I'd Better Weigh In...

A recent study shows that "weight-ism" is more common than racism.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
Furthermore, apparently fat women suffer the slings and arrows of outraged skinny people far more often than do fat men.
Holy...cow. I'd have never guessed.
I first wrote about this away back in July, 2004...shortly after this blog was born. I've touched on it several times since. This study, along with recent familial events (my wife, who is not just fat but morbidly obese, has joined a gym), has compelled me to revisit the topic.

You can tell me racist jokes and I'll laugh, because everyone's a little bit racist. You can tell me gay jokes and I'll laugh at them even though I'm as gay-friendly a straight man as you're likely to find. Blonde jokes, redneck jokes, religious jokes...none of it offends me. But fat jokes touch a raw nerve every single time, and have for as long as I can remember.
They start early. Fatty-fatty-two-by-four, can't-get-through-the-bathroom-door was a first grade playground staple. A couple of years later and we're into the "Your mama's so fat" jokes...absolutely none of which I ever found the slightest bit amusing. Before too long, the "jokes" take on all the attributes of a personal attack...and who ever coined that other saying about sticks, stones and names was, quite frankly, full of shit. Names do hurt. They hurt plenty.

As the article linked above says, weight is still thought to be entirely within one's control. Scientific studies have proven otherwise, but hey, you eat a lot of crap, you get fat, right? Don't eat a lot of crap, get up off your ass and exercise, and the weight will just melt off, never to return.
For some people that's true. For others, it's not that simple.
I'll cite my wife here. My wife is 5' 5" (165 cm) tall. According to a handy-dandy online ideal weight calculator, a "healthy" weight for Eva is somewhere between 119 and 147 pounds.
Fat chance. Pun definitely intended.
Eva went through her initial physical fitness assessment yesterday at her new gym. Through all manner of high-tech gadgetry and a personal consultant named Erin who really knows her stuff, Eva was able to learn things about her own body that her doctor doesn't know. Things which she had long suspected, but which had never been proven. And some other things that absolutely flummoxed her.
Erin came up to her after all was poked, prodded and shot through with electrical current and sad "Okay, here's the bad news. You're fat."
"Really?" said Eva. "Shit, I was skinny as hell this morning!"
Erin laughed. "Okay, fair point," she said. "I wasn't sure how blunt I could be. You do know, then, that you're obese, and..."
"...actually", interrupted Eva, "the term is 'morbidly obese', and, um, yup, I knew that."
"Oh...kay then," says Erin. "A smartass, eh? Well, for sure, you're morbidly obese, and that's the bad news. Wanna hear the good news?"
"Sure," said Eva, expecting a rah-rah pep talk ("We will rebuild you! Faster, stronger, skinnier!")
"Okay," said Erin. "But first off, what are you in this for? Are you looking to lose weight?"
Eva answered that while she certainly wasn't against the idea of losing weight (what morbidly obese person is?), that wasn't her primary goal. "I want to feel good", she said. "I want to be healthy. I don't care about my weight...in fact, I don't know it and I'd rather you not tell me."
Erin seemed more than satisfied with this answer. But still, she pressed. "Just ballpark it", she said. "Is there some weight you'd like to be?"
"Under two hundred pounds"(91 kg), said Eva.
"Never gonna happen", snapped Erin, not unkindly.
Here's why: Eva's lean muscle mass is 167.2 pounds (75.84 kg).
Did you get that? Eva has about thirty pounds more lean muscle mass in her body than her total body is "supposed to" weigh.
Even Erin was a bit surprised at this...surprised and very happy. "Fat's nothing," she said. "I can deal with fat. I can make it go away. It takes four days to burn a pound of fat. It takes six weeks to gain a pound of lean muscle mass. You," she said, pointing a finger, "are clay."
Which made Eva pretty happy, let me tell you.
"Here's another thing," said Erin. "You're not eating enough."
"???" said Eva.
"Most people aren't, and I know you aren't." She went on to explain, referencing Eva's test results, that my wife's basal metabolic rate--the amount of calories she burns just laying in bed motionless all day--is ridiculously high. Put it this way: any accepted 'diet' she tries, she'll simply starve herself. In fact, she's doing that just eating "normally" right now. Her body's in starvation mode, storing up every scrap of fat it can...which at least partially explains her weight being what it is.
How's that for counterintuitive, eh? You're not eating enough food to lose weight.
Eva told Erin how much water she drinks. Erin called bullshit. "Nobody drinks that much." Meet Nobody: my darling wife. "I'd tell you to cut down--"
"--but if I cut my water intake, I feel very ill," says Eva.
"--but you can't. Okay, there's some disconnect there," said Erin, and probably by the next time they meet she'll know exactly what that disconnect is (to ten decimal places) and how to treat it. Did I mention I was impressed with this woman?
Eva's going to have a personal trainer, with Erin overseeing her program. In eight months Eva won't recognize herself.

