Weighty Issues

At work on Tuesday:

Developer: Do you hear that?
Business Analyst: Yeah. What is that?
Developer: It sounds like the theme song for Doctor Who. Where the hell is it coming from?
Graphic Designer: It’s just my phone! Hang on! Stupid purse.

"Using data from a national health survey of more than 40,000 Americans, researchers found that obese adults were up to twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions as normal-weight adults." (full article fom Yahoo/Reuters)

Let’s get one thing straight: no mater what your attitude towards fat and body acceptance, being fat in North America is hard. You can love yourself as much as you want but turn on a television or open a magazine and you’ll quickly told that you’re not being all that you can be.

Articles and studies say you’ll earn less than your thin counterparts and that you’re less likely to be hired than a thin person (have I mentioned that we’re heading into a recession?). Your grandmother tells you that no man will ever want you with thighs like that. There are only four clothing stores you can shop at and two of them cater mostly to colour-blind women who love scratchy synthetic fabric. Who wouldn’t be more prone to depression?

And that’s the best case scenario. That’s if you’re lucky enough not to have people make fat jokes to your face or shout names at you as they drive past in cars. That’s if you’re confident enough that you don’t think people are judging your restaurant orders and the contents of your shopping cart. That’s if you haven’t tried again and again to loose weight only to have it come back.

So, yes, I can see why obese people are more prone to depression. But the real question is: why can’t you? Why do you need a study to tell you something that common sense and empathy should make apparent?

New York - In a surprise move that is shocking government agencies and anti-obesity groups, the nation’s employers are teaming with the oil industry in support of obesity. In a press conference held earlier today, Employers and Oil in Support of Obesity (EMSO) indicated that the United States economy will be thrown into a tailspin if efforts to curtail obesity are successful.

Though many are puzzled by the groups stance, EMSO has been researching the issue for some time and claim that there are several key benefits to employing staff with bulging waistlines and to keeping obesity trends on their current course.

“Studies have consistently shown that obese employees are paid less than their thin counterparts,” said group president Edward Stepford. “Obese employees are less likely to ask for pay raises or to complain about working conditions. Thirty Three percent of US adults are obese. If the government succeeds in eliminating obesity then the playing field will be leveled. Paying these people the same as their thin counterparts is something most companies can’t afford.”

With career councilors estimating that even a modest overweight of ten to fifteen pounds can impact salary, the EMSO predicts that a major drop in overweight and obesity levels will hit the economy like a ton of bricks with smaller employers being hit hardest.

The food and oil industries are also poised to suffer if the country continues down it’s path to a healthier population. The COO of a major snack food manufacturer (who asked that his name be withheld) estimates that sales of his products could plummet within the next five years. “Everyone knows that the obese are the largest market for potato chips and prepackaged cookies. They live off that stuff. Get rid of the obese and whole aisles of the supermarket will go untouched.”

Says Edward Stepford, “If obesity is curtailed, fast food establishments will have to shut their doors. It is widely acknowledged that overweight and obese people are the only real customers for this type of food. The impact on the quality of the workforce will be devastating.”

Stepford points out that the majority of Fast Food employees are teenagers and college students. “The fast food industry provides these kids with their first experiences in the job market and many students rely on these jobs to help save for college. Take that opportunity away and, five years from now, we’ll be looking at a workforce with less experience and education.”

Though not as vocal, the oil industry has thrown significant funds behind the advancement of EMSO. Recent studies on the impact of obesity on global warming have indicated that overweight people need more fuel to transport themselves and the massive quantities of food that they eat.

While environmentalists see this as a threat, the oil industry sees it as a way to recoup some of the costs that they have lost from the decrease in home heating consumption. Says researcher Ken Smith, “People don’t realize the effect that obesity is having on home heating costs. Fat acts as insulation. A BMI of 30 is the equivalent of walking around with two wool sweaters on – these people simply do not need to heat their homes as much as their thin counterparts.

It is too early to see what impact the EMSO will have on the governments anti-obesity efforts but, with the financial backing of both the food and oil industries, a new day may soon be dawning.

--
There ends my snark for the day.

