Big Fat Lies
Gwyneth Paltrow: "It's good! I'll live longer."
Jay Leno: "No, it just feels like you're living longer."
- in reference to Paltrow's low-fat diet.
Fat is unhealthy. This is the number one argument against fat, and the most ill-conceived one. But you've heard it every single day since you were a child, how can it be wrong? "The sky is blue, the world is round, and fat is unhealthy! Doctors say so! It must be unhealthy if doctors say so! And some chick's website telling me otherwise isn't going to convince me."
I understand that. But keep in mind that the sky is not actually always blue, the earth is in fact slightly egg-shaped, and doctors just a century or so ago said such things as "Fresh air is bad for you," "Acne is proof of masturbation," "Smoking is good for you," "Bathing could kill you," and "Here, these leeches will have you feeling better in no time!" What makes us so arrogant to think that now we have reached the absolute, God's-honest truth and are not wrong?
I am going to provide my back up, but I have a suspicion that it sadly won't do some of you any good, and I don't blame you. You've been told the same lies for so long. And there's so few people out there saying what I'm saying, and the majority of the population can't be wrong, right? Au contraire, the majority is often very wrong, as proved by history. If you don't believe me, why not go on your own quest for truth?
Here you are, from the New England Medical Journal: "Given the enormous social pressure to lose weight, one might suppose there is clear and overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity and the benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the data linking being overweight and death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight loss, are limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous."
I also recommend reading a book called "The Obesity Myth." It painstakingly goes over nearly every study of obesity ever done, raking through the minute details to reveal the truth beneath. It's so thorough that it's almost boring as it qoutes statistics and medical jargon, but that's what makes it so reputable. What the author found was that many of the studies done on fat have actually come to the opposite conclusion they had set out to confirm. Several things seemed to go wrong with these studies:
* They didn't rule out other mitigating factors. For example, they would compare fat people who ate nothing but donuts and rarely excercised to thin people who ate fruits and veges and vigorously exercised. Instead of concluding that lifestyle, not size, was the culprit, they would determine fat was.
* They would twist the data around to make it look as if fat was a major health risk. For example, they might say "Your are ten times more likely to die at 60 if you are fat." What they wouldn't say is your so called "ten times more likely" actually amounted to a fraction of a percentage point difference.
* They would flat out lie about the results. This tended to happen if a diet company or fat-negative government office was sponsoring the study.
* If the results *did* say that fat isn't bad, the study got buried or ignored. Several times I've seen these studies announced on the news from a somewhat sheepish anchorman who last week had done a news piece on how best to lose weight. And several times I've seen the same anchorman the following day announcing another miracle diet, ignoring his own contradictory stories.
* Some of the research was based on death reports. An odd thing happens when a fat person dies: their cause of death is usually listed as "obesity." Often it doesn't seem to matter that they actually died of a heart attack or of pnuemonia or brain tumor. *Obesity* is believed to be the cause of the heart attack, the pnuemonia, the brain tumor, therefore in a doctor's circuitous thinking obesity is the cause of death. So there are a lot of people who die of "obesity" in America. Another funny thing: anorexics and bulimics corpses are almost never listed as having died of "underweight" or "eating disorder." They are listed as dying of pnuemonia, or vitamin deficiency, or some infection. Of course, they did die of these things, but the eating disorder caused these. Why the double standard? So deaths from being thin are underrepresented.
Fat serves a purpose. Skinny women are more likely to get osteoporosis, have less cushioning to protect their organs from injury, and in some extreme cases are unable to menstruate. Fat women also have the advantage over their thin sisters in that they get less wrinkles. And just think where Kate Moss look alikes will be when a famine strikes.
Speaking of famine, let's think carefully about why we tend to have the genetic predilection toward easily gaining weight. I believe it's because our fat ancestors are the ones who survived famine and disease to pass on their winning "fat gene" to us, which served them so well when those who were thinner wasted away around them and dropped off like flies. This is Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest." This also explains part of the reason that in ages past fat was considered so beautiful -- because it denoted good health and vitality. At the same time it was a display of wealth; it meant you had enough money to eat well.
Losing weight is little more than a losing proposition. At least 98% of diets fail to keep the weight off for more than 3 years (laughably, Weight Watchers counts a weight loss, gaining the weight back, and then losing it again as 2 successes.)
The Copper Institute for Aerobics conducted a study on 30,000 people and found that thin, sedentary people are not healthier than active, fat people.
Losing weight will not necessarily make you healthier. "Even granting the existence of an association between increasing body weight and higher mortality, at least for younger people, it does not follow that losing weight will reduce the risk. We simply do not know whether a person who loses twenty pounds will thereby acquire the same reduced risk as a person who started out twenty pounds lighter. The few studies of mortality among people who voluntarily lost weight produced inconsistent results; some even suggested that weight loss increased mortality," says the New England Medical Journal.
