Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss as a result of following Health at Every Size.

Dang, this post was hard to write. I had a really hard time putting my thoughts together on this topic.

Let me start with a confession: I have been held back from fully embracing a Health at Every Size^® (HAES) lifestyle (despite my absolute belief that it is a sane and effective way to live) by my inability to completely stop putting my desire to be smaller above my desire to be healthier.

Let me break that down for you. Despite my personal commitment to and belief in the ideas behind HAES, the part of my brain that’s had an eating disorder since childhood, that’s had “lose weight” as a forefront thought for decades, has never been completely shut down. This is why I still sometimes exercise to the point of injury while making an attempt at eating far below my body’s base metabolic needs. This is why I still suffer from body dysmorphia. This is why I haven’t been able to learn to eat intuitively.

It’s better now than it was before HAES. At least I know intellectually that my body size is not the end all, be all indicator of my health. I can honestly say that despite the disordered thinking that still sometimes rears up, I fully understand that I can improve my health whether or not my weight ever changes.

Since I’ve been writing every day about my Eat the Food experiment, I’ve gotten some negative attention from people who are against Fat Acceptance, HAES, Body Acceptance — these are very angry people. I’m usually either under their radar or blissfully unaware that they are making fun of me on Reddit or Tumblr or wherever, so the blow back has been a little shocking to me. It’s made me really think, though. I believe that the rift between the HAES folks and the diet-and-exercise-always-works-just-stop-being-a-lazy-glutton folks stems from the basic human desire to be understood without feeling put on the defensive.

They don’t want to be told they can’t lose weight, even if they have had many failed attempts or yo-yo experiences or whatever. Those who have had successful, long-term weight loss (and I think they are disproportionately represented in this group) don’t want to be told their experiences don’t count.

We don’t want our lived experiences negated, either. We don’t want to be told we’re lying about what we eat or how we live.

HAES is simply this: a lifestyle that advocates intuitive eating and moderate exercise as a means to gain health without focusing on weight loss.

The truth is that if you eat intuitively and you exercise moderately, especially if in the past you were doing neither, you might lose weight. Dr. Linda Bacon talks about HAES leading to bodies finding their natural weights or set points in her book Health at Every Size. The disconnect comes when instead of weight loss or set points or natural weight being part of the big picture, it is the whole mural, so that things like cholesterol, body strength, cardiovascular fitness, joint health, bone density, blood pressure, and blood sugar, aren’t even visible around the edges.

There is a difference between not trying to lose weight and trying not to lose weight.

One means that your focus is elsewhere. Maybe you aren’t even in a place where you can put a priority on health at all — in the middle of a divorce or grieving the death of a loved one, for instance. Maybe you are working to improve your health, but you aren’t measuring your progress with a bathroom scale.

The other means that you are actively attempting to either stay the same weight or gain weight. I can imagine some reasons for trying not to lose weight. Maybe you’re happy with the way you look and feel. Maybe you’re concerned with yo-yo dieting and you think that, for you, staying the weight you are is your best route. Maybe you are underweight or at a weight you’re comfortable staying at. Maybe you think being fat is beautiful and you want to be beautiful. Whatever the reasons, they aren’t my business because I’m not in the business of being the body police.

What I do know, however, is that most people I come across who are fat and follow a HAES lifestyle fall into the first category. The act of practicing HAES usually means that they are interested in increasing their health. They are not trying to lose weight, because they are using other means to measure their success. Or maybe they are in recovery from an eating disorder and focusing on weight loss is detrimental to them. Or maybe after many, many failed attempts at getting smaller, they can’t face thinking about that anymore, so they focus on something else. Maybe they’re focused on lowering their high cholesterol or controlling their blood sugar or maybe, like me, increasing their energy levels.

If doing the things that cause weight loss is going to lead to someone losing weight, it isn’t actually necessary for them to have that weight loss in the forefront of their thoughts at all times. Let me give you an example.

I’m not trying to make my feet smaller. I have big feet. Very big. I’ve worn a 12 wide since my last baby was born nine years ago. (Random fact about me: I gained a shoe size with every one of my three pregnancies.) I’m resigned to the fact that I have limited access to cute shoes. When I started my Eat the Food experiment, one of the first things that happened was that the edema I’ve dealt with for the same nine years disappeared. Result? None of my shoes fit. They are all too big. I’ve lost almost an entire shoe size.

Does the fact that I’m not trying to have smaller feet negate the fact that I do? Does my foot size reduction only count if I go on a foot-reduction diet and exercise program?

Nope.

And HAES is like that, too.

You might lose weight. And that’s okay. You aren’t going to have to turn in your Body Acceptance club card if you do. It just means that your body is changing because you’re adopting different habits.

I started my experiment thinking I wouldn’t talk about weight at all. I’m pleased to find that this really isn’t about weight for me. I honestly thought that might just be lip service, fake-it-til-you-make-it talk. The further I go along, though, the more I hear from people who are struggling to reconcile a changing body with their commitment to HAES. I also hear from people who struggle with guilt because they are caught between wanting to lose weight and wanting to take the HAES path.

I think it’s important to say that it’s okay to hope that following HAeS will help your body find it’s natural weight. It’s okay to feel good about the changes in your body as you follow the practices of HAES, like eating intuitively and exercising moderately. A big part of HAES, though, is decriminalizing the body you live in now. That’s good news, because it means you get to love your body and celebrate it starting right now. Believing that you have a good body puts you in a much, much better position to take care of it.

Believing in HAES and living a HAES lifestyle usually comes with an attitude shift away from “I’m so gross and if I don’t lose weight I’m going to die” to “my body is a good body and it deserves to be taken care of.” That shift doesn’t always come easy. It’s HARD to undo years and years of negative self-talk, believing that the size of your body is an indicator of your worth as a human being, and failing over and over to fix yourself in the long term.

It runs counter to HAES to believe that the only possible way for you to be healthier is to lose weight at any cost, using any method. I actually believe that much of the time that mindset has more to do with wanting to look a certain way or wear a certain size clothing than with actually wanting to be healthier. It does NOT contradict HAES to actually lose weight as a result of adopting intuitive eating, moderate exercise, and self-love.

Trigger warning: Graphic discussion of eating disorders.

For National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, I created a video. Partly because I need to do more vlogging and partly because I think it’s important that fat people with eating disorders get some visibility.

If you’re having trouble seeing this video the transcript is below:

Hi everyone. This week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Everyone knows by now that I struggled with an eating disorder for about a decade. From the time I was 15 to the time I was 25, I went through phases of binging, purging, starvation, diet pills, over-exercising and yet more starvation. When I found Fat Acceptance, which pulled me into recovery, I was eating about 300 calories a day. Every day I would eat a Boca veggie patty with ketchup and no bun for lunch and tofu noodles with pasta sauce for dinner. I’d be proud of myself when I got dizzy and enjoyed the out-of-touch feeling, zoned-out feeling that I often got.

Despite the fact that about one in three women have eating disorders, I never feel like people quite get it. Though I was eventually diagnosed with EDNOS (or, eating disorder not otherwise specified) after I was in recovery, people, including friends, family, and my spouse, often encouraged and supported my eating disorder. It’s a little disturbing for me to find out that people with EDNOS have higher mortality rates than either people diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia with a mortality rate of 5.2%. It’s about 4% for anorexia and bulimia. I was never hospitalized, though there were times when I passed out daily and I probably should have been.

But, you know, I was fat and fat people don’t have eating disorders. All we have is the “good fatty” mentality of dieting. If you’re dieting to lose weight, regardless of how extreme it is, you’re a good fatty. If you exercise and eat all the right things. you’re a good fatty. Mind you, good fatties don’t have to diet or have eating disorders, as long as you’re doing what society thinks you should be doing, you’re a good fatty.

The thing that I want to really emphasize here, though, is that this mentality of hating my body until it was thin nearly killed me. There were times when my self-loathing would hit epic proportions and, in the depths of body-hating depression, I would become suicidal. I want to remind everyone that my first suicide attempt at the age of 10 was because of my body size and the constant stream of abuse that I endured from both family and peers. From some of my first memories, until I was almost 26 years old, I was depressed, obsessed with thinness, and suffering every minute of it.

Fat Acceptance set me free. My weight hasn’t changed much from my 25-year-old self, despite years of untreated thyroid disease. I eat in a way that followed the Health at Every Size approach, which means I get to eat what I want, when I want, and how much I want AND not feel guilty about it. It encourages a healthy way to eat — and I don’t mean eating your veggies and demonizing other foods. I mean a mentally healthy way of eating.

Learning to love my body has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me and, as a side effect perhaps, I’ve not been suicidal since finding Fat Acceptance. Fat Acceptance is a movement which, I believe, can help every individual, including those who suffer from eating disorders and disordered eating.

Trigger warning: Graphic discussion of eating disorders and fat shaming.

Back in 1999, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the popular addiction specialist turned TV and radio host, did something unconscionable that only caught up with him in 2012:

A Boston judge on Thursday approved a record $3 billion guilty plea by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which paid the “Celebrity Rehab” doctor — known as Dr. Drew — $275,000 to tout Wellbutrin, approved by the FDA to treat depression, as a drug to treat other conditions including obesity, addictions and sexual dysfunction.

Dr. Drew infamously told “Loveline” listeners that Wellbutrin “could explain a woman suddenly having 60 orgasms in one night.” Dr. Drew was part of “Operation Hustle” (I am not making this up), Glaxo’s campaign to illegally promote the off-label benefits of its antidepressant. Sales reps wanted to promote the wonderdrug as the “the happy, horny, skinny pill.”

Dr. Drew’s “non-branded campaign” (as he called it in his public response to the charges) is the kind of conflict of interest that makes many of our readers wary of anti-obesity research, like bariatric surgeons who publish glowing research on weight loss surgery. But in a country waging a War on Fat, society tends to dismiss the means of getting thin, so long as the ends are impressive (see: Biggest Loser).

This kind of all-or-nothing approach to weight loss and (supposedly) health is nothing new, but it seems as though the impact that such a weight-focused approach can have on individuals is now affecting Dr. Drew in a way he might not have anticipated.

As a way of drawing attention to National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (NEDAW), Dr. Drew’s daughter, Paulina, publicly disclosed her seven-year battle with anorexia and bulimia. Last November, she first published a harrowing account in the Columbia Spectator about confronting her mother over her ED on a ride home from a nice restaurant. Her mom kept talking about some friends who owned a gym and their tricks for staying thin. The subject became too much for her:

My ability to listen to my mother talk about her gym owners had disappeared when I had hit rock bottom four months prior and had put myself into therapy. Purging eight times in one day to cope with the emotional stress of being home during spring break had finally scared me enough to take action. And here I was again, stuck in a car with her.

Without even thinking, the words erupted from my mouth.

“Well I’d rather have an over-eating disorder than an under-eating disorder.”

She said, “You don’t mean that,” to which I replied, “Yes I do. I’ve already had an under-eating one.”

Without missing a beat, she responded, “No, you haven’t.”

I paused, but before I knew it, the words were out of my mouth. “Yes, I have. I’ve been throwing up since the seventh grade.”

All of the air was sucked out of the space we both shared. This was not the way I wanted to tell her; this was not what I had planned. I had imagined a triumphant moment that involved eating a whole cake with my hands without breaking eye contact and saying, “YES, I HAVE BEEN A BULIMIC AND ANOREXIC FOR SEVEN YEARS. BUT NOW I AM BETTER. I AM EATING THIS CAKE BECAUSE I WANT IT AND I’M HUNGRY. AND GODDAMN IT TASTES GOOD.” But the words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to take them back. The following moment was the longest and most painful silence of my life; I felt like my stomach was going to fall out and that I was going to projectile-vomit onto the windshield. After a silence that lasted far too long, she responded.

“Well, get your teeth checked.”

It’s a disturbing response, and one that the media has immediately picked up on as proof that the ED was her mother’s “fault.” And indeed, parents can definitely trigger EDs in people (my wife being one example I know intimately), but Paulina goes on to explain how her whole world centered around getting and staying thin:

My 13-year-long figure skating career fostered my eating disorder, which was normalized by the people around me. Both inside and outside the world of figure skating I was repeatedly praised for my “perfection.” Everyone constantly inquired about my thinness, asking how I did it and how they could emulate it. My hunger didn’t matter, I was told, because it was merely a means to an end. A friend’s mother told me that if I went to bed hungry, I would lose weight. And it was true. I began to realize that people liked me better thin. I had boyfriends who never failed to comment on how “amazing” and “beautiful” I looked; my friends and their mothers asked me what I ate and how I worked out. Thinness became my entire identity. Everyone needed me to be thin and, even worse, I needed myself to be thin. [emphasis mine]

Paulina makes the case that it takes a village to normalize an eating disorder, but admits that within her nuclear family, “‘diet and exercise’ is our religion.”

Paulina with her father and mother.

As a parent, I’m painfully aware that I will eventually do something or say something that may make a deep and lasting impression on how my children perceive themselves and their role in society. Parents screwing up their kids is inevitable (although there are varying degrees of effect), which is why, despite my initial disgust with Paulina’s mom, Susan, I read more about how she reacted in the long-term to her daughter’s ED. And from what I’ve read, Susan has been very supportive in the two years since her “get your teeth checked” comment.

And then I found this post in Susan’s blog regarding Paulina’s ED and that comment specifically:

I was terrified and speechless. I had no idea how to respond, since I have no formal training in this subject.  In a defeated voice I muttered my response, not to hurt her, to advise her as a mother would. Maybe I was angry because she hid this from me. As a mother, I’m frustrated and confused, even talking about it now. I feel like I failed as a mother and I sink into a deflated self. My baby girl was suffering from an eating disorder. How could I have not known? Her periods were normal, she was always at a good weight, and I never saw her vomit. No one knew.

Was it the best response? No. But people are complicated and their reactions, particularly to their children, can be unpredictable. But most importantly, Susan seems to have learned how to support Paulina. Even better, Paulina was strong enough to move forward and overcome her ED and she is now an fierce advocate for Body Acceptance. She’s leading events at Columbia University this week for NEDAW, including this awesome photo session promoting body positivity.

This is an excellent “lemons into lemonade” moment; the kind of moment you hope will come from such tragic circumstances. But I think her father still needs a wake-up call on how his attitude toward fat people may influence not only her daughter’s perception, but the public’s perception of weight and health.

Paulina shares an anecdote in this Bodies Endangered blog post that highlights his pragmatic problem:

When I was last home from school in June, I brought up Kim Kardashian during a family dinner. I hadn’t even completed my thought about how disgusting I found the media’s emphasis on her weight gain during her pregnancy, before my mother interrupted me: “Yeah. She got really fat.” I paused and looked at my father, hoping that he would start a riot on my behalf; he just mumbled his medical opinion under his breath, saying, “You know, it’s very unhealthy for the baby to gain that much weight. Could be Eclampsia, which is very serious.”

It’s the kind of comment you would expect from 9 out of 10 doctors, who are just as susceptible to the panic surrounding obesity as anyone else. But later, Paulina says something quite revealing: “From a young age I was told to crave hunger, to strive for it. If I went to bed satisfied, I felt that I had failed. This left me physically and emotionally starved.” Recall the bolded comments on hunger above. The emphasis on hunger played a significant role in Paulina’s ED, and we get a glimpse of where it came from in some of Dr. Drew’s podcasts.

Dudebro and the Doc (1996)

If you weren’t aware, Dr. Drew frequently partners with an unrepentant douchebag named Adam Carolla, who is best known for his racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic rants. Like his cowardly progenitor, Tom Leykis, Carolla’s public relevance is tied directly to the stagnant supply of perpetually-threatened dudebros who need constant reassurance that they are the kings of their domain (“their domain” being mom’s basement).

The dynamic is that Dr. Drew is the yin to Carolla’s yang… Carolla is the abrasive “straight-shooter,” while Dr. Drew legitimizes whatever the fuck Carolla spews out by polishing it up with his benign, clinical manner, thus softening the dudebro message for a broader audience.

I haven’t seen the Dynamic Duo in action since the ’90s, so I thought I’d see what they have to say about fat people and I was shocked — SHOCKED! — to discover that Carolla is an equally colossal douche on that subject as well. I stumbled upon this podcast from exactly one year ago, during which Dr. Drew talks about his diet.

“How’s your diet work?” Carolla asks.

“I don’t eat,” Dr. Drew says. “Here’s how I know I’m okay: I’m hungry. And then I try to eat so much that I don’t get full. I eat good, balanced, low fat, high protein, but I try not to get full so that I’m like hungry an hour later. That tells me that my body’s using its resources. So I’m hungry all the f’ing time and it aggravates me.”

Sound familiar?

