they don’t need to be. Erasing someone’s feeling because it’s illogical or inconvenient to you is a pointless endeavor. And two, you shouldn’t change your language or behavior around someone because JUST because it offends them personally. You should do it because you understand the specific ways that people are treated in society based on their group membership and how that creates a different experience than yours – even if they haven’t experienced it yet. It’s the reason why doing blackface is wrong even if your black friend doesn’t know the history and tells you they don’t care. This political correctness crusade has never been about exhausting yourself by constantly catering to individuals’ whims. It’s about understanding general patterns.

If you yell at a woman, especially if you are a man, you should understand that A) as a woman she might have had the experience of being abused by a man in the past – a particular dynamic that most men can’t experience, and B) she probably experiences low levels of verbal harassment most of the time, and your behavior will add to this accumulation of stress.

If you’ve been thin all your life and some of your friends make fun of fat people, with jokes ranging from playfully using fat stereotypes to being downright annoyed by them, you will probably laugh along with them even if you’re neutral or apathetic toward fat people personally. But then what happens if a year or two later you’ve gained 60 pounds? You’re not just so fat that only you notice – you’re so fat that everyone else has noticed too. You’ve never been one of “those people”, but now you are. How do you think all the jokes and insults your friends made about fat people are going to affect you? You’ll probably hate yourself and you won’t know what to do. You probably won’t have many sympathetic friends or relatives to fall back on.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t just assume that since an individual has not yet experienced explicit instances of discrimination for their group affiliation(s), it’s okay to make jokes or share negative views of their group. You might have a black or Muslim friend who may have been subject to systemic discrimination but happens to not have had insults and slurs hurled at them by strangers or been threatened with racist symbols or Islamophobic messages. But they can still experience these things in the future, and if they do they will probably not recognize it right away, because you’ve been deriding Muslims or black people for years. Just because you don’t see them as “one of those people” and you’ve convinced them that they aren’t, that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be treated that way by others.

The point of political correctness is to try – at least TRY – to educate yourself about the experiences of marginalized groups and use what you’ve learned to treat strangers and kin with more empathy and respect. But more than that, it’s about fighting for systemic change; a kind smile and a conversation will only do so much. It’s dishonest and misleading to reduce fights for social equity to policing individuals’ language. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But people who are truly “woke” know that people get their beliefs from SOMEWHERE, and they spend more of their time fighting the institutions that produce loyal followers rather than simply shaming people into compliance, or exiling them as punishment for their personal failings.

The Word “Overweight” Really Doesn’t Mean Anything

We’re back again with a hard-to-search query, and lo and behold it’s still about fat stigma. This time I’m trying to investigate the use of the term “overweight”, looking for nuanced analyses of its multiple uses and their consequences. But I have come back empty-handed. And whenever that happens, I BLOG.

THIS…. this is that blog.

I was attempting to watch a film analysis on YouTube and when this guy referred to the main character as “overweight”, I couldn’t watch anymore. Would people please, please stop using this word?! It’s not just offensive, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid word. I know what he meant. He meant fat. But fat in a “kind” way, in a way that suggests… not that fat, just fat enough for it to be noticeable. First off, you’re not granting anyone a kindness when you use this euphemism. The reason you’re using it is because you want to indicate that you can see a difference in someone’s body proportions, shape, or composition that qualifies them as “fat”, but that they are not REALLY fat, like, the real fat people over there that are actually the ones who are ill or weird or subhuman. It’s not “fat” – it’s “fat lite”. “Fat-ish”. But by doing so, you’re reinforcing the notion that there is a level of fat that is too far gone, too different, too inexcusable. You’re reinforcing the belief that there is any amount of fat that someone has that could make them chiefly responsible, and that we know exactly the point when someone is so fat that it amounts to an illness. But more importantly, when we say the word “overweight” we really mean 3 things, and we use them interchangeably:

Having so much fat that your physical or mental* health is worse than ideal**
Having a particular body shape – some proportion of fat that is intermediate between the proportions commonly seen in the media and the fattest person you can think of
Having a proportion of fat that you think is greater than average

And by “average” I again mean consistent with common media depictions. In reality, many people are fatter than what you see on social networking apps and TV. According to the CDC , the average (mean) height for a female in the United States is about 5 feet, 4 inches (162 cm) and the average weight is about 170 pounds (77 kg). A rough estimate for the resulting average BMI is around 29, which is considered “overweight” by medical authorities. Will a female with a BMI of 29 LOOK fat? It depends, both on the proportions of the person and the schema of the observer. Are they so fat that their health is suffering? Perhaps, but it would still be difficult to know that with any certainty just by looking at them. Are they TYPICAL? Yes, yes they are typical.

