If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.
You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame
you. Including you.
This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.
Advertisement
In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.
One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity
cause
ill health, result
from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight
doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers
such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.
So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?
Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th
century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began
routinely recording
patients’ height and weight at every visit. Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications
to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.
The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in
language that shifted
from words like chubby
and plump
to the more clinical-sounding adipose,
overweight, and
obese. The word
overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word
obese, from the Latin
obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.
In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,”
writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring and
stereotactic brain surgery
that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.
Bariatric surgery is the latest of these. In 2000, about 37,000 bariatric surgeries were performed in the United States; by 2013, the number had risen to 220,000. The
best estimates
suggest that about half of those who have surgery regain some or all of the weight they lose. While such surgeries are safer now than they were 10 years ago, they still lead to complications for many, including long-term malnutrition, intestinal blockages, disordered eating, and death. “Bariatric surgery is barbaric, but it’s the best we have,” says David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Reading the research on obesity treatments sometimes feels like getting stuck in an M.C. Escher illustration, where walls turn into ceilings and water flows upward. You can find studies that “prove” the merit of high-fat/low-carb diets and low-fat/high-carb diets, and either 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise or 90 minutes. You’ll read that fen-phen is safe (even though the drug damaged heart valves in a third of those who took it). Studies say that orlistat (which causes liver damage and “uncontrollable” bowel movements) and sibutramine (which ups the risk of heart attacks and strokes) are effective. After reading literally more than a thousand studies, each of them claiming some nucleus of truth, the only thing I know for sure is that we really don’t know weight and health at all.
“We make all these recommendations, with all this apparent scientific precision, but when it comes down to it we don’t know, say, how much fat someone should have in their diet,” says Asheley Skinner, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “We argue like we know what we’re talking about, but we don’t.”
For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”
Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.
“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up
a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.
While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is
linked
with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories
a day.
Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure,
especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with
lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship.
Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013
Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight
had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.
Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.
Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the
lowest
rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.
None of this stops doctors and researchers from recommending weight loss for health reasons. Donna Ryan, professor emeritus at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, co-chaired the National Institutes of Health panel that recently developed
new guidelines for treating obesity, including calorie-restricted diets and commercial diet programs. “Those who have a BMI of 30 and up need treatment, no questions asked,” they wrote. I asked Ryan why, given that so few people keep weight off and given the risks of yo-yo dieting, the committee backed the same old ineffective treatments. “I’m not familiar with any of the research that says yo-yoing is bad for you,” Ryan told me. “I’m not convinced there’s any harm whatsoever in losing and regaining weight.”
Why do doctors keep prescribing treatments that don’t work for a condition that’s often benign? I suspect one reason lies in the fanaticism that often seems to drive the public debate around weight. Last January, for instance, when Flegal’s meta-analysis showing a low risk of death for overweight people hit the news, one of its most vocal critics was Walter Willett, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. He told a reporter from NPR, “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” A month later, Willett organized a symposium at Harvard
just to attack Flegal’s findings.
Willett’s career, like countless others’, has been built on the obesity-will-kill-you paradigm. Tam Fry, a spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum in the U.K., also dissed Flegal’s work. “This is a horrific message to put out,” he told the BBC. “We shouldn’t take it for granted that we can cancel the gym, that we can
eat ourselves to death
with black forest gateaux.”
Actually, Flegal’s findings suggest nothing of the kind. But Willett, Fry, and others seem to see them as a dangerous challenge to a fundamental truth. UCLA sociologist Abigail Saguy, author of
What’s Wrong With Fat?, says people are often invested in their own thin privilege. “They want to think they’ve earned it by working hard and counting calories, and they cling to it,” she says.
There’s a lot of money at stake in treating obesity. The American Medical Association—against the recommendations of its own Committee on Science and Public Health—recently classified obesity as a disease, and doctors hope insurers will start covering more treatments for obesity. If Medicare goes along with the AMA and designates obesity as a disease, doctors who discuss weight with their patients will be able to add that diagnosis code to their bill, and charge more for the visit.
Obesity researchers and doctors also defend what appear to be financial conflicts of interest. In 2013, the
New England Journal of Medicine
published “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts About Obesity.” The authors dismissed the often-observed link between weight cycling and mortality, saying it was “probably due to confounding by health status” (code for “We just can’t believe this could be true”) and went on to plug meal replacements like Jenny Craig, medications, and bariatric surgery.