This is the kind of thing Paulina was taught throughout her life: hunger is the goal, hunger is something you should crave, something you should strive for. It’s a kinder, gentler version of “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” And it’s not just the advice he gives his daughter, it’s the advice he still lives by to this day. My question is, if cultivating hunger is such an effective and sustainable weight loss strategy, why does Dr. Drew have to keep starting new diets?

Right on schedule, Carolla gives the standard dumbass dudebro diet template that he thinks people have somehow forgotten. “I’ve found that most people say this and the number 1 ‘Hey, you used to be fat, why are you not fat any more?’ — stop drinking soda and started walking is usually the number 1 answer.” I’ve got news for Carolla: I don’t drink soda regularly and I walk all the damn time. Why am I not skinny, yet? “It’s insane that there probably have been more books written about dieting than there have been about World War 2, World War 1 and Vietnam.”

“Oh sure, all wars combined,” Dr. Drew responds.

Ignoring why there are so many books about dieting, Dr. Drew goes on to explain his theory on the “obesity epidemic” by claiming that “people are so unregulated emotionally that they use food to regulate their emotions and then they can’t contain — they have no frontal lobe function — they can’t contain their desires.” Again, recall Paulina’s comment about how the emphasis on staying hungry left her “physically and emotionally starved.”

[Sidenote: Regarding the popular claim that obese people are brain-damaged or, as Dr. Drew says, "they have no frontal lobe function." The prefrontal cortex (PFC) controls executive function, which includes working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving. Basically, the line of reasoning goes that either getting fat damages your PFC or a damaged PFC makes you fat. The most frequently-cited study on the topic compared the PFCs of ten lean, nine obese, and eight formerly-obese women and found that obese women had the least active PFCs.

Of course, this doesn't explain why the lean women with a BMI of 26 had greater PFC function than formerly-obese women with a BMI of 28. If PFC were affected by weight alone, you would expect that function to be more comparable. But if you dig a little deeper, you learn that leptin-deficient people have lower functioning PFC as well, and when they receive leptin injections, their PFC improves. Leptin reduces their constant hunger. Fat people tend to be leptin resistant, so their body doesn't process the leptin as well. Could this affect PFC function? And does weight cycling affect PFC function, such that extreme cyclers have lower PFC function than non-cycler? And, as always, how does fitness affect PFC function? All unanswered questions, but, yeah, let's just run with fat people are brain damaged.]

Carolla goes on to talk about his recent experience at Disneyland, complaining about all the fat people in scooters and how scooters should be for people who are too physically frail to ride the Matterhorn, which is like “being gang-raped dry.” Dr. Drew laughs about this and joins in the rape jokes, which is problematic on a whole other level.

Anyway, Carolla wants the audience to know that Disneyland is full of horrible, horrible fat people and he goes on a rant that tells you exactly what you need to know about where his concerns for their health and well-being:

When you see the 63-year-old chick walking around and [she's] got the extra 30 pounds on her or 50 pounds pounds her, okay. But when you see the 19-year-olds — lots of ‘em, lots of ‘em — and I always notice especially the women… guys can go ahead and play nose guard for the football team or still occasionally get laid or even if they have to, just buy a prostitute. But the fat chicks, socially — and I also started doing a map, so a couple things: a) many of the employees over at Disney are not husky and not fat, but morbidly obese. You’re talking about women that are — and men, but I always say I notice the women because it impacts their life socially more greatly. [emphasis mine]

Dr. Drew chimes in with, “You feel bad for them.”

Gee… why is it that fat women are more socially impacted than fat men again? Let me scratch my big, dumb, hairy chin a minute and think…

So, Carolla goes on to lament the fact that he only sees the fat female Disneyland workers paired up on to work the rides with other fat females. “What they should really do, honestly,” Carolla ponders, “they should put the thin ones with the fat ones so that the fat ones have something to look at —”

“Some motivation,” Dr. Drew says.

“Other than themselves,” Carolla responds.

“For health reasons.”

Yes, clearly Carolla’s concern for these “fat chicks” is their health. And his reasons for making fun of fat women is because he’s concerned for their health. Carolla goes on to talk about how when his writing partner is on a diet and they go out to eat together, he tends to eat better, which is something Dr. Drew calls “social motivation.”

Carolla goes on to lament the sad PUA fact (and PUA is nothing if not sad) that “when you’re out on the hunt,” he has to deal with fat chicks. I’m including this rant because this is the kind of shit that Dr. Drew contributes to on what is half his show:

There was always the chick who was a little chunky, but not fat, just a little chunky, do you know what I mean? And had a little extra bosom on her, which was a plus, but a little extra ass on her, which was not a plus, unless you’re a black guy, and you were like — but there was always that chick. There was the chick — there were hot chicks, there were chicks that looked great in their bikinis and then there was that chick that was cute in the face, but she was just like 15, 20 pounds away from being hot, you know? And it was kind of understood. It was almost a shame. She had beautiful eyes, but kind of a big ass, you know? And that chick wasn’t 100 pounds overweight. That chick was 10, 15 pounds overweight. She’d be smokin’ at 125, 130, but she was more 140, and therefore blowjobs only and everyone felt sorry for her. That chick who was 10, 15 pounds overweight and could never really get past that mark, you know what I mean? Every once in a while she’d drop a couple pounds, but she’d quickly get up to that fighting weight. So cute, but always a little extra meat on her, just enough to get her off the desirable chart for most of the guys.

This is the kind of mentality that drives young women to a perpetual dieting or, worse, eating disorders because they are taught think of their bodies in this way by our culture. Most of that cultural influence comes in the form of ubiquitous subtlety: Adam Carolla’s dream woman in every magazine, movie, TV show and pop music act. This teaches women and dudebros alike that 140 pounds is something to be ashamed of, something that makes a woman completely undesirable. And now Carolla is scandalized by women who weigh over 200 pounds. Dudes who weigh that much? That’s fine. They can be noseguards and still get laid.

But remember: it’s all about health.

So Dr. Drew tries to reason with Carolla about changing social standards, saying, “Is it possible,  you know, women really set the tone for what’s attractive, you know what I mean? Is it possible things are changing and guys are sort of into that? Because there are those guys who are into it. And those are the ones that are into are into it.”

“I agree, but until Sports Illustrated or Victoria’s Secret has one of these chicks show up on the beach —” Carolla retorts.

“Okay, enough said,” Dr. Drew says. “Touché.”

“Because that’s who decides.”

Exactly.

And here we see the biggest problem with Dr. Drew: when faced with Carolla’s toxic misogyny and tireless douchebaggry, Dr. Drew rolls over completely. He wants to be the voice of reason, but he can’t help but join in on the joke because otherwise Carolla mocks him for being spineless. This willingness to yield to Carolla’s brute opinions takes a particularly ugly turn when the conversation turns to hunger in America and how cheap food has gotten. Carolla compares the price of gas at the start of Obama’s term to now (which is incredibly misleading, since gas prices spiked throughout the Bush era wars, but dropped just before the 2008 election) and how the price of tacos has barely moved.

“Well, kids go to bed hungry every night, Adam,” Dr. Drew says, sarcastically. “They’re starving. There’s hungry kids everywhere.”

Carolla laughs derisively and says, “They are not.”

Dr. Drew then explains how people can simply panhandle in a subway for 50 cents and get a whole meal from Del Taco, adding that people can “do it every day with no end in sight.” Carolla reminisces on the good ol’ days of poverty when you’d beg for money all day just so you could afford a loaf of bread and a can of beans.

“That’s the point: are we starving or are we obese?” Dr. Drew says. “Especially when I hear hunger commercials, I get confused. I don’t understand. How could a third of children go to bed hungry and be obese? Maybe that’s the problem.”

Carolla talks about how he goes to bed hungry all the time. I mean, what’s the big deal, guys?

“And by the way,” Dr. Drew adds, “when I’m not hungry, I’m gaining weight. I need to be hungry or else I’m in trouble. I’m hungry right now.” Again, we see the Pinsky’s Cult of Hunger on display.

Carolla returns to the subject of fat girls at Disneyland and says that he thinks there are more fat women than men, which is “that’s something that’s new and weird and sad, which it used to be a 23-year-old chick was like, ‘Hey man, I gotta look good because I gotta get myself a man to marry me in the next five years.’”

Again, we see the facade of health laid bare. This isn’t about whether fat people are healthy, but about whether fat women are motivated enough by Carolla’s pin-dick to lose weight. But Dr. Drew puts a “positive spin” on it by reminding us that women get fat because they are fucked up.

“But what we’re seeing is ‘I’ve gotta keep this big thing around me to protect me from people so I don’t get abused the way I was as a kid,’ which we know — you and I know — that’s the majority of this shit.” Okay, so far we’ve learned that fat people are brain damaged and the majority of fat women have been abused. Great analysis, Doc!

As if this weren’t bad enough, Carolla then endorses stigma as the best way to motivate fat people. “There’s nothing that keeps people in line like ‘I don’t want to fuck you fatty.’” Dr. Drew laughs and laughs at this hilarious observation, completely ignoring the fact that if weight stigma actually produced results, then obesity rates would not have risen between 1980 and 1999, when mocking fat people was par for the course.

Carolla continues, “I will not hang out with you, I don’t want to be your boyfriend or your girlfriend, I don’t want to be engaged to you, I don’t want to start a family with you because you’re unattractive to me and you’re unhealthy. Now that is the ultimate ‘Get in line, straighten your shit out.’” As you read about Adam Carolla’s concern for health, bear in mind that this is the man Dr. Drew himself said is “almost an alcoholic.”

As with most of this shit, Carolla is pulling success of motivational stigma out of his ass, since researchers have studied stigma extensively and know how ineffective it is in motivating people, particularly weight stigma. Dr. Drew is an addiction specialist, so does he believe that stigmatizing drug addicts will help them get clean? If not, then why does he let Carolla spew this unfounded bullshit day in and day out on his show?

It’s because Dr. Drew has no fucking clue what the fuck he’s talking about. Recently on CNN, Dr. Drew answered viewer questions and when asked about exercise bulimia, he responded, “I got a whiff of exercise bulimia. You sort of exercise too much, and if you miss it you freak out. You have to constantly exercise.  I don’t feel right if I don’t do it.  But, you know, a little whiff of mental health issue never hurt anybody.” Really, Dr. Drew? You think getting “a little whiff” of a mental health problem doesn’t hurt anybody? Perhaps that’s why you think Carolla has a little whiff of alcoholism? And have you asked your daughter what that “whiff” can do?

I found another Carolla/Drew podcast from November, shortly before Paulina published her article on her ED. Once again, both Carolla and Dr. Drew mock the idea that poor people can’t feed their kids, and again, Dr. Drew says “You can eat for a dollar a day in this country, easily.” He then follows this up by saying, “I’m anti-obese, I’m pro-hunger.”

Dr. Drew listens as Carolla proposes yanking everybody off food stamps and performing a kind of tough love experiment that forces families to take responsibility for themselves and he speculates on how many people would really starve. “Ten million? Five million? Two million?” All of this, Dr. Drew listens to and responds to positively and reinforces Carolla’s message, as though this Cro-Magnon, knuckle-dragging fuck-face has all the world’s problem’s solved, if we’d just snatch food stamps away from hungry kids because they don’t understand how you can be poor and fat.

Dr. Drew promotes a two-dimensional view of these enormously complicated issues: fat is bad, thin is good; the poor should eat fast food and not get fat; and hunger is always, always good. You can’t take shortcuts when it comes to health messaging. A doctor can’t promote drugs for off-label purposes for a quarter-million dollars and say it’s what he would have said anyway. A parent can’t teach their kids that hunger is a virtue and be surprised when one of them develops an eating disorder. A celebrity can’t suggest that perhaps poor kids would be better off going to bed hungry and not sound like a monster.

I am glad that Paulina has recovered from her eating disorder and that her relationship with her mother has improved. But her father is still promoting misinformation and a collaborating with a man whose definition of health is how fuckable she is, defined by whether she’s a 140 pound lard-ass or a 125-pound babe. Dr. Drew is part of the cultural problem that emphasizes looks as a proxy for health, which is critical trigger for eating disorders in young women.

Paulina may have escaped the harm of eating disorders, but nearly 30,000 women are hospitalized each year for ED-related health issues (PDF). Isn’t it about time that Dr. Drew takes an ethical stand for them as well? Isn’t about time Dr. Drew told Adam Carolla to shut the fuck up?

Trigger warning: Discussion of calorie counting in order to eat enough food to meet daily caloric requirements.

As I write this, I’m 70 days into my 100 day Eat the Food experiment. This is my ten-week follow-up.

Just as a reminder, I decided ten weeks ago to eat above my base metabolic rate (BMR) for 100 days. BMR is calculated based on gender, age, weight, and height. It’s the number of calories your body needs to keep your organs functioning if you lay in bed all day. Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is the number of calories your body needs to maintain your weight, taking your daily activities into consideration. My TDEE is 3,100 calories. I used this calculator to figure out my BMR and TDEE.

For 100 days, I’m eating AT LEAST 2,500 calories. That’s the minimum, not the maximum. And that’s net, which means that I eat back the calories I burn through exercise. I’m blogging about my experiment daily.

Today I’ll answer some questions that I’ve been asked and let you guys know how it’s going otherwise.

I’ve had some questions about the fact that I am focused on eating a minimum of 2,500 calories without really talking about a maximum. Some people are genuinely curious, while others use that as a reason to concern troll. Several of the trollish kind have pointed out that eating below your BMR is not going to kill you. Putting aside the fact that anorexia is definitely eating below BMR and will in fact kill you, I’ll give these people the benefit of the doubt that they mean eating below the BMR, but more than, say, 1,200 calories a day.

Plenty of people do in fact eat well below their BMR all the time because they are dieting, fasting for religious reasons, because they are food unstable, because they are ill. That doesn’t take away from the fact that eating above your BMR is the best way to keep your body thriving, instead of just surviving.

I think the idea of tracking for a minimum, rather than a maximum, is a foreign way of thinking comparable to how thinking about maternalistic societies is foreign to people from paternalistic societies. It can be strange to think of a husband taking his wife’s name and children passing on their mother’s name rather than their father’s when you’re from a deeply paternalistic society. We live in a deeply weight-loss centered society, and the idea of anyone — in particular a fat person, but even a thin person — thinking about calories in a way that has nothing to do with weight loss is WEIRD. I get it. So, let me share with you something that just came about very organically as I’ve made my way through this experiment:

Despite making no effort to curb my calories, I’ve found that when I eat as much as I want, I’m somewhere between 2,500 and my TDEE (net) calories every day without making any effort. In other words, having the freedom to eat literally as much as I want has not led to me eating 10,000 calories a day. In other words, without thinking about weight loss or trying to lose weight, I’m eating an amount of food that is likely to slowly allow my body to come to its natural weight.

I’ve talked to a couple of people who are interested in my experiment, but think that tracking calories would be too triggering for them. All I can say is that I had the same fear. Data is my biggest trigger. It was a little scary for the first week or so, but then I started to feel so much better physically that there was no way I was going to give it up and risk going back to the restrict/binge cycle that I’ve lived with most of my life.

If you think that eating above your BMR is something you want to try, it might take a little bravery at first. There are ways to pay attention to how much you’re eating without actually tracking. You could research what the number of calories you want to eat no less than looks like. You could do an exchange program like the one the USDA uses for it’s My Plate program (the My Plate program goes up to at least 3,200 calories, so you should be good.)

Food is one way that I celebrate my amazing body. I feed myself so that I have the energy to do what I want to do everyday. I feed myself because just about every part of my body is designed to reward me for eating. Eating feels good. I feed myself because I love myself and eating enough food is a wonderful way to express that self-love. I feed myself because I want to be strong and healthy. My experiment has given me the ability to understand my body’s needs and my relationship with food in a way that I never have before.

So, ten weeks in. As I talked about last time, I haven’t lost much weight. It’s hard to over-estimate how disproportionately large the benefits of eating above my BMR every day for ten weeks are compared to the minuscule amount of weight that I’ve lost. I set out to improve three things: sleep, energy, and pain.

I’ve gone from sleeping maybe five or six broken hours a night to falling asleep with no problem and staying asleep for seven or eight hours a night. When I started my experiment, I was taking a sleep aid most nights. I haven’t taken one at all for eight weeks. I wake up rested and energetic, which in and of itself would be enough to make me never want to stop Eating the Food.

When my experiment started, I was crashing every day at 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon. I was so tired all of the time that I was almost non-functional. I had a huge amount of stress after meeting a deadline for my second book that I could not seem to let go of. The last three days, I’ve left my house at about 8:30 in the morning and been out until after 9 p.m. Unless you’ve lived with major, never-ending fatigue, it might be hard to really understand the significance of having enough energy to get through a busy 12-hour day that includes school, work, exercise, family obligations, and entertainment, without wanting to die about halfway through. I am amazed every day at how much more energy I have now than I have had in years. Maybe even my whole adult life.