I was playing with online health trackers and tools. A fairly comprehensive health site had a tool which let you work out how many calories you burned each day. The tool was slider-based so you slid bars to indicate your age, weight, and activity level. You could also manually type in your answers. Liking anything that lets me click and drag, I started with the sliders.

As I dragged the weight slider to 227lbs, I noticed that there wasn’t much room left to the edge of the bar. Puzzled, I dragged to the end – 300lbs. When I tried to manually enter my weight as 320 a danger sign popped up, letting me know that my answer was out of range.

Up until three hundred, there’s still hope. After three hundred, you’ve fallen off the end of the world.

I’m going to try and stop reading the Fatosphere – at least for a little while. Grant you, I came to that decision this morning and have already checked it twice.

It's a slow day over on www.yahoo.com.

Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish children during World War Two by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, died in the Polish capital on Monday after a long illness, local media said.

My sister and I wander around my favourite second hand bookshop. I flip through a copy of “The Revolution will be Accessorized” while she sifts through baskets of fun buttons and magnets. I can’t blame her enthusiasm; this was, after all, the store where I found my “Reading is Sexy” and “I Read Banned Books’ buttons.

“Look at this!” she calls, holding up a circle.

I walk over and peer. It was a typical no-smoking button – only, instead of a cigarette, there was a wire hanger. “I almost got that for you,” I confess.

“What stopped you?”

“The fear you’d wear it everywhere and get the shit kicked out of you. Also, the fear of Mom.”

She nods and hands it to the shop owner who looks at us and says, in a low whisper,"Someone bought one of these earlier.”

I sense a story, “And?”

“She works at the mall, in retail, and really hated dealing with coat hangers and people who leave coat hangers in the dressing room. She said she was going to start wearing it to work on casual day.”

My mouth drops open. “Did you tell her what it was?”

She shakes her head.”My boyfriend was watching the store. He was trying to figure out how to tell her but she grabbed her change and was out the door before he could think of how to.”

“Oh. My. God.” Visions of a poor girl getting glares from customers and not knowing why filled my head. This was a conservative town. What if they surrounded her and threw 2/$30 t-shirts at her.

“Maybe no one will get it,” I say, later, as my sister and I watch Waitress on TV.

“Is Pete coming over?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I reply, “I think so.”

She nods. “I’ll put it on and we’ll ask him.”

My boyfriend arrives an hour later and my sister pins the small circle on her sweater. “Look what I got!”

He nods, “Cool.”

I look at him, suspiciously. “Do you know what it means?”

He shook his head. “No, not really.”

“If you had to guess?”

He thinks for a moment. “No wire coat hangers ever? No Joan Crawford.”

My mother calls me the next morning. My sister has already filled her in on her shopping. “How could you let her buy that?” she asks me as I wonder at what point I will no longer be held responsible for talking my sister out of piercings, tattoos, and accessories.

“Don’t worry,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “No one is going to get it.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “No one is going to get it.”

About a year ago, I stumbled across community targeting people who questioned beauty standards and those who did not conform to them. I perused a month or two of entries, liked the discussions I saw, and joined the community. Like many women, I dislike beauty magazines and advertising trends; what’s more, I like discussing them. While I shave my legs and get my hair cut at a salon (on the infrequent occasions when I actually bother), I don’t wear makeup and I never learned to walk in heels. Surely the fact that I shaved my legs would be offset to the contributions I brought to the table; after all, it wasn’t like I was going to be posting encouragements for all women to embrace Lady Bic.

I was wrong.

Two weeks after I joined, discussion grew ugly. Any conformity became guilt with a moderator fanning the flames. One hundred and fifty members left the group to start their own. I went with them. The most frustrating part? Some members of the original community saw it as a triumph (a year later, the occasional joke or quip is still made) not as the loss it was.

One hundred and fifty people. That might not sound like much but each one of those people were reading what you had to say, were question beauty standards in some form or another. If even a third of those people, even one or two of them, posted a news story or participated in an intelligent discussion, the community was richer for it.

The thing is, when you engage in “I’m the better feminist” games, everyone loses. Being a better feminist isn’t about beating someone over the head and making them feel like less until they adopt your standards – that’s the game the beauty industry and the patriarchy plays. The smart feminist knows the difference between a large stick and a seed of doubt and realizes that both are necessary at different times.

