The Fat Chick Diaries

Amphibians have been taking a major hit for decades. Back in the early 1990s, I was doing graduate research on ranid frogs, so I was paying very close attention to what was being published about amphibians at the time. There was a crisis afoot: frogs were turning up everywhere with bizarre mutations, and populations were dwindling and even mysteriously dying out. There was lots of theories at the time: nematodes and other parasites, UV radiation, chemical pollutants, etc. I will admit that in the past seven or eight years, I have been paying very little attention, as my career trajectory has tended away from teaching biology. But what little I did happen to see did not paint a pretty picture for the froggies.

Frogs are what zoologists call an indicator species. Being amphibians, they have extremely permeable skin. They absorb water and accomplish a fair amount of gas exchange that way, so in that sense the permeability of their skin is adaptive and very handy. However, it also leaves them very vulnerable to pollutants. It’s one of the reasons you have to be very careful what you have on your hands when you handle them. You can’t smoke cigarettes and then handle frogs– the nicotine on your fingers is enough to harm them. If you’re a field biologist out in the wetlands studying frogs, you can’t use bugspray. This can be hugely unpleasant. I speak from experience. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as with the canary in the mine, if you see something going horribly awry with the frogs, you need to consider the possibility that humans are next. Turns out, what’s going horribly awry with the frogs is now going horribly awry with us, and we have only ourselves to blame. Nicholas Kristoff has a great column about it in the New York Times. I haven’t had a chance to go read the source material, so I’m working just from the Kristoff article right now.

Apparently, there is more and more evidence that the culprits are endocrine disruptors. They get into the water supply through human activities, such as women taking birth control pills who excrete high levels of estrogen in their urine. They flush the toilet, and the sewage treatment plant isnt’ really set up to remove pharmaceuticals from water, so…

The results are not good. Male children are being born with genital deformities at increasingly high rates. Horror stories like that. How all of this relates to this blog is this: Apparently, the evidence that endocrine disruptors cause obesity is mounting. Here’s a quote from the article:

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

That last part is so important, I’m going to paste it again:

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Now, you and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the rise in obesity is due solely to fat people being a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs with no self control. We sit on the couch all day swilling Cherry Coke and eating Snickers bars. It’s easy and fun to blame us, so why look for alternate explanations? Sure, the fatties swear up and down they’re trying like mad to eat healthy and lose weight, but they’re still fat, so they must be lying, right? After all, they’re already full of other character flaws– laziness, gluttonny– so it’s not hard to see they must also be liars, too, right? After all, where does the phrase “big fat liar” come from?

The problem with this, other than the obvious joy people take in engaging in vicious negative stereotyping and blaming behavior, is that this type of laziness means there’s no real push to search for other possible explanations. Nothing else could possibly be making us fat- we’re obvioulsy doing it to ourselves. Pollution causes other reactions in the human body– asthma, cancer– but not this one. No, couldn’t be this one. It’s just sooooo much more fun to blame the fatties, because then we can make fun of them and hate them and feel superior. See how that works?

I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would cry out for action if the ONLY problem that endocrine disruptors in the environment were causing was increased rates of obesity. But there are babies involved. Nothing generates an outcry and a demand for action like deformed babies. So there’s hope.

Amphibians have been taking a major hit for decades. Back in the early 1990s, I was doing graduate research on ranid frogs, so I was paying very close attention to what was being published about amphibians at the time. There was a crisis afoot: frogs were turning up everywhere with bizarre mutations, and populations were dwindling and even mysteriously dying out. There was lots of theories at the time: nematodes and other parasites, UV radiation, chemical pollutants, etc. I will admit that in the past seven or eight years, I have been paying very little attention, as my career trajectory has tended away from teaching biology. But what little I did happen to see did not paint a pretty picture for the froggies.