I was taking pain medication every day. My back hurt, my shoulders hurt, my head hurt. Really, there wasn’t much that didn’t hurt. I haven’t had to take any pain medication at all, except for two headaches, since the first couple weeks of my experiment. I was waking up stiff and that doesn’t happen anymore with the exception of one shoulder that is still a little stiff, but is much, much better. Instead of general, everywhere pain, the pain that I do still have is isolated to the sciatica that has bothered me since I was pregnant with my daughter nine years ago. Because it’s isolated, I can stretch it and ice it or give it heat, instead of just feeling miserable all over and taking medication. The pain is greatly reduced as well and getting better all the time.

I’ve noticed a shift over the last two weeks from just eating whatever struck my fancy and making sure that I got enough calories, to thinking about how the food I eat is going to make me feel. I love this, because I think it’s a sign of recovery and healing. And I think it’s a move toward intuitive eating, which is my own personal ultimate goal. I’ve always had a major sweet tooth, but I’ve noticed less of a desire for sweet food lately, for instance. I still eat it, I just don’t want it as often, if that makes sense.

I’ve decided that I am definitely going to do another 100 days when this experiment is over. (By coincidence, this experiment is over on March 24, which was my mother’s birthday.) The second 100 days would start on March 25, then. Some readers of my personal blog are going to join me, which makes me super excited! You’re welcome to come along, too. I’m not entirely sure what coming along will entail — except that we’ll support each other in Eating the Food and working toward incorporating Health at Every Size^® (HAES) principles into our lives. If you’re interested in HAES, but you’ve had trouble really implementing it (like I did), then maybe having some support will help. Email me at shauntagrimes at gmail if you have any questions, or follow my blog for more information.

Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss surgery and its consequences.

I don’t remember where I saw “WLS: Not everyone lives happily ever after” (I’ve slept since then and my memory is shot, another complication from that failed weight loss surgery (WLS) I had in September of 1997), but my first thought on seeing the headline was “No shit, Sherlock, what was your first fucking clue?”

The American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery state that the number of weight loss surgeries in the US increased from 13,000 in 1998 to over 200,000 in 2008. Reasons for undergoing weight loss surgery can range from health needs to the desire for a confidence boost. But new research suggests that although the surgery may make people happy in some ways, it can also cause problems.

Gee, ya think? Sure, it might put some of your ailments into remission (notice, I didn’t say “cure them”), and it might change the way people treat you, but does it really make a person happier?

Personally, if people treat me better simply because I’m thinner, then fuck them, I don’t need them in my life. That’s pretty much a slap in the face, telling me that I wasn’t worthy of being treated with dignity and respect simply because I was fat, but now that I’m thinner, I’m worthy of being treated like an actual human being (good thing I don’t have to worry about that, since I am never going to be thinner, short of ending up with some catastrophic disease that causes drastic weight loss).

Karen Synne Groven, of the University of Oslo in Norway, interviewed 22 women aged between 24 and 54 years as a part of her doctoral thesis.

All women had undergone gastric bypass surgery — one of the most common bariatric surgery procedures. It involves rerouting a part of the small intestine past the stomach in order to reduce food intake, promote satiety and suppress hunger.

The majority of the women were interviewed twice. The first time was 1 year after surgery, while the second interview took place 2.5-4 years following surgery.

Groven says although most previous research suggests that weight loss surgery leads to an increase in quality of life for the majority of patients, her findings suggest that not everyone lives happily ever after following bariatric procedures.

“Although most previous research suggests that weight loss surgery leads to an increase in quality of life for the majority of patients…” I would say that all depends on how you define “quality of life.” If you’re defining it strictly on how other people treat you, how much weight you lose, how easy it is to buy clothes, how easy it is to navigate the world — then I can see where “quality of life” might be considered to have improved. But if you’re also considering the physical complications of WLS and whether or not it actually worked, as opposed to the other criteria I listed, you may not think your “quality of life” improved all that much.

“Becoming slimmer and lighter is mostly perceived of as positive. At the same time it is ambivalent, since people start to behave differently towards the women after they’ve had surgery. People are friendlier than before, and this may feel extremely provoking. And people often ask very invasive questions concerning the woman’s radical weight loss.”

The interviews revealed that some of the women experienced a boost in self-esteem after surgery, were more outspoken, and found other people were more likely to listen to what they were saying — particularly in the workplace.

Groven notes that although these factors are clearly positive outcomes, this could also be seen as a “grief” because the women realize they had to undergo weight loss surgery before seeing these outcomes.

These “positive outcomes” have a very negative side to them — what does it do to one’s self-esteem to realize that people are only listening to your opinions because you’re thin? Not because your opinions are valid, not because you have a right to those opinions and to express them, but only because you’re now thin? What happens to your self-esteem if the WLS ends up not working and you end up regaining the lost weight? Does that make you feel even worse than you did before you had the WLS and lost weight?

As for those “invasive questions” that people ask about weight loss, it’s all part and parcel of this thin-obsessed culture we’re living in. Everyone is not only afraid of getting of fat, but if they’re already fat, they feel obligated to ask “How did you do it?” so that they can either say “That worked for me,” “That didn’t work for me,” or “Hmm, I’ll have to try that.” Problem is, if/when they find out you had WLS, they think you took the “easy way out,” and then your “accomplishment” is negated. It’s a no-win situation, which sure doesn’t make for an improvement in quality of life.

Although many women reported negative thoughts and health issues after weight loss surgery, none of them said they regret undergoing the procedure.

“They say they would have done the same today and that they had no choice considering their life before surgery. Some said that the pains were a small price to pay,” says Groven.

She adds that this suggests women are influenced by society’s perception of the ideal female body, and that being obese is not within this scope.

“They are living with a body which is not accepted by society, and they are constantly judged from their size,” she says.

Since this is just a doctoral thesis, Groven’s interviews with 22 women out of the 200,000+ people who have WLS every year isn’t really a representative sample. If Groven wanted to make it representative, she would have to ask more WLS patients if they had any regrets. Of course, she can’t ask those who died from having WLS or who died from the complications from WLS if they regretted having it — want to bet that most of them would rather be fat and alive than thin and dead? Want to bet that their friends and loved ones would rather have them fat and alive than thin and dead?

As for me, I had WLS almost 17 years ago and I can tell you right now that I have a fuckton of regrets — if I had known then what I know now, there is no way in hell I would have gone along with my nurse practitioner’s recommendation for WLS. I would have told her to go to the surgeon and have WLS herself and to leave me the fuck out of it (she was fat too). I would much rather deal with the problems I had back then — arthritis and minor mobility issues related to arthritis — than all the issues I have now.

I’d love to be able to go back to being able to eat a wide variety of foods, instead of having to do without fruits, veggies, dairy, high-fiber foods, and any kind of fat (butter or margarine are out, as well as anything fried in any kind of oil). I’d love to be able to go back to being able to walk through the mall without being in severe pain. I’d even love to be able to go back to my before-WLS weight of 350 lbs. I’d love to not have fibromyalgia, migraines, and explosive diarrhea if I forget and eat something that triggers my mutilated digestive system. None of these are worth having just for the slight chance of being thinner, and risking death sure isn’t worth being thinner. I’ll take a life lived fat over being dead and thin any day — and I know too many people who died after having WLS to feel any other way.

Trigger warning: Eating disorders, diet talk and assholes.

When I first started blogging about Fat Acceptance in 2009, I made the clever decision to begin by immediately pissing off everybody. As I recall, there was only one other guy writing on the subject, but unlike him, I had zero experience with feminism outside of my preconceived notions of what feminism meant. As a result, I said shit that pissed off many feminists and then, as I tried to understand their perspective by asking questions, I pissed them off even more.

I felt a deep-seeded frustration because I was honestly trying to understand, but when I didn’t frame things properly or when I used indelicate phrasing or when I stated a forceful opinion, I was subjected to the white-hot flames of social justice purgatory. And it sucked.

It sucked because nobody likes to be flame-roasted when they are just trying to understand why their views are so offensive. But the very act of asking questions offended people, since I could just as easily have Googled my questions, found a preexisting blog post on the subject and learned on my own. Of course, from my entitled perspective, I was thinking “Yeah, but if you want me to agree with you then why don’t you just answer the question and I can get on with the work of understanding?” The answer, of course, is that nobody is under obligation to educate my ignorant ass.

When I fucked up, people were mad — mean mad. But because I knew my intentions, my response to them was often “You catch more flies with honey.” Of course, this pissed people off more because who the fuck wants a bunch of flies buzzing around in their mother-fucking honey?

In any case, some people who were patient enough to answer my questions, and hold out a bit of honey, explained to me why it’s so offensive to demand kindness from others when I’m clod-footing around a subject that is so personal and intimate to them. Yeah, by being gentle, perhaps they could lure a few more mansplaining flies into the fold, but because of the overwhelming amount of ShitLords in their midst, they just didn’t have the wherewithal to discern the intentions of each and every guy who came knocking on their door. Those activists were no longer interested in converting ignorant hostiles, but were educating those who were willing and able to listen without jamming their own ego into the center of discussion.

Do you catch more flies with honey than vinegar? Yeah, absolutely. But after nearly five years of blogging about fat issues, I’ve found that 99% of the flies in question prefer hanging out on a great big pile of shit. And do you really want flies dripping feces into your nice jar of honey?

I bring this up because in the last few days we’ve had an enthusiastic reddit response to a few items on our blog, and y’all know how that goes.

Fifth Annual Reddit Conference on Deplorable Fatties

First came the /r/FatLogic folks who took umbrage with our Diet Talk page. Basically, they love to mock the idea of trigger warnings because they think it’s about oversensitive fat people crying themselves to sleep at night after some beefy Brodin “disproves” Health at Every Size^® (HAES) with his irrefutable anecdotal evidence. An example of this belief is the first comment on that subreddit which begins, “So this is how they maintain their delusion. This is the same as plugging their ears and going ‘LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”" I’ve also seen complaints that the use of trigger warnings for everything makes a mockery of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In reality, our blog includes readers who have either overcome, are overcoming, or are in the depths of an eating disorder (ED), whether anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder. Some of those same people also suffer from PTSD, and reading about calorie counting or food blogs or diet talk can put them in that ED frame of mind. Trigger warnings aren’t for all our readers, but for those who need them.

And the whole point of the Diet Talk page is to explain the difference between discussing the science of weight loss and weight loss evangelism, which our readers DO NOT WANT. Of course, this offends the ShitLords of reddit because they believe free speech means we have to let these Jillian Michaels rejects put in their two cents whenever and wherever they want (something we did ages ago to hilarious effect). They think that by banning weight loss evangelism, you all are somehow isolating yourselves from their wisdom and that we are brainwashing you into laying prone as much as possible while having Twinkie cream intravenously pumped into your stomachs.

Now, I don’t go out of my way to start shit with reddit, but if I notice a subreddit talking shit about us, I will sometimes respond if I have the capacity. In this case, I did, and I responded without the honey. Their response was predictable, although I did have a somewhat productive discussion with a few people on the subject (my comments have been downvoted so much you have to search for the thread to open).

Later that same day, /r/TumblrInAction spread word of Shaunta’s Eating the Food post.For those unfamiliar, TiA mocks Tumblr bloggers who write about social justice (people they call SJWs, or social justice warriors), but they try and claim the “high road” by putting in their rules, “Don’t be massive twat. We’re here to make fun of Tumblr SJWs, but we’re not here to outright troll them or personally attack them.” Yeah, because the mouth-breathers who read TiA don’t look at the screencaps posted, then troll the Tumblrs highlighted. It’s a thin veneer of respectability that crumbles beneath the weight of hatred permeating these subreddits.

Again, I only found out about TiA’s post about Shaunta because they linked to our page and some of their trolls tried to comment on our page, so I went there to respond. That reddit thread was chock full of dumbasses “refuting” shit Shaunta never wrote. I summarized their ridiculous response in this thread:

Listen, you’re the people linking to my blog, talking shit about it without actually reading what was written. You’ve got the guy who thinks Shaunta is trying to lose weight by eating more food, you’ve got the guy calls her “lazy and self-indulgent” despite her thorough explanation in this series of her activity levels, you’ve got the guy who says 2,500 calories is too much without knowing how active Shaunta is, you’ve got the guy claiming she has diabetes, you’ve got the guy almost grasps what Shaunta is doing then falls off the deep end, and you’ve got the guy who thinks she’s eating less than she was and is scared of losing weight.

In other words, some dimwitted douchebag read the first paragraph, it rustled his jimmies, and he shared it with his fellow reddit ShitLords who read even less (as admitted here) and pounded their chests even more. Once again, I said fuck the honey in my responses to them. As a result, I got this warning from the moderator:

Around this time, Shaunta joined the fray and has been diligently answering questions WITHOUT calling them assholes (aka, with honey), which is awesome. But then redditors started to complain to both her and me about my tone. For instance:

• Whiner 1: “Thanks for being an asshole, asshole.”
• Whiner 2: “I assume you know /u/atchka… You might want to tell them to stop acting like a douche. You can defend yourself without that twat.”
• Whiner 3: “It would be nice if he’d go back to playing with himself, or whatever it is he does, instead of picking fights with everyone including the mods. /u/shaunta is doing it right; even when she’s been insulted or provoked she’s keeping a civil tongue in her head – but then again, she’s an adult.”
• Whiner 4: “hey dude, you do realize shaunta is here, right? let her speak for herself since this about her. i don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but i wouldn’t want someone talking on my behalf when i can do it myself, especially if they were making a huge specticle of themselves doing so.”

So here’s the message we’re getting from TiA: we can publish links to your blog, mock a version of you we have created out of whole cloth, make fat jokes at your expense and call you a liar, a sloth and a glutton, but don’t you dare call me an asshole!

I get the same response from Tumblr trolls, like this fuckface who has spent almost a year trolling Fat Acceptance posts that have nothing to do with her. She claims to be a former HAES advocate who saw the light and is now fighting our misinformation, except she only wants to argue HAES claims made by random internet people who don’t understand HAES (you can read my honey-free takedown in which I compare ignorant HAES advocates with ignorant evolution advocates here). I spent quite a few hours refuting her bullshit and pointing out her inconsistencies, which I summarized for others she has trolled, but I grow weary of beating my head against that wall.

This morning I discovered another /r/FatLogic post about Shaunta’s writing filled with more mockery and misinformation, like this hilarious claim that Shaunta is an opiate addict(!!!).

Here’s the thing: we always have a choice of how to respond. Shaunta has chosen the patient educator route, which is how I most frequently respond to skeptics and trolls on here and other forums because of my early experience with Fat Acceptance feminists. I definitely believe that taking the time to refute trolls is invaluable, even when the troll being educated chooses willful ignorance over reasonable discussion. Others who witness the conversation will have both viewpoints before them and will get to choose which side makes more sense.

Contrary to Shaunta’s patient vigilance, I chose the scorched earth route this time because I rarely emerge from a reddit discussion feeling like the skeptic is anything more than willfully ignorant and the audience (the other participants in the subreddit) are anything other than hostile and trigger-happy fat-haters. As evidenced above (and elsewhere), few redditors actually read what we write (although a handful have in the last day or two and I had civil disagreements with them), and even fewer even understand the discussion. For most of them, it comes down to FAT BAD and anyone saying anything but that is a threat to them.

I chose the scorched earth route because these flies don’t give a shit about my honey. They simply want to trample my opinions into the ground and charge me for the pleasure. The only response that the vast majority of denizens from fat-hating subreddits will accept from me or Shaunta is “You’re right, I’m wrong, please follow me around 24/7 like a fucking CIA agent and show me the error of my ways.”

I’m a big believer in civil discourse, but I don’t owe civil discourse to those who are clearly uninterested. If they were interested, they would have actually read what Shaunta wrote and asked questions based on her own words, not the words they put into her mouth. Instead, what we got was a bunch of disgruntled dudebros who populate forums devoted ENTIRELY to mocking marginalized groups, but who think it’s unfair for me to be mean to them.

When you are targeted by these groups, or others like them, you get to choose how to respond. Personally, I think being a patient educator like Shaunta with the general population is the most noble way to try and persuade skeptics of the righteousness of our cause. But there may come a point in time when you realize that patient education is futile and you are perfectly justified in fighting fire with fire. I’ve reached that point with hate-bait subreddits.

You do not owe haters your honey. When someone calls you an asshole, you can call them an asshole right back. And when they complain that you’re being mean and unfair and that you catch more flies with honey, just remind them of what Mr. Pink taught us in Reservoir Dogs.

Trigger warning: Detailed discussion of disordered eating.