Five of the 20 authors disclosed financial support from sponsors in related industries, including UAB’s David Allison. I asked him how he would respond to allegations of financial self-interest. “It would be no different than anybody saying about any other person who puts forth an idea, ‘I want to comment that you have this background or personality, this sexual orientation, weight, gender, or race,’ ” he argued. “These conflicts were disclosed, we didn’t hide them, we weren’t ashamed of them. And what’s your point?”
Another layer to the onion may lie in our deeply held cultural assumptions around weight. “People, journalists, and researchers live in a world where it’s taken for granted that fat is bad and thin is good,” says Saguy.
Doctors buy into those assumptions and biases even more heavily than the rest of us, which may explain in part why they continue to blame patients who can’t keep weight off. Joseph Majdan, a cardiologist who teaches at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, has lost and regained the same 100 or so pounds more times than he can count. Some of the meanest comments Majdan has heard about his weight have come from other doctors, like the med-school classmate who asked if she could project slides onto a pair of his white intern’s pants for a skit. Or the colleague who asked him, “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?”
“When a person has recurrent cancer, the physician is so empathetic,” says Majdan. “But when a person regains weight, there’s disgust. And that is morally and professionally abhorrent.”
The idea that obesity is a choice, that people who are obese lack self-discipline or are gluttonous or lazy, is deeply ingrained in our public psyche. And there are other costs to this kind of judgmentalism. Research done by Lenny Vartanian, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests that people who believe they’re worthless because they’re not thin, who have tried and failed to maintain weight loss, are
less likely to exercise
than fat people who haven’t strongly internalized weight stigma.
It’s hard to think of any other disease—if you want to call it that—where treatment rarely works and most people are blamed for not “recovering.”
Over the years, Robin Flamm, a full-time parent from Portland, Oregon, has bounced in and out of Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, gone paleo, done Medifast. Everything worked—for a while. She’d lose 30 pounds and gain back 35, lose 35 and regain 40. She thought she needed to exercise more, eat less, work harder. Like most of us, she blamed herself.
At age 48, she decided she’d spent enough time hating her body, wishing herself different, feeling like a failure. She started seeing a therapist who offers an approach called Health at Every Size, though she was skeptical at first. In the current “obesity epidemic” climate, the idea of pursuing health separate from weight, of accepting that people come in many shapes and sizes, feels radical.
She felt both terrified and relieved to put away her scale, delete her calorie-counting app, and start to rethink her beliefs around food and health. While most obesity docs insist that restrained eating—counting calories or points or exchanges—is necessary for good health, not everyone agrees. About 10 years ago, Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and therapist in Madison, Wisconsin, developed a concept she calls eating competence, which encourages internal self-regulation about what and how much to eat rather than relying on calorie counts or lists of “good” and “bad” foods. Competent eaters, says Satter, enjoy food; they’re not afraid of it. And there’s solid evidence that
competent eaters score better
on cardiovascular risk markers like total cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglycerides than non-competent eaters.
Not that abiding by competent eating, which fits the Health at Every Size paradigm, is easy; Robin Flamm would tell you that. When her clothes started to feel a little tighter, she panicked. Her first impulse was to head back to Weight Watchers. Instead, she says, she asked herself if she was eating mindfully, if she was exercising in a way that gave her pleasure, if she, maybe, needed to buy new clothes. “It’s really hard to let go of results,” she says. “It’s like free falling. And even though there’s no safety net ever, really, this time it’s knowing there’s no safety net.”
One day she was craving a hamburger, a food she wouldn’t typically have eaten. But that day, she ate a hamburger and fries for lunch. “And I was done. End of story,” she says, with a hint of wonder in her voice. No cravings, no obsessing over calories, no weeklong binge-and-restrict, no “feeling fat” and staying away from exercise. She ate a hamburger and fries, and nothing terrible happened. “I just wish more people would get it,” she says.
Photo illustrations by Slate. Photos by Thinkstock.
*shrug* everyone is so different, it's hard to say. My weight is strongly correlated with hormone levels. Every single major gain or loss in my life has been tied to birth control pills or pregnancy. Started pills, up 15 lbs. changed pills? Down 15. Got pregnant? up 25. Stayed there. Changed pills? Down 15. Got and IUD? Up 15. Literally no other changes. Been exercising and eating only 1600 calories a day for the last month? Not any sort of movement at all. I am doing all the right things, right? And yet. This is why most people fail at losing weight. And if nothing I do helps, then what's the point in being hungry all the time. (other than the exercise to get fit - that's just a no-brainer. I need a stronger heart.)
I lost 70 lbs (from 250 to 180) in the few years after my first wife passed away - not necessarily from grief-fueled self starving, but from a conscious decision that I needed to exercise more and get the hell out of the house.