I hope people will see that the criteria I listed above are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. People who look “chubby” are likely not over-weight in the sense that they are fatter than average. They probably are average. There are many people who have physical and mental disorders that we associate with being fat, but we don’t suspect it, because they aren’t fat. And besides, at least 80% of American adults may be “overfat”, which is largely to do with visceral fat depots (surrounding your guts); this figure includes a significant proportion of people whose BMI would classify them as having “normal weight”. Where’s our “concern” for them?

So please, let’s stop saying “overweight”. What should we use instead? Oh hell I don’t have ALL the answers. …. Let’s just say FAT for now and I dunno… use modifiers? I’m open to suggestions.

Thanks for reading.

For more on fat stigma, I like this blog post from Scientific American:

Fat is Not the Problem – Fat Stigma Is

*Being “obese” is associated with a greater likelihood of suffering from mental illnesses. Currently, the direction of causation constitutes a chicken-or-egg debate, but it seems that at least in the case of major depression, there is some evidence that both are likely to lead to each other. The mechanisms are not yet well understood. We do know that fat stigma causes increased risks for mental and physiological illnesses irrespective of BMI. Mental health may also suffer from the neurochemical and endocrine disruption that can occur with a diet of high-processed foods and a lack of regular exercise, but these conditions hold true for everybody.

**”Ideal” is, of course, subjective.

The Morality of Fat – Levels of Misconception

Tiers of the Morality of Fat:

1) Being fat does not always mean you’re unhealthy.

2) Being healthy is not always ethical.

People use their physical and mental stamina in order to oppress others, and the pleasure that they can experience can make them apathetic and ignorant to the ills of the world and other people in it.

3) Being ethical is not just about being prosocial; it’s also about living the good life.

4) Being prosocial is not always possible.

Claims that fat people over-consume at the expense of lower income people across the world, or at the expense of the environment, may have some validity. But on the whole, everybody in the middle class who live in developed nations use a great deal of energy in their daily lives, such that any additional costs from eating more food and requirements of supplementary healthcare are unlikely to be proportionally significant. More importantly, most middle and lower class people in developed nations face systemic barriers to having affordable healthy food and time for exercise, as well as mental healthcare for disorders like addiction and anxiety. Asking people to simply put in more effort toward eliminating their need for consumption cannot be enough.

5) Living the good life is subjective.

For some people, living a longer life or having lots of physically demanding experiences is important. But they’re not the only keys to a happy life, and some goods that come from being alive actually come at the expense of a longer life or being able to have lots of physical experiences, irrespective of how fat you are or how much you eat. You can’t have it all. It’s important to some people spend a majority of their time making art, solving puzzles, or enjoying lots of food. You can’t just assume that these things are less valuable. Though it can be argued that changing your diet and activity level can boost your performance and enjoyment of these experiences as well, that is true only to a point. Specializing in anything you enjoy still requires some sacrifice, and being human is about more than just being in tune with your biology.

6) Living the life you want is not always possible.

The majority of people who go on some kind of diet program do not experience sustainable weight loss. Exercise burns significantly fewer calories than people think. Fat loss may be possible in the near future for significant segments of the population, but not unless there are substantial changes in food access, job security, healthcare access, education, and media advertising. For now at least, most of us will have to accept the fact that we are going to get fatter, or stay fat, for a while. Exercise is still beneficial in a lot of ways other than simply losing fat, but it’s also something that is difficult for many people to do consistently. Moreover, people are naturally unlucky about all sorts of things, not just in the realm of fat. Some people respond to calorie restriction better than others; some people have more resources to support them than others. Some people grow up with physical activities and healthy eating as positive and reliable parts of their lives. Many do not. People have impairments, deformities, or injuries that they are born with or acquire later in life – cancers, blindness, missing limbs – that carve out life paths with very different outcomes. For these people, joy and achievement cannot look the same as it does for average people. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, but oftentimes people with disabilities have to be more creative and tenacious when society does not give them a simple blueprint for what experiences will make them happy, much less what actions they can take to make them happen.