I have been reading the progress of Shaunta and her Eating the Food experiment and it has inspired me to my own experiment.

My experiment has been nothing so structured as hers, which is partly why I haven’t written about it yet. Also, I fail more than I succeed so far.

Because of my past (being starved as a child and early teens, then starving myself by dieting from early teens to my late thirties), I just don’t think about eating. I usually get one full meal in a day when I make brunner for my husband (brunner means whichever meal he can eat either before or after work, depending on which shift he’s working that month). On his days off, we will usually have two meals and then he’ll snack on other things throughout the day.

I know it isn’t healthy to get the vast majority of my calories in one meal. Yes, I do a little bit of snacking, but it’s not often. And usually I don’t go for the nutritionally-dense food when I snack because all of the sudden my blood sugar drops and I need something now, of course.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been trying to eat at least two meals a day. I know even that’s not enough, but it’s baby steps here. And as I said above, I’m “failing” more than I’m succeeding.

I have noticed that on the days when I do remember to have two meals, and sometimes even nutritious snacks, I have so much more energy to do things. Lately, when I forget an early day meal, I’m tired, I need a nap, and I’m headachy all day. When I remember to eat anything that is nutritionally dense in the morning — leftovers from the previous day’s brunner; a scrambled egg; a homemade wrap with avocado, tomato, and lettuce in it — my day goes much better.

So, you’d think it would be easy for me to remember.

I’ve developed strategies for eating more than once a day, even: have simple foods ready so I don’t have to prepare something just for myself; hard boil a few eggs once a week so I can just grab one or two when even making a wrap is too hard.

At the present, I have a batch of homemade yogurt in the refrigerator, and presliced strawberries waiting for me to combine them (with a few nuts). I have the makings for a veggie wrap. I have a few hard-boiled eggs.

Most of the time, I don’t remember any of them. Most of the time, when the minor hunger pains hit, I ignore it. And so, most of that food ends up being thrown away because it’s gone bad.

It’s hard for me to get rid of the internalized messages: you don’t deserve to take up any space, you are fat and fat people shouldn’t eat, starving yourself is the only way to be healthy when you are fat. I know none of these are right. I write about how size does not equal health or lack of it all the time. I’ve written about how eating appropriately is a form of self-care.

Yet, in the two months I’ve been trying to eat more, eat even just two meals a day, I haven’t been able to get there more than maybe a third of the time. It’s progress, yes.

Baby steps. I have to continue to remind myself that I didn’t get to disordered eating habits in one day. It took many years for me to get to this point. Even with everything I’ve learned from Health at Every Size^®, the ingrained habits of neglecting myself, and actively trying to starve myself, are not going to go away overnight.

I look forward to the day that I am eating two meals a day consistently, along with various healthy snacks. But right now, I’m not to that point. Right now, I still have to constantly remind myself to eat more than once a day.

The news this week has been abuzz over a young man’s attempt to create an alternative fashion doll to the ultra-popular Barbie, by modeling it on the measurements of an “average” 19-year-old woman, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meet Lammily:

Named after creator Nickolay Lamm, the doll is shorter and wider and will feature bendable joints and minimal makeup. Lamm has created a crowdfunding site to raise the $95,000 to produce the dolls (as of this post, he more than met his goal with close to $400,000 in donations). He also plans to make outfits, accessories and add dolls of different ethnicities.

Lamm’s reason for making the dolls is to have another toy out there that doesn’t promote Barbie’s unrealistic beauty standards or the sexualized style of Bratz, another doll that’s been popular with young girls. It’s refreshing to see someone, especially a young guy, trying to put another option out there.

However, there are some problematic elements with the campaign, particularly the fact that Lammily would still meet the ideal of someone who has a socially-acceptable body and Lamm is marketing the doll as one that has a “healthy lifestyle” (and as we know, there are plenty of people out there with proportions way larger than this doll who do live healthy lifestyles). There’s also  the use of the terms “real” and “normal” to describe the new dolls (even if a live woman would never be able to recreate Barbie’s actual proportions without costly plastic surgery and disordered eating) that demean those with slender figures.

I do wish Nickolay Lamm a lot of luck with his project. He is trying to make something that young girls might feel good about in this sea of nonstop negative body talk. And who knows, if Lammily becomes a hit, maybe in the future we will see someone do this:

Meet Big, Bad Barbie. Comes with her very own bridge for all those trolls to cross.

Trigger warning: Discussion of calorie counting in order to eat enough food to meet daily caloric requirements, and subsequent, modest weight loss.

The twelve-week mark for my 100 day Eat the Food experiment came and went a couple of days go.

Just as a reminder, I decided twelve-ish weeks ago to eat above my base metabolic rate (BMR) for 100 days. BMR is calculated based on gender, age, weight, and height. It’s the number of calories your body needs to keep your organs functioning if you lay in bed all day. If you don’t eat those calories, your body will metabolize your fat and lean tissue to get them. Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is the number of calories your body needs to maintain your weight, taking your daily activities into consideration. My TDEE is 3,100 calories. I used this calculator to figure out my BMR and TDEE.

For 100 days, I’m eating AT LEAST 2,500 calories. That’s the minimum, not the maximum. And that’s net, which means that I eat back the calories I burn through exercise. I’m blogging about my experiment daily.

Today I’ll answer some questions that I’ve been asked and let you guys know how it’s going otherwise.

So, my ten week post caused a bit of a rumpus.

I want to make a couple of points, to be sure that they are absolutely clear.

1. Fat people’s bodies burn more calories than their thinner counterparts. That means that their TDEE is higher. At 5’9″ and 340-ish pounds, mine is 3,100 calories. That’s the number I need to eat to maintain my weight, assuming a sedentary day. On days that I swim, my TDEE goes up to about 3,800 calories. It’s important to know what your TDEE is because eating too far below it is uncomfortable. Notice, I didn’t say that you will die instantly, after your organs suddenly stop working if you eat way below your TDEE for a day. Your BMR is a good counterbalance to your TDEE. It gives you a window. If you aim to eat between these two numbers consistently, you may find that you have more energy, you sleep better, your whole body starts to thrive in a way that you didn’t even know was possible. That was my experience, anyway.
2. Some people got upset because my experiment involves making sure I eat at least 2,500 net calories a day without talking about an upper limit. I can only assume that they believe that fat people are like a dog I once had who would eat until his belly popped if I gave him unrestricted access to food. Like “Fat lady is letting herself eat whatever she wants with no limit to her calories, she must be eating her body weight in cake everyday (and that’s a lot of cake because OMG she’s huge).” Turns out though, that by letting go of limiting what I can eat, I’ve finally been able to stop binging. When I know that I can eat as much as I need to, I actually have found that I just want to eat as much as I need to. I don’t have the urge to eat an entire bag of mini peanut butter cups or every bite of a restaurant meal. I’m still healing, but switching my focus to making sure I eat enough, from trying to make sure I don’t eat too much, has been a life changing experience for me. Not limiting your calories is not the same thing as going on an all-day-every-day-for-the-rest-of-your-life binge.
3. When it comes to Health at Every Size^® (HAES), people who consider themselves anti-HAES are woefully misinformed about what HAES is. HAES does not claim that everyone on earth is already healthy. HAES advocates for taking a proactive approach to health in a weight-neutral way. You don’t get kicked out of the club if eating intuitively and getting some exercise causes weight loss. You don’t have to turn in your HAES card if you hope that happens.

Okay, that’s off my chest. I feel better.

I’m closing in on the end of my 100 day experiment. I didn’t have any real idea that it would be this successful when I started. I hoped to have some more energy and improve my sleep, and maybe not hurt so much. I added ten minutes of exercise a day to my goal because that was honestly all I could manage in December.

This week I made it to 1,100 meters toward my goal of being able to swim 3,000 meters. I am consistently sleeping eight hours a night with no sleep aid. Since December, I’ve added to my days school first; then the edits for my book; increased my non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) by ten-fold at least; plus an ever-increasing amount of exercise, and my energy level has kept up beautifully. When I’m tired at the end of the day, it’s the good kind of tired — not the “system crash” kind of exhausted.

I think that eating consistently at a level that is below my TDEE, but above my BMR, has been a big winner for me. I have a steady, even level of energy throughout the day. I’m positive that a lot of feeling better has come from having the energy to exercise in a way that I really enjoy. It’s all a nice, little, self-propelling cycle that is so much better than the restrict/binge cycle I’ve lived with most of my life. There is no wagon to fall off because all I’m doing is eating enough and exercising moderately.

I started this experiment not wanting to focus on weight at all. During Le Rumpus, I found myself repeating over and over that what I’m doing works because I have lost about a pound a week during it. I sort of regret that now. Not because it isn’t true, but because I don’t think that going from 360 to 345 pounds  (or 350 to 335, depending on which scale I use — 15 pounds, either way) is the real proof that eating above my BMR and getting some exercise has been a successful endeavor. The benefits I’ve received so far outweigh the amount of weight that I’ve lost, it almost doesn’t even feel reasonable to credit weight loss for any of it.

I still wear the same size clothing. I’m still the fattest person in the pool when I go swimming. I still have a BMI in the high 40s. But I have no more pain. I have no more sleep problems. I have no more 3:30 pm total body system crash. I’ve gone from being able to barely swim 150 meters to swimming a nice, strong 1,100 meters. Those 15 pounds are the very least of the benefits that have come from the last 88 days.

I am not sorry that I’m losing a little weight. It just feels like another way my body is adjusting to getting a consistent amount of food and more exercise everyday. HAES is not about wanting to be fat. It’s about accepting your body the way it is. In my case, it means accepting my fat body and not waiting for thinness before I start showing it some respect. Eating well and exercise and body acceptance. I have been blown away by the results of truly practicing all three.

I’ll be starting another 100 days on March 25. If you’re interested in joining me, you’re more than welcome. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, drop me a line at shauntagrimes at gmail or follow along on my personal blog. I’ll be posting journal prompts every day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them.

Trigger warning: Talk of eating disorders, restrictive eating and eating enough calories for minimum function.

I’ve struggled with hypoglycemia-like symptoms for years — more years than I can remember. My doctor finally diagnosed me with hypoglycemia and recommended eating every two to three hours, or eating when symptomatic. The odd part is that I don’t experience my symptoms except for when I’m active.

Even light housework can make me sick to my stomach, dizzy, weak, and shaky. So, I dutifully did as my doctor asked and monitored my symptoms based on when, how much, and what I ate. The final score? It doesn’t seem to matter. What I eat or when I eat hasn’t had an effect on my symptoms one way or the other.

So I got to think about Shaunta’s recent journey to eat enough for her body and wondered whether my problem is not hypoglycemia, but calorie deprivation? After all, these symptoms are very close to what many eating disorder (ED) patients, including myself, experienced when not eating enough. When I was eating 300 calories a day, I was often dizzy, sick, weak, and shaky.

The thing is, I’ve been in recovery for three years. So why are my symptoms not improving? Well, having thyroid disease means that I am often too tired and sleep through meals. It also means I’m rarely hungry, so I often skip meals; one to two meals a day is pretty normal for me and I only average 1,400-1,700 calories on a day when I’m eating a solid three times. So if I’m eating fewer calories than that from less than three meals a day, then it’s not unreasonable to think something might be connected here. Especially lately, as my diet has only gotten more restrictive. Not only am I vegan which, let’s face it, is naturally pretty low calorie, but I’m also gluten free and have recently been put on an extremely restrictive autoimmune elimination diet. So even when I’m not skipping meals because I’m asleep or not hungry, I’m skipping meals because I just don’t know what the heck to eat!

I’m cautious about bringing this up to my doctor though because he’s, well, a fatphobe and obsessed with me losing weight. When he put me on the autoimmune elimination diet he was convinced the “pounds will just melt away,” even though I have not lost a single pound and I’m pretty sure I’ve gained a few. Maybe because of the hypothyroidism, maybe because my body is perpetually stuck in starvation mode because I’m not feeding it enough, maybe because genetics have stubbornly put my set point squarely at a size 22 and 280lbs. I’m not sure.

What I do know is that I love being active. And that doesn’t always mean going to the gym, although I do love that too. But I also love gardening and walking with my son and redecorating and fixing things up and cleaning (yes, when I’m in a good mood, I love to clean), but these are all things I cannot do when I feel this sick every time I try to accomplish anything. Doing the dishes shouldn’t make me feel like I’m going to hit the floor or make my stomach churn. It’s gotten unbearable.

So, I’ve committed to eating five times a day. I don’t want to count calories, not even to make sure I’m eating enough, because it’s triggering and, well, let’s face it: a pain in the ass.  If eating five times a day doesn’t work, then I’ll count whatever I need to, but first things first. Eat solidly throughout the day.

I want to give a special shout out to Shaunta for going on her wonderful food journey to eat enough to nourish her body because if she hadn’t, I may seriously have never thought to do the same. Eating very little has been my way of life since I was 15 years old (I’m almost 29 now so, wow, 14 years). It’s almost unthinkable for me to eat up to 2,000 calories or more a day!

I was on a diet once where I had to fluctuate between eating 2,500 calories a day and eating 1,000 calories a day. Let me tell you, for me personally, eating 2,500 was tough, even though I was only a vegetarian at the time and not vegan. I felt like I was constantly eating and constantly full.

I may not need that much to function or make my symptoms disappear, but whatever I’m eating now just doesn’t seem to be enough. But here’s where I need your advice: should I keep this experiment secret from my fat-hating doctor? Or should I tell him flat out that I think I’m eating too little and watch his head explode when I say I want to eat more?

Trigger warning: Discussion of eating disorders.

It’s been a while, huh? A month at least. So what’s been going on? Shiiii, a lot.

I need some lovin’

I’ve talked a bit about what’s happened in college and about the looks I get as well. As far as school has gone, my sign language teacher is still a bigot and my history teacher is still terribly ignorant about anything other than her flavor of ethnocentric history, but I have reconciled with the sociology teacher (the one who was rude to me) and the “religious” teacher turned into the program director instead and the real teacher is waaaaay better. Heh, the bigot teacher has asked me to drop her class because “I will never pass [her] class” and I might as well “save [my]self from the trouble.” Thanks for the vote of confidence, lady!

Do you remember that I was taking care of my kid brother a while back? He is with our Mom now in Arizona and she too is suspicious about an eating disorder (ED) after he was spending a lot of time in the bathroom after eating. As far as I have heard, he stopped that behavior, though I worry about him hiding it better. Anyway, since he has left, I have acquired another roommate; one who is closer to my age. We’ve already went out clubbing (I NEVER KNEW IT WAS SO FUN) and had small parties at the apartment. I can tell you it’s been a big help to go home to people who care after a particularly hard day and talk about the triggers. Speaking of…

I’ve had to go to the doctors lately and, damn, if I didn’t have to go I wouldn’t. This has been my main source of pain for the past few months. I am going to have surgery soon and am required to see a specific doctor for progress and checkups leading to the table. This doctor, though, has made it very obvious that she doesn’t like me from the beginning and continually triggers my ED despite my comments and pleas. I have told her I have an ED, and immediately afterward she goes on and on about the importance of calorie counting and how it will help me “lose weight for the operation.” Right, because my restrictive nature has totally made me thin /sarcasm/. I can’t even ask to see another doctor because the other one is worse! I can’t leave for another place because my insurance requires I use that hospital or else I will have to pay full price for the surgery, but I don’t know if I will survive these people!

I have lapsed with my health and have slipped back into my ED habits. It’s taking a toll on my body and mind. I think I will have to just smile and nod with the doctor and grit my teeth until my operation date in May. Maybe I also need to take a nature trip and disappear for two weeks. Ah, how I long for no more assholes in the world, amiright? Why can’t people be tolerant and compassionate? Freaking people…. *mutter mutter*

Trigger warning: Discussion of calorie counting in order to eat enough food to meet daily caloric requirements, and subsequent, modest weight loss.

In mid-December I was a wreck. I was exhausted and stressed out and in pain. My whole body crashed by 3:30 or 4:00 every afternoon and I wasn’t able to do even the most basic of day-to-day tasks like laundry or grocery shopping without needing serious recovery time. Despite my fatigue, I had severe insomnia and needed to take an OTC sleep aid several nights a week. I came across a blog called GoKaleo.com and learned about basal metabolic rate (BMR) and total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), and since I had to do something to try to feel better, I decided to give eating above my BMR a try. I committed to eating at least 2,500 calories and exercising for 10 minutes every day for 100 days.

