The Lure of Skinny: Part 2

Skinny is such a powerful thing in our society.  If you're skinny, you have power, social power; the power to attract the opposite sex, the power to get many more jobs and have more opportunities, the power to make friends and to be seen as trustworthy, the power to tell (fat) people what they need to do to become skinny as well.  For reasons that are very hard to understand, our society today puts skinny on a pedestal and makes it the highest level of moral rightness you can ever achieve.  You're seen as trustworthy, well disciplined, highly motivated, energetic, and healthy, just by the way you look. 

On the flip side, fat people are seen as lazy, lairs, gluttonous, self-centered,  having no self control, and on the verge of death every time they put anything in their mouths that isn't a leaf of lettuce.  We're told that we should be ashamed for the way we look, because obviously we just need to eat less and exercise more and we can be just like the skinny people.  And the sad thing about it is, fat people absolutely believe that 100%.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many overweight and obese people are desperate to lose weight?  The message to lose weight has become so frantic, so terrifying, it's as if it's a highly contagious disease, and if we don't take action right now, all will be lost!  Many fat people are lead to believe that they're just months away from diabetes and heart disease, even if they're physically very healthy.  And so they take on the task of losing the weight, for themselves, for their families, for society as a whole (because everyone knows that obesity is a drain on the medical system).

 This desperation is what feeds the $60 billion dollar diet industry.  If being skinny is so good morally, socially, and physically, it's worth spending money on, right?  Well, according to recent studies, no, not really.  Only 5% of dieters keep the weight off for 5 years, and the ones that do keep it off make it their life's mission.  Several of the people who told their diet stories in the book Body of Truth said that maintaining the weight loss was a full time job, and they had to stay at it constantly.  But that's the great thing about the diet industry; they know that their business model works really well.  The dieters lose weight initially, they keep it off for 6 months to a year, then start gaining it back.  They can then say, "Hey, the diet isn't at fault; you just didn't stick to it!".  And because people are so desperate to lose weight, they believe it and come back for more punishment.

I don't know how well the low carb and paleo diets work long term.  I do know of several people who have kept the weight off with low carb for many years, but I know of even more people who have gone up and down with it.  As for the paleo diet, I don't know if what we call "paleo" today (as opposed to Lorren Cordain's paleo, which I understand is low fat and anti-saturated fat) has been around long enough to see if many people can keep the weight off long term.  As I said last time, this doesn't mean I don't think these diets are great; I think they're wonderful ways to get back to health, for sure.  What I really don't know is if they're any better at keeping the weight off compared to any other diet out there.  If anyone has any info on this, I'd love to see it.

The most damaging aspect of this whole get-skinny-to-be-healthy mindset is that it skews a person's idea of what healthy really is.  You begin to think that anything that makes you skinny is healthy, even if those methods are clearly dangerous.  Or at the very least, you use that as justification.  Truth be told, I'm fairly certain that health is only an added bonus to weight loss for most people.  Even if they don't say it out loud, I'm pretty sure that the number one reason people attempt weight loss is to look good, and to be socially acceptable.  It's so easy, when you're thinking about or doing something dangerous to lose weight, to give yourself and others the justification that, hey, you were unhealthy as a fat person, so this can't be bad for me!

A case in point of this disturbing mental gymnastics is the Kimkins disaster.  I know I've talked about it briefly before in my blog, but I never went into much detail about it.  Back then, I was fascinated by the drama of what happened, and how Heidi (Kimmer) could put herself into a situation like that.  I found myself reading the whole drama again recently, though this time, I see something a lot more disturbing.  I paid special attention to the blogs of people who went on the diet and were deep into it, but because of the fraud, they left the site and started talking about their experiences.  I see people who were so desperate to lose weight and be beautiful, that they rationalized a 300-600 calorie low carb/low fat diet as a way to get healthy.  They believed, despite being intelligent well educated people, that this was enough food to fuel them for the whole day:

594 calories

And if that wasn't doing it for them and they found themselves in a weight stall, they could try this for their daily intake instead:

376 calories

 (Both pictures are from Mariasol's anti-Kimkins blog.  I highly suggest reading through their blog and those they link to if you're interested in this fascinating side of low carb history.)

