superodalisque
Well-Known Member
i don't at all believe that a fat person's goal in life should be to beat obesity. i don't believe that fat has to be unhealthy , or that thats a premise we have to live our lives around. i also don't believe a fat life has to be a source of social degradation. but what i do like about all of this obesity talk is what its beginning to lead to, the need for the public to truly understand and maybe even respect where fat folk are coming from. for whatever reason, it can only make a fat person's life better to have the acceptabilty of psychological abuse aimed at fat people in the country decrease especially as it connects to incorrect assumptions.
i found this interesting article in "The Atlantic" by Marc Ambinder, a journalist that was formerly fat. i wonder if he has a symbol for that now
. judging by the photos with the article, i think he looks great either size. but i guess we all have to decide for ourselves where we are comfortable.
he weighs 150lb now and used WLS to get there. i'm fine with his personal choices but i don't agree with how he kind of casually glosses over the fact that the surgery is only effective, by his own admission,for 50% of the people who go through it long term.
i've been hearing more and more of this kind of talk around obesity lately and i'm glad that for whatever reason abuse toward fat people is finally getting hashed out in public. if you can get beyond all of the anti fat talk and statistics at the beginning he talks about the realities of being fat in a really educational way. he talks about presumptions about being fat and perceptions about will power and the medias version of fat porn, that is using programming that encourages people to gawk at us as though we are freaks. he also talks about the food industries complicity and the American lifestyle. i'm posting parts of the 1st page here--be patient with the anti fat talk and stats at the beginning. i think he has to kind of establish that he is with the weight loss program in order that people listen to him. the rest really gets into what its really like for a lot of folks as fat people today and why what other people say and do to them is unfair to a great degree. i'm posting the 1st page here and the link to the entire article. interesting read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/beating-obesity/8017/2/?
Beating Obesity
By Marc Ambinder
By 2015, four out of 10 Americans may be obese. Until last year, the author was one of them. The way he lost one-third of his weight isnt for everyone. But unless America stops cheering The Biggest Loser and starts getting serious about preventing obesity, the country risks being overwhelmed by chronic disease and ballooning health costs. Will first lady Michelle Obamas new plan to fight childhood obesity work, or is it just another false start in the countrys long and so far unsuccessful war against fat?
IN 1948, CONGRESS doled out $5 billion to Europe in the first installment of the Marshall Plan, the World Health Organization was born, a simian astronaut named Albert I was launched into the atmosphere (he died), and doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts, an American everytown that once was a seat of the abolitionist movement, began a pioneering study of cardiovascular disease. Its initial results helped persuade the American Heart Association, in 1960, to push Americans to smoke fewer cigarettes and, a year later, to cut down on cholesterol. Today, thanks to a long-running public-health campaign, Americans have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, they smoke less, and fewer die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease fell by at least half in most developed countries.
Would that we had had similar success battling obesity. In 1960, when President-elect John F. Kennedy fretted about fitness in an essay for Sports Illustrated titled The Soft American, roughly 45 percent of adults were considered overweight, including 13 percent who were counted as obese; for younger Americans, ages 6 to 17, the rate was 4 percent. Obesity rates remained relatively stable for the next 20 years, but then, from 1980 to 2000, they doubled. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general announced that obesity had reached epidemic proportions. Seven years later, as the obesity rate continued to rise, 68 percent of American adults were overweight, and 34 percent were obese; roughly one in three children and adolescents was overweight, and nearly one in five was obese. Americans now consume 2,700 calories a day, about 500 calories more than 40 years ago. In 2010, we still rank as the worlds fattest developed nation, with an obesity rate more than double that of many European nations...
VIDEO: Marc Ambinder revisits his decision to have bariatric surgery
...If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale willpower versus the food-industrial complex debate. We need to understand what causes obesity, and what can really address it. And we need to try everything from rezoning fast-food restaurants and restricting food advertising to supporting new treatments and rewriting insurance policies. We wont summon the collective will to take these steps until we recognize that our attitudes toward obesity are as unhealthy as the condition itself. We dont want to look at fat people, much less pay for their medical care; we dont want to be contaminated by them. But if we want fewer fat people in our midst, then we, as a nation, must start by treating them without condescension or contempt, and recognize the real obstacles that stand between them and better health.
ITS FASHIONABLE in anti-obesity circles to borrow insights and metaphors from the 50-year battle against smoking. That struggle offers useful lessons, mostly in the sphere of politics, but the story arc of American tobacco is much less complicated: nicotine is a habit-forming drug packaged in a carcinogenic product that the tobacco industry promoted while hiding the truth about its deadly effects. Doctors knew that nicotine was addictive, and they had ways to treat the addiction. Raising the social stigma against smoking helped to curb the practice, as did higher taxes on cigarettes.
Obesity belongs in a different category of social illness. You cant become a smoker until you decide to start smoking. For all the peer pressure and advertising that helped turn many 20th-century Americans into walking chimneys, you dont have to smoke to live. But if you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese, Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me when I met him at an obesity conference in Washington last summer. This does not absolve individuals of the responsibility of trying to get more exercise and eat healthier. But it suggests a synergy between policy intervention and personal efforts to lose weight. Friedens tenure as New York Citys health commissioner from 2002 to 2009 was intensely productive and attention-getting: under his direction, the city banned trans fats from restaurants. And as anyone in Manhattan who grabs breakfast at Dunkin Donuts or other chain establishments knows, caloric content is strategically placed on menus. I am confident that the problem of obesity can be solved, Frieden told me. But whether it will be solved is a different question.
The rise in obesity is associated with a rogues gallery of individual, social, and technological factors. The Big Two, as scientists call the leading factors, are reduced exercise and increased food consumption: Americans are ingesting more and more calories than theyre burning. But underlying that simple energy-in, energy-out equation is a complex, and so far inexorable, interplay between powerful physiological and societal forces.