A couple of things scared me. I was afraid that I’d gain a lot of weight, since I believed that I was eating 1,800 calories most days. I had to tell myself, over and over, that 100 days wasn’t enough time to gain too much weight. That it would be worth it if I felt better, and I could re-evaluate in 100 days if I did find myself gaining like crazy. I was also afraid that having a minimum number of calories to eat a day, without a maximum, would mean that I ate 5,000 calories a day. I’ve never been able to eat intuitively as called for in Health at Every Size^® (HAES), even after three years of trying, and I was pretty wrapped up in being a “good fatty” who didn’t overeat most days. Lastly, I was afraid that tracking my calories (I did, every day for 100 days, on My Fitness Pal) would trigger my disordered eating and lead to those 5,000 calories a day.

I’m so happy that I faced those fears. It took a couple of weeks to get to the point where I could eat 2,500 calories a day, every day. I had to train myself to eat breakfast because without it (and without binging) I wasn’t eating enough on a day-to-day basis. I found that my tendency was to undereat several days in a row, followed by a day or two of overeating. Learning to eat about the same amount every day with consistency was maybe the best thing that came out of this experiment. By the end of the first month, my energy was lasting until 8:00 or 9:00 pm. By the end of the second month, I had enough energy that I was actually having trouble going to bed. I had to teach myself to settle down at night when I wasn’t on the verge of collapse.

So, I have more energy. I have far less pain, no more edema, no more insomnia. For the first three weeks, sometimes my 10 minutes of exercise was doing a load of laundry or throwing a tennis ball for my dog. In early January, I went swimming. I was barely able to get through six laps (150 meters) in 12 minutes. This week, I swam 1,200 meters in 40 minutes. This week, I’ll also lift weights three times and walk four times. All in all, I’ve gone from 70 minutes of exercise a week (really, in the beginning, more like just being slightly more active in my daily life, since I didn’t do much actual “exercise” in those first days) to exercising moderately about five hours a week. In 100 days.

It’s hard for me to even articulate how much better I feel. Want to know something that sucks? When your nine-year-old asks if you’ll take her to the park and the idea of doing it makes you want to cry. What to know what rules? When you ask your nine-year-old if she wants to go to the park, because you have the energy to spare, and she gets so excited that she wraps her arms around you and tells you that you’re the best.

On Valentine’s Day, I went to the student health center at my university for a fitness evaluation, as part of a wellness program I’d signed up for. My blood pressure was 129/82, which is just a little bit into pre-hypertension and my heart rate was 93 beats per minute, which is just a little bit above normal (which is 60 to 90). At that point, I’d been swimming for about five weeks and was up to 800 meters. On March 20 (five weeks later), I had another evaluation and my blood pressure was 124/79 (still a tiny bit pre-hypertensive, but better) and my heart rate was 76 beats per minute, which is a big improvement and smack dab in the middle of normal. So now I’m wondering if maybe some of the way I was feeling in December wasn’t due to hypertension. I’ve never had high blood pressure before — it’s always in the 120/80 range — but I was under a lot of stress leading up to December, and it’s possible.

The bottom line is, my heart is healthier because I started eating more consistently which gave me more energy which allowed me to get more exercise. I’m also happier, because I feel better and I’m not hungry or hangry.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to intuitive eating. My fear about eating ALL the food ALL the time was unfounded. Turns out, when I’m never very hungry, I am far less likely to binge. For the first time, I’ve started to understand what Linda Bacon and Wendy Oliver-Pyatt (who wrote a book called Fed Up! that is very HAES-like) mean when they say that allowing yourself to eat what you want, when you want, will ease the obsession with certain foods. About six weeks in, my husband brought home a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups — you know, the little mini ones… the ones I could easily sit and eat a whole bag of without even realizing I’d done it. I was upset. Why was he sabotaging me? I hadn’t binged in six weeks, now this? And then I took a breath. I ate a few of those mini bites of heaven, and then I didn’t want anymore. Not “I was able to make myself stop eating” or “I made my husband take the bag out” or “I fed the rest to my kids.” I really just had enough, and I knew I could have more later, so I stopped eating them.

I had a meeting with a registered dietitian today. I was very happy that she understood HAES and intuitive eating. I brought her a five-day eating log, and she didn’t have any problem with what or how much I’ve been eating. She said that because she is anti-diet, she talks with clients about how to eat to their needs and their appetite, versus telling them what they should eat. Her one concern was that tracking is not exactly in line with intuitive eating, and she wanted me to stay aware of the possibility that I’ll become obsessive about it. And she had a point. I am aware that tracking could slip into something I don’t want it to be, and I’m conscious about not letting that happen.

I will track for at least another 100 days because I still feel like I’m learning about my relationship with food and it’s still helping me. For instance, it’s been helpful for me to see that an extra hungry afternoon can almost always be tracked back to a light breakfast and a workout — and never, ever to a lack of willpower or me being a disgusting glutton. Tracking feels like intuitive eating training wheels right now, and I’m not ready to go without them just yet. But I know that I won’t need to track forever. I’m working toward intuitive eating and it’s fantastic. I’m relearning what I knew when I was a kid: what it feels like to be hungry, what it means to eat to satiety, and how to stop eating when I’m full. Tracking is helping me trust myself, which is a major step in overcoming disordered eating.

Nine Things I Learned From My 100 Day Experiment

1. There are some people who get very, very angry at the mention of HAES, or god forbid, Fat Acceptance. My posts here have been reposted to reddit, where they were ridiculed and I was made mocked. I spent some time on reddit, trying to understand where the anger came from and trying to clear up misunderstandings about HAES. Not everyone I met was the angry anti-HAESer type. Some people asked questions and there were some good conversations, and I actually enjoyed some of the debate.
2. Consistency was the key to feeling better for me. Eating about the same amount every day, and making sure that amount was enough to allow my body to heal and thrive and get stronger — I believe that has literally changed my life. I will never, ever diet again. Not even the “I’m a good fatty who doesn’t overeat” diet. Never. Ever. Again.
3. Tracking was scary, but worth the risk.
4. It wasn’t my goal, but one result of eating more intuitively, not binging, and exercising more has been a small, slow weight loss that seems to be continuing. I’ve had to do a lot of thinking in the last few weeks about how weight loss fits into HAES and Body Acceptance. I bought (another) copy of Linda Bacon’s book and found this quote: “[T]he best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.” This is what tracking calories has allowed me to do. It’s let me give up being a good fatty. I wish I could have done it without tracking, but after three years, I realized I needed something to help me.
5. When I look at a picture of me in early January and one from this week, the difference I see goes so far beyond that small weight loss. In fact, when I look at these pictures, what I see is strength. I see that I’m standing straighter and I don’t look so exhausted. I look healthier because I am healthier, and that, after all, was my whole goal.
   
6. Even though I am normally very triggered by data (like calorie counting), I found that I had no problem at all shifting my mindset from calorie counting for a maximum (no more than 1,800 calories) to a minimum (at least 2,500 calories). There were days when I ate more and days when I ate a little less, but overall I was able to focus more on my appetite and my hunger signals when I wasn’t worried about staying under a certain number of calories. Today, I am far closer to intuitive eating than I have ever been before.
7. Eating enough has allowed me to make huge gains in fitness and strength. In two-and-a-half months, I’ve gone from being able to swim 150 meters to 1,200. In December, I was barely functioning. Since then, I’ve added school, the edits to my second book, my daughter’s soccer practices, four hours a week of exercise, the household things that I’d left up to others because I didn’t have the energy for it — and my energy holds up to all of it.
8. I’m done being a good fatty. I won’t ever feel guilty about eating again. I’ve learned so much about how food affects my well-being over the last 100 days. I’ll never go back to worrying about what other people think about how much I eat or what I eat. I convinced myself, over the course of years, that eating 1,800 calories a day most days meant I was being good. At least I could wave my little “I don’t eat like a pig” banner when I felt self-conscious about my weight. Now I know for sure that what I was really doing was restricting to be a good fatty, which triggered disordered eating, which caused binging, and this vicious cycle hurt me. Never again. Ever.
9. My body has pretty powerful systems in place to make sure I eat enough. So does yours. I truly believed that I was eating 1,800 calories most days. I didn’t track, so I can’t say for sure, but I believe now that I was eating more than I thought I was. HAES is all about intuitive eating. Another term is mindful eating, and I know now that I did a lot of mindless eating. I ate because I was bored or anxious or upset or happy, and I didn’t even register what I was eating or sometimes even that I was eating. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a place where I can eat completely intuitively, without having to put a lot of thought into it beyond checking in with my hunger signals. I do know, though, that I can eat more mindfully. I can pay attention to how what I eat makes me feel and to how much I need to eat to feel satisfied. I believe it’s okay to eat for reasons other than hunger. Food brings comfort and is a way to celebrate and that’s okay. Eating a whole bag of Reese’s miniature peanut butter cups without even tasting them, or really even realizing that you’re doing it until you’re stomach hurts — not so much.

Today, as I write this, it’s day 100. I did what I set out to do and the results were stunning. Tomorrow, I’ll start another 100 days — the 100 Day Experiment 2.0. Eventually, I’ll be able to eat without putting so much thought and energy into it. I’ll be able to exercise because it feels good, without feeling the need to record every swim and every walk. For now, it’s working for me, and I’m excited to see where the next 100 days will take me. I won’t update here as often, but you can follow along at my blog and I’m sure I’ll post here about it sometimes.

Every Tuesday I send out a free 100 Day Experiment newsletter. If you’d like to receive it, click here to sign up.

Trigger warning: Discussion of diets and weight loss.

Sandra Aamodt is a neuroscientist. The video below is her TED Talk about our brains on weight loss and, in particular, about mindful eating.

She has a very, very pessimistic view of weight loss. Far more pessimistic than Linda Bacon in Health at Every Size. Bacon wrote:

…the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.

Aamodt’s advice is to learn to eat mindfully — eating when you’re hungry, stopping when you’re full — in an effort to mitigate eating disorders and stop gaining weight. Your best bet, she says, is avoiding diets because they will, in almost every case, cause you to get fatter. She explains how the body’s systems for controlling weight are like a home thermostat. You can open a window in the winter and cool things down, but the thermostat is still set where it’s set and it works to regulate the temperature of the home. Similarly, you can do drastic things to lower your weight, but your internal thermostat is still set where it’s set and your body will still work to regulate your weight back to it’s set point. Often it overshoots and you wind up fatter.

So, is my thermostat stuck in the 350-pound range? I have this on my mind, because I’ve lost a little bit of weight (about 15 pounds over the course of three or four months). I have no idea if eating mindfully, which for me means making sure that I’m eating between my body’s base metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure (the number of calories my body needs for organ function and to maintain my weight), will continue to cause slow weight loss. I don’t know if Aamodt is right, and my body’s thermostat is set so that I’ll probably not be able permanently lose much more weight or if Bacon is right and, if I give my body what it needs, it’ll take care of coming to my “healthy weight” on its own.

I know that if I’ve learned one thing from a lifetime of trying to manipulate my weight, for me personally, dieting is a recipe for failure. I wish I could go back to my 20-year-old self and take Aamodt’s advice about mindful eating and not gaining weight. I don’t believe that I would have gone from 180 to 360 pounds in the 22 intervening years if I hadn’t cycled through diet after diet, fostering disordered eating along the way.

In Aamodt’s talk, she uses one chart. It looks at four healthy behaviors: improving nutrition, increasing exercise, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. While people with normal weights show an increase in health with each of these behaviors that they adopt, it’s obese people who show the biggest increase when just one behavior is adopted. When people who are of normal weight and people who are obese adopt all four, the difference in their levels of health nearly disappears.

If you look at the chart, you can easily see that it implies that having a BMI of more than 30 is a significant health risk for someone who doesn’t eat well, doesn’t exercise, who smokes, and who drinks a lot of alcohol. Adding in just one healthy behavior doesn’t make much difference for those with BMIs below 30, but does for those with higher BMIs. By the time you get to all four behaviors, it’s a pretty even playing field.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that for the vast majority of humanity, very low calorie diets are impossible to sustain. There are some people who are able to lose significant weight and keep it off for the long run, but they are outliers. I think some of them design their lives around making sure that they can put a lot of their attention and willpower toward keeping the weight off. Some of them, perhaps, weren’t fat for long enough to reset their thermostat to a higher level. Maybe they gained weight after an illness or a pregnancy, for instance, and lost it within a year or two.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Body Acceptance and HAES community is that while there is a lot of talk about weight loss and how possible or impossible it is, there is very little discussion about gaining weight. So little discussion, in fact, that when I think about it now, I’m not even sure how to wrap my head around it. I almost never think about gaining weight. I don’t think about someday weighing 370 pounds or 380 or 400. I assume that what I weigh now is the most I will weigh. My weight has been stable since I started practicing HAES, but before that I had gained ten pounds a year for the six years since my youngest child was born. I have no idea when that would have stopped, or if it would have at all.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep losing weight, but I am pretty confident that I will never be thin, and I’m at peace with that. I am positive that I have control over how active I am, how strong I am, how well I feed myself. I’ve never been a drinker or a smoker, but it’s interesting to me that when the other two of the four healthy behaviors — eating and exercise — fell apart during a recent time of stress, I fell apart, too. I felt like crap. Bringing them back in line has had nearly miraculous results despite only a very, very modest weight loss.

I think maybe putting the focus on the things we can control, like adopting healthy behaviors, maintaining weight, improving health, is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves. Whether Aamodt is right, and weight is not something we can control beyond a narrow range, or Bacon is right and mindful eating and joyful exercise will allow our body’s to reach a natural, healthy weight, we know that letting go of the fight to be smaller is maybe the path to reduced stress, increased happiness, and improved health.

Here’s the thing: HAES stands for HEALTH at Every Size, not HEALTHY at Every Size. It doesn’t imply (I find it strange to think that anyone thinks it does, but a recent foray into reddit-land has taught me that there are people who do) that everyone on Earth is already healthy. Improved health is the goal of HAES, and I truly believe that’s an attainable goal that can have sustainable results.

Click here to subscribe to my 100 Day Experiment newsletter and get a copy of my anti-dieting guide.

Trigger warning: Discussion of weight-loss and diet programs.

Now she’s fading, somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh.

—from “Celebrity Skin” by Hole

We’ve all heard and read about Kirstie Alley’s constant struggles to shed the pounds. Now she’s teamed up with Jenny Craig and caught flak for her comment about “not being circus fat” and just wanting to lose 30 pounds in her new commercial.

This is actually Kirstie’s second attempt with the weight-loss company. Back in 2006 her first stint with Jenny Craig resulted in a 75 lbs. weight loss, leading to the the infamous bikini reveal on Oprah.

The pounds came back, though, and in 2010, she launched Organic Liaison, a company that is allegedly a front for Scientology, though Alley denied this. Over a year later, Alley claimed to lose 100 lbs. on the first-ever USDA-certified organic product. However, she was later sued by Marina Abramyan, a customer who used the product without success. She claimed that Alley’s weight loss was not from Organic Liaison, but due to her competing on the hit reality show Dancing With the Stars, where celebrities, most of whom have no formal dance training, go through intense physical training to prepare for the show. In the end, Alley had to settle with Abramyan out of court for $130,000 and was ordered to mention her time on Dancing with the Stars on the Organic Liaison website.

As part of her deal with Jenny Craig, Alley got a fairly sweet deal for her diet company and its signature product, an organic appetite suppressant called Rescue Me:

Jenny Craig’s parent company CI Holdings, Inc. has acquired Alley’s Organic Liaison line and will be integrating Organic Liaison’s key products into the Jenny Craig line.  They will be available in centers in the near future… “Rescue Me” will be the first of the products from the Organic Liaison line to be available in Jenny Craig Centers.

With Kirstie Alley “coming home,” as she calls it, to Jenny Craig, time will only tell if she manages to reach her new weight loss goal. But if history repeats itself, she will probably lose the weight, go through yet another short-term honeymoon phase, and return right back to the high set point her body is probably used to thanks to long-term yo-yo dieting.

I realize it’s her body and she’s free to do with it as she wishes, but it’s frustrating and heartbreaking to watch her continuously go through these cycles of weight loss and weight gain, then beating herself up when she gets fat again. She needs to know that she is lovely no matter what her size, and that giving up this dieting insanity and maybe embracing Health at Every Size^® (HAES) may make her feel better and more positive about herself thanshowing off her body off in a bikini to a gaping audience on Oprah.

This is the first post introductory post from from Dow Jones, our latest blogging candidate. After she submits three guest posts, we will vote on her inclusion in our blog.

This is going to be my first post. I’m on WordPress! Yay!

I will be talking about things that I am interested in and hopefully get some positive feedback, some new online friends and some intellectual discourse.

Things that I am interested are social justice, particularly the Fat Acceptance movement, religion and philosophy, Photoshopping, among other things.

A little about myself, I am a 34-year-old woman who is hearing impaired, has bipolar and Asperger’s Disorder, of which I probably will be blogging about that as well.

