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Category: Fat

Death Is Not An Option

I believe it was the late, lamented Spy that used to run a feature called ‘Death Is Not An Option.” The idea being that you had to choose between two equally bad options for sex — and death was not an option. So, George Bush and Pol Pot? Tom DeLay and a cockroach? Leslee Unruh and Caitlin Flanagan? You get the idea.

Ladies and germs, I present to you, Death Is Not An Option — the Adam Corolla and Donald Trump edition!

Thanks ( I think) to Shakes.

A Conservative Trifecta: Fat-shaming, welfare-state-hating, and victim-blaming

What’s making you fat now? Food stamps.

The argument goes something like this: Low-income people are more likely to be overweight than wealthier Americans. Low-income people are often on food stamps. Therefore, we should re-vamp the foodstamp program because clearly federal food relief leads to obesity. Also, poor people today (read: uppity Negroes) feel entitled to things like food, unlike the humble poor of yesteryear (read: white people, as evidenced by the examples used by the conservative authors — the characters in “Cinderella Man” and “Angela’s Ashes”), who knew enough to be humiliated by their economic situation. From the Hoover Institute article:

The searing images of the Great Depression, and the movie’s themes of pride, humility, hard work, and family, present an interesting contrast to the plight of the poor today. Although there are no doubt many individuals and families in need, the picture of poverty in America today can best be described as muddled.

To which “independent woman” Charlotte Hays follows:

Well, that was then, and this is now: Today many people regard receiving food stamps not as a humiliation but as an entitlement. We’ve made it that way. At one point, there were food stamp ads in the New York subway. They were designed to show that even ordinary, middle class folks might have to resort to food stamps in a spot of trouble.

Imagine that: a program which sought to lessen the humiliation of being on food stamps. Ha. Everyone knows that the poor should be properly humiliated for their lack of income. It’s the compassionate conservative way.

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Since Jill’s Been Stepping On My Toes

She’s been going nuts today, stealing all my ideas for posts. Hmph. And I’m the fat girl around here.

But she didn’t get to this one: FDA approves a new weight-loss drug.

For dogs.

WASHINGTON – Is your hound round? Too much flab on your Lab? Is your husky, well, husky? A new drug may provide some help. The government approved the first drug for obese canines on Friday. Called Slentrol, the Pfizer Inc. drug is aimed at helping fat Fidos shed extra pounds.

“This is a welcome addition to animal therapies, because dog obesity appears to be increasing,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the
Food and Drug Administration.

A dog that weighs 20 percent more than its ideal weight is considered obese. That takes in about 5 percent of the nearly 62 million dogs in the United States. An additional 20 percent to 30 percent are considered overweight.

The liquid drug appears to reduce the amount of fat a dog can absorb. It also seems to trigger a feeling of satiety or fullness, according to the FDA.

You know what? Dogs are omnivores and scavengers. I’ve never known a healthy dog to turn down a particularly tasty treat, especially if there are other dogs around. Junebug is the only dog around here, which means that she hides her treats in nooks and crannies about the place (such as in, oh, THE COUCH) and she will even leave her food lying around for days, though she’s more than happy to eat whatever I have. Interestingly, I had my neighbors in last night (they’re interested in buying the place) and Junebug, being neurotic about vistitors, finished the food that’s been sitting in her bowl for three days while they were here.

Because dogs are scavengers, they will eat pretty much anything that’s offered to them. And a lot of people get in the habit of offering their dogs a LOT of treats.

Dogs are also at the mercy of their owners for exercise, and too many people who own dogs don’t walk them enough. God knows I could get Miss Thing out more often, were it not the dead of winter and were I not knee-injured again.

So you get dogs who get too much food from their owners (who perhaps think their dogs would refuse food if they weren’t hungry) and don’t get exercised enough who get fat. And, mind you, they’re master manipulators, so any attempt at restricting food intake is met with a lot of whining and guilt.

All this by way of saying, dogs really don’t fucking need canine Xenical. They need less food and more exercise.

Plus, have you read the side effects?

The prescription drug also can produce some unfortunate side effects, including loose stools, diarrhea, vomiting, lethargy and loss of appetite.

Because cleaning up vomit and diarrhea is less effort than taking your dog for a walk, I suppose.

And I love this bit that Pfizer felt compelled to include in their press release:

And it’s not for dog owners. The FDA discourages the drug’s use in humans and lists a litany of side effects should anyone ignore that advice.

I’d say I was surprised, but I used to do products liability, and one of my firm’s clients was a manufacturer of the relatively harmless half of Fen-phen (or is it Phen-fen?). And this was AFTER the heart problems of the other half were known. But we had friends of the attorneys calling — usually attorneys themselves — looking for the stash of Fen-phen we must surely have had or had access to.