Almost all of that weight loss happened over the period of about 6 years, from 2005 to 2011. I have kept it off. I walk at a 4mph pace 5-6 miles a day (running would take less time, but my frame doesn't tolerate it), I drink a lot less alcohol, almost never do fast food, largely abandoned sugared soda and never, ever take my eye off the ball.
My breathing (despite a smoking habit) has dramatically improved, I get colds and flu far less frequently, chronic ankle and joint pain I had before is gone, I sleep better.
Sorry if this sounds self-congratulatory, it's not meant to be. My basic belief is that eating less and exercising more is a good thing, without commenting on the macro issues around obesity and health. I think people who lose weight by dieting miss the point that staying less-fat is a daily and essentially permanent commitment. Exercise sucks if you're conditioned to regard it as work. It's awesome when you're used to it, and crave it everyday.
Yeah, people can't keep weight off because doctors give us utterly idiotic advice to eat tiny amounts constantly. You want to reset your body's leptin sensitivity? Fast.
I have seen some fairly "overweight" people do some pretty darned athletic things. It seems like exercise is the biggest piece of the puzzle.
"People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life."
Nah, your job takes up 40 or more hours a week typically. Staying reasonably fit takes five hours a week. Devote ten hours a week and you can be solidly fit.
Knew a guy in the Army who looked pretty grossly overweight, but could smoke half the guys in the unit on the run (and scored midrange on PU/SU). You'd never guess it looking at him. He was significantly overweight, but probably in better shape than a lot of thinner folks.
The hard part is realizing that, especially once you've gotten fat to begin with, staying fit may not mean looking thin.
This article ought to bring out the "it's not my fault I'm fat, besides I'm more healthy than those skinny freaks" commenters in droves. Whatever you have to tell yourselves.
I dunno, being fit, that is, being able to go for a vigorous walk without gasping for breath, move reasonable-sized/weight objects without breaking down, having good health, those are the deal to me.
I've been obsessed with numbers on a scale too long.
Where is she getting these ideas that obesity doesn't affect your health?? Not buying it. I think she cherry picked her evidence on this subject to fit with her supposedly shocking exposé. Irresponsible journalism. Really irresponsible.
@JoLoBx
It depends on how you look at the obesity epidemic. If you view it as a symptom of our unnatural food supply, things begin to click. Obesity is a symptom, not a cause.
@Dixiewrecked@JoLoBx
Good lucking convincing people of that, when they refuse to look at the evidence because it doesn't agree with their "common sense." The author laid out tons of sources and meta-analyses done by educated, qualified people...but JoLoBx just isn't "buying it"!
@JoLoBx
- well, being skinny clearly causes poor reading comprehension, because she didn't say that being fat doesn't affect your health. What she said is that once you are fat, losing weight doesn't improve your health. Which is a completely different thing, although apparently recognizing that level of nuance is beyond most people.
@JoLoBx
Being obese is correlated with worse health than being ideal weight- she admits it in the article -- but being overweight is correlated with better health than being ideal weight -- that's the j-curve she mentioned. It's an odd result and one that is being researched further.
When I came to USA I gained fantastic amount of weight in a short period of time. There is something wrong with the food in the USA. Look at the pictures of American people in the 1970s and 1980s. They are not only much, much slimmer, but also their bone structure is much more petite.
Anyway, when I get back to the old country I immediately lose weight, or if I gain any, I have to eat like a pig for 6 months straight to gain 10 lbs, while sitting in front of a desk for 12 hours a day. In the USA I can gain 10 lbs in a week, if I am not careful, which back home is impossible even during Christmas, where I eat essentially one meal a day (starting at 9AM and finishing up at 11PM).
Now, I know that you guys love Monsanto more than life itself, especially here on Slate, but there is a reason why people get fat immediately after coming to USA and then lose weight while going back, no diet, no extra exercise.
There is a reason why people just 25 years ago in the USA were all slim and petite, no diet, no exercise, and now they are not.
Also, there is a reason why the processed or even semi-proceed food in the USA makes you always feel more hungry and more tired, never full and satisfied.
I don't think it is the calories that is the actual problem here.
@Dixiewrecked@---
Not only that. It used to be that you could eat an apple and not brush your teeth, because apples contained only fructose. The teeth-decay bacteria need one molecule of fructose and one of glucose to work their magic. Well, guess what. American apples have been engineered to contain glucose as well as fructose to make them sweeter. So Monsanto apples essentially contain what is an equivalent of HFCS. And as you know HFCS is not very good for you... :-)
Of course you can still buy real apples, however they are not as sweet as HFCS apples...