The smart feminist doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Of all the hoopla in the Fatosphere this week, the thing which saddened me most was a post in which someone said that a diet blogger interviewing another diet blogger about a diet book was hardly surprising. The blog they were referring to was, of course, Big Fat Deal. Maybe I’ve got those pesky lard tinted spectacles on again but I fail to see how BFD is a diet blog.

I think I may have devoted a post or two to cheese - I declare this a cheese blog!

Someone please bring me more cheese.

Via the blogs Feed Me and Gawker, there is a story circulating that some of the photographs for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty were retouched. In an Interview with The New Yorker, master of retouch Pascal Dangin says (of the Dove campaign) “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

And I say, well duh.

It has never occurred to me that the photos weren’t retouched. It’s a bit like flipping through an issue of Figure. I see women who are slightly smaller than myself but without all of the little lumps and bumps that my body has; their fat is shapely and firm.

That’s not to say that I dislike the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. I thought it was a rather brilliant ad campaign with some nice social side benefits. Key words in that last sentence: ad campaign.

Dove’s campaign, though it seems daring when compared with other advertisements, was actually fairly low risk. It used women who were larger than models but not larger than the average woman (at least not noticeably) – large enough to stir interest but not large enough to spark outrage from the obesity task forces. Putting a “normal” woman on a billboard with retouching is a calculated risk. Putting any woman on a major billboard without retouching is something few companies would actually be brave enough to do.

(note: am referring strictly to the Campaign for Real Beauty; the pro-age campaign did feature a plus sized woman)

It’s 7:23 AM. I’m eating my cereal and drinking a glass of Pepsi in the hopes that it will help me wake up in lieu of coffee. In between spoonfuls and sips, I surf the Fatosphere. Seeing a link titled A Fat Woman’s Manifesto, I click and end up on the blog On the Whole. The entry is a ten item statement by Judy Bagshaw. I stop at number two. I re-read it three or four times.

Life is a banquet. I intend to get my money's worth.

I need to have this on a t-shirt, a bumper sticker, on my desk at work, and scattered strategically throughout my home because, if there’s one thing I’ve always been good at, it’s selling myself short. I constantly wait for the other shoe to drop, for things to go sour or not work out. I rarely focus on the moment, always feeling like I should be somewhere else doing something else.

I don’t want to look back at my life only to find I was the skinny girl at the buffet who only takes two scoops of salad and a breadstick (as a side note to girls everywhere: stop doing this! It’s cheaper just to order a salad from the menu).

Headline: How to ditch diets forever and still stay slim

From the body of the article: Step 1: Diet when you're really ready to make a healthy change.

Health and medical articles which use the term "flab" instead of fat or weight.

Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 10 random things, facts, goals, or habits about yourself. At the end, choose anyone you think may answer - to be tagged, listing their names & why you chose them. You can't tag a person who has tagged you.

I’ve been tagged and, though I’ve been trying not to post memes, I thought it would be interesting if I made all ten things weight or body related.

1)Even though I’ve insisted that I don’t ever want to get back down to a size eleven, I still have some of my size eleven clothes. I loved them and haven’t been able to work myself up to giving them away.
2)I’ve recently taken to saying “Fit as a Cello” because fiddles are kind of scrawny.
3)I was once asked to be a co-mod at 100lbs but declined. Though I said it was because of my schedule, it was really because I wasn’t sure I had enough patience and politeness.
4)While in college, I determined that fat girls (or at least this fat girl) should never wear overhauls.
5)90% of the clothing in my wardrobe comes from Reitman’s.
6)I have no problem ordering a burger when everyone else is ordering fish or salmon.
7)I’m an incredibly fussy eater. When I was young my parents didn’t make me try anything I didn’t want to.
8)I’ve never eaten a peach, plum, cantaloupe, tangerine (actually the list is frightening so I’ll just stop there). See number 7 for explanation.
9)I often wish Douglas Adams had written a book where dieting, a dieter, or a diet company was central to the plot (or what passes for plot in Douglas Adams’ books). I think he would have liked the series 4 premiere of Doctor Who very much.
10)I don’t wear makeup – not because of my strong feminist principals but because a: I’m lazy and b: I don’t like the feeling of it on my skin and c: I always forget I’m wearing it and rub my eyes.

