The Fat Chick Diaries

I use an online food log to keep track of what I eat. I started doing this while I was seeing a nutritionist in 2008-2009, whom I lovingly refer to as the Food Nazi. I started going at the suggestion of my internist after my annual physical in the fall of 2007, when she recommended I lose weight and I told her what she should already have known: Being a fat chick, I have tried numerous times to lose weight with diet, exercise, blah blah blah, and while I have lost anywhere from 5 to 40 pounds, I have regained it every single time, usually much more than I originally lost, leaving me fatter in the long run, not thinner. In short, been there, done that, got the same results that 95% of people do. This is the story of virtually every fat person I know. Any other suggestions, doc, or is that all you’ve got?

That’s when she suggested the nutritionist. I have to say, the doc was right in the sense that I did actually learn a lot from talking to a nutritionist, and I have made some permanent changes to my eating habits that will benefit my health in the long run. The weight loss, however, was minimal. Raise your hand if you’re surprised.

After a year, I felt I wasn’t learning enough new things to make it worth the cost of continuing to see her. You see, my insurance doesn’t cover nutritional counseling unless I’m actually sick, which I’m not. However, the online food log I started keeping while under her care was a revelation to me, and I still do it. It lets me know that I’m getting the right balance of nutrients, when I’m overeating or undereating, etc. It also lets me log my weight, and sure enough, every so often I lose a pound. Not only that, but carefully monitoring my eating has helped me lick the one less-than-perfect test result that’s been dogging me for the past several years– my “good” cholesterol is always a hair too low. Now it’s perfect. So I keep doing the food log.

Most of the people on the site are there to lose weight. I will admit I am thrilled when a pound disappears, and I sometimes let myself get caught up in the weight-loss hoopla. It’s happening slowly enough for me that I let myself believe I may actually keep it off this time. One of the ways in which the site bangs the weight loss drum is to keep a running total of the combined pounds lost by all of the site’s members. So far, it is more than 34,000 pounds. That’s a lot.

There are a few problems with this calculation. First, it doesn’t tell us how many individual people factor into that calculation. Do they have 30,000 members? If so, that’s not a lot per person. In addition, it doesn’t tell us if that calculation reflects the CURRENT weight for members or just each member’s LOWEST weight, whether that’s current or not. Most importantly, it doesn’t account for people who have lost some weight, then started gaining it back and got so frustrated they stopped logging altogether. They may weigh more than they did when they started, but we’ll never know.

Anyway, that 34,000 pound figure is so huge, it got me thinking. Fat molecules are mostly hydrocarbon chains. When you use fat for energy, you are breaking the chemical bonds in those chains to release the energy stored in those bonds. As a result, you breathe out a boatload of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, as we all know, contributes to global warming.

That got me thinking about fat people as a form of carbon sequestration. The reason a lot of the carbon dioxide floating around in the air today wasn’t floating around in the air two hundred years ago is that it was hidden in the earth’s crust in the form of coal and oil. In other words, it was sequestered. Trees do a great job of sequestering carbon dioxide, but unfortunately the human race seems hell bent on stripping the earth’s surface of as many trees as possible to create grazing space for cows (who burp and fart methane all day) and suburbs (which you have to drive to and from, releasing carbon from the fossil fuel in your gas tank, because it’s too far to walk). That’s bad news for carbon sequestration.

That got me thinking about Gaia. You know, the hypothesis that the earth is just one giant superorganism, and that all of the systems and processes that take place in and on the earth are a part of the functioning of that organism. If Gaia can’t sequester carbon dioxide in one way because we’re messing her up, she’ll sequester it in another way– in fat people. It’s like Mother Earth punishing us for not letting her sequester carbon the way she needs to. We got caught burning too many fossil fuels and cutting down too many trees, and now Mother is going to punish us with the OMGbesity Epidemic.

(disclosure: I totally stole the phrase OMGBesity Epidemic from another blogger, and sadly I can’t remember who, so I can’t make a proper attribution. But it’s too cool not to use it. If it was you, let me know.)

Do I really think that’s what’s making us fat? No, of course not. But you gotta give credit where credit is due– fat people are sequestering a whole bunch of carbon that would otherwise have to be somewhere else. If all the fat people so villified by society and the media suddenly lost all that fat, well, that carbon would have to go somewhere, and where it would go would be right into the atmosphere. So what will it be, skinny people? Fat people and polar icecaps, or no fat people and no polar icecaps? Maybe you’d suddenly be much more willing to put up with fat chicks on the subway if the alternative were for the entire New York City subway system to be below sea level.