Worst of all, depression can make this entire journey not seem worth it. Life is inherently full of suffering, confusion, grief, and regret. Sometimes this is downright intolerable. Everyone deserves the opportunity to change their circumstances so they can have new experiences and respond differently to life’s challenges, and even when people have depression… a new job, a new friend, or a new home may be all it takes to begin to make that happen. You could be like me, a person whose anxiety is frequently so bad that I overestimate the risks of physical harm and social embarrassment for trying new things, and I underestimate my worth, my capabilities, and my capacity to handle setbacks, such that I rarely enjoy the benefits of change. But there are those people for whom these resources are out of sight or out of reach for a long, long time. And there are also people who may never respond positively to these changes even when they occur. Human life is messy, and in this very fundamental way people can have vastly different inner worlds, and some people are more different than others. I can only offer this: you can never be fully sure that you are one of the people that can never benefit from a change in your life. But I would not harass even a loved one to stay alive and look for new possibilities no matter what. To do such a thing is not only presumptuous; it is selfish. And above all, it is cruel.

You’ll Benefit More From Exercise Than From Being Thin

The University of Cambridge published a longitudinal study in 2015 that found people were twice as likely to die prematurely if they were inactive than if they were obese. A moderate amount of activity amounting to a brisk 20-minute walk daily is sufficient to decrease your risk of death 7.5%. Lowering your BMI below 30 kg/m^2 would only decrease your risk by 3.6%.

This data is important, not just to reduce fat stigma but also to orient people at all levels of fatness toward an achievable, manageable, and sustainable threshold to increasing health outcomes. If these findings ring true, then the scary level of hype from the fitness industry, wellness industry, and the medical field is overwhelming, and it will continue to intimidate and dissuade many people from getting the benefits from exercise that they deserve. People should have the right not to exercise, but this toxic association between fatness and health, versus exercise and health, has got to go.

P.S.:

You know what ELSE would be nice? If major publications would refrain from using misleading, lazy, garbage microaggressions. This article in Scientific American from 2015 mentions that people can see health benefits from walking at a casual pace for just 2 minutes every hour, though at least 150 minutes a week of more “moderate intensity” exercise such as brisk walking is recommended. The article ends thus:

“The assumption here, of course, is that those casual walks around the house don’t take you to the refrigerator for a snack.”

… A blatant, and frankly unnecessary, piece of fat prejudice. Note that nowhere in the article is there a discussion of obesity or caloric intake. The POINT, people, is that a casual exercise like walking can improve your body’s functioning, not that it reduces fat. Eating will not “erase” the benefits.

Losing Weight – Does It Mean Losing What Makes You Unique?

I don’t have to be as fat as I am, or get fatter than I am, in order to affirm my truth – the truth that I am queer, that I am sensitive, that I am an introvert. But I certainly do treat my fat body differently than I used to; I dress myself differently, I use more expressive body language, and I show more skin. I should have the right to change or maintain my body however I like. I cannot deny, however, that for most of the time I’ve ever lost weight intentionally that it was rooted at least in part in a sense of shame over my personality, my talents, needs, and desires. And much of the rhetoric I’ve used and I’ve heard other people use when it comes to the need to lose fat and maintain a thinner body is actually code for the real reason we all got so fat in the first place – an initial fear and grief over having been unacknowledged, mistreated, or ignored. Again, it isn’t necessary to be fat in order to reclaim our authenticity. There are some serious conversations to be had about mental and physical health. Exercise is objectively a good thing, and no one should have to feel like a prisoner in a cycle of food addiction or social isolation. We should have the right to experience a more social or physically active life if we want to. But the censorship and condemnation of fat bodies is a way to silence the hearts and minds of people of color, LGBTQA+ people, and people with psychological or physical impairments. We have to make sure that if we do try to become thinner, we aren’t losing more than our fat in the process.

Questions The Internet Will Not Give Me An Answer To

Why is it in virtually every “after” photo or video I’ve seen of males on the internet or TV commercial involve becoming more muscular and not simply being less fat? I feel like it’s sometimes true that women’s after pics show “toned” figures, but that for men it’s a given that they have to have visible muscle definition and laud their dedication to fitness regimens. Why?

Being Fat Means… What, Exactly?

This post is inspired by Virgie Tovar’s No I Won’t Cut You A Smaller Slice of Cake.