As I said, I am interested in the Fat Acceptance movement. Why? It is a movement that I feel is very much in need given that we live in a society that puts the thin ideal on a high, unattainable pedestal. It is much needed because women and men suffer from low self-esteem, confidence, and more because of the constant bombardment of propaganda from the media. Everywhere we go, we see magazine covers portraying thin people as beautiful, tabloids that blast celebrities for having even a smidgen of cellulite, innumerous articles on the internet about the “obesity epidemic,” and publications both

Copyright Nearsighted Owl

online and off about dieting.

People who fall short of the beauty ideal, particularly fat people, are ostracized, marginalized and discriminated against. One only needs to read blogs such as First Do No Harm, Fat Heffalump, and This Is Thin Privilege in order to see that such discriminatory behavior against fat people is common.

Another reason I want to blog about Fat Acceptance is that it helps me. I am one of those millions who suffer from low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and low self-worth. Some of this is, I will say, part of my mental disorders. However, I see the same type of media portraying perfect bodies and flawless faces, and I see and read the numerous posts of fat hate on the internet and I feel that if I can somehow make a small contribution to the Fat Acceptance movement; it will not only help me, but maybe, just maybe, I could help someone else out there. Perhaps it can be a woman who has dieted on and off for years and feels like a failure each time she gains weight. Perhaps it could be a teenager being picked on for his weight and seeing a blog where acceptance of one’s body in a positive way could lift his or her spirits up. Perhaps it could be someone who works in the field of psychology or nutritional studies, what have you, who could be spurned to see the other side of the “obesity epidemic.”

All of these are valid reasons that a small part can make a difference.

I will do my best to be informative, check and recheck my sources, and to contribute to a growing internet community that focuses on group and personal experiences; that deal with such issues as Fat Acceptance, body positivity, and mental health topics that interest me.

I do hope that what I write will be thought-provoking and engaging.

I want for people to consider that some things that are out there, in the media, or elsewhere, aren’t always what they say it is. Nor what it seems to be. I hope to promote critical thinking on some of these topics and I hope for more intellectual, stimulating conversations on these topics.

So this is all I have to blog for now. I will be back eventually when some more ideas come to me.

Dow Jones

Trigger warning: Discussion of disordered eating.

Hey e’rybody, how’s it goin’? (<—best Southern accent)

Do you remember when I was talking about trying to survive my hospital and their terrible doctors to get a much-needed surgery out of the way? Yeah… so let me tell you.

Come and sit with me.

Back in December, I went to the hospital (that I had previously researched for insurance purposes and recommendations) because my insides were acting funny and I needed to have them checked. It turns out that I need surgery done to fix a few hernias. Well, my insurance requires me to have a medically-monitored waiting period of six months; don’t ask me why, I have no idea, even though I asked. Specifically, they were looking for changes in my weight. Because the most prominent problems are in my digestive system, I was put into the gastroenterology, endocrine and bariatric center part of the hospital for the observation period. Can you guess where this is going yet?

Day one, they treated me as if I was a bariatric patient. I was forced to go to nutrition classes and weight management classes and intro classes where they talked about diets, the various kinds of bariatric surgeries, and how they were trying to “save” people’s lives. Of course I complained! But I was shut up when I found out that this hospital was the only one within a hundred miles that my insurance would cover almost completely. I would have to suck it up.

Oh how I pulled my hair out! Straight out of the gate, I told the hospital and every personnel I could pin down that I had a small window of opportunity to have the surgery done, and every time I was told not to worry about it, that everything would get done. Every month that I had to drag my behind to that hospital, I asked about being scheduled for the surgery, and every time, without fail, I was told not to worry about it. And every month I went, I was scolded for my weight gain and given a lecture about how important it was for me to lose weight before my surgery and how important it was to count calories.

I think I mentioned this before as well, but I have an eating disorder. I tend toward long periods of fasting that end with a binge that results in more, and longer, fasting. Because my appointments were really early in the morning, I had to skip breakfast to be on time. Afterward, I would feel so shitty that I wouldn’t eat again until my roommates noticed and yelled at me.

Fine, I’ll just eat my damn laptop then.

So April comes around, and that’s when the shit really hit the fan. My final weight check started off with the doctor coming in huffing. She gave me a few stink side-eyes, said a few comments about my gain, and asked if I had any questions. Of course, my surgery still had not been scheduled, so I asked “So can we still do this in May?” With her answer, I was so surprised that I had the control not to slap the shit out of her. She leaned in real close to me, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “That is ABSOLUTELY not possible. Absolutely not possible.”

Bitch, you just ruined six months of my life! If someone, ANYONE, had told me that the surgery wasn’t possible in May, I would have looked somewhere, ANYWHERE, else. May was literally the only time I was going to be able to take off the time for the full three weeks of recovery. When I talked to the surgeon himself, he said he was completely booked until June, and that he was going to take a two-week vacation in the middle of the summer AND it was going to take at least a month for the hospital to contact me again with the surgery date.

If it happens when I think it will (in July), I am so screwed; it will be right in the middle of my summer semester, close to the end, when it will be the most important time to attend. I cannot afford to miss three weeks of class! I was planning on working this summer, but now I will only be available for a month before I’m out for another month, then in August I will not be able to work because I’ll be doing my “clinic” hours (when I’m out in the community, working for free). Also, in the beginning of August my apartment lease runs out, and considering the new roommates, we will have to move to something bigger. I can’t lift heavy boxes with stitches in! To put the icing on the hate cake, I found out that, because my general doctor sent his medical files to the hospital, I could have had my surgery scheduled back in March.

Every single step of the way, I have run into hospital staff who really shouldn’t be working with fat patients. Perhaps I wasn’t as self-deprecating as the others, or perhaps, because I wasn’t swallowing their weight-loss bullshit, the vitriol was clearly established.

I am just so done with this hospital. I just want this to be over with so I can continue on with my life.

Trigger warning: Diet and weight loss talk.

With various injuries, detours to specialists, and other tasks that need taken care of, I’ve been putting off my routine medical visits for about a year at this point. When my NuvaRing prescription ran out, I finally had to address my lack of check-up. I hate that chemical birth control is prescription-only because it’s not much more than a tether to the prescriber. And it worked, because my options were go back for a new one or start having periods again.

While my doctor tends to be HAES-friendly, her staff isn’t. At several points during the history update, I received the suggestion that I go on a diet. Initially, I told the nurse that I was on a diet. Every living thing is on a diet of some sort, be it a diet of sunlight, a diet of plankton, or a diet of whatever you want. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t see eye-to-eye on that definition.

Next round of bloodwork review, she wanted more information about my diet, so I told her about my eating habits. Next round, it was the suggestion that I go on a weight-loss diet. If my thyroid was fixed, surely I could lose weight. I recounted my year of Weight Watchers, where my weight loss “curve” was a flat line. Her final attempt was to tell me what I should eat. No amount of explaining that the foods she thinks I should eat do nothing but make me sick would dissuade her from the notion that I need to eat those foods. No, pairing a “sugar bomb” with protein did not help.

She finally left it with the note that I will consult with my specialists. This isn’t a doctor I see regularly, so I put up with it to get to the prodding of my insides and the prescription. A week later, my endocrinologist told me he’d write me one san lecture or having to get naked.

While I’d prefer not to gain more weight, since replacing a wardrobe is expensive, I do find changes in my weight to be a useful diagnostic tool. Gaining weight like crazy? Time to check thyroid function. Losing weight like crazy? Not the time to tell me how nice my face is looking, I need to check my adrenal function. I also don’t like losing a lot of weight because, again, replacing a wardrobe is still expensive.

Since I’ve been able to stay the same size for a couple of years now, I’m more willing to get myself nice things that last, rather than the cheapest things I could find because I don’t know what size the next month would bring. This stability has made me willing to get a drawer full of cute and colorful exercise clothes to wear for physical therapy, skating class, and off-ice training. Thanks to Swimsuits for All, my size 22 body is much easier to get into a swimsuit than my size 12 one was.  I can get two suits that I like and that fit me for the price of one suit I sort of liked and sort of fit me. Who needs a weight loss diet to be beach ready?

One thing I had adopted from diet talk is the notion of cheat day. I really like the idea of not letting the perfect get in the way of the good. Doughnuts might be off my plate, but I can still enjoy the occasional french fry.

Early cheat days should’ve been renamed pain days, as I learned what my body could and could not tolerate. Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. As my tastes changed, and I got more attuned to the foods that made me feel good, my “cheats” weren’t cheats so much as stretches. I love refried beans mixed with salsa verde, cilantro, onions, and cotija cheese. And because it doesn’t provoke the same reaction as my formerly-beloved maple doughnuts, it was a lot harder to say goodbye to.

When I exercise, I can usually tolerate the extra carbs. With that in mind, I renamed Cheat Day to Treat Day. A scoop of rice once a week won’t kill me. Pairing it with orange chicken will do me in, but shrimp with lobster sauce has been my go-to Chinese dish since I discovered it. Usually Friday is my Treat Day. It’s fun to end the week by treating myself to sushi, street tacos, some crazy dessert item, or whatever else strikes my fancy. And if a pizza party breaks out at work, it’s not nearly as stressful as it was when I was being more restrictive. Treat Day just becomes Pizza Day that week, and I’ll take Hawaiian.

Trigger warning: Human scum ahead. Read with caution.

Over the last week, I noticed a new trend among the fat haters. Let’s call it the Dudebro Evopsych Manifesto. In meme form, it goes a little something like this:

To understand how utterly ridiculous this idea of evolutionary disdain toward fatties is, you just need to go back to 200-pound Lillian Russell, the sex symbol from the 1890s.

Fat and desirable: whodathunk.

So when I saw this meme, I couldn’t help but laugh. There are guys out there who really, truly believe that they are being “forced” to like fat women. Apparently, there are roving gangs of the militant fat girls assaulting innocent young men who are just trying to do humanity a favor by offering to pass on their healthy, pure genes with the evolutionarily ideal woman (aka Hot Girls). But things have gotten so bad that these brave, noble men are finally speaking out against the oppression they’ve endured and are pushing back against the long-established social advantages that fatties have enjoyed for far too long.

Bravo, young memer. Bravo.

That would have been the end of my interest in the Dudebro Evopsych Manifesto, were it not for the article published back in December that I recently saw on Facebook titled, “Why I hate fat girls: Tipping the Dating Market Scale.” Now, for obvious reasons I’m not going to link to the site and give these bottomfeeders any more attention than I’m already about to do. But I will link to this image of the post, along with copyright acknowledgement for its author, 20Nation. You don’t need to read it completely to get the gist,  but if you’re interested from an anthropological or comedic standpoint, there it is for your reference.

But the general sentiment can be summed up in a few choice paragraphs and these beautiful, beautiful headlines:

• Hot girls in fat countries are stuck up
• Fat people don’t think that obesity affects anybody but themselves
• Why obesity in men has a different effect

And my personal favorite…

• What you can do?

But before we get into those juicy sections, we have to understand 20Nation’s basic premise:

Being raised in The States and then spending years traveling the world, I have noticed a phenomenon. I have noticed that the attractive girls in the USA are especially stuck up, overconfident and entitled. You may think that this is just the culture, and it is, but only a part of it is the culture. I actually remember thinking to myself “What are hot girls so difficult?”

Aside from his pathological inability to construct a basic question (what are you write so dumb?), 20Nation has some really, really solid arguments (per the residents of Waterworld) that prove his points perfectly in his effort expose the tyranny of fatties as a devious plot to keep him unfuckable in America.

We all remember Adam Smith’s treatise on the invisible handjob of the market.

According 20Nation, because American  women have gotten so fat the percentage of available thin women (not to mention the percentage of available thin AND attractive women, am right I?) has dwindled to such dire proportions that the limited reserve of Hot Girls is getting too uppity for his liking. Or, as 20Nation puts it:

Because of an unnatural amount of guys sucking up to them and fawning over them, these women start to believe they are gods gift to planet earth; they think that their dating market value is much higher than it really is… Many of these fat girls would actually be stunners if they took care of their body. If they did that, the small amount of hot girls wouldn’t get so much attention from so many men and the world would be a better place.

Hear that, fat girls? You can make the world a better place if you’d just stop being so fat and let 20Nation get his needledick hard long enough to ejaculate away the desperation and loneliness his bitter existence.

But here’s the funny thing about 20Nation’s flaccid argument: it’s disproven by his own fucking “data.”

20Nation is quite the prolific blogger, having written “How I Fucked 19 Pinay Girls in 14 Days in The Philippines,” “How I Banged 31 Dominican Girls in 25 Days,” and “Mexican Girls: How to Bang, Types and Pictures.” I also found some of his lesser known articles like “How I Cured 21 STIs with Body Glitter and Jello Shots,” “How to Barter With Sex Workers Using Forged Checks,” and “Crying In Your Pillow: How to Keep Your Hostel Mates from Hating You as Much as You Hate Yourself.”

And then there’s this:

But what 20Nation’s most proud of is his map charting “Easiness of Girls By Country.” Again, just so we don’t have to give traffic to human toe fungus, here ya go.

Compare that with the World Health Organization’s map of overweight and obesity prevalence in women. What you may notice is that the prevalence of fat women doesn’t exactly correlate with the easiness of girls.

But what, oh what, could possibly explain why women in the United States won’t fuck 20Nation if not the devastating effect that obesity has had on the International Easiness Index? Well, I did notice one map of global gross national income per capita that suggests poorer nations tended to fall into the “Won’t Touch My Penis” category on 20Nation’s map.

And you know what’s even weirder? There’s a similar correlation with countries that have greater rates of sex tourism:

But yeah, let’s go ahead and run with the argument that the reason American women won’t fuck 20Nation has nothing to do with the fact that his 20 Dollar Cambodian Woman is probably living in dire poverty.

He then goes on to compare the easiness of women in Mexico vs. the Philippines as evidence that his theory is correct. But when you look at the WHO’s stats on obesity rates for women aged 30-100, you notice a distinct pattern to obesity rates in countries where 20Nation boasts of his exploits:

• Cambodia  — 0.5%
• Colombia — 34.7%
• Dominican Republic  — 47.9%
• Haiti  — 26.0%
• Nicaragua  — 51.2%
• Philippines  — 7.3%
• Thailand  — 16.2%

For reference, the obesity rate of Mexico is 51.1%. Yet he boasts of his exploits in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, both of which have comparable obesity rates. But also, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic have booming sex tourism (same with Colombia and Haiti). But Asia is genetically less inclined toward comparable obesity rates with the West. Yet even though Asia has some of the lowest obesity rates globally, that doesn’t actually correlated with metabolic health, as explained in this discussion of diabetes global obesity rates from the American Diabetes Association’s journal Diabetes Care:

In Asia, obesity rates do not directly correspond with diabetes rates. India, for example, has a very low prevalence of obesity, but notably high rates of type 2 diabetes. A number of Asian countries also have substantially lower rates of overweight and obesity than the U.S., but similar or higher rates of diabetes. In Asian populations, increased risk of diabetes starts at a lower BMI than in Europeans. In addition, even a modest amount of weight gain during adulthood substantially increases the risk of diabetes in Asians.

Ignoring these facts, 20Nation moves on to the section titled “Fat people don’t think that obesity affects anybody but themselves” stating:

Most fat people really believe this. They think that they are not hurting anyone and that it is their body to do with as they please. But they do affect other people. They affect men and the dating market. Not only do they make it harder for men to score with the girls they are attracted to, they are forcing some men to choose something that is unattractive to them or be celibate… Obesity literally affects other people because they have to look at it.

That’s right! Fat girls are literally hurting guys with their selfish decision to not be hot. WON’T YOU THINK OF THE DUDEBRO PENII!!!

And just to be clear, fat guys are under no obligation to stop being eye pollution, as explained in the following section, “Why obesity in men has a different effect,” which may be my favorite section of all:

Like it or not, we as men have to face the facts… we are shallow, especially in comparison to women. Women care about looks, but they care about looks much less than men… Because women don’t care as much about looks, this means that a fat guy can get a hot girl. This means that the obesity epidemic doesn’t affect how women feel about men as much as it affects what men feel about women. Men are the ones getting screwed. All the fat guys can still chase after the hot girls and they do.

All the fat guys. Every single one.

I completely understand if you need to take a minute to appreciate the steaming mound of self-rationalizing bullshit that is this paragraph. I’ve read it at least 50 times and I’ve shaken my damn head so much I’m thinking of having a Lazy Susan installed in my neck.

Apparently, women care about other stuff more than looks (presumably swagger and cash), but for some reason 20Nation still can’t get laid in America. I mean, it’s an evolutionary fact that even fat guys can fuck hot girls, so clearly it’s not his looks (which, incidentally, aren’t shared anywhere on his blog or in his books). Hence the convenient theory that obesity rates are preventing him from getting laid.