So here I am thinking I’m all clever for thinking of this, but alas, somebody already beat me to it. Take a look at this blog post from the New Scientist. The guy actually does the math, which I am way too lazy to do (because, you know, I’m fat and all…). Definitely some food for thought.

When I write about the built environment, it’s usually in the context of healthier living and the way in which living in sprawl encourages fatness. See my past posts on the topic here. However, being carfree, I am also keenly interested in city living as a way to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pollution in general, and dependence on foreign energy. Here’s a fantastic article in Business Week by Alex Steffen that absolutely everyone should read.

The long form of the article is here, if you really want to get into the details. It’s well worth the read. One of the comments posted under the article provides a link to a set of photographs similar to other ones I’ve seen on the web such as this and this. These are really compelling visual images of the space saved by transporting people by bus instead of driving individual cars. If you’re reading this and you’re a school teacher, I hope you’ll consider using a photo like this in a lesson someday. You can even reenact it out on the playground. It’s a powerful image.

I take my hat off to the state of California.

There is something I’ve been dreaming of for years now that seemed all but impossible, given Americans’ love of sprawl. Sprawl is a culprit in so many modern evils– global warming, the loss of green space, less-walkable neighborhoods, and longer commutes. Long commutes, in turn, lead to less time to exercize and prepare meals from scratch, more time sitting motionless in the car, often grabbing unhealthy meals in the go, less time for community involvement, and, of course, dependence on foreign oil and all the unpleasantness that entails .

My dream has been to see anti-sprawl measures like brown space development, the building of more multi-family housing closer to where people work, and more options for public transportation. Today’s New York Times reports that California has passed just such an initiative.

This is real leadership, people. The potential benefits of such a thing are tremendous, varied, and far-reaching.

From the Washington Post today, to be filed under “weird things that make you fat.” Apparently, being sedentary doesn’t just make you burn calories more slowly. It actually makes you hungrier and likely to eat more. Greeeeaatttt….. another one-two punch we didn’t really need.

Slacking Up an Appetite

A new study suggests that couch potatoes get hungrier than active types. Barry Braun of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his colleagues studied six young, lean and fit men and women in three one-day experiments.

On one day the volunteers spent 12 hours being physically active: walking, sorting papers, picking up books and folding laundry. They were not allowed to sit for more than 10 minutes each hour. On the other two days the volunteers watched videos, worked on computers and were only allowed to move around by being pushed in a wheelchair. In one of these sessions they were allowed to eat the same amount as in the previous scenario, whereas in the second one their food intake was reduced.

Surprisingly, the volunteers reported feeling hungrier, having a greater desire to eat and feeling like they could eat more after a meal in the couch potato scenarios than after the highly active session.

— Rob Stein

DW wrote:

How in the world is this a surprise to anyone? Whenever I am very busy doing yardwork or enjoying a very active vacation day, I am seldom hungry. When I sit at my desk all day at work, I spend half my time thinking about food.

Every single person I work with and all of my family members have always said the same thing.

Back when I took freshman psych in college, there was a chapter in one of the required texts called “Birth Control by the Toaster Method.” This was a loooooong time ago, so unfortunately I do not have the name of the author to cite. The purpose of the chapter was to point out potential flaws in data analysis, the most common being the tendency to mistake correllation for causation. The name of the chapter derived from an example in which couples living in certain country (I forget which) who owned toasters had fewer children than couples who did not own toasters. However, it should be obvious to all but the stupidest among us that the toasters themselves were not the cause of the drop in fertility (actually, it’s fecundity, not fertility, but that’s a pet peeve for another day). The relationship between the two was one of correllation, not causation. The underlying cause behind both was most likely income level– it was already well-documented that couple of higher socioecnomic strata have fewer children on average. They’d also be more likely to be able to afford a toaster.

I very strongly suspect, as do many others, that the same holds true for fatness and the diseases that frequently (but not always) accompany it, such as heart disease and diabetes. It’s not that the fatness causes the disease, it’s that the same thing that causes the fatness also causes the disease. For example, if you go through a long period of being sedendary and/or having really bad eating habits (I’ve done both in the past), you will probably pack on some poundage. You will also most likely put yourself at risk of developing diseases associated with bad eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle. In fact, the latter is true even for people who don’t get fat in the process. Moreover, it is supported by the increasing body of research that shows that fat people with healthy habits are healthier than skinny people with poor habits.