People look for rational ways to justify their prejudice toward being fat and certain forms of consumption, noting how being too fat and eating too many processed foods can negatively affect your physical health and your cognition (which suggests a rationale for the belief that fat people have poor moral character). But there’s ample evidence that fat affects everyone differently depending on where they store it and how much they have. Many of the “negative” psychological traits associated with eating a Western diet are due to the emotional and psychosocial consequences of fat discrimination, which takes the form of ridicule, food policing, social exclusion, lack of physical accommodation, and poor media representation. To a great extent, fat prejudice is arbitrary. Signals of body fat and signals of eating habits are symbols; they are a form of social compliance. Keeping to a specific window of body fat and eating certain foods are ways to indicate you’re part of the group. The opposite may as well be the norm – and in fact, in some cultures it is. Not being fat or not eating large quantities of food… these things can make you look untrustworthy, unreliable, and ungrateful. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that fat prejudice is often code for racism and sexism. From what I’ve read, bodies that are non-White or non-male may be more comfortable with fatter bodies and larger portion sizes, and so stigmatizing those bodies and behaviors is a subversive way to discriminate against these groups.

Does Fat Shaming Work? And Why Are We Fat, Anyhow?

I feel I have to address the comments Bill Maher made in his editorial segment at the end of his show on Friday. I’m certainly not the only one who will. I’m sure there will be many posts and articles in the coming days (which isn’t unusual for Bill). In my summary, Bill Maher argued for the use of shame to relieve the public of the negative health effects of being fat. He characterized shame as a useful tool to promote healthy behaviors in the same vain as smoking, drinking, and wearing a seat belt. Bill Maher has been frequently cited for his views on African Americans, Muslims, and gay and trans people… and Stan Lee. So this isn’t new. And he’s made discriminatory remarks about fat people many times before. Still, as someone who’s been fat most of their life, and spent a great deal of time studying how the media handles diet, weight, and health, I’m going to address issues that I see with his argument.

I think people who are addicted to smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol should not be shamed out of it. Like any addiction, there are neural, hormonal, behavioral, and socioeconomic factors that support smoking and drinking. From what I’ve read, shaming isn’t even the most effective way to change any behavior – not for children or for adults. People generally understand if their behaviors are harmful. They still feel compelled to do them anyway. Only if you address the factors supporting peoples’ addictions can they be free to “will” their way to new behaviors. Also, drinking in particular has a long grandfathered history in Western cultures, integrated into so many aspects of life. How are addicts supposed to fight THAT, exactly? …Even with the current science on how harmful drinking can be. More than that, food addiction and eating disorders are not the same because – and really, this doesn’t take much observational prowess to point out – you chemically MUST eat, practically every single day, for the rest of your life. If you want to stop smoking or drinking, ideally you would aim for abstinence because you would want to mitigate the temptation to overdo it, and to eliminate any other opportunities to do further damage to your body than you already have. But what if you were told you needed to drink an alcoholic beverage every single day – forever – but any more will hasten your death?

I do agree with the premise that corporations are greedy and manipulate us into behaviors that hurt us in order to increase their profits. We should have the choice about how we want our bodies to look and whether we eat more healthfully. Right now, we don’t have that choice. Sugars are addictive, the liver doesn’t process fructose very well, vegetables are relatively expensive, and people don’t have cultural allowances for homemade meals. Exercise isn’t seamlessly integrated into everyday life for many people – instead, it’s optional, and it’s up to each person individually to figure out how they can do it. This is… a pain in the ass. Scientists estimate that at least 70% of people have enough abdominal fat to affect health outcomes. That’s got to be a larger pool of folks than people who have eating disorders. For many people, fat is something that just kind of… happens. And a lot of them aren’t even noticeably fat. Shame certainly isn’t going to reach these people, and it shouldn’t. Easy access to unhealthy food, and rituals designed around it, are definitely part of why people less healthy than they could be. But holding people individually accountable to eating better is incredibly difficult in this context, and it’s only one contributor to why people get fat. And let’s say you can get people who are already experiencing poorer health from being fat, or from having an eating disorder, to adopt healthier eating and exercise habits. Their bodies will still never behave as if they hadn’t had an unhealthier experience, what with the changes to the reward system of the brain, the hormone ghrelin, and increased fat cell count and long-term lowering of metabolism in some cases. Does fixing “bad” eating habits change all of this? Will they never need to cross paths with food advertising, restaurants, or catered events? We do not have the tools (yet) to effectively treat the entire body for the adverse effects of getting fat. But we can invest in changing the infrastructure that supports the lack of food choice and exercise opportunities. And all the while, let’s not shame people anymore.

I’ll post references when I get around to it. In the meantime, I’m exhausted. I could go for some cookies and some bread. And like, also a danish.