‘Tween Girls at Risk for Fatness

No, I did not make that title up myself.

As if being a tween is not hard enough, scientists now call the years between 9 and 12 a time when girls are especially at risk of getting fat.

Girls are more likely to become overweight in those preteen years than when they are teenagers, researchers report Monday in The Journal of Pediatrics.

The study did not say why that was and did not examine boys to know whether they face a similar risk.

Imagine that.

Other research has shown that the preteen years are when youngsters switch from heeding parents’ dietary advice to eating like their friends do, [National Institutes for Health Dr. Denise] Simons-Morton said. Less physical activity plays a role, too. She recalls from her own daughters’ tween years long sedentary hours on the phone and worries about getting sweaty.

“It should be cool to be physically active, and attractive,” she said.

Yes. Because what’s cool now is to sit around and be ugly. Someone’s got her finger on the pulse of adolescent priorities.

Obesity Report Cards and Eating Disorders

In the unlikely event that you attend a public school, are overweight, and had no idea, now you’ll get a note sent home evaluating your BMI and letting your parents know whether or not your weight is “normal” — despite the fact that BMI is a seriously flawed standard, and all the experts seem to agree that this new report card system will put more students at risk for eating disorders.

But who cares about health when we have a war on fat to fight?

Six-year-old Karlind Dunbar barely touched her dinner, but not for time-honored 6-year-old reasons. The pasta was not the wrong shape. She did not have an urgent date with her dolls.

The problem was the letter Karlind discovered, tucked inside her report card, saying that she had a body mass index in the 80th percentile. The first grader did not know what “index” or “percentile” meant, or that children scoring in the 5th through 85th percentiles are considered normal, while those scoring higher are at risk of being or already overweight.

Yet she became convinced that her teachers were chastising her for overeating.

Since the letter arrived, “my 2-year-old eats more than she does,” said Georgeanna Dunbar, Karlind’s mother, who complained to the school and is trying to help her confused child. “She’s afraid she’s going to get in trouble,” Ms. Dunbar said.

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The fear of fat is fucking up my commute

Well, this is interesting. Seems like at least once a week during my morning commute, the MTA stops or delays a train due to a sick passenger. And they never do tell you what the deal is, or how long, or why they can’t just dump the person on a platform in the care of some nice transit officers and get on with the trip (what can I say? I’m heartless when I’m late to work).

I can’t recall ever knowing exactly the cause of a delay or what exactly was wrong with the “sick passengers” holding up my commute (well, except for that one time when some guy in my car was bleeding all over the floor from some kind of jobsite accident and other passengers got pissed off at him for getting on the train instead of getting help because he was ambulatory and they wanted to go home).

All this by way of saying, now I do know what the holdup is much of the time: fear of fat. Specifically, fainting dieters.

NEW YORK – Sick subway passengers, most of them dieters who faint from dizziness, are among the top causes of train delays, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

After track work and signal problems, ill passengers rated among the main reasons for subway disruptions between October 2005 and October 2006, according to an analysis of MTA statistics, AM New York reported Tuesday.

Asim Nelson, a transit emergency medical technician, told the paper that fainting dieters topped the “sick customer” list.

“Not eating for three or four days, you are going to go down,” Nelson said. “If you don’t eat for 12 hours, you are going to get weak.” . . .

Fainting spells caused by missed meals topped other “sick customer” causes, including flu symptoms, anxiety attacks, hangovers and heat exhaustion, according to Nelson.

Nelson is part of the MTA’s “sick Customer Response Program,” which consists of emergency medical technicians and registered nurses. When a rider becomes sick, the train conductor must stay with the passenger until emergency responders arrive.

Ironically, or perhaps not so much, the article is accompanied by an ad for Zone Diet chefs. At least they encourage eating frequently in small amounts so this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

The pitfalls of one-size-fits-all measures

According to the National Institutes of Health, the man on the left in this photo is obese. I wouldn’t doubt the one on the right is, too.

I don’t really have time to write an in-depth post on this today, but Ezra has a good post today about an article in The New Republic by Paul Campos that was just brought out from behind the subscription wall (you do need to register to read it).