But where I’m really going with this post is this:

Recently I’ve posted a bit about the relationship between the built environment and fatness. Here’s a related article from Newsweek (another oldie-but-goodie) that talks about the unhealthy nature of the habitat we’re creating for ourselves and its relationship not to fatness, but to heart disease. Think of fatness as the toaster and heart disease as the fertility rate. It’s easy to see how people living in unwalkable, sprawling suburbs might wind up with both.

What is to be done? I wrote in a previous post about incentivizing the development of more walkable communities. However, the greater issue is demand. People move out to the sprawling ‘burbs in part because that’s the lifestyle they want. They want space. They don’t want to feel crowded. They value the conspicuous of consumption that a McMansion provides. These are all parts of the reason why families having fewer and fewer children are still buying larger and larger houses, with larger and larger yards. Perhaps the mortgage crisis will curtail this trend somewhat, but I doubt it will be enough to cause a radical cultural shift that will increase the demand for housing in compact, walkable communities. Good, strong leadership is needed. I don’t hear either presidentail candidate talking about this issue. Any ideas?

Today, an oldie but a goodie from Newsweek about the relationship between our built environment and the fact that we’re all getting fatter. This appeared in Newsweek in 2003. It’s disheartening to think how many MORE sprawling suburbs have been built since then.

A quick sample from the article:

Transportation, environment, economic development, legal and public safety officials typically must sign off on new development. But public health officials are rarely, if ever, consulted, so our subdivisions actually make us fatter and lazier… We haven’t learned from the past. In the 19th century, a new type of architecture was developed to cut down on epidemics of cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Yet in the 21st century, we’re doing just the opposite: Instead of designing walkable cities, we build sprawl that makes us even more dependent on the automobile–and only exacerbates the epidemic of the age: obesity.

Now, obviously some public health bureaucrat is not going to wave a magic wand and stop the development of unwalkable communities. But Congress could certainly incentivize the building of walkable communities for both developers and prospective home buyers. This would be especially useful since the benefits of living in walkable communities doesn’t seem to be incentive enough to curb the American appetite for McMansions in sprawling suburbs. Unfortunately, even though articles similar to this one continue to be written, and the evidence continues to pile up that the habitat we build for ourselves is working against us, nobody’s really doing anything about it.

A subject I think about a lot is the built environment, and what the physical layout of our country is doing to our health. Specifically, living in increasingly sprawly suburban sprawl where nothing is walkable and one must drive everywhere is making us fatter, affording us fewer opportunities for exercise, and oooohhhhh, don’t even get me started about what it’s doing to the health of the planet. Somebody I know from a carfree mailing list goes so far as to refer to cars as “exercize avoidance machines.”

One of the things I really love about living and working in New York City is that it encourages– even requires– a substantial amount of walking.
Here’s my daily commute: I walk two and a half blocks from my apartment to the subway, up two flights up steps to the subway platform, change trains once, walk up two more flights of stairs to the street-level. (I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s not– in my part of Queens, the trains are elevated. They go underground to get into Manhattan, so yes, I’m climbing stairs to get in AND out of the subway system in the morning). Then I walk about six blocks to get to my office. That’s 8.5 blocks of walking and four flights of stairs before I even start to work. In the evening, I do it all again, except by then I’m walking down four flights. So even on days when I do no other exercize, I’m still getting in a fair amount of physical activity. Most New Yorkers that I know have similar routines. Some of us are extra-freaky and even do isometric exercizes while riding the subway.

Compare that to every suburban job I’ve ever had until I told my car in 2005: Walk from front door to driveway, drive to parking lot at work, walk from parking space to building. That’s not even five minutes work of walking, and no stairs whatsoever. Most of my suburbanite friends have similar commuting habits.

My point? Say what you want about city living, but suburban sprawl is making Americans more sedentary.

Having said all that, I must point out that the sidewalks in Manhattan during rush hour are insane. Fortunately, David Rakoff has compiled a list of walking rules to help us all out. It is part of a collection of three op-ed pieces on ways to get New Yorkers moving around the city faster and reduce congestion. Forward this to every New Yorker you know– there are a lot of folks on the sidewalks here who could use a little guidance.

For a year when I first moved to New York state, I had no television.  When I packed up to move, I realized that everywhere I had ever lived (in the dorms or in apartments with roommates/significant others/spouse), the television belonged to the other person.  Now that I was 100% on my own, I had no television.  My choices were to get one or live without it.  I chose to live without it, just to see what would happen.  What happened was this:  I got out of my apartment a LOT more.  I danced, I swam, I joined a chorus.  When I was home, I spent a lot more time reading the things I "never had time" to read before.  In point of fact, part of what motivated me to start dating actively was the fact that lounging around my apartment was not an attractive option because there was no television.  In short, ditching the television for a while was a HUGE improvement in my quality of life.