Frogs are what zoologists call an indicator species. Being amphibians, they have extremely permeable skin. They absorb water and accomplish a fair amount of gas exchange that way, so in that sense the permeability of their skin is adaptive and very handy. However, it also leaves them very vulnerable to pollutants. It’s one of the reasons you have to be very careful what you have on your hands when you handle them. You can’t smoke cigarettes and then handle frogs– the nicotine on your fingers is enough to harm them. If you’re a field biologist out in the wetlands studying frogs, you can’t use bugspray. This can be hugely unpleasant. I speak from experience. But that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, as with the canary in the mine, if you see something going horribly awry with the frogs, you need to consider the possibility that humans are next. Turns out, what’s going horribly awry with the frogs is now going horribly awry with us, and we have only ourselves to blame. Nicholas Kristoff has a great column about it in the New York Times. I haven’t had a chance to go read the source material, so I’m working just from the Kristoff article right now.

Apparently, there is more and more evidence that the culprits are endocrine disruptors. They get into the water supply through human activities, such as women taking birth control pills who excrete high levels of estrogen in their urine. They flush the toilet, and the sewage treatment plant isnt’ really set up to remove pharmaceuticals from water, so…

The results are not good. Male children are being born with genital deformities at increasingly high rates. Horror stories like that. How all of this relates to this blog is this: Apparently, the evidence that endocrine disruptors cause obesity is mounting. Here’s a quote from the article:

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

That last part is so important, I’m going to paste it again:

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

Now, you and I both know that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States think the rise in obesity is due solely to fat people being a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs with no self control. We sit on the couch all day swilling Cherry Coke and eating Snickers bars. It’s easy and fun to blame us, so why look for alternate explanations? Sure, the fatties swear up and down they’re trying like mad to eat healthy and lose weight, but they’re still fat, so they must be lying, right? After all, they’re already full of other character flaws– laziness, gluttonny– so it’s not hard to see they must also be liars, too, right? After all, where does the phrase “big fat liar” come from?

The problem with this, other than the obvious joy people take in engaging in vicious negative stereotyping and blaming behavior, is that this type of laziness means there’s no real push to search for other possible explanations. Nothing else could possibly be making us fat- we’re obvioulsy doing it to ourselves. Pollution causes other reactions in the human body– asthma, cancer– but not this one. No, couldn’t be this one. It’s just sooooo much more fun to blame the fatties, because then we can make fun of them and hate them and feel superior. See how that works?

I don’t believe for one minute that anyone would cry out for action if the ONLY problem that endocrine disruptors in the environment were causing was increased rates of obesity. But there are babies involved. Nothing generates an outcry and a demand for action like deformed babies. So there’s hope.

I like it when somebody does a study to see whether there are things about fat people that are just plain different from skinny people. You know, things that might help explain why some people are heavier than others that fall outside the category of “fat people are mental cases with no self control who sit on their asses eating buckets of lard all day.” Here is a recent example, covered this week in the New York Times.

Researchers looked at salivation in very fat versus thin people, and found that when presented with a new taste (not altogether new– just new as in that haven’t already been tasting it at the time), thin people stop salivating over it much sooner than the very fat. From the article:

“This is basically saying that there is a difference in how we respond to food physiologically depending on our weight status,” Dr. Bond said. “It suggests that this habituation process is impaired in people who are obese.”

“They’re not as sensitive to those feelings of fullness, and as a result, they continue to eat longer,” he added.

The article goes on to conclude like this:

“It’s going to be longer before they stop eating,” Dr. Bond said of the protracted salivary response.

But he noted it is not clear whether the slower habituation response is a cause of obesity or a feature of it.

“What we don’t know is whether obese people show this different level of responding before they become obese, or if it is something that happens as you gain weight, and whether it changes with weight loss,” he added.

Ever since meeting my biological mother after a lifetime being raised by skinny people, I have been 100% we’re not all fighting the same battle. The playing field is not level. There’s something going on with us that makes it harder for us. I think society (and a few individual, particularly smug thin people) give thin people credit for having more willpower than they actually possess, and not enough credit to fat people for the willpower they possess. It isn’t JUST about willpower. It never has been. But when we jump to that conclusion, we do not bother to look for other factors that may be in play. That type of “blame the victim and look no further” approach doesn’t fly in other fields of inquiry, and it shouldn’t fly with obesity research either. That’s why I’m happy to see this type of research done.