The most disturbing part about this epic tale of self-deception and desperation is the long term effects.  Many people (mostly women) who stayed on this diet for months started to have side effects; losing hair, brittle nails, feeling nauseated, dizziness, blacking out, heart flutters, and in some cases, serious heart problems.  And yet, despite all of these issues, they were brushed aside as if they weren't a problem, not just by the owner of the site and her admins, but also by the members.  They were told, and believed, that there was no such thing as starvation mode, that the side effects were normal, and that whatever they were experiencing was temporary and worth it to be skinny and healthy. 

But there is such a thing as starvation mode.  It's called YOU'RE STARVING!  Anyone with a functioning brain should know that eating very tiny amounts of food is what starvation is.  By definition, it's to "die or suffer from lack of food."  SNATT is a term that was used frequently on the Kimkins website; it stood for Semi-Nauceous-All-The-Time, and it was a state you wanted to be in.  If that's not suffering from lack of food, I don't know what is. 

The other side effects aren't normal, by the way; they're signs that your body is suffering.  You lose hair  because your body is in shock.  Your nails become brittle because you're not providing your body with the proper amount of nutrients and good fats and protein.  You get dizzy and black out for several reasons, including low electrolytes, hypoglycemia, and low blood pressure, all of these things linked to the starvation diet.  As for heart problems, well... when you're on a very low calorie diet, your body starts to eat away at your muscle tissue just to keep you alive, and of course your heart is a muscle.  It's not a secret that many anorectics die from heart problems.

That's the lure of skinny.  Intelligent, healthy people, who perhaps have more padding than society deems proper, put their lives at stake just to fit into the crowd.  The really sad part is that it's usually all for naught.  Scientists have not only shown that 95% of dieters regain the weight, but that yo-yo dieting is very bad for your health and leads most people to an even higher weight than when they started.  I don't exactly trust scientists, not after reading many of the scathing reviews of studies done by the low carb/paleo community, but there's a cultural component to this idea of yo-yo dieting.  The fact that so many people have lived through the up and downs of weight cycling and ended up heavier than before should tell us that there's at least some truth to it. 

So why do we, as a society, continue to promote dieting to people who are otherwise healthy?  I think the idea of weight=health is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it's impossible to believe a fat person is perfectly fine.  It doesn't help that "health experts" are out there vehemently rejecting the idea of healthy obesity, screaming that this plainly wrong idea is costing us all money and making people sick and dead, despite the mounting science that shows that obesity isn't really that big of a health risk (or one at all, in the case of overweight).

I wonder sometimes if this will ever change.  Will doctors ever promote a good diet and exercise as ways to get healthy rather than skinny (and then be satisfied if the patient gets healthy but doesn't lose weight)?  Will women's magazines have cover stories about how to get healthy in 30 days with a beautiful round woman showing off her incredible biceps (as opposed to a tiny skeletal woman standing in one leg of her former pants)?  Will we ever be told by our government the truth that dieting is actually very bad for us, and encouraged to eat wholesome, natural, real food for whole body health? 

I suppose only time will tell.

The Weight Thing

In case you didn't already know, I used to be fat.  Like, really fat.  Like, I was literally morbidly obese.  At 5'7, 275 pounds, my BMI was 43, which classed me as morbidly obese.  The worst part was that I was a sweet and naive 17 year old and I didn't understand how sick I was.

I did managed to lose weight, though.  Slowly, in steps, it came off.  Some came off when I fell in love with Chad and started treating myself better.  Then we started going out and being active together, and more came off.  I moved in with him and took over cooking almost all the meals, and more came off. 

