Dieting and Hunger

Back for a moment; have been busy with little things like college and having a nervous breakdown. Fun times.

I’ve talked in the past about my tendency to not eat when I’m hungry when I’m stressed, depressed, or anxious. It’s been going full-force for the past week or so. I think every day I’ve eaten a few bites or less and a coffee for breakfast, and then when it comes around to lunch my stomach hurts too much to get much down (even if it looks appetizing, which it usually doesn’t). By the evening, when I’m back at home and don’t have to depend on planning ahead or working around my class schedule (which I don’t seem to have the presence of mind to manage), I usually manage to get a full meal into me even (mostly takeout, which worries me–first because my fruit and vegetable intake has been far less than balanced, and second because I feel like any day now my need to not spend money will override my need to feed myself), but it feels like too little, too late.

I’ve never dieted. And it occurred to me the other day–is this really what people do all the time, just to try to be thin? How can people stand it? I just want nothing more than to eat normally again and have this constant gnawing hunger go away.

Diets: in which goodbyemyboy bitches about her family, and it won’t be the last time

(I wrote this during a long car ride and then got carsick. Fun times.)

Diets don’t work. Everybody knows that, even Weight Watchers. Dieting has become increasingly associated with yo-yoing and unhealthy eating habits. So why aren’t more people embracing Fat Acceptance and Health At Every Size?

Going back to that conversation with my mother, here are some things that she told me:

• My brother is “too heavy.” (True, if we’re going by BMI standards.)
• He eats a lot. (True, but he’s also a sixteen-year-old male athlete. He’d probably be in trouble if he didn’t eat a lot.)
• He eats too many eggs. (Apparently he’d been going to school early for extra help towards the end of last semester and buying breakfast there, which worked out to about four egg sandwiches a week. Only for the obese can four eggs a week be considered some huge excess.)
• He’d be better at sports if he lost weight. (Dude, his size is why he’s so awesome at what he does. I’ve seen, more than once, kids half his size rush him in lacrosse and literally bounce off and fall on their backs. It’s fucking hardcore.)
• It doesn’t matter that he’s healthy now, because The Dreaded Obesity will catch up to him later. That’s just the way it is.

And the crazy thing about all this is that she completely agreed with me that diets don’t work, that ~*~lifestyle changes~*~ like healthy eating habits (which she seems to be conflating with diet tricks like calorie reduction and filling up on low-calorie, bulky food, but that was an argument I wasn’t about to get into) and increasing physical activity may not result in weight loss but will improve health regardless–but she still insisted that weight loss is both possible and an imperitive.

The solution to this cognitive dissonance is, apparently, that she doesn’t expect him to drop 30 lbs. overnight–it should happen slowly, over time.

So apparently all that people have learned about diets not working is that diets do work if you call them ~*~lifestyle changes~*~ and lose weight slowly. We’ve got a long way to go.

On Admiring Fat Bodies

A friend recently posted a question about feederism, and if fat acceptance was okay with such a thing. After reassuring her that no, feederism is absolutely not okay, I looked up NAAFA’s official statements on feederism and fat admirers, and these two things jumped out at me:

[NAAFA advocates:] That people of all sizes become empowered to demand respect for their bodies in the context of sexual relationships, without attempting to lose or gain weight in order to win a partner’s approval or attract or retain that partner’s desire.

Further, NAAFA believes that in a society where at least 65% of the population is considered fat, a preference for a fat partner is normal and should be encouraged rather than discouraged.

I’m sure most people, including myself, would see feederism as a fetishizing, objectifying practice–and yet people have no problem with expecting their significant others to lose weight for their own sexual satisfaction. The fetishization of fat is disgusting and wrong, but the fetishization of thin, that’s just normal.

