No-Scale November

I am sad now that I forgot to write about this sooner. I saw someone on Facebook suggest No-Scale November, and I quickly jumped at the opportunity and recruited more friends to join me. The plan is to go 30 days without weighing ourselves (or to look the other way if we must at the doctor's office).

Though I've been practicing intuitive eating under the Health At Every Size (HAES) paradigm for about a year and have no intention of losing weight, even with all my intense exercise, I've still been weighing myself several times a week to prove that I'm doing it "right" and maintaining. There's no reason for it, and though it didn't influence my mood much, it was a waste of time and thought when I could be doing anything else at all.

No-Scale November provided the perfect reason to stop.

I weighed myself on Halloween, saw the number in my usual range, and have since forgotten it. I noticed this month that I've spent less time thinking about my body and more time admiring it in the mirror. I don't believe that it's undergoing any significant changes (I've been eating the same and exercising less), but I do like it more the more that I see it. Rawr.

I didn't know if I would weigh myself again on Dec. 1 to "prove" that I can eat "right," but I had a cool idea of shooting some pictures of my smashing the scale with a hammer for fun and art. Then I had friends who wanted to do it, too, so a few of us are taking No-Scale November a step further and having a scale-smashing party in the first week of December.

But isn't that a huge waste of perfectly good items that could be donated?

Uh, no. Scales don't make people happy and I'd feel sorry for whomever got mine, which was less than $10 from IKEA some years ago and will now serve its higher purpose as capital-A Art. I'll post pictures!

I'm not going to buy a new scale (even though I'm passingly curious about my body fat percentage and whether it's changing the more that I exercise), nor to I regularly check my body measurement or plan to start. The fit of my clothes is all that I need.

A Post on Privilege and Coming Out

When an acquaintance admitted to being very mainstream, part of the dominant Christian culture, and concerned about making others uncomfortable with her ignorance, a few of us chimed in to thank her and offer perspective and suggestions. Here are mine.

Some of the issues that are integral to who we are but that we feel we have to hide are sexual orientations, gender queerness, alternative romantic and sexual relationships, religious/spiritual beliefs and lack thereof, social and political beliefs and activism, and even our passionate support of everyone else in these categories.

Lead your questions with "May I ask ... ?" in a gentle tone. It's very respectful, and I, for one, respond very positively to it—eager to inform and comfortable with declining if I don't want to discuss it in that moment. If someone is brave enough to open up to you, understand that they may or may not feel up to giving you the full alt-lifestyle 101 lecture, and that you are not entitled to be educated by them. There are hundreds of blogs and articles and books about it; ask for reading recommendations if you want to learn more.*

We censor ourselves in front of our family, our coworkers, and new people we meet, ever wary of the climate in any group. Some of us have come out to people who we expected to love us unconditionally and received some traumatic fucking backlash because of their selfishness and close-mindedness. And it's scarier still to imagine how acquaintances and strangers might react.

I'm a very privileged, educated, intelligent, middle-class, cis-presenting, hetero-presenting, conventionally attractive, slim, and able-bodied white woman living in a safe neighborhood. What could I possibly have to complain about?

• But I am terrified to talk about my relationships at work or family gatherings. My family doesn't know that I've been with my boyfriend for nearly 2 years; they don't know about him at all. My coworkers know but not why we can't move in together or marry.
  
• I'm afraid in most spaces to share HAES concepts, because dieting is so firmly entrenched in our cultural narrative and I don't like it when people think me daft for espousing such ideas, no matter how much science backs me up. Or worse, many think me ignorant of reality and my own weight discredits me.
  
• I'm warming to the idea of coming out as atheist, at least in friendly spaces where the issue comes up, but I still kept fearfully silent at a Meetup event this week with an enthusiastic believer.

I admire those out there with the bravery to live fully open, and I try to be kind to myself and refrain from berating myself for not doing the same. I've discussed it with my boyfriend, and we're on the same page of not wanting to spark anger, backlash, and disappointment directed at us; we spend enough energy coping with life's difficulties. I choose my battles and closets carefully, and I still spend a large chunk of my time stressed out, anxious, worried, depressed, and sleeping poorly.

I'm not sure I'll ever feel safe enough to come out of all these closets, but I do think someday I will be strong enough.



*She did, and I led off with Skepchick and Queereka because they're very intersectional. Another friend recommended The Friendly Atheist. What resources would you suggest?

No Benefits to Intentional Weight Loss

Here is a great interview with Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight (HAES), about the dangers of intentional weight loss. Here is her peer-reviewed article that compiles information from numerous studies to support the claims that intentional weight loss is detrimental to health, as well as supporting the Health at Every Size approach It’s very long but very accessible and interesting, and I highly recommend reading it. Below are a few excerpts.