The gist of the article is that the “obesity crisis” is largely manufactured, and what’s behind it is both a diet industry that funds a lot of the research and stands to make a lot of money offering “solutions” as well as just plain visceral disgust of seeing fat people:

Obesity research in the United States is almost wholly funded by the weight-loss industry. For all the government’s apparent interest in the fat “epidemic,” in recent years less than 1 percent of the federal health research budget has gone toward obesity-related research. (For example, in 1995, the National Institutes of Health spent $87 million on obesity research out of a total budget of $11.3 billion.) And, while it’s virtually impossible to determine just how much the dieting industry spends on such research, it is safe to say that it is many, many times more. Indeed, many of the nation’s most prominent obesity researchers have direct financial stakes in companies that produce weight-loss products. (When they are quoted in the media, such researchers routinely fail to disclose their financial interests in the matters on which they are commenting, in part because journalists fail to ask them about potential conflicts.) And the contamination of supposedly disinterested research goes well beyond the effects of such direct financial interests. As Laura Fraser points out in her book Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry, “Diet and pharmaceutical companies influence every step along the way of the scientific process. They pay for the ads that keep obesity journals publishing. They underwrite medical conferences, flying physicians around the country expense-free and paying them large lecture fees to attend.”

This situation creates a kind of structural distortion, analogous to that which takes place in the stock market when analysts employed by brokerage houses make recommendations to clients intended to inflate the price of stock issued by companies that in return send their business to the brokerages’ investment-banking divisions. In such circumstances, it’s easy for all the players to convince themselves of the purity of their motives. “It isn’t diabolical,” eating-disorders specialist David Garner told Fraser. “Some people are very committed to the belief that weight loss is a national health problem. It’s just that, if their livelihood is based in large part on the diet industry, they can’t be impartial.” Fraser writes that when she asked one obesity researcher, who has criticized dieting as ineffective and psychologically damaging, to comment on the policies of one commercial weight-loss program, he replied, “What can I say? I’m a consultant for them.”

What makes this structural distortion particularly insidious is that, just as Americans wanted desperately to believe that the IPO bubble of the ’90s would never burst–and were therefore eager to accept whatever the experts at Merrill Lynch and on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page had to say about the “New Economy”–they also long to believe that medical experts can solve the problem of their expanding waistlines. The reason for this can be summed up in six words: Americans think being fat is disgusting. That psychological truth creates an enormous incentive to give our disgust a respectable motivation. In other words, being fat must be terrible for one’s health, because if it isn’t that means our increasing hatred of fat represents a social, psychological, and moral problem rather than a medical one.

The convergence of economic interest and psychological motivation helps ensure that, for example, when former Surgeon General Koop raised more than $2 million from diet-industry heavyweights Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig for his Shape Up America foundation, he remained largely immune to the charge that he was exploiting a national neurosis for financial gain. After all, “everyone knows” that fat is a major health risk, so why should we find it disturbing to discover such close links between prominent former public health officials and the dietary-pharmaceutical complex?

None of this is to suggest that the war against fat is the product of some sort of conscious conspiracy on the part of those whose interests are served by it. The relationship between economic motives, cultural trends, social psychology, and the many other factors that fuel the war on fat is surely far more complex than that. But it does suggest that the conventional wisdom about fat in the United States is based on factors that have very little to do with a disinterested evaluation of the medical and scientific evidence, and therefore this conventional wisdom needs to be taken for what it is: a pervasive social myth rather than a rational judgment about risk.

Basically, what Campos is arguing is that fatness matters less than fitness when the data are crunched, and that the one-size-fits-all measures like BMI or weight charts do more harm than good because weight is used as a proxy for health, regardless of other factors.

In addition, we’re an incredibly schizophrenic society when it comes to weight and fat. We’re told how sinfully rich desserts are, but cautioned against appearing as though we actually ate them. The messages start early: young kids are developing more and more eating disorders as they absorb culturally fucked-up messages about fat. Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting are more likely to use extreme forms of weight loss, such as vomiting, later on than girls who don’t. At the same time, the media gets a bug up its ass frequently about The Childhood! Obesity! Epidemic! and runs scaremongering stories like this one — reporting a study in which researchers reported a link between teenage obesity and middle-aged death. Oh, and a second study about weight loss in teens using Meridia (hey! there’s that diet-industry involvement again. I suppose the 14 pounds lost on Meridia beats the average on Xenical. You remember Xenical — “I lost 6 pounds on Xenical, and all I got was this oily anal leakage”).

I do need to wrap this up, but be sure to read the comments at Ezra’s. The fat-bashing starts early, and the “But — but — diabetes!” comments aren’t too far behind. And then go read Amanda’s and Scott’s and Shakes’ posts on the subject.

And I Am Telling You

Jennifer Holliday’s performance of the showstopper during the 1982 Tonys.