I was reading some posts on a messageboard yesterday about spouses and weight gain. One man posted that his wife had gained a lot of weight and was also not interested in her personal appearance, sex, or exercise–and how was he supposed to deal with the fact that he didn’t find her physically attractive anymore? Even if she didn’t, as seemed likely from the comments, have depression, why would someone be interested in exercise if her husband is clearly only pushing her into it to try to get her to lose weight? Why would someone be interested in sex if her husband doesn’t find her attractive? This is why empowerment is so important–empowering people to demand respect for their bodies as they are, and empowering people to feel confident enough in their bodies that they demand a partner who finds their bodies attractive instead of settling for one who will try to force them to change.

Another thread was about husbands who loved their wives’ fat bodies, but instead of bringing a breath of fresh air as I’d hoped, I found this comment (paraphrased): “My wife is 60 lbs. overweight and I love her body the way it is. I wouldn’t want her to lose much weight, maybe just 30 lbs. or so.” What? As we’ve seen before, 35 lbs. is the difference between “normal” and “obese.” 30 lbs. is not a little bit of weight. What kind of world do we live in, that someone can claim to love someone’s fat body just the way it is, and still want her to lose weight?

Ever since I got engaged, I started getting a lot of weight loss ads on Facebook. Here is the worst offender, I think:

“You’re beautiful already–but you should still lose weight!” It’s like the mainstream anti-diet doublespeak: “Diets don’t work, and you don’t have to be thin to be healthy, but you should still diet make ~*~lifestyle changes~*~!” It seems so much more dangerous to me than “you’d be beautiful if only you lost weight,” because it’s a lot more insidious. It’s fat hatred in fat acceptance clothing. And it does make me wonder if the people who talk like that are maybe just afraid to admit that they find fat attractive without adding the obligatory “but weight loss is good” disclaimer to the end of it.

“A Story of My Mother”

A friend posted this story in LiveJournal’s Health At Every Size community. I like statistics so I wish I knew some more about the connection between weight loss and dementia; I’ll post more if I find out something. But stories like this always break my heart.

Last week, I had to go see my dad and together, we had to put my mother into a nursing home because of her dementia. It was a heart-wrenching occasion for many reasons. My mother has been declining for many years, precipitated or at least exacerbated, I believe, by an extreme weight loss. She had had pain in her knees for some time, but the doctor refused to operate until my mom lost weight. She’s always been a big woman. At 5′ 10″ she usually weighed about 300 lbs. They told her she had to lose more than 100 to do the surgery, which is difficult if you can’t walk. She basically starved herself for a couple years and they finally did the surgery. When she awoke from the surgery, she was delusional. They had to put her in a home at that point until she recovered enough to be sent home. She still couldn’t walk without a walker and was in constant pain from that and arthritis. After that, she had trouble finding words. Her weight continued to plummet, which she was quite proud of.

You see, my mom has always been large, like her parents, but she has never accepted it. When I was four, she had a nervous breakdown because of diet pills. As I and my sister grew larger, she always told us that no man would love us unless we were thin. She was never happy with my father and always on the verge of some kind of breakdown. She could never be happy with herself or her life. She could never stand up for what she wanted, because she never felt she deserved it because she was fat.

Save the economy; eat less!

Or not, as Tari Follett writes over at Shapely Prose. Go read it.

Also, I was surprised to find out that Americans eat 3770 calories a day, which seems incredibly high. So I did a bit of looking around and, as I suspected, the figure is artificially high because it includes wasted food (which accounts for up to 50% of food in the U.S.–now that is scary and depressing), as well animal feed and industrial uses (such as ethanol). Aside from encouraging Americans to eat less meat and more local food–which, as Tari points out, is not always a viable option–perhaps Ms. Brahic should have suggested that Americans stop purchasing more food than they eat.

Measuring Weight Loss

I don’t understand how or why people could measure weight loss or gain in ounces. My normal, day-to-day weight fluctuations are on the order of one or two pounds. Whether I’m “overweight” or “obese” pretty much just depends on what time of the month it is. Do chronic dieters just focus a lot on keeping their weight abnormally steady, or are my weight fluctuations just way crazy?