And so, with the help of all those frustrated American men with high standards who are still getting rejected by American women despite the fact that women aren’t as superficial as men, 20Nation lays out the groundwork for a New American Revolution:

If you are talking to a fat girl, don’t tell her how beautiful she looks, tell her how beautiful she would look if she were a healthy weight. If a fat girl is asking you if she thinks she should diet, tell her that she better if she wants to live a long life. If a fat girl complains that no guy likes her, don’t pussy foot around the subject, tell her why no guy likes her. Every person can help make the world a better place, one fat girl at a time.

This is 20Nation’s brilliant idea: stigmatize fat women. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 50 years, it’s that society doesn’t stigmatize fat women enough. We’ve gotta go that extra mile, dudes. Otherwise men will be “faced with a dating market that is stacked against them (if they want a girl they are naturally attracted to.)” and as 20Nation bemoans, “This is unfair and it is a problem that our forefathers never had to deal with.”

Yes! As Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac, “No fatties.”

Now, if you don’t have the time or patience to wait for American men to fix the obesity problem, 20Nation has a sweet backup plan for you:

The only way out?

I hate fat girls because of how hard it makes getting laid, but you can escape fat girls. Open up a map and go to any place with low obesity rates. Watch how much different an attractive girl will react when you start hitting on her; it will blow your mind. Watch as a relationship with a beautiful woman will naturally happen, without the need of high level game and lots of experience with women.

These places are the promised lands; they are the places that we were promised as kids. They are the places that we imagined when we grew up, back when we thought women were supposed to be sexy, feminine, thin and sweet creatures. The promise land exists… in a land far away… a land with very few fat girls.

In other words, “Hey men, if you’re sick of getting shot down by Uppity Hot Girls in America come to the Philippines where there are 60,000 to 100,000 child prostitutes just waiting for your highly-valued American dollars.” Now, you may be asking, “Shannon, why credit child prostitutes and not just 20Nation’s smooth moves on helpless, humble foreign girls?” Well, for one, all three posts about the Swoop The World’s sexual conquest in the Philippines (including the account of having sex with 19 “Pinay” girls in 14 days) include multiple accounts and nude photos from “Cebu.” According to the Children’s Legal Bureau (CLB), Cebu City is the hub for trafficking children:

“In 2004 two of the four most common routes to traffic children included Cebu City, which is widely known to have the highest rates of CST (child-sex tourism) in the country. Filipino law enforcement cites Cebu City as a pedophile hot spot,” read the CLB report. Of all the cities and towns in Cebu, Cebu City, per Department of Tourism 2010-2011 statistics, recorded 1,068,830 million travelers, of which 275,137 were foreign nationals.

So, in a nutshell, the fat hatred coming from 20Nation is just the top, crusty layer on a massive scabby pie of human misery and sadness. And the thing is, 20Nation, and other dime-a-dozen gurus like him, are like those barrels of nuclear waste in horror movies that trigger an outbreak of zombies. Other sad, desperate dudebros read this shit and jump on reddit to go “Yeah man, fat chicks are totally to blame for me not getting laid, so I’m going to scream on the internet to take out my sexual inadequacies on them.”

The sick reality is that one of their heroes and mentors is just some pathetic asshole attempting to turn a profit on the fact that he can only have sex by exploiting the global scourge of sex trafficking.

That’s really all there is to it.

But what kind of monster would do such a thing? Well, the answer to that is kind of interesting…

Lifting the Mask

Now, what I didn’t realize when I first read this post is that the blog, Swoop the World, is a PUA blog. For those unhip to the lingo of the tragically chaste, PUA stands for Pick Up Artist. You know, Frank TJ Mackey shit?

 Except, in reality, the Mackey prototype is one Tom “FAT SLOB” Leykis:

Line’s on the left, ladies.

Mr. Leykis is a big fan of Fierce Fatties, as I’ve pointed out in two separate posts. The only reason I even knew who the hell Tom Leykis was is because he started posting blog comments that never saw the light of day. I emailed him and tweeted at him to discuss it with him and got no response. Yet he continues to post the occasional comment, including one about two weeks ago.

20Nation is Tom Leykis on steroids. You know the whole Nice Guy Syndrome? You know, when the Nice Guy is super sad because Hot Girls only want to date Bad Boys, so they keep getting Friendzoned (i.e., told “I love you like a brother” or “you’re such a good friend” as an indication that Hot Girl has no romantic interest). Nice Guys are a plague because there’s a sense of entitlement to a girl’s affections simply because the guy is not a being complete asshole.

Well, 20Nation et. al.  are the mutant offspring Nice Guys. 20Nation is what happens when the Nice Guy stop pretending to be nice. Instead, these Nuclear Guys convince themselves that the problem isn’t them, it’s that women have to be tricked into fucking them. Enter the siren song of the PUA.

PUA gurus promise desperate guys that they’ve discovered the trick to seducing women no matter how hot they are. Of course, you have to buy the books and the videos and the tickets to the seminar. Only then will you learn the secrets of “The Scrambler.”

I found this ad on PUA Forums, which explains the philosophy behind the magic:

When a man learns the proper technique of being a good Pick Up Artist, he increases his desirability immensely. He then can show off to his friends the women that he is able to date, while they are still struggling to find someone to say, “Hello” to them. As other women see that there are a bunch of other gorgeous women being seen with this one man, more and more of them will show an interest in him, too. The new Pick Up Artist will not be able to keep his calendar free after this starts to happen for him.

PUA Forums also shares a photo of what we can only assume are PUAs of High Renown.

Pick Up Artists or Carnival of Souls? You decide.

Like other PUA shysters, 20Nation has a number of PUA ebooks. If you’re interested, you can find them on Amazon under the name Nicholas Jack, which I will link to just so you can see the hilarious fact that all but one of his books are free. Likewise, when you click through 20Nation’s posts, you find that every third post announces that one of his books is free FOR A LIMITED TIME, or forever… whatever. The one book that actually costs money is called The Key Logger: A Forbidden Glimpse at the True Nature of Women, which is reviewed by fellow terrible human being Matt Forney.

The premise of The Key Logger is rather unique; it’s about how Jack secretly installed a key logger on his computer so he could spy on his girlfriends’ Facebook and email accounts. The book follows ten separate girls he used the key logger on, covering the range from an innocent “good girl” to a hard-partying Paris Hilton wannabe to a nutty slut looking to cuckold her husband, and all of them behave in the exact same way.

As a point of reference, Forney is a popular douchebag blogger who once inflamed the internet with an article titled “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem,” which begins “I’m just gonna come out and say it: I love insecure women. Whenever a girl I’m talking to brags about how she’s ‘confident’ and ‘strong,’ I can feel my dick deflating like a punctured tire.” He followed this brilliant analysis with “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem.” Forney also took the time to write his own satirical PUA ebook on “how to bang fat chicks” inspired by posts he read on reddit and This Is Thin Privilege, both hallmarks of the kind of reddit trolls we’ve dealt with on our blog.

It’s also worth noting that Matt Forney has a shitload of fat-hating articles all about how horrible fat women are and how they ruin dating for guys like him, who would otherwise be swimming in willing vaginas. As always, these Nuclear Guys have a pretty high regard for themselves: they’re totally fuckable, but women are the problem. I mean, just check out the way Forney represents himself on his blog.

Wow, what a badass. He looks all cool and tough, but he’s also got those sensitive blue eyes. I mean, what lady could resist such a fine specimen of —

The real Matt Forney. Once again, line’s on the left, ladies.

— wait, who’s this? When I zoom in, I’m pretty sure I’m looking at a rejected Cabbage Patch Doll.

This Forney dude is just some dipshit who compiled his blog posts into an ebook about profiting off trolling. Yeah, I can’t imagine why this guy’s not getting laid without standing on the shoulders of Tom Leykis. But Forney’s such a tool that even high school newspapers are taking him down a notch.

So Forney’s got “Nicholas Jack” guy’s back, but who the fuck is Nicholas Jack (aka 20Nation)? And what kind of pathetic sack of shit puts a keylogger on their computer to spy on the women willing to mercyfuck him?

It seems Nicholas Jack is a pseudonym for a notorious PUA and internet scammer named Rob Wiser. You can make up your own mind, but a user named The Great Milenko on a forum called PUAHate (which is a whole other world of misogyny) recently wrote an exhaustive biography of Rob Wiser’s  other online persona GManifesto, and makes a convincing case for him being behind 20Nation. And this is Rob Wiser:

I dare you to caption this photo without reference to this man’s dick.

As Milenko explains:

“GManifesto” is nothing but a marketing vehicle for Rob Wiser’s paid products, which makes Rob Wiser (aka “GManifesto”) a coy lowlife spammer. Everything that “GManifesto” has ever wrote in the past seven years (including dozen other monikers he used) was designed to build his brands, to build another platform from where he would be able to seamlessly link to his numerous cross-promotional products and, more disgustingly, to also extract intelligence for his products on the sly.

That “intelligence” is what Wiser/20Nation used to compile his “Easiness of Girls By Country” map. Milenko goes into great detail outlining exactly where Wiser comes from and the way he has built his internet marketing “empire” into a scam that pays his airfare from Sex Tourism Capital to Sex Tourism Capital.

In all likelihood, Rob Wiser is the loathsome piece of scum is the source of the “Why I hate fat girls” article and dozens of online identities all shilling the same PUA bullshit, while trotting the globe paying to have sex with women who are more-likely-than-not in sexual bondage. And it’s the Rob Wisers of the world who pour fuel on the fire of contempt toward fat women raging on the internet today. And it explains a lot about the double standard in stigma that we’re all acutely aware of.

PUA Fodder

We talk a lot on this blog about how the media impacts girls, particularly with regard to body image and self-worth. We all know the statistics about young girls hating their bodies long before they even reach junior high. We’ve all read about the role that magazines, TV, music and movies have played in that tragedy. But we don’t often talk about the effect that the media has on boys. And its an effect that can be summed up in a phrase extracted from that PUA Forum description I shared earlier: “He then can show off to his friends the women that he is able to date.”

Masculinity is often judged between men by the women they date. I grew up acutely aware of this fact and as a teenager felt compelled to “compete” for the attention of women who I thought would reflect well on me by other men. It’s this exact same pressure that drives Nice Guy Syndrome. In a culture where men are judged by the women they date, there is naturally going to be a pressure to “get” a Hot Girl, as defined by cultural ideals. But these Nice Guys run into the reality that women won’t fuck them, even if they believe themselves to be “high quality” guys.

Rather than face the fact that women may reject them for the exact same reasons that they reject certain women (i.e., they just aren’t attracted to them, whether for superficial reasons or not), they create this elaborate fantasy whereby women are the prey and they are the predators, capable of hunting their quarry with the right skills.

I was certainly no stranger to this mindset. I was complaining about girls putting me in the “Friendzone” long before it had a name.

Me in the Friendzone circa 1998 with Angie, the girl who would become one of my best friends.

As a teen, I was the Nice Guy who desperately wanted a girlfriend and would do just about anything to woo a girl. And raised on a steady diet of ’80s romantic comedies, I became convinced that the way to a girl’s heart was through the Grand Romantic Gesture — some public display of infatuation that would catch a girl’s attention and make her realize that I was such a Nice Guy that she’d be better of with me than the Bad Boys with whom I felt a sense of perpetual competition.

For four years straight, I used Valentine’s Day to launch one Grand Romantic Gesture after another aimed at winning the heart that year’s Hot Girl. For four years straight, I would reveal myself as the Secret Admirer behind the flowers or mix tape or anonymous phone call playing “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” only to experience the inevitable rejection that followed. Of course, what I didn’t realize is that, objectively speaking, my attempts at seduction were really fucking creepy.

Thankfully there was no PUA Movement when I was a teen, so all I had to fall back on were those ’80s movies. There were so many that left an indelible mark on my imagination: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, Say Anything…, Breakfast Club, Can’t Buy Me Love. But the one that illustrates Nice Guy Syndrome was Pretty in Pink, my generation’s Romeo and Juliet, minus the tragic double suicide.

Seriously, just fuck off already, Duckie.

I had such a crush on Molly Ringwald, who played Andie, the ginger, avant-garde fashionista being pursued by not one, not two, but three guys. First, was her quirky best friend Duckie (John Cryer), who was pretty much the prototype for the Friendzoned Nice Guy. Then came Steff (James Spader), the handsome. wealthy Bad Boy who admits up front that he’s had the hots for Andie throughout high school, despite her turning down his advances. When they remake Pretty In Pink, Steff will be a PUA. And then, somewhere in the middle, was Blane (Andrew McCarthy), the rich kid with the heart of gold who woos Andie throughout the film.

The problem is that Blane and Molly run in two different economic classes. While they get together early on, Blane eventually chickens out when Steff gives him shit for dating poor Andie. All the while, Duckie relentlessly, unabashedly, obnoxiously woos Andie, which she repeatedly and patiently shoots down.

On the other hand, Blane actually succeeds in getting Andie to go out with him by stalking her at her record store job and using the pretense of buying a record to strike up a conversation. At one point while Blane is “shopping,” he keeps glancing up at Andie until he finally catches her eye and they share a smile. In my mind, this was the key. Eye contact was how I would get to the point where I could ask my potential crush out.

Convinced that I was more Blane than Duckie, I would often hang around where my crush might be, attempting eye contact that might spark our first unspoken interaction and lead to so much more. I saw it all as part of the elaborate stagecraft necessary to attract girls. And, of course, the girl just saw it as that creepy guy who keeps staring at her from across the room. Needless to say, I remained the obnoxious, oblivious Duckie throughout high school.

It wasn’t until I started reading about Nice Guys and Friendzones as an adult that I began to realize just how shitty my behavior was and, quite possibly, how much it contributed to my abysmal dating life. And while part of it was the kind of entitlement that makes Nice Guys so toxic, another part was rooted in my belief that I could get girls to like me if I just did the right things.

In other words, I had learned from my culture getting a girl to like me was my job, my responsibility and, therefore, if girls didn’t like me, I was failing somehow. Either I was too ugly or too unfunny or wore the wrong things or said the wrong things or did the wrong things, and that if I just had the right approach then I would improve my chances of getting the Hot Girl to notice me. Society reinforces that message by telling men that they are the ones responsible for attracting women, for asking them out, for seducing them, and for convincing women that they are worth dating. So if you can’t find love, then there’s something wrong with you.

It wasn’t until I actually heard the girl’s perspective on Nice Guys that I realized what the real problem was: sometimes girls just aren’t attracted to you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Period.

I know it sounds pretty obvious now, but it sure as hell wasn’t at the time, or else it was too painful to admit.

Admitting that not every girl was attracted to me meant admitting that I was less of a man than those who could. I also didn’t appreciate just how much of my self-worth was intimately tied up in whether a hot girl found me hot as well. Being rejected by a crush became a major source of anxiety for me. It wasn’t until I discovered the brand new world of online dating back in 1996-1997 that I could talk to girls without the soul-crushing fear of rejection.

It’s from this perspective that I understand how PUA gurus find their acolytes. In the Rob Wiser exposé, Milenko paints a picture of a pathetic slacker who has found a way to convince insecure men that he can salvage their masculinity by teaching them his secrets… for a fee.

My hope is that that when you think of Rob Wiser, 20Nation and all the other pathetic PUA gurus out there peddling fat hatred for clicks, you will think of this:

This is one of the sources of so much masculine angst.

This is one of the sources of the Dudebro Evopsych Manifesto.

This is one of the sources of the entitlement and the contempt and the demands that fat women get thin or else destroy humanity one deflated boner at a time.

And the better we understand where it comes from, the better equipped we are to combat its toxic influence.

Trigger warning: Discussion of calorie counting, healthy behaviors, weight loss and eating disorders.

I’m halfway through the second 100 days of my Eating the Food experiment that started in December, back when I felt half dead.

The experiment itself is pretty simple: For 100 days at a time, I’m eating above my Basal Metabolic Rate and exercising at least 10 minutes a day. This has settled into eating between 2,500 and 3,000 calories a day and swimming or lifting weights 30 to 60 minutes five or six days a week. On top of that, because I have more energy, I’m just more active in general than I was in December.

I didn’t know what to expect back in December. I only knew I had to do something. What I got was an incredible increase in energy, a drastic decrease in pain, the end of edema that had plagued me for years, and I don’t have insomnia anymore. And I’ve lost about a pound a week. That last one? That’s the one that I’ve been indoctrinated to care about. That’s the one that as a society we really, really focus on. It’s the least of the benefits though, for me. I still weigh about 340 pounds. I still wear a size 26 dress. Am I sad I lost 20 pounds? Nah. But it is so clear to me that the other benefits are way, way out of proportion to that small weight loss.