Salon has a nice piece here about Holliday’s performance during the original Broadway run of “Dreamgirls” and how That Song worked its way into the culture. Particularly into gay culture. I like what Michael Musto and Billy Zavelson have to say about why it resonated:

“That type of song has always resonated with gay audiences. It tapped into everyone’s fears of abandonment,” says Michael Musto, longtime Village Voice gossip columnist, and who used to lip-sync to Holliday’s version of the song as the finale to the sets he played with his band the Musts. “[Holliday] was acting out every degrading humiliation and every uncouth reaction we all want to do when we’re dumped but don’t — because we have to face people the next day.”

Holliday’s performance, shepherded along by Bennett’s innovative direction, also struck a chord with gay listeners because it showed the singer doing what many of them could not do: Holliday was unabashedly expressing herself. “If you were ever afraid of who you were, or were never able to fit in, you’re going to respond to that type of commitment,” says Zavelson. “Putting yourself out there 100 percent — it’s not easy to do.”

Jennifer Holliday rode that song into stardom (even recording it for an R&B album which my first college roommate played incessantly — that, and “Another Night” by Aretha Franklin. She had Guy Issues). But despite the accolades she got, she — like her character, Effie — never really crossed over into the kind of fame that her talent should have brought her.

While Holliday had a busy career after Dreamgirls, charting with the occasional R&B song, making guest appearances on TV shows like “Touched by an Angel” and “Ally McBeal,” and performing regularly at gay-themed events and fundraisers, she never again reached the heights of “And I Am Telling You.”

The first letter in response to the Salon article criticizes Holliday for being temperamental and being pigeonholed and thinking she owns the role — all that by way of saying that it was Holliday’s own fault she’s not famous, and that the only reason she got notice was because of Michael Bennett, who directed the show on Broadway.

Yeah, like we’ve never heard of a temperamental Broadway diva before. Did our letter writer not see Valley of the Dolls before? As for “owning” a role — as if anyone criticizes Merman for “owning” Mama Rose or LuPone for “owning” Eva Peron or Brando for “owning” Stanley Kowalski. Please!

The problem with Jennifer Holliday’s career is most likely the problem with Effie’s career. Namely, she’s big, she’s black, and she’s a diva. You can have some of those qualities and make it big in show business, but it’s damned difficult to do it with all three. From Frank Rich’s 1981 review of the show, in which he identifies the theme of assimilation and selling out as the dramatic engine of the play:

Perhaps inevitably the cast’s two standouts are those who play characters who do not sell out and who suffer a more redemptive form of anguish: Miss Holliday’s Effie and Cleavant Derricks, as a James Brown-like star whose career collapses as new musical fashions pass him by. Like Miss Holliday, Mr. Derricks is a charismatic singer, who conveys wounding, heartfelt innocence. When, in Act II, he rebels against his slick new Johnny Mathis-esque image by reverting to his old, untamed Apollo shenanigans during a fancy engagement, he gives ”Dreamgirls” one of its most crushing and yet heroic solo turns.

Interestingly, in the film version of Dreamgirls, the character of Effie is played by Jennifer Hudson, who I keep hearing was “famously” booted off American Idol, but I’m not entirely sure why since I don’t really watch the show (anyone?). I do, however, know enough about the show to know that Simon Cowell is intensely critical of any woman who carries the slightest bit of extra weight (regardless of talent), but doesn’t say a thing about the male contestants’ weight.

From what I’ve been hearing, Hudson sings the hell out of the song and acts the hell out of the role — which, being on film, requires a lighter touch than Broadway. What’s somewhat jarring is the idea that Hudson, who’s a great deal thinner than Holliday was in the play, would be deemed too fat for crossover success. But then, this was a film for which Beyonce Knowles, who’s refreshingly curvy, had to lose a great deal of weight. I guess what plays in the music industry doesn’t play in Hollywood (and there goes that theme of assimilation again).

The question, then, is whether Hudson will be able to parlay the critical buzz she’s getting for her performance into a sustainable career or whether she’ll be a novelty act unworthy of inclusion with the “regular” performers.

Global Warming: Blame My Fat Ass

I noticed this news (PDF) last week, grumbled briefly, and then fixed myself a sandwich.

Well? What’d you expect me to do in light of such awfulness?

Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.

The numbers are added costs linked directly to the extra drain of body weight on fuel economy. In a paper to appear in the October-December issue of the journal The Engineering Economist, the scientists conclude that each extra pound of body weight in all of today’s vehicles results in the need for more than 39 million gallons of extra gasoline usage each year.

It’s not the results or the calculations I have my problems with; data don’t care if you hate them. For a terrific summary of what I do have problems with, and why, I have to point you to Gina Kolata’s article, with what might be my favorite title ever: “For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monster.”

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