@---
The processed food makers hire armies of chemists to make sure the food is addictive and non filling. It's food-flavored chemical. Other countries ban that crap.
@---
To be fair, it is possible to live in the US and eat little or no processed foods. Of course, you have to have a reasonable amount of time or money on your hands to pull it off.
@The Judgernaut@---
Actually, you have to know how to cook. Raise your hand if you took Home Economics in High school, if you know how to measure dry and wet ingredients, if you know the difference between a sautee and a braise.
@Dixiewrecked@The Judgernaut
Fair enough. I guess I'd fold that in under time and money myself, but I've probably been listening to too many economists.
@The Judgernaut@Dixiewrecked
I agree with your time argument 100%, but convenience is only part of the problem. There are way too many facets to this issue, but I feel the easiest to confront is to clean up the food supply, and help people not feel intimidated by a 6-quart pot.
@The Judgernaut@---
I can cook but cooking for 1 person is much harder than even for 2 people (and let's face it when I am all alone here I actually want to go out and see some human beings).
However yes, any time I get a visit from my mom, or from my fiancee (that was earlier before we had a kid and she was allowed to fly into USA as a tourist), the "Whole Foods diet" allows for eating 5 meals a day without rapid weight gain.
Unfortunately I live in the part of USA where access to fresh cheap fruit and vegetable is limited: only watermelons and peaches grow here and everything else is trucked in from far away.
So premium stores are the only source of reliably not rotten produce (probably why poor people in the South are super-duper-fat).
Not a word of this will change the minds of the fat-shamers and the anonymous internet hordes who obviously know way more about weight loss than any doctor or scientist. I'm genuinely fascinated at how...just...offended some people are that any one else would dare to be fat. And yet many of these are the same people who will argue that drugs and abortion should be legal...because what you do with your body is no one else's business!
For the record, I think drugs, abortion, and being fat should all be legal, although none of them affect me ;)
My thoughts are the obesity epidemic is a symptom of a larger processed food epidemic. My mother's generation grew up on highly processed boxed and canned foods with long shelf-life engineered into the product.
I have an uncle in his 70's who is nowhere close to obese, but has had 3 bypass surgeries. When I go to my aunt's for lunches, I can expect boxed Mac'n'cheese, instant potatoes, gelatin molds with Cool Whip, and other highly processed foods meant to sit on the shelf for months at a time.
To sum it up, if your food doesn't spoil in a timely manner, don't eat it.
So many commenters here are saying how they did x,y and z and they kept the weight off, and patting themselves on the back. As if their experience would be the same for everyone. But it's not at all.
I am 5'5" and I spent my time in up to my mid 30's at about 110 without thinking. No dieting, little exercise, desk job. Then I got a divorce, and my weight plummeted to 90lbs in the space of a couple of months. Also without thinking. I wasn't anorexic or bulimic but I was concerned enough to see a specialist.
He told me how much more dangerous it was to be underweight than overweight, and I was at immediate risk of all kinds of dangers. He ordered me to eat as much fattening food as I could stand. And I did, but it took a very long time to slowly get my weight back up. And then I stayed level at my 110lbs for perhaps 5 more years.
Then my thyroid packed up, and even though I am properly medicated for it, I started gaining more and more every year. I am now overweight, and you would think considering my history, I should have the ability to shed those extra pounds, no problem. Not so. Nothing seems to get rid of them. I eat from scratch and I work on a farm, and still it creeps up every year, But honestly, I'd much rather be this way than back at 90lbs.
My experience has been enough to show me that metabolism has a huge impact on your weight. I am more disciplined than I was when I shed 40lbs at the drop of a hat.
So please bear in mind, you may only be successful at your diets because of things outside your control - and that may change at any time.
@This is me
This is exactly right. A pattern of eating that works for you might not work for me and vice versa. In 20 years, treating weight issues is going to be like treating cancer - each patient will get a different set of recommendations depending on the specifics of their situation.
There is also an issue regarding quality of life, not just length of life. My wife and I are in our mid 60s. We do a lot of hiking, cycling, and dancing. It may be overgeneralizing but the other people we see engaged in these types of activities are very fit, regardless of their age. It is extremely rare to see an obese person on a hiking trail, for example, or doing an evening of dancing.
This is one of the most misleading, poorly written posts ever. There are too many factual errors to even go through and address. Needless to say, this article belongs in the circular file. What is this Fox news for fat people ?