A certain breed of reader, all too common, will glance through the above, shake his or her head and say "see? Exercise and proper diet and that's all it takes." To which I'd take the point they missed and jab it in their bony middle. Eva will never weigh what she's 'supposed' to. Erin says she'll look like she's under 200 lbs...but she won't be, can't be. Not with over 165 pounds of muscle. Eva's pretty fit. In fact, if she wasn't so fit, her fat would hospitalize her at the very least.

Yes, my wife is unique. So is everybody else. What works for some people won't work for others.

And oh, are there others. It's passing odd that fat jokes are still acceptable in a society that's, um, expanding as rapidly as ours. The obesity rate is unprecedented in all of human history. And unlike the days of yore, when fat was almost invariably the result of gluttony and only the rich could afford to be fat, these days fat comes from the damnedest places and you need to be richer and richer not to get fat.

Folks, a very small minority of the obese--women, especially, but men too--are okay being the weight they are. Everybody else is desperately unhappy...and they've tried any number of things not to be fat anymore. Some of those things may have even worked, for a time, before the weight came rushing back. Contrary to extremely popular belief, your average fatty doesn't eat like a pig and lay like a lump. Indeed, my wife doesn't eat enough. So making fun of these people isn't just mean-spirited, it's also ignorant as hell. I really wish people would stop for a minute and try to put themselves in other people's shoes before they open their big fat mouths.

The Battle of the Bulge

Last year, on a low-carb diet, I managed to lose just over thirty pounds. I had more energy, much less stomach irritation, and just all around felt better.
So why'd it all come back?
Several reasons, really. Although I had found low-carb foods I enjoyed, there was the not-so-insignificant matter of all those other high-carb foods I enjoyed. Because I wasn't having them, I convinced myself I enjoyed those high-carb foods more. Didn't take much convincing, either.
Then there's the matter of price. I've discovered that no matter what road to healthy eating you may take, your wallet is forced to diet right along with you. It's perhaps understandable in the case of a low-carb diet, which goes against most prevailing dietary wisdom (eat steak, cheese, eggs, and cream...and lose weight? Yeah, right!) There's no denying it worked for me...until the money situation tightened a few notches. Then my belt loosened a few notches.
But never mind low-carb: even a diet infused with plenty of yucky vegetables (healthy, for sure, but yucky, for surer) gets pricey. If you want to eat cheap, go for the bread, rice, and potatoes...but for the sake of your waistline you'd better be prepared to walk everywhere. Or better yet, run. Backwards.
Is it any wonder that, statistically speaking, the poorer you are, the more likely you're obese?
But the biggest problem, for me, at least, has nothing to do with what I eat and everything to do with how much I eat. Simply put, I'm a pig. By the standard serving sizes printed right on the box, bag, or can of whatever the hell it is we're scarfing, I suspect most of us are. Hands up all of you who eat eleven potato chips and stop eating.

Okay, hands down, all you bullshitters.

Or take those Lipton Sidekick side dishes. Those are supposed to be split four ways. Try that next time you prepare one: you'll find a serving constitutes about three mouthfuls. Barely a taste.
Ditto Kraft Dinner. I mean, I knew a box was too much, but half a box is also too much. Here's a question, and I'm only half joking: if you abide by all these serving sizes, how do you not gnaw your own arm off out of sheer ravenousness?

To make matters worse, I was sabotaging myself with plates the size of monster truck tires and bowls like rain barrels. We bought these things because we liked them, but even the oversized portions I'm used to consuming looked relatively puny; correct serving sizes make your supper look like it came out of one of those nouveau cuisine places where they give you three carrot sticks and charge you a hundred bucks for the honour. Oversized flatware is getting more and more common these days, have you noticed? It's frustrating.
"Hey, I like this pattern!"
"Yeah, but you'd have to saw it in half. Oh, wait a second, that's supposed to be a saucer. Can you break in in quarters?"
"Okay, what about this one? It's a reasonable size."
"Yeah, and it looks like gangrene. Put it back."

And, of course, there's the matter of exorcism...I mean, excercise. I don't get enough. I'm actually pretty certain that all this foofarow about low-fat, low-carb, low-cal, high-fibre is pretty much a moot point. You can eat whatever the hell you want so long as you're willing to exercise it off. Consider the Amish. Their food is rich and tasty and spectacularly unhealthy by the standards of the modern dietician. But they work thirty-nine hours a day. You'd be skinny too.
Face it: the only diet absotively GUARANTEED to work is to eat fewer calories than you burn. I admit, I'm pretty partial to the Ken-diet, to wit: eat whatever you want, and just don't swallow anything...

So: life changes. I'm trying very hard to regard food as fuel, not fun. That's a bitch of an attitude adjustment when my whole diet has always been planned around what I like to eat. We're gradually, as money permits, introducing more organic stuff into the diet (and there's another wallet-killer! Organic eggs range between 1.5 and almost three times the price of regular eggs, and I'll bet you most people can't taste a difference. And eggs are among the cheapest organic items, relative to their non-organic counterparts.

We'll get serious about this when we return from southern climes. Cue the Premier Fitness jingle:

I don't wanna be a fat guy
Rubbery flubbery blubbery out-of-shape dude.