I’m not going to tag anyone specifically so if you’d like to do the meme, have at it.

If fat people are so lazy, why is it that I want to learn the entire Blackpool dance sequence to The Boy with the Thorn in His Side?

On the subject of scales and weigh-ins:

One person's accountability is another person's ball and chain.

Junkfood Science recently devoted two entries to the darker side of weight loss surgery after a segment on 60 minutes reportedly highlighted gastric bypass surgery. While the show featured a number of patients post-op none of them, according to the Junkfood Science entries, had passed the one year anniversary of their surgeries. The Junkfod Science pieces, which attempt to shed some light on the darker side of WLS, can be found here and here.

Five minutes ago, I clicked on an article headline on Yahoo News titled Gastric Bypass May Also Relieve Low Back Pain. The article, provided by HealthDay, states that Thirty-eight morbidly obese patients with low back pain who underwent gastric bypass surgery reported that their pain decreased by an average of about 44 percent six months after surgery. While the article goes on to state that more than 72 million people were obese in 2005-2006 and that 75 to 85 percent of Americans will experience back pain in their lifetimes, it makes no mention of the side effects or complications of the surgery.

The American College of Gastroenterology, in a press release detailing possible nutrient deficiencies post-op for patients who have undergone gastric bypass surgery, stated that “Researchers warn that calcium malabsorption may increase the risk for developing osteopenia (low bone mineral density), osteoporosis (a progressive bone loss that may increase the risk of fractures), or osteomalacia (softening of the bones due to defective bone mineralization.)” (the release can be found here).

So, while the HealthDay article touts wls as relief, one can’t help but wonder what the long terms effects on the patients’ back pain will be.

I, of course, being an obese woman who suffers from chronic back pain have thought of an alternate possibility; what if the reduction in back pain isn’t the direct result of wls but, instead, the result of more mobility and physical activity on the part of the patients? When physically active, I experience less pain in my lower back and require less medication.

“Do you know what you girls are having? “asked the waitress as she approached our table.

“A plain bagel and a fruit plate,” my friend answered.

“Mushroom omelet with a side of sausage,” I replied.

Neither of us commented on the other’s choice. I was wondering how you could go to a restaurant that served the best breakfast in town and order a plain bagel. She, I’m sure, was wondering how you could eat so many calories without worrying about it for the rest of the day.

Though she was thin, she worried about her weight. Overweight pushing obese, I also worried about my weight – I just wasn’t about to pass up my favorite omelet.

Six or seven sizes apart, we were both subject to a media message that preached constant diligence.

Is it annoying when someone who is smaller, thinner, leaner, bemoans their weight? Yes. But it’s also terribly sad and inevitable. In a climate where weight is a constant issue, everyone loses and no woman survives unscathed.

If you were thin and saw how fat people are viewed, wouldn’t you be scared of putting on weight? Saying “God, I’m so fat!” is a means of reassurance. It’s a hope that someone will contradict you. The motivation may be different but the desire for reassurance is the same.

We look at someone who has the body we’ve told we should have and we wonder how they can have the gall to be so blind and insensitive to say “I’m so fat” when we spend hours trying to reform ourselves in their image. We direct our anger and annoyance at the woman rather than the machine.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Fat people are __________?

Pick your least favorite fat stereotype and explain why it doesn’t apply to you. Post the results in your own journal, along with this note, and encourage others to do the same. (I can’t guarantee that people won’t argue with you or call you a liar but doesn’t that just show how much of a problem there is)

Stereotype: Fat people are less productive in the workplace.

Over the past year I have taken 1.5 sick days. So agonized was I, over these days, that I left my cell phone and home phone number with several of my coworkers – urging them to call me if they needed anything.

At the company I worked for prior to my current employer, two project managers told me (separately) that I was one of the few employees who provided reliable estimates and who they didn’t worry about meeting deadlines. So productive was I, that I took work with me on a trip to my grandmother’s funeral and worked in the evenings (I’m not proud of this, btw).

When I graduated from college (something like a workplace), my studio head told me that I was in the top ten percent of graduates from the college. Not graduates from that year – graduates in the history of the school.