In this article from the New York Times, Julie Weed reports on a minor rebellion among primary care physicians, who are radically changing the way they do business so they can see fewer patients each day and spend the time it really takes to offer them quality care. It involves things like reducing office staff and going to web-based appointment management. It also means freeing themselves from the yoke of insurance companies, which have huge paperwork requirements (forcing doctors to hire office staff) and puny payouts.

This got me thinking. This movement is both small and young. The overwhelming majority of doctors still practice rapid-fire, assembly-line medicine, where nurses or medical assistants line patients up in rows of little examining rooms and doctors move along the hallway, popping into each room for as little time as possible, just long enough to order some tests (all of which must be performed off-site, natch), or make a diagnosis and write a script, dictate a few notes, and move on.

If you were one of these doctors, why would you take the time to dig deeper when you could just say, “It’s because you’re fat. Lose weight. NEXT!”

I’m not saying they’re right. I’m saying that type of environment breeds this type of behavior. Fatness is the low-hanging fruit. The easy explanation. And a harried doctor under pressure to move fast probably just can’t help herself after a while.

In fact, the more fat people a doctor has on her schedule in a day, the more money she can make. She can practically run down the hall, pausing momentarily at each door just to peek in and say, “It’s because you’re fat! It’s because YOU’RE fat! It’s because YOU’RE fat TOO!” That leaves a lot more time to ponder the real mystery cases– like when thin people develop medical problems they think only fat people get. Thin and got heart disease? Well, we’ll actually have to look into that, won’t we?

It’s in everyone’s interest to reform the way modern assembly-line medicine is practiced. But I’m thinking maybe it’s especially in the interest of those of us whose larger bodies offer doctors an easy way out.

I learned two new phrases today: “thin privilege” and “diversely-bodied.”

Things are busy, and I’m a bit behind in reading the fat-related articles from the New York Times. I just finished this one from way back on May 14. (See? I told you I was behind!)

The article is about the experience of fat people in yoga classes, and how separate courses for fat folks are springing up all over the country. It notes specifically the inhospitable climate in many regular yoga courses, due in part to the inability of many yoga instructors to offer appropriate support and pose modifications to accommodate the needs of people who, for example, have breasts and bellies to big to allow them to get into the standard child’s pose. That’s me, by the way– I do mine with my knees spread apart so my belly has a place to go. But then, I do my yoga at home with Megan Garcia’s wonderful DVD put out by the folks at Just My Size. Well worth the money if you’re a beginner.

As usual, the comments that follow the article run the gamut from enlightened and supportive to ignorant and hateful. A few suggest that fatties need to be in classes with thin people so we can have thin role models who did the hard work of losing the weight. This, of course, falsely presumes that all thin people are thin because they work hard at it, that all fat people are fat because they haven’t bothered to work hard at it, and that we’re looking to be (or need to be) inspired by thin role models in the first place.

But then there is this comment by Anna from Atlanta, which I just loved:

It’s amazing that a practice meant to bring about awareness can operationally be so closed! I’ve practiced yoga for many years and have always very much enjoyed the rare opportunities to practice in diverse communities…it brings a whole new level of joy into movement! But before reading this article, I had never considered the fact that diversely-bodied groups are so rare because lots of teachers don’t know how to adjust the full spectrum of bodies.

It’s “thin privilege” to be blind to the ways some are included and others excluded in this society….thanks for opening my eyes! In the future, I would like to train as a teacher, and I will remember this article.

We all struggle, and we can all benefit from enjoying and exploring our bodies…my practice helps me manage depression and be less aggressive toward myself. Until there are more integrated classes with well-trained teachers, I think it’s wonderful that there are separate classes for plus-sized yogis. If yoga is about accepting ourselves as we are and playing mindfully at our edge, then our community of practice can acknowledge its exclusivity (and the underlying issues that inform it) and work intelligently at becoming more inclusive.

— Anna, Atlanta

Among the things I liked about Anna’s enlightened comment is that it taught me two new phrases: “thin privilege” and “diversely-bodied.”

Thin privilege if, of course, an adaptation of “white privilege,” which is a concept that covers all of the ways that white people, even those who work hard to eschew racism, still experience benefits of being white whether they want to or not. It ranges from having no dearth race-mates in positions of power and authority and the vastly different treatment white people receive when they come into contact with law enforcement (nobody gets pulled over for Driving While White) to being able to buy band-aids that match your skin tone. If you Google the phrase you’ll find extensive lists of examples of white privilege.