So, I’ve learned a few things in the past five months, and I’d like to share them with you. Some of them might make some of you do what my third grader does when I say something obvious.

Others might come as much of a surprise to you as they did to me.

1. I’ve been squeezing myself into clothes that were too small, for a very long time. It’s shocking to me that I’ve lost nearly six inches from my waist, and have not lost a clothing size. Instead, the clothes I’ve been wearing forever fit me so much better. I wasn’t conscious of refusing to go up a size, but it’s clear to me now that that is exactly what’s been going on.
2. Tracking calories helped me stop obsessing about food. You’d think that taking the time to put everything I eat into My Fitness Pal everyday would make me spend more time thinking about food. I know that I went into this expecting that I might have my eating disorder triggered. Turns out, though, that I think about food way, way less now than I did in December. Part of the reason why is that tracking has helped me move toward intuitive eating in a way that I’d never been able to before. Part of the reason is because I’m not binging or worrying about binging or feeling guilty after a binge, and I’m not feeling hungry while trying to convince myself not to eat. All of those things take up a lot of mental real estate. Or they did. Not anymore.
3. “Healthy weight” doesn’t mean what I thought it did. Here’s what I’ve learned: eating mindfully, eating intuitively, not binging, and not eating past the point of being full, plus a reasonable amount of enjoyable exercise, have allowed my body to do something that it was designed to do: regulate my weight. I was not at a healthy weight in December. I wasn’t exercising — hell, I was barely getting out of bed. I was not eating intuitively. I was binging some days  and eating only half of my Total Daily Energy Expenditure (the number of calories my body needs to maintain my weight) on other days. Since starting to really follow Health at Every Size^® (HAES) (instead of just thinking it would be a really good idea), I’ve consistently lost about a pound a week. For the first time in my life, I don’t have a goal weight (or an ULTIMATE goal weight) in mind. I trust that as long as I keep eating and exercising in reasonable amounts, my body will get to a healthy weight, whatever that might be.
4. You can be metabolically healthy and still feel pretty damn sick. I might have had a healthy blood sugar, and blood pressure that was close enough to normal to not be alarming (just moving into pre-hypertension, though, which was scary for me), but there is no mistaking the fact that in December I was not well. Health is a holistic thing. It’s not binary. It’s not a destination. And I’m not sure it’s something that can be measured with a few metabolic tests. It is possible to have a measure of health, and still feel like hell.
5. If you start where you are, you can do things that seemed impossible. In January, I sat down and wrote out swimming workouts that would bring me from 150 meters to 3,000 meters. When I got about halfway done, the sets seemed so impossible that I started to question my sanity. I’m at that halfway mark now. I can swim 10 times farther today than I could in January. In March, I could barely do a body weight squat. Today, I’m squatting 85 pounds, and more every time I lift. I’m stronger than I thought I could possibly be in this short time.
6. People lose their shit when you do what they think you should, but not in the way they think you should do it. By people, I mean Random Internet Strangers. Not even all Random Internet Strangers, because some of them are incredible. Just the ones who don’t understand HAES and are confused by someone who doesn’t fit into their mold. Some of them are waiting for you guys to get mad at me for losing weight. Some of them are bent out of shape because I won’t call HAES a diet or weight loss plan. But you know what? It’s okay. I’m not doing this for them.
7. Daily blogging has been an incredible experience. Whenever I’ve had a day where old, tired self-hate-y thoughts creep in, I’ve been able to work those thoughts out through my blog. It’s helped me to remember where I started and how much HAES has improved my health. It’s helped me to remember that this isn’t about weight, which has helped me to continue to get stronger and to recover. It’s also connected me with a bunch of you in a way that I couldn’t have otherwise.
8. I’ve done a lot of damage to my body. I’m not fat by accident. I’m not fat because I’m genetically predisposed to weighing more than 300 pounds. I’m not fat because of some condition or medical factor. I’m fat because I have a long history of eating my emotions. I’m fat because I had a traumatic childhood that ended with a full-blown eating disorder that I’m only just now fully recovering from. I’m fat because I gave up on being an athlete when I was a teenager and became sedentary. I’m fat because during each of my pregnancies I lost 40 pounds and, during the first three months after my babies were born, gained twice that much. Three times. I’m fat because I do have the genetic predisposition to be a larger person, and on top of those three pregnancies, I fed that predisposition a LOT. And I’ve hurt myself. That self-harm culminated in December with me weighing 360 pounds, so lacking in energy that I could barely move, hurting so much that my husband had to help me put my pants on, and stressed to the breaking point. I can’t take off my fat suit and leave it at home, but I can unwind that damage day by day by practicing healthy behaviors. — especially by eating mindfully and exercising. HAES is literally saving my life.
9. It is possible to love yourself and your body, and still want to change. My wanting to change wasn’t so much about the size of my body as the state of it. I loved myself enough to know that I didn’t want to continue down a path that I truly believe would have ended with me losing mobility. Loving yourself, accepting yourself, doesn’t have to mean that you never want to change anything. It can be that acceptance and love that is the catalyst for the adoption of healthy behaviors that bring about real, positive change.
10. I love you. I mean that with all my heart. You guys have been here for me through this weird, little experiment, through the healing process. You’ve let me be open and honest about what I’m doing and how I’m feeling and how it’s affecting me, without judgment. Fierce Fatties is my home, and I’m so glad I get to share it with all of you.

Trigger warning: Discussion of eating disorders, dietary choices, and weight loss.

Check out Tessa Shackleford’s Etsy page for more amazing, surreal artwork like the awesome illustration she did for this post.

Two weeks ago, my friend Leah Segedie, founder of Mamavation, confronted Don Thompson, CEO of McDonald’s, at a recent Shareholder’s Meeting about its aggressive advertising tactics aimed at children. I first met Leah during the Strong4Life debacle two years ago, and although I don’t agree with her emphasis on weight loss, I’ve always been impressed with the ferocity of her activism despite her gentle demeanor. Kind of like how the adorable Tasmanian devil has the strongest bite per unit of body mass.

Don’t fuck with Leah.

So when I saw her mention on Facebook that she was meeting with Thompson, I immediately thought “Uh oh, McDonald’s is in for it now.”

Leah shared with Thompson and the shareholders that as a child she developed binge eating disorder and that she equated Happy Meals with (surprise, surprise) being happy. In response, Thompson laughed and said, “Happy Meals can’t give you an eating disorder my dear.”

Now, I’m not an expert on eating disorders, but from what I’ve read about them, I’m not so sure that Happy Meals actually cause eating disorders, but they certainly are capable of filling a void when an eating disorder develops. Compulsive overeating can be an emotional coping mechanism and “palatable food consumption” can trigger dopamine receptors, giving us an instant hit of happy naturally. Couple that with the not-so-subtle inducements of free toys, a meal made entirely of Happy and a jovial clown, and you’ve got everything you need to appeal to a child already struggling with emotional issues or an eating disorder.

Personally, I think advertising aimed at children is fucked up, regardless of who’s doing it, and nowhere is that more ruthless or relentless than McDonald’s. But as I read Leah’s account of delivering her message to the CEO of McDonald’s, I couldn’t help but feel despondent about the fight she’s waging.

Let’s say Leah’s successful and Don Thompson calls on McDonald’s to end advertising toward children. As Leah explained to me, she’s going after the market leader to create ripple effects. But when it comes to the broader fuckery of the American food system, McDonald’s is just one head on a very fucked up Hydra.

Copyright belongs to the amazing Tessa Shackleford of DumbKat Press.

I’m not a big believer that fast food or even fast food advertising is a leading contributor to the increase in obesity rates, let alone the health effects that are typically associated with fatties. Reliance on fast food and processed food is a response to socioeconomic constraints that nudge people toward shortcuts in meal preparation. I’ve written about the social determinants of health before, which are various factors that influence what we typically think of as health “choices.”

As Jen wrote as far back as 2010 when San Francisco banned Happy Meals, McDonald’s is not the problem, it’s a symptom.

Although the wealthy and powerful have always had access to dietary shortcuts, the rabble only achieved access to dietary shortcuts after World War II, when processed food were celebrated as an aid to housewives back when a single income could support an entire family. These advances in food technology were followed by the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and Nixon’s agricultural subsidies of 1973, both of which suddenly created a whole new era of democratized access to regular, palatable foods, both whole and processed.

At the same time that the Food Industry began doing what all capitalist ventures do (i.e., profit by any means necessary), the economic realities facing families shifted drastically from the 1950s single-income household. As outlined in disturbing detail by Elizabeth Warren’s Two-Income Trap (a book I cannot recommend enough), just as women were finally untying the apron strings and joining the workforce, competition among middle class families for homes in desirable neighborhoods (typically defined by high-quality school districts) led to the burgeoning credit crisis that ultimately led to the Great Recession. But this period was also defined by a new reality that even two-income households were struggling to get by. Throw in an increase in single-parent households and suddenly time and money become precious commodities.

Enter the modern food system: efficient, cheap, highly palatable and ready to answer the day-to-day struggles of a middle class stretched to the limits.

That food system has enormous systemic problems, as I outlined in my post on a massive egg recall happened back in 2010. This food system has become the dietary gatekeeper for most American families, and has even taken over many of the conferences hosted by professional nutritionists and dietitians. For example, McDonald’s catered the California Dietetic Association’s last conference, leading to blistering criticism from members. And the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has long been criticized for teaming with Coca-Cola, Hershey and Kraft. But again, this twisted synergy is the logical result of the socioeconomic reality in our country. Thirty years of federal austerity has slashed investment in science, so the natural response is for the food industry to fill that fiduciary gap and simultaneously buy legitimacy through dietary organization sponsorships.

But addressing the underlying causes of our corrupted food system is an even more daunting challenge than convincing McDonald’s not to advertise to children. If I were benevolent dictator, I would make one decrees that, I believe, would lead to long-term improvements to the social determinants of health which influence those “healthy choices” we want people to make. I would address the wage stagnation problem that has plagued American workers for decades. I strongly believe that America’s startling levels of income inequality contribute to the social determinants of health more than any other issue.

Of course, the reality is that Washington DC has entrenched interests guarding the wealth of 1% like their lives depend on it. As a result, we’re struggling just to push through the modest minimum wage hike that an overwhelming number of economists and Americans support.

We need American families to have more flexibility, both in terms of time and money, which will drastically improve their dietary choice. I don’t believe for one minute that most families prefer eating McDonald’s or heat-and-eat frozen meals over home-cooked, freshly-prepared meals. They’re simply stretched to the limit and are doing the best they can with the resources available to them.

But America is a bootstrappin’ society, believing that every decision is a matter of personal freedom and moral fortitude.

For example, I recently heard a fascinating interview on NPR’s Here & Now with Michael Pollan, the clean food guru who urges everyone to ditch processed foods. He makes some great points about obsessing over food, going so far as to warn of the dangers of orthorexia nervosa and nutritionism, which is ironic given his demonization of processed foods. But toward the end, host Robin Young points out that rather than the food industry addressing the problems Pollan advocates against, we are creating a two-tiered food system: one for the wealthy and one for the working class. Pollan’s response is quite revealing:

Yeah, and there is a danger that we will move toward, and to some extent we have moved toward, a system where some people can afford good food, and some people can’t. But I think it’s important not to confuse organic and local food with healthy food. You can eat really healthy, leaving meat aside, with just simply eating the real stuff… We also know that poor people who cook actually have healthier diets than rich people who don’t. And cooking is available to everyone. Yes, we have enormous amount of time pressure, but you don’t have to be rich to cook. All you need is a pan and some olive oil.

Now, there’s three things that bothers me about Pollan’s response: first, the wealthy aren’t just eating organic fruits and vegetables. They are able to access organic and whole processed foods as well. They can afford to eat and shop at higher end establishments like Whole Foods and Panera Bread (St. Louis Bread Company for true believers), which has recently announced it’s getting rid of artificial additives. And although Panera still has unhealthy choices, it’s far easier to find a palatable, healthy option there than at McDonald’s.

Second, and most importantly, Pollan’s dismissal of time constraints. This is the argument I hear most often: people just need to prioritize cooking. We’re also supposed to prioritize exercise. Oh, and sleep — let’s not forget the importance of getting a full night’s rest. Working families don’t get much out of this advice except, “You’re doing it wrong!” Yes, to cook you just need a pan and some olive oil, but you can’t just ignore time constraints with a swish of your wand. Time constraints are real, and even during the halcyon days of the 1950s, stay-at-home moms relied on processed foods to reduce the time constraints of dedicated domestic management.

In fact, during a previous NPR interview, Pollan acknowledged the difficulty of achieving his goals, saying, “You’re going to have to spend either more time or more money, and perhaps a little bit of both. And I think that’s just the reality. It’s really a question of priorities, and we have, in effect, devalued food. And what I’m arguing is to move it a little closer to the center of our lives, and that we are going to have to put more into it, but that it will be very rewarding if we do.” That sounds delightful, but shifting priorities is not always as easy as readjusting an Excel spreadsheet.

Finally, Pollan makes the case that you don’t have to eat organic fruits and vegetables to be healthy, which I’m glad he mentions. But in my conversation with Leah, she asked if I’d heard of atrazine, a pesticide sprayed on fruits and vegetables. Atrazine is one of a number of known endocrine disruptors (aka obesogens) that have been linked to increased weight and metabolic diseases. As explained by an atrazine advocacy group (as in, a group supporting the use of atrazine), this chemical is sprayed on a great number of our fruits and vegetables, including almonds, apples, avocados, blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries, cherries, conifers, corn, cranberries, filberts, grain sorghum, grapefruit, grapes, guava, lemons, loganberries, macadamia nuts, nectarines, olives, oranges, peaches, pears, pecans, plums, popcorn, raspberries, strawberries, sugarcane, sweetcorn, and walnuts.

So even if you follow Pollan’s advice and eat non-organic fruits and vegetables, you may stay fat because of the endocrine disruptors that farms now rely on to mass produce whole foods.

And yet we continue to make fatness about choice and priorities, rather than these enormous socioeconomic factors that influence what we eat.

And ALL of this bullshit is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got the media, research institutions and the government encouraging this simplistic narrative of gluttonous fatties on one side, then turning around and promoting that exact same fucked up food system on the other. For example, I’ve written extensively about Huffington Post‘s coverage of fatness, including this nauseating juxtaposition:

Oh no, the cheeseburgers making us fat! But don’t worry because you’ll look stunning in this new swimwear line!

Or there’s this startling announcement that dominate HuffPo’s front page:

Yes, it’s so fucking grim that a third of the world is fat. Clearly HuffPo is taking a stand and will do everything in its power to encourage people to not be so fucking fat because —

What?!? Okay, so, HuffPo freaks out about global obesity rates on May 28 and then grins on June 5 to announce that “we’ve all been waiting for” the Taco Bell Quesarito (and by “we” they mean stoners). So, being fat is horrible, terrible and fear-inducing, but Taco Bell’s latest five-ingredient masterpiece is awesomesauce?

Or how about this one: the Canadian Medical Association Journal has published multiple articles on endocrine disruptors and the Sisyphean task of maintaining long-term weight loss. So it makes perfect sense that on its blog, it would publish an “article” by a primary care physician that opens with “Fat people eat more ice cream. That’s not an evidence based, statistically validated or methodologically robust observation. It just looks that way to me.”  He goes on:

Now back to the anecdotal evidence. Just when I fancy an ice cream, and far away from international obesity data, it’s almost certain that I will meet some obese teen ambling along, slurping a giant ice cream cone. It puts me off. It is not politically correct, however, to imply that obesity is someone’s fault… Muffin tops are the norm. Jeans bursting at the button. Great wobbly bellies, man boobs, and enormous reinforced bras. Clinicians see the fat mountain daily. We already know about inflated clothes sizes and airplanes with larger seats. But, as a population, we seem blind to the need to re-calibrate portion size and challenge the nature of fast food.

Finally, we all know how First Lady Michelle Obama has used Let’s Move to reduce childhood obesity rates, going so far as to sidle up to The Biggest Loser not once, but twice to promote her health message. Meanwhile in 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture gives Domino’s Pizza $12 million to revamp its menu with more cheese.

All these efforts, all these messages provide a constant source of tension and conflict between promoting a broken, but highly-profitable food system and blaming fat people for being such undisciplined, self-loathing slobs who should just prioritize cooking those vegetables that are still fucking with their hormones.

So while I support Leah’s efforts to put a stop to advertising aimed at children, I’m far more pessimistic as to how much an advertising moratorium really will influence the health of children, let alone their weight.

The food industry hydra is enormous, adaptive and nearly impossible to kill. But I still admire anyone who takes sword in hand and is willing to take on such a Herculean task.