Helen Pluckrose Discusses Obesity and Fat Shaming

It occurred to me to write this article because 'tis the season where we celebrate refined carbohydrates and overeating. Holiday eating automatically means a table filled with sugary treats. Here's another well-known fact: Here in the U.S. more than 70% of us are overweight or obese.

The thought of holiday sweets automatically puts me in defensive mode.  I've substantially modified my eating and exercise routines several times during my life. I've once lost more than 30 pounds and I've lost more than 20 pounds twice. I know from experience that I need to consciously watch what I eat, make myself get on the scale several times each week and force myself to exercise. If I don't do these things, I inevitably gain at least 2 or 3 pounds each month. Over the course of 12 months, that can add up to more than 30 pounds. My personal struggles and hard-won successes probably explain my lack of patience with the common claim that being obese is something over which they have no control.  Or the claim that obesity is something that can be healthy or even admirable. I bristle when I hear people accuse me of "fat shaming" when my careful words and motives focus purely on health issues faced by obese people.

I've followed the writings of British writer Helen Pluckrose on many topics, including weight loss and "fat shaming." I follow her on Twitter and really enjoy her matter-of-fact upbeat attitude. Pluckrose currently describes herself as obese and indicates on Twitter that she is working on losing weight. In the attached 2019 article, "Big Fat Lies: The Fat Activism Movement is Risking Lives by Suppressing Obesity Research," she offers the facts first, then her opinions, regarding obesity and accusations of fat-shaming. For starters, according to WHO, most of the world's population "lives in countries where an excess of weight now kills more people than being underweight."

The accusation of "fat shaming" often begins with the false claim that overeating has little to do with obesity.  Pluckrose does not buy this attempt to portray obesity as an immutable characteristic:

There are certainly plenty of people who insist they eat very little and yet are heavily overweight, but it’s hard not to notice that in regions where people genuinely don’t have enough to eat, none of them are obese.  Similarly, people who tell us they are obese because of their genes do not seem to have answers for where all these obese genes suddenly came from as our grandparents’ generation did not have the same problem

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Long-term fasting and its potential health benefits

In "Starving Your Way to Vigor," an article in the March 2012 issue of Harper's Magazine (available on-line only to subscribers), Steve Hendricks discusses the possibility and the potential therapeutic effects of long-term fasting. How long is it possible for a human to refrain from eating any food (drinking only water)? It was once thought that one would be dead within 10 days. That was a theory that conflicts with the real world. For instance, Hendricks tells the story of a despondent doctor named Henry Tanner (his wife had left him), who tried to starve himself to death. During his long fast, his hunger pangs diminished and various ailments disappeared--he got better.

On the fortieth morning, the collegians weighed him at 121.5 pounds, thirty-six fewer than when he had begun. His other vitals were interesting only for being uninteresting: normal pulse, normal respiration. At noon, he ate a peach, which went down without trauma. He followed with two goblets of milk, which the collegians thought imprudent on a stomach so long inactive. But the milk not troubling him either, he ate most of a Georgia watermelon, to his colleagues’ horror. In succeeding hours he added a modest half-pound of broiled beefsteak, a like amount of sirloin, and four apples.
Hendricks reports that in 1965, a 27-year old Scotsman fasted for more than a year (eating only vitamins), dropping from 465 pounds to 180. His case was reported in the Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973 and in the Guiness Book of World Records. Hendricks himself decided to fast, to experience the lack of food first hand. At the beginning, he weighed 160 pounds. He proceeded to lose 25 pounds in 20 days, regaining only 5 pounds in the two years since completing the fast. Much of Hendrick's article is a detailed description of his experience. Here's a taste of his article:
I continued to dwindle. By Wednesday, the seventeenth day of my fast, the report from the bathroom was 138, three pounds from home. So near, I considered for the first time whether I might care to fast longer—a month, say, or the Christly forty days, or even a few days more to out-Tanner Tanner. I wasn’t long deciding no. Endurance, even with my ugly swings of mood and energy, was not the problem. The problem was that I missed eating. I wanted the sensation of food in my mouth again—the textures, the flavors, the hots and colds, the surprises, even the disappointments. I also wanted the fellowship of eating. Sitting to meals with family and friends had been sociable enough at first, but in the end it had proved an inadequate substitute for companionship, a word whose roots com (with) and pan (bread) reveal its true meaning: breaking bread with others. Not breaking bread with my intimates, I was an outsider in their rite.
Hendricks relates anecdotes that intense long-term fasting improves or even cures such maladies as hypertension, epilepsy and cancer. He laments the lack of serious scientific research to determine the extent to which the claims regarding these benefits are true. I was amazed to learn of the possibility and potential health benefits of long-term fasting. Last week, on the morning I read Hendrick's article, I decided to see what it would be like to not eat for two days. I only lasted 9 hours. I found myself at work, working on a legal brief and needing lots of mental focus. Not eating was not at all painful, but it made me light-headed and unfocused. I understand that these symptoms would pass if I gave them time, but I pulled the plug and decided that I would try a fast when I didn't need to be at work. I'll let you know if and when I carry through with this experiment.

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Adult baby food

Dr. David Kessler has written a new book called "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite." He was recently interviewed by Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com. You can also listen to their discussion here. I was intrigued by Kessler's notion that much of the food to which people become addicted is "adult baby food":

We're eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it's two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it's very stimulating. It's layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It's as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.

But it's not just the fat or the sugar. We dress up food really well here in the United States:

We make food into entertainment. We make it into a food carnival. Go into a modern American restaurant: the colors, the TVs, the monitors, the music. You do it with your friends. We've taken sugar and added all these multiple levels of stimuli. What do we end up with? Probably one of the great public health crises of our day.

Go visit Salon for the entire article. Lots of worthy observations. For instance, he discusses why people get fat (it's not because fat people enjoy eating more than skinny people). Also, there is no body "set point" to protect you from gaining weight. Kessler offers lots of ideas for not allowing your brain to get hijacked by high calorie food. On a related note, I've had to constantly monitor my own eating and exercise to keep myself where I need to be (I'm now 5' 11" and 170), and I use a variety of techniques I described here, especially the need to avoid refined carbohydrates and to constantly aim for whole grains and lots of vegetables and whole fruits (not juice).

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How to lose two pounds per week, guaranteed.

Three weeks ago I noticed that I was overweight again, but I’m doing something about it again.

I’m not quite sure what did it.  Maybe it was the almost-nightly bowl of ice cream or maybe those french fries weren’t really counteracted by those side dishes of broccoli.  Whatever it was, three weeks ago I noticed that bad eating habits had kicked my weight more than 15 pounds over my usual weight.  Those 15 extra pounds I was carrying around weighed as much as a bowling ball.

I’ve had to lose weight before. Five years ago, I decided that I was tired of carrying around lots of extra weight.  Back then, I noticed how bad things had gotten after a friend showed me a photo of that 194 pound version of myself at the beach.  Back then, I decided to see if I could lose 10 or 15 pounds.  After doing a bit of research, I implemented a series of the eating and exercise strategies that worked well for me.  They worked extremely well.  I’m going to share them in this post.  I dropped more than 4 pounds per week, week after week, until my 194 pound carcass melted into 159 pounds, a swing of 35 pounds. After I got going with my program, it was almost painless.   I found myself feeling better and I looked better.  Based upon well-established statistics, I knew that I had substantially decreased my chance of being afflicted with heart disease, stroke and various kinds of …

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