Your genes are no excuse for being fat

The Amish study involved 704 people; blood samples determined which of those had a variation in the FTO gene linked to obesity. Among those with the variant, those who got about three or four hours of moderate physical activity a day weighed up to about 15 pounds less on average than the least active people.

So you’re saying that all I have to do to have my doctor tell me to lose 35 lbs instead of 50 lbs is to exercise for a ridiculously unrealistic amount of time each day?

How about a slightly more accurate headline: exercising as much as 3-4 hours per day has very little effect on your weight.

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.

What’s up with video games?

When I was growing up, until I got to high school and discovered the internet, sci-fi television, and advanced placement classes, I read an average of 6 books a week. That was pretty much all I did with my life. I wasn’t social. I also wasn’t very physically active; the only sport I played for any extended length of time was bowling. Frequent knee injuries and extended asthma problems, as well as time constraints, have discouraged me from being active in recent years. I am “overweight.”

My younger brother plays video games for several hours a day. He also plays sports for most of the year and frequently works out at the gym. He is “obese.”

The trap is, of course, “if you didn’t sit around playing video games all day, you wouldn’t be obese,” and I have even found myself falling into it. But what is the difference between me being sedentary and reading for most of my childhood, and him being sedentary playing video games for part of his time, and being a lot more active than I ever was for the rest of it? I’ve never experienced it personally, so I don’t know if there’s a stigma against fat people who sit around reading (“obviously that’s what makes them fat”) like there is against fat people who dare to spend some time in front of the television or Xbox. But it seems more like an intellectual prejudice than anything.