I’m a bit surprised at myself that it never occurred to me to use the term “thin privilege” to describe the range of privileges that accrue to thin people in society because they are thin, especially to thin women. Next time you go to the mall and see the number of clothing stores for thin women compared to those for fat women, even though the majority of American woman are considered fat, well, that’s thin privilege: a wider range of clothing options, including professional attire. Next time you watch the news and realize that Candy Crowley is virtually alone as fat chick in the world of television journalism, well, that’s thin privilege. Thin people make more money and face less workplace discrimination. Thin students never have trouble fitting into the desks at school. And let’s not even talk about airplane seats. That’s thin privilege. The scapegoating of fat people because certain health issues are associated with weight while thin people with unhealthy habits get a pass from society because they can’t be identified on sight, well, that’s thin privilege too.

This is a phrase I need to use more often. All of us do.

Not that you’d know it with all the attention Clay Aiken got that year, but in 2003 Ruben Studdard won American Idol. A short while later, the same media outlet did back-to-back stories about Ruben and the original American Idol, Kelly Clarkson. The article about Ruben was all about his life before Idol, what a nice, sweet, cuddly guy he was (his nickname is the Velvet Teddy Bear), what a thrill it was to win, and his plans for the future.

The article about Kelly was about how fat she had gotten since she won.

Say WHAT?

At the time, Ruben was easily twice what most doctors would consider his ideal weight. Kelly was not overweight in the least– she may have been toward the top of the healthy weight range for her height, but certainly not above it. At all. Like, not even close.

I was so outraged by this that I still feel it years later as I write this. I wish I could remember where the stories appeared so I could link them. The double standard at work in these two back-to-back stories was absolutely shocking, and the people who covered the story apparently did not notice this about themselves.

Ruben is the Velvet Teddybear. I’m just going to guess that any female contestant who was twice the healthy weight for her height– assuming she made it that far in the contest at all without being eliminated solely for her weight– would have, ahem, a slightly different nickname. Cow? Pig? Certainly not teddybear.

More recently, we see Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent. My first reaction upon watching the video was to be thrilled by her talent and thrilled for her that she got to realize her goal of performing in front of a large audience and absoluting wowing us all. Soon afterward, I had a different reaction. I felt disgust at the thought that the real message of the Susan Boyle phenomenon is that nobody– not the three judges, not the live audience, and not most of the people who have since viewed the video on YouTube or elsewhere– believe something so beautiful could come from that particular person. That particular fat, dowdy, midle-age person. Her voice is remarkable, yes. But her STORY is remarkable because she is middle-age and fat and dowdy and somehow, miraculously, still worth listening to. Would the reaction of the judges and the audience have been the same if she were young, thin, and beautiful? Shame on all of us for the stereotypes and assumptions we carry around in our heads. And shame on us for applying such a different set of standards to women than we do men. After all, we knew Reuben could do it all along! And what was that gray-haired guy’s name who won last year? We loved him from the start! See my point?

And now, in today’s New York Times, we have this. It’s a story about fat actors. It’s not the same kind of story we read about actresses who get fat– those stories tend to be about how those women can’t get roles anymore, and on the rare occasion that they do, they’re playing the fat sidekick, the fat mom, or the annoying fat chick at work. But not lead roles, and certainly not heroic or romantic leads. But today’s NYT article was about famous actors porking out and still getting lead roles. Not a single mention of the actresses that gain weight and still get lead roles, because THERE AREN’T ANY.

GOD DAMMIT THIS KIND OF DOUBLE STANDARD PISSES ME OFF.

I mean, really. What else is there to say?

The New York Times reported this morning on a study that appears to show a link between fat kids and the proximity of a fast food joint to their school. The trade group for the fast food industry, of course, finds the study to be flawed. But it seems like common sense to me: If it’s easy for students to go grab a burger or some pizza during lunch, and in so doing GET THE HECK OUT of school for a period, they’re gonna do it. Do it often enough, and it’ll start to show up on your waistline.