The New England Medical Journal also found there was no proof of a connection between gaining weight and a shorter life span.
Fat and heart disease do not go hand and hand. According to Gleen Gaesser, Ph.D., associate professor of physiology at University of Virginia and author of "Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health", there is no correlation between body fat and plaque in the arteries. Autopsies indicate that fat people are not more likely to have clogged arteries. I can attest to meeting several very skinny men who had had heart attacks, sometimes even several.
Many fat people are unhealthy. Whether that's because of fat is a question that has not been answered. Fat people are often under tremendous stress due to the hateful atmosphere in which they live, and stress is obviously very aging. Acquiring health insurance is also more difficult when one is overweight. This can result in no health care, which would amount to worse health. Fat people regularly avoid the doctor as well, because one can go in for a lump in their breast and come out with weight loss pamphlets. I've heard horror stories of the kind of rudeness and hatred you would only expect to be delivered from a white supremisist to an black panther! Fat people usually go to the doctor because of a health problem completely unrelated to their weight, and yet they are almost invariably berated, talked down to, or offered weight-loss methods. This has sometimes resulted in life-threatening diseases going undiagnosed. To add insult to injury, these diseases are then blamed on the patient's size.
Furthermore, fat people have usually been on every diet known to man. Talk to any fat person about the subject, and you'll hear a long list of miracle diets and work out regimens. This yo-yo dieting exacerbates and perhaps even causes most of the diseases associated with obesity.
Thus, fat people are probably unhealthy because of lack of health insurance and medical care, stress, diets, and avoidance of getting serious health problems taken care of because it means having to deal with harassment.
So why do you hear these lies so often?
It's a bizarre thing: some body trend becomes fashionable. Oftentimes it's a trend that is initially regarded as an unhealthy one. Then medicine oddly enough comes out with some announcement that this body fashion is actually also coincidentially healthy. An example: corsets. Evil contraptions that rearranged women's organs and bones, caused them to faint, miscarry children, and even die. When they first became popular, it was well known they were not good for women, but it didn't matter. Then physicians began saying that they actually promoted good health. They supported good posture, proper breathing, and fine moral fiber. Children were crammed into these things "for their health." Any physician who said otherwise was often labeled to be a liberal quack. Succeeding fashion trends have followed a strikingly similar route: flappers were thought to be hurting themselves with their weight loss; smoking was initially known to be bad for the lungs; bathing was understood to reduce instances of disease. But when these things became fashionable, the perception of them changed: thin was good; smoking was good; bathing in the 1700's was thought to be very dangerous.
To further aid my argument, consider the following. If muscle is good, and thin is good, and eating balanced meals is good, then *why* aren't we encouraged to look like female weight lifters? You know, the muscle-bound, rippling amazons that men often wrinkle their nose at and call freaks. They're thin, aren't they? They exercise, don't they? They watch their meals carefully, right? If health is really our concern when it comes to body weight, then we should be looking to them as our health and beauty standard! They are the extreme example of what we are told is healthy so their should be our ideal, our goal. Then why do doctors encourage us to lift light weights so that we will develope "lean muscle" (read: small) instead of bulk? Is it because bulk is unhealthy? Certainly not! It's because being like these women (who, by the way, I have a strange admiration for) is not fashionable. If it were, then it would be declared healthy.
There is a $40 billion dollar diet industry. These diet industries hire doctors to do studies. These studies are given to medical students in school, thus the diet industry has a hand in what doctors are taught. This diet industry knows it's very survival depends upon you buying into the lies.
All right, we've hopefully established that an active fat person is healthier than an inactive skinny person (and if that isn't established in your mind, it might be best to go to a more extensive reference on the subject, such as Marilyn Wann's Fat!So?.) At least I hope that some doubt has been struck in your mind. But isn't exercise only healthy because it helps you lose weight? Astoundingly, I never thought about this question when I was doing sit ups, I just assumed the only healthy thing about exercising was the fact that I was losing weight. And when I was exposed to fat activism, I thought that it was the ticket to no more sit ups ever again and lots of cheetos! Woo hoo!
Wrong. Exercise is still healthy and necessary. Your fruits and veggies are still a important part of your every day diet. Balance in one's diet is important. The freedom you can now allow yourself to have, however, is to eat when you're hungry, to stop when your full, and to eat what you want but only in ADDITION to traditionally healthy foods (healthy as defined by vitamins, minerals, proteins, ect, as opposed to calories). If you start exercising and eating an apple and celery sticks every day (along with your donut), you just might lose weight, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with being skinny. But you probably will only lose a little bit of weight at best. You probably won't be skinny. But you'll be healthy.
Back to the Fat Acceptance Menu
Email: ericaherron@hotmail.com