What I discovered, however, was that everybody who found out I had no television treated me as either a freak or a charity case.  Numerous people offered to give/lend/sell me their spare television.  (Why, I wonder, do so many people have a spare television in the first place?).  They simply could not grasp the idea that anyone would voluntarily live without the boob tube, and viewed my lack of same as a problem in need of solving.

The same thing happened a few years later when I voluntarily gave up my car. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I had inherited a television in the meantime and was no longer t.v.-free).  When people ask me why I did this, I usually take a shortcut and tell them I did it so I could afford graduate school without student loans.  While this is technically true, there’s a lot more to it than that.  Part of me did it to save money.  Part of me did it because it was a challenge and would force me to exercise more.  Part of me did it because of my deep and abiding distaste for the bastard child of Bush’s foreign and energy policies, commonly known as the Iraq War.  I was a single person living in a region that technically had public transportation (woefully inadequate though it was), and I just couldn’t justify the luxury of driving myself around when American soldiers were dying in the Middle East.  And before anybody tells me that war isn’t about oil, know that I am on to you: you’re the same people who believe the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.  Riiiiiight.

But I digress.  My point is, when I voluntarily gave up my car and started walking, biking, and taking the bus everywhere, many of the people in my life just couldn’t wrap their minds around it.  The odds of being in a car accident are far greater than the odds of being attacked by a malevolent stranger while out walking, even at night.  For that matter, so are the odds of a fat person keeling over dead from one of the diseases commonly associated with being fat.  Nevertheless, my mother strenuously objected to my choice to go carfree, primarily because she was terrified that I would die a bloody, violent, and untimely death if not ensconced in the metal cocoon of a motor vehicle at all times while outside my apartment.  Most of my friends responded with, "Why would you want to do THAT?!?!"  There was apparently even speculation among some of my coworkers that I had lost my license for drunk driving or something– after all, why else would someone with a decent salary take the bus?  To his credit, my father was the one and only person who thought it was a great idea and supported me from the get-go.  With just about everybody else, this decision did not compute.

My point is this:  sometimes decisions that could lead to a more active lifestyle but which fly in the face of societal norms are not accepted and supported by others– even those others who think you should take steps to adopt a more active lifestyle.  It takes a certain amount of conviction to reject societal norms and do your own thing.  Peer groups and Corporate America together can create a lot of pressure to live ones life a certain way.  It’s human nature to want to be seen as normal and successful, and it’s easy to understand why most people succumb.  Goodness knows, in a lot of ways, I do it myself.  Where it becomes problematic is when doing so is harmful, and it happens all the time on a really grand scale.

Case in point:  People who buy giant, new-construction McMansions out in the burbs, where the only way to get anywhere is to drive.  Not only are these houses destroying countless acres of farmland and/or greenspace, wastefully expensive to head and cool, and driving up demand for foreign oil by forcing residents to drive everywhere, they’re also apparently making us fatter.  According to an article in today’s New York Times, the design of newer neighborhoods makes people who live in them many times more likely to be obese, because they discourage walking in favor of driving.  This phenomenon falls under the general category of the "built environment," meaning the environment we build for ourselves to live in, and the effects it has on us and our well-being.  If we choose big McMansions on oversize lots in the suburbs over multi-family housing in smaller, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, we’re creating a built environment that discourages walking and leads to the burning of fewer calories.  A closely related issue that the article does not address is the fact that as these new housing developments are built farther and farther from centers of business activity, people spend more and more time on sedentary commuting and less time, say, cooking nutritious meals or working out at the gym.  Still, the mark of middle-class success is a newly built McMansion in the suburbs with two SUV’s in the driveway, so that’s the way things are going, healthy or not.

Whenever I talk about things like this, some skinny person is always ready to jump in and accuse me of not holding fat people responsible for themselves.  No, not really.  I just think– no, I know–  that to the extent that widespread fatness is a problem, it’s a multi-faceted problem, and it will require a multi-faceted solution.  Individual responsibility for food and exercise choices is one large facet, but by no means the only one.  I have no real use for the people who prefer to stick their fingers in their ears and say "lalalalalalalala I can’t hear you" when research shows there is something contributing to the increase of fatness in America other than donuts.