In 2010, I went on a low calorie diet, started running three days a week and lifting weights once or twice, and within five months, I had lost another 30-35 pounds.  By then, I was down to 185.  I wanted so badly to lose another 10 pounds so I could shout from the roof tops that, HEY WORLD, I'VE LOST 100 POUNDS!

But low calorie dieting is terrible.  I'm sure anyone who has tried it can understand what I'm talking about.  I was eating about 1500-1700 calories a day, and later once I'd lost 30 pounds, I shifted to 1300-1400 calories a day to try to lose more weight.  My goal was 160 pounds, which would just get me into the "normal" BMI range.

I was hungry all the time.  Like, hungry to my core.  I couldn't eat enough to satisfy the hunger I was feeling unless I ate over my calorie range.  I didn't shun fat, but I also knew that fat was 9 calories whereas carbs and protein were 4, so I tried to avoid it so I would be able to eat more food, because I was so hungry.  And being a vegetarian, it was remarkably hard to get enough protein.  On days where I was trying really hard, I'd eat about 60g of protein, but it was mostly from soy, low fat dairy, and wheat gluten.  

The worst part was the food obsession.  I would think about food every moment of the day.  I would carefully weigh each and every item.  I had to specially formulate recipes and carefully divide the results to make sure I was getting the right amount of calories.  I spent hours a day typing in the foods I'd eaten in Sparkpeople.com's food diary.  And at the end of the day, I would go and check how many calories I had left and try to get as much extra food as I could.  Food was my life.  I dreamed about it.  Meals were the centers of my day. 

That's why I loved the idea of low carb dieting so much, when I finally opened myself up to the science behind it.  I wanted to just eat what I wanted of low carb food, stay away from the higher carb items, and watch myself effortlessly get skinny.  I did lose some weight.  I was 195 pounds when I started, and managed to lose 10 pounds in a month, bringing me back to 185.  But I haven't really lost anything since then.

I know this system works, because I've seen what it's doing for Chad.  He was lean before we started, but he managed to lose about 20 pounds while also putting on muscle.  So I know it's not that this low carb idea is wrong.

Some days I struggle mentally with this.  Sometimes all I want to do is lose 20 more pounds and I think I'm willing to do anything I can to get there.  But then I remember actually being 175 at one point while low calorie dieting.  I had to starve myself to an incredibly uncomfortable level to get there, and then my will power just broke and I couldn't stop myself from putting those 10 pounds back on.  Maybe my body is trying to tell me that this is the weight I'm supposed to be at.  Losing 90 pounds in very respectable.  And I can't expect my body to work the same after being at 275, either.  I don't think it's actually capable of being very lean after that.

But that doesn't stop me from wanting to be skinny.  I know I've written in the past about how sick it is for us to want to be skinny, that we should be striving for health instead, but I can't help it.  I still want it.  I want to be one of those beautiful models who looks great in a bikini.

To what lengths am I willing to go to lose weight?  I've thought about trying nutritional ketosis, like Jimmy Moore.  I've thought about a low calorie low carb diet.  I've thought about cutting out dairy and eggs to see if that helps.

But I worry.  This doesn't seem safe.  Pushing my body to extreme lengths to lose weight that probably isn't causing me any problems.  I worry about nutritional ketosis.  There are people in the paleo crowd that claim that women need more natural carbs (from  fruit and veggies) for their fertility.  I worry about low calorie low carb diets, because Chad and I are trying to conceive.  What if I got pregnant and I didn't know it?  A low calorie diet doesn't just starve me; it starves the baby, too, and the first couple of weeks are when the nervous system are developing.  As for cutting out dairy and eggs?  What the heck would I eat if I couldn't eat dairy and cheese?

Some days I want so badly to be skinny.  So, so badly.  But most days I long for something simpler.  To be healthy.  That's the real goal here.  To feed my body.  To build up muscle I lost as a vegetarian.  To correct the harm I did on a low calorie diet.  To be whole.  To never be hungry to my core. 