Concern has arisen that this weight focused paradigm is not only ineffective at producing thinner, healthier bodies, but also damaging, contributing to food and body preoccupation, repeated cycles of weight loss and regain, distraction from other personal health goals and wider health determinants, reduced self-esteem, eating disorders, other health decrement, and weight stigmatization and discrimination.

Only studies with an explicit focus on size acceptance were included. Evidence from these six RCTs indicates that a HAES approach is associated with statistically and clinically relevant improvements in physiological measures (e.g. blood pressure, blood lipids), health behaviors (e.g. physical activity, eating disorder pathology) and psychosocial outcomes (e.g, mood, self-esteem, body image). All studies indicate significant improvements in psychological and behavioral outcomes; improvements in self-esteem and eating behaviors were particularly noteworthy.

Attempts to lose weight typically result in weight cycling, and such attempts are more common among obese individuals. Weight cycling results in increased inflammation, which in turn is known to increase risk for many obesity-associated diseases. Other potential mechanisms by which weight cycling contributes to morbidity include hypertension, insulin resistance and dyslipidemia. Research also indicates that weight fluctuation is associated with poorer cardiovascular outcomes and increased mortality risk. Weight cycling can account for all of the excess mortality associated with obesity in both the Framingham Heart Study and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). It may be, therefore, that the association between weight and health risk can be better attributed to weight cycling than adiposity itself.

It is also notable that the prevalence of hypertension dropped by half between 1960 and 2000, a time when average weight sharply increased, declining much more steeply among those deemed overweight and obese than among thinner individuals. Incidence of cardiovascular disease also plummeted during this time period and many common diseases now emerge at older ages and are less severe. (The notable exception is diabetes, which showed a small, non-significant increase during this time period.) While the decreased morbidity can at least in part be attributed to improvements in medical care, the point remains that we are simply not seeing the catastrophic disease consequences predicted to result from the "obesity epidemic."

That weight loss will improve health over the long-term for obese people is, in fact, an untested hypothesis. One reason the hypothesis is untested is because no methods have proven to reduce weight long-term for a significant number of people.

Psychologist Deb Burgard examined the costs of overlooking the normal weight people who need treatment and over-treating the obese people who do not (personal communication, March 2010). She found that BMI profiling overlooks 16.3 million "normal weight" individuals who are not healthy and identifies 55.4 million overweight and obese people who are not ill as being in need of treatment.

Why I talk about weight and health and Fat Acceptance so much

I’m privileged: I’m a 26-year-old, college-educated, middle class, straight-sized, cis-presenting, pretty, white woman. But I have been the victim of body shaming and mocking and direct insults from strangers and from family. I was told flat out last year by a brand new doctor who asked nothing of my food and exercise habits to lose weight. I had just run 3 miles that morning and was devastated and, of course, fired her.

Health at Every Size (HAES) and FA are important to me because every female member of my family (and most of the men, too) is obese and has been for the vast majority of their adult lives, excepting only me and my sister, probably because we’re the youngest and in our mid-twenties. I spent 25 years swallowing and dwelling on and obsessing over the message that I will spend the entirety of my life—DECADES—battling my weight, battling my genetics, waging war against my weak and traitorous body, and spent too much time blaming my family for their weight and my inevitable fate, before finding HAES.

I gave up calorie counting after college because it made me neurotic and obsessive and cranky and a miserable person and it probably qualified as disordered eating. And I was one of the “lucky” few who could easily manipulate my weight through exercise alone and enjoyed doing it. Weight loss has always come easily for me; maintenance has not. Since college, I’ve been bouncing back and forth within a 20 pound range and thinking that was normal. It’s not. It’s normal in that it aligns with most (95%) people’s  experiences with weight loss and gain, but it is not healthy or natural. Weight cycling does one more harm than being heavy.

I gave up restricted eating last year after reading a blog post from The Fat Nutritionist that outlined the exact cycle of just thinking about restricting a food triggering a binge response. The concepts of permission and intuitive eating allow me to eat better overall and enjoy every minute of it. Would you believe that I quickly dropped 5 or 6 pounds going into the holidays when I quit working out and began eating all the goodies I wanted after having maintained a steady weight for a few months? Having a healthy relationship with food means appreciating not only its nutritional value, but its emotional, social, cultural, and comfort values too and trusting your body to normalize fluctuations, such as partaking wholly of a holiday feast with people you love.

There is no science—NONE—to support intentional weight loss as a healthy behavior. It is NOT evidence-based medicine. And it IS, in fact, harmful. As a feminist, humanist, and skeptic, I am appalled at the cultural myths about thinness, the conflation of weight with health, and the rampant casual concern-trolling and discrimination against fat people.

And I am sick and tired of hearing everyone, especially people I care for, hate on their bodies and their weight, and of seeing their submission to the LIE that thin = happy/healthy/good/worthy.

Seriously,
Fuck You.
You’re wonderful.