The question is, what do we do with this information? Do we creat Fast Food-Free School Zones in much the same manner that we attempted to protect children from drugs in the era of Nancy Reagan and “Just Say No” by creating Drug-Free School Zones? Should the schools themselves have to prove they are offering substantially more healthy fare in their own cafeterias before local small business owners are forced to relocate or go out of business? Should young people be carded at the door before being allowed to buy fast food during the school day? If so, would there be penalties for purveyors of cheeseburgers for serving minors, the way there are for bars? Would the real police then actually become the Food Police?

I don’t think this study tells us anything we didn’t already know, and now that the study is out there, what action is there to be taken that doesn’t fall into the category of Nanny State Saving The Fat Kids From Themselves?

I haven’t done a Daily Pug Count in a while, so here’s today’s figure as of 4:04 p.m.: Four pugs. One in Queens, three in Manhattan. I’m telling you, NYC is Pug City, y’all.

Anyway, back to business. I saw Megan McCain on the Rachel Maddow Show the other day, and Rachel mentioned Megan is on Twitter, so I went and checked her out. Having seen images of Megan throughout the campaign and having just watched her during her interview with Rachel, I was very surprised to see among her Twitter entries (I guess they’re called “tweets”) a statement defending her own curves and encouraging the rest of us to love ours, too. I thought… did somebody make fun of her for being fat? If so, how is that possible? She’s not rail thin like her mom, but she’s certainly slim. Have we really gone that far over the edge that we’re fat-bashing Megan McCain now?

As it turns out, the answer is yes: Megan McCain, who is a size 8, got fat-bashed by her own fellow Republican. Tara Parker Pope writes about it on Well today.

That just stuns me. I mean, really? To me, a woman who wears a size 12 shouldn’t be considered plus size, because in terms of her clothing needs, she has a heck of a lot more in common with a size 8 than a size 18. A size 10 looks thin to me. But a size EIGHT??? Come on, REALLY? We’re fat-bashing in the single digits now?

You’d think there are no more pressing issues facing this country right now. Yeesh.

Over on the New York Times Well blog, Tara Parker Pope writes today about “the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods.” They put people into groups and assignged each group a particular type of reduced-calorie diet: some cut down on carbs, some cut down on fat, and some cut down on animal protein. Here’s what happened:

After two years, every diet group had lost — and regained — about the same amount of weight regardless of what diet had been assigned. Participants lost an average of 13 pounds at six months and had maintained about 9 pounds of weight loss and a two-inch drop in waist size after two years.

This is somewhat ambiguous language, but the bottom line appears to be this: after all that effort, two years later people were down an average of only nine pounds. NINE POUNDS. Since the participants were considered overweight to begin with, one can assume that the pointy finger of society felt they had more than nine pounds to lose. Oh well.

My own conclusion for this study is that it proves that substantial weight loss is damn near impossible regardless of what you try. The conclusion drawn by the researchers is that it doesn’t matter what kind of calories you’re counting, as long as you’re counting calories. Cutting fat works about as well as cutting protein– the point is to be cutting something. Thank goodness for small favors. But to me, cutting 750 calories out of your diet every day only to have lost a mere 9 pounds two years down the road hardly seems worth the sacrifice. Beneath the post, one of the commenters, JenK, puts it like this:

Well, there’s also a question of whether an average net loss of 9lbs is worth that much effort.

Starting a regular exercise program is probably just as good for your health in the long run, and will probably feel better, than jumping through the food hoops.

So I wonder… what do we do with this information? Do we really want to live in a society where we all obsessively count calories? I will admit to keeping an electronic food log. I do it mostly to keep myself honest and nutritionally balanced, but it also counts calories automatically, and I will admit that I do find myself looking at that number a lot to see what I can learn from it, if anything. But do I really want to do that for the rest of my life? Does anybody? Should anybody?

Wow. That’s pretty bleak. They

After all of that hullaballoo about the “obesity tax” on sugared soft drinks in New York, it turns out the Governor was only kidding. He never expected the tax to be enacted. All he really wanted to do was draw people’s attention to the issue of childhood obesity. Such a kidder.