This week I’ll be too distracted and occupied to blog, but I send you all my best! Look for a post first week in August.
In the meantime, live joyfully most of the time, eat healthfully most of the time, exercise most days and treasure whatever body happens. If you’re a blogger, do your best to tell a truth and advance compassion. Those are the words that carry me through.
At Big Fat Blog, from time to time, political arguments erupt in the comments, and then shut down quickly, over which US political party is the most size accepting. The arguments are quashed, generally, by the Libertarians who point out that both the left and the right view fat as a moral issue. The right sees obesity as a failing of personal responsibility, whereas the left sees it as metaphor and consequence of society’s greed and overconsumption. The Libertarians then make an unsubtle marketing plea, since they see themselves as the original torch bearers (and remain more consistent and stalwart than the upstart tea partiers) of “keep government out of our lives.”
Well, I am on an email list for an online, left-leaning news analysis publication called Truthout, and, truth be told, I don’t click through very often. But, for obvious reasons, this article, Are Chemicals Making us Fat?, caught my eye. Could it be that the left is coming ‘round?
It’s a rather simplistic article, written as though this conversation is brand-spanking new “Researchers have called these chemicals endocrine disruptors. . . But a new, more relevant term for these chemicals has emerged. They are now also called obesogens.”
Has emerged? Bruce Blumberg of the University of California at Irvine takes credit for coining the term obesogen, and his research using that word seems to date back to the mid-2000s, but the conversation regarding endocrine disruptors and obesity has been going on for decades. (Our conversation at this blog, which I extended not once, not twice, but three times, is one of the most fun conversations on the topic.)
I am uncomfortable with the Truthout article for a number of reasons. I don’t like how it conflates and confuses obesity and diabetes, as though they are conjoined twins. This is a common practice now, and a panic-laden term “diabesity” has “emerged” to express this concept. Generally, if blame is Read the rest of this entry »
“You can accomplish anything you want with hard work.”
You dare not criticize it. You dare not suggest that light skin color may convey an advantage, that already having resources or growing up in a home where the parents are educated and speak proper English may help. You will be whomped squarely with an anecdote that breaks that rule, you Negative Nelly, you! People pull themselves up by the bootstraps every day, and if you temper your celebration of their achievement – by citing statistics or expressing compassion for the people who don’t succeed despite trying – then you will be put in your place. It’s downright unpatriotic to suggest that the playing field isn’t even. That’s just an excuse for laziness.
Well, the American Dream will be the platform of Miss South Carolina in this year’s Miss America pageant. (Be sure to click through to the video.) Technically, Bree Boyce’s platform is “Eating healthy and fighting obesity,” but the subtext is the American Dream. Bree weighed 234 pounds when she was 17. Now, at 22, she weighs 122. She uses her life story as the example of the obesity-curing benefits of hard work and rugged individualism.
“I did it all on my own. I did it for myself.” She tells the Today Show’s Ann Curry.
She conflates being fat with being unhealthy and she conflates “it” (weight loss) with the American Dream:
“I had so many dreams and aspirations for myself. And I knew that being so unhealthy I wouldn’t be able to accomplish any of those dreams. So by changing my lifestyle completely, I did a 180, and it’s been completely amazing, and I’m just so excited.”
From what I can tell, however, her dreams and aspirations have been to get thin and win beauty pageants, like her older sister Tiffany. In a family that supports those aspirations. And she has done it.
She works out two to three hours a day when preparing for contests and she “maintains” her “lifestyle” with half- to one-hour of daily exercise. But she hasn’t spent much time in “lifestyle” mode, methinks. She’s been working hard. She loves looking at her swim suit competition pictures, and, indeed, there’s no denying that she is ripped. She tells Ann that when she did her swim suit promenade, to keep the butterflies in her stomach at bay, she was just thinking about herself, her hard work and all the people she could inspire. She kept herself focused on how she is “a confident and successful woman. And to strut my stuff on that stage was the proudest moment of my life.”
In the end, it’s all the American Dream. She sums it up:
“Whatever it is in life that you want to do, it takes hard work. There’s no secret. It’s hard work, and determination and perseverance. All those things.” Read the rest of this entry »
Before I say another word, my conscience tells me to add a BIG trigger caution here. If you are a size acceptance proponent and are feeling the least bit susceptible to the call of the weight-loss diet fairy, skip today’s post. If you’re feeling brave, however, I’d love your response as well as that of my maintainer friends.
In my last post I explained Katarina Borer’s methodology for comparing the effects of food intake and exercise on appetite and on certain endocrine secretions. Dr. Barry Braun describes it as “a multicondition crossover design to cleverly disentangle the relationships between energy imbalance, exercise, energy intake, putatative energy-regulating hormones and perceived appetite.” Yup. That’s what it was. Now, let’s see whether I can explain in plain English what happened and what was correlated and what was not.
In her first study, Appetite Responds to Changes in Meal Content, Whereas Ghrelin, Leptin and Insulin Track changes in energy Availability, Dr. Borer found:
The graph array that interested me most, as a maintainer, however, was Figure 2 (in the second study it was reposted as Figure 4). I was surprised, in fact, that it was not included as a “finding” in the Discussion section.
It looks fuzzy in my preview, but I was able to click on it to get a blown-up view that was very clear. Column 4 describes the trial day Read the rest of this entry »