Doctors posting here will have to confirm this, but I've heard that GPs are required by a lot of hospitals to "counsel" patients about weight whether they (or the patient) want to hear it or not. It reminds me of the old doctors who used to talk about the risks of smoking with a cigarette dangling from their lips (yes, they used to do that) ;)
I know my new insurance provider at work (Humana) is pressing weight loss on us with obnoxious vigor. We have a "health" czar who talks to us about our risks, even if we have private doctors who we see regularly. She is supposed to take our weight, BP, etc and set up a health plan for us. I avoid her. I've been urged to join exercise groups (even though I have rheumatoid arthritis and have to take care of my joints), weight loss groups and get monitored by "health buddies". Barf. I have flat refused to have anything to do with them.
@Raggedhand
Whoa, forcing medical exams is an ADA violation. Employers aren't supposed to inquire into your health unless there is a specific reason/concern you cannot do your job.
"People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss."
So what. If the same thing that fixes your type 2 diabetes also happens to make you skinnier we are supposed to take this as evidence that folks with diet related health problems shouldn't change their diets?
I'm not quite sure how to take this article. I lost a fair bit of weight a few years ago -- something like 60 lbs. I'm not a tall man, and I'm not a muscular man. But I was sedentary and my eating was pretty uncontrolled. I lost weight by basic accounting. I boosted my activity and closely watched what I ate. I've probably since regained ~15 lbs, but my diet is still pretty good, and I exercise a fair bit (running ~20 - 25 miles a week). I'd love to drop another 30 lbs or so for cosmetic reasons and to lessen the wear on my legs when I run, but it's harder to drop those pounds today than it used to be. I'd also love my doctor to stop telling me that I'm fat, because I'm not a moron and I can tell this myself.
The message of this article seems to be "correlation between mild obesity and health outcomes is sketchy, and losing weight is hard."
Most people seemed to have missed an important point: it's not productive to morally judge people for being overweight, nor is it based on science, and it's obviously rude anyway. Current standards of beauty are historically arbitrary, so there's nothing innate that makes us shame fat people. We're taught to do it, just as we can be taught to be a bigot in myriad other ways. You don't have to be sexually attracted to people before you're kind to them.
I read articles like this and have to laugh a little. I've battled my weight my whole damned life, basically starting with precocious puberty at the age of 9 and my father telling me I looked disgusting in a bathing suit at the age of 11. Up down, up down. A bout of anorexia in my senior year of high school, marrying into a family that ate like pigs, two kids. About 10 years ago I lost 50 pounds, needed to lose 10 more but the fact that I was starving all the time and working out 2 hours a day was literally running my into the ground. Fast forward at the age of 45, about to reenter school to try and jumpstart a new career, and I'm tired of being the "fat girl", finally. If it takes it being a job, the focus of all my mental and physical energy, so be it. I've spent the last 25 years raising kids and babysitting a husband through whatever he wanted, while he stayed in shape and healthy and I was fat and stuck at home. Not happening, not anymore. DGAF. I will not, even if it kills me, be stuck in a wheelchair, sick, tired and depressed like my mother because of obesity. I don't need to be rail, model thin. I middled aged with 2 kids for crying out loud. BUT, I can be in shape, I can be healthy, and yes, it takes some discipline and self-will, dead qualities in our society. Man-up, woman-up, whatever you have to do and stop making excuses for being fat. Get whatever you need to get your health in check. A gym membership is cheaper than surgery and chronic diseases that require 100s of $$ in meds. Its your life. Its mine. I will not spend another minute being fat.
@Kathryn Victoria
The last page of the article discussed the concept of conscious eating. Perhaps exercise and being a conscious eater who loves herself is the way to go for you? I'm not saying this as an expert, just as another moderately chubby middle aged woman who gets some exercise, eats lots of veg and fruit and tries to be as kind to herself as she is to her friends.
March 23 2015 5:24 PMLost CauseDo devotees of the Confederacy have a First Amendment right to put the rebel battle flag on their license plates?Mark Joseph Stern
March 20 2015 2:00 PM“I’ve Convinced Them to Let Me Write About Pretty Much All My Other Obscure Interests”Here are John Swansburg’s favorite reads from
Slatethis week, from the good old Grateful Dead to ex-con voting rights. John Swansburg
March 23 2015 10:24 AMCricket for AmericansA guide to the completely simple, totally not confusing sport.A.J. McCarthy, Chris Wade, Lisa Larson-Walker, and Erica Walsh
SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone. See the Facebook Help Center
for more information.
SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone. See the Facebook Help Center
for more information.