I wonder if there's some in between road, where I can respect my body and  feed it what it needs, but at the same time start shedding the leftover bulge.  I just don't know.  I really don't know if it's a fight worth fighting.

Man, I just can't concentrate tonight.  I have a large art commission to get finished, but I can only work on it for about five minutes at a time before my mind starts wandering and I find myself on google looking up things like "Marilyn Monroe's BMI" (about 20, by the way).  I couldn't even focus long enough to finish that sentence before going back to google, lol.

What's mostly on my mind tonight is an ad I saw today while flipping through RedBook.  I don't read many magazines anymore because I'm trying to divorce myself from the "everyone knows" type articles and the you-have-to-be-perfect-and-beautiful-all-the-time mentality that makes up practically every part of almost all the magazines I used to read.  I had to start throwing away my Shape magazines as soon as I got them because they were making me depressed (just eat less and  move more and you'll look like this supermodel!!!!!!!).  And don't even get me started on Cosmo.

The ad I saw in Redbook was for Slim-Fast.  Yes, Slim-Fast is annoying in general.  "Just drink our carbalicious drinks and then starve yourself and you'll lose weight!"  Don't you just want to kick them where it counts sometimes?  Yes, we all do.  But this ad is different.  And apparently, it's just part of a huge ad campaign.  The tv commercials, I hear, are really bad (NC-17, seriously).  But I'll stop rambling and just show you what caught my attention.  Click on it to read the small stuff.

Yeah, ok.  Who amongst us hasn't tried to lose weight because we kind of hated the way we looked when we were fat?  I know I have.  When I went on a low calorie diet, it was to look better because I hated the way my body looked.

The reason this ad bothers me so much is because it adds fuel to the self-loathing fire that most women (and men) live with.  No, it doesn't say, "Hey gals, you should hate your body so that you'll want to buy our product," but it does try to make you think that by losing a couple of pounds, maybe you'll get everything you want in life.  A sexy bikini body that will attract that hot guy you like who will love you so you don't have to love yourself.  It was almost scary to read what Ashley from Massachusetts said her real reason was...  To be the skinniest mom in her group.  Not just one of the skinniest, or the healthiest, or the strongest or even the prettiest, but the skinniest.  There's something wrong with this picture.

I don't think it's healthy for women to focus on skinny.  That's not what really matters, at the end of the day, because we're not all designed to be skinny like that.  Some of us are designed to be chunky, curvy, strong or big boned.  And there's nothing wrong with that.

My grandma lived to just shy of 103.  She wasn't a skinny woman.  She wasn't fat by any means, but she was big boned, thick, muscular, well built, even into her 100s.  She worked hard all her life raising 12 children, about half of that time working on a large farm and the other half working as a school lunch lady (back in the day when they made every meal from scratch).  She didn't get skinny until shortly before she died. 

I wish the media wouldn't focus so hard on weight.  It seems like practically everything said about a star is about their weight.  Look at how great she looks in a bikini (and here's how you can looks that great too!!).  OMG this celeb is skin and bones!!!  WOW this celeb is a beautiful plus size lady!  And that celeb lost all her baby weight in TWO DAYS!

Let's just stop with the weight thing already.  It's not as important as we make it out to be.  Yes, I think it's really cool when people celebrate plus sized stars, and I also think it's a needed wake up call when they point out how ridiculously skinny some celebs are, but I think spending that much time focusing on weight is dangerous.  Pretty soon, everyone is saying how losing weight is the only way to be happy, the only way to be healthy.  Instead, let's focus first on health and finding our body's natural balance.  If we're treating our bodies right, they'll get to the weight that we're supposed to be at.  That may mean we're very skinny, like my 6'5 175 pound bean pole husband.  Or that might mean we're chunky, like me, a curvy 5'7 185 pound girl.