Start with our bodies. Molded by evolution in the Pleistocene era, when grains and meat were not easily acquired, they are hardwired to store as much energy in reservefatas possible. Some scientists think that the brain tries to regulate our caloric intake and metabolism to keep our weight within a range that is heavily influenced by our genes. This set-point theory argues that an obese persons body will actually defend an excessive weight. An alternative hypothesis, settling-point theory, argues that body weight settles into a range determined not just by genes, but by their interaction with learned behaviors and environmental cues.
External physiological factors also play a part. Start by blaming your mother: recent research suggests that your likelihood of obesity may be shaped by how much she ate during pregnancy (mothers who dieted or overate were more likely to have babies at risk of obesity later in life) and whether she smoked (smoking may suppress appetite, but it correlates with fatter offspring). Obesity is also correlated with lack of sleep, with exposure to certain chemicals (like bisphenol A, used in making plastic bottles), even with the type of bacteria that is found in our intestines. And, of course, we adapt, not necessarily in the most healthful way: a high-fat, high-sugar diet can alter the composition of the bacterial flora to persuade our gut to signal the brain to eat even more.
When we subject our Pleistocene bodies to our modern era, in which corn is cheap and animals are killed by others and safely prepared, the effect on waistlines might seem predictable. But why did the obesity rate accelerate in the United States beginning in the 1980s, setting us apart from our peers in other developed countries? (Though the Mexicans and the British come close.) Did Ronald Reagans declaration that its morning again in America prompt us all to start eating bigger breakfasts?
Sort of. Over the past two decades, as the U.S. economy shed manufacturing jobs, work has become more sedentary for many people; the decline in the real minimum wage and thus labor costs (which account for one-third of the cost of fast food) has made that Happy Meal even happier; and the pressures and distractions of modern life have driven us away from our hearths and off to T.G.I. Fridays. The average American spends half of his or her food budget outside the home, and the concept of a regular mealtimewhich correlates with healthful body weighthas been consigned to the dustbin of Nick at Nite sitcoms. (When a group of Italian economists recently divided the number of calories consumed per day by the amount of time spent preparing food, they found that Americans consumed 42 percent more calories per minute of food-prep time than Europeans.) Portion sizes have increased at restaurants and at home: Brian Wansink of Cornell University and Collin Payne of New Mexico State University reviewed all seven editions of The Joy of Cooking and found that, since 1936, the calorie counts for one serving of 17 out of the 18 recipes that have been continuously publishedincluding macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, and apple piehave increased by 63 percent.
Food companies like to keep us happy, and theyve figured out which molecular combinations make our mouths water. Cheaply manufactured, energy-dense, sugary and salty snacks now crowd our refrigerators and pantries. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has written a book, The End of Overeating, that accuses the food industry of manipulating the levels of sugar, salt, and fats in food in order to create a neurochemical addiction. Over time, these hyperpalatable foods change our brain chemistry in ways that make us overeat. Other researchers have discovered that withholding sugar from rats seems to bring on symptoms similar to those produced by drug withdrawal. Food companies have also done their best to turn food into entertainment: we barely blink at fast-food commercials that lure kids by offering free toys with their meals. Even the non-food economy has learned the benefits of having food around: according to researchers at Tulane University, a fifth of furniture stores, for example, serve up candy and other high-calorie snacks. As Kessler puts it, Its socially acceptable to eat at any time. That wasnt the case four or five decades ago.
Those at the base of the socioeconomic pyramid have been most exposed to these changes and have the fewest resources to resist or counteract them. In fact, obesity has become a marker of sorts for lower socioeconomic status. The lower your educational attainment, the more likely you are to be obese. In the United States and other developed countries, where access to food isnt usually a problem, poor people tend to be fatter than wealthy people, and Americans living in rural areas tend to be more obese than Americans living in inner cities. (In 2008, the five states with obesity rates of 30 percent or more were Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee.) Black children are more at peril of becoming obese than white children; black women are more than 50 percent more likely to be obese than white women. At the current rate of increase, epidemiologists noted in a recent article in Obesity, it will take less than 30 years for all black women to become overweight or obese. Obesity rates are above average among Mexican American boys, as they are among Hispanics generally. Obesity rates among young American Indians tend to be nearly twice the national average.
Untangling correlation and causation is difficult, and many of the causes overlap. But obesity researchers increasingly believe that material disadvantages best explain the spread of obesity among poor people. Populations with less access to health care, for example, tend to receive less preventive care like nutritional advice or weight-loss regimens. Many poorer neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets and more fast-food franchises per capita. The food sold at bodegas, small markets, and convenience stores in inner cities is frequently of poor quality and cheap. Whats cheap? Well, as obesity researchers like to point out, over the past several decades, fresh-fruit and vegetable prices have risen significantly while prices for sugary processed foods have dropped.
to read more click on the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/beating-obesity/8017/2/?
i found this interesting article in "The Atlantic" by Marc Ambinder, a journalist that was formerly fat. i wonder if he has a symbol for that now
. judging by the photos with the article, i think he looks great either size. but i guess we all have to decide for ourselves where we are comfortable.he weighs 150lb now and used WLS to get there. i'm fine with his personal choices but i don't agree with how he kind of casually glosses over the fact that the surgery is only effective, by his own admission,for 50% of the people who go through it long term.
i've been hearing more and more of this kind of talk around obesity lately and i'm glad that for whatever reason abuse toward fat people is finally getting hashed out in public. if you can get beyond all of the anti fat talk and statistics at the beginning he talks about the realities of being fat in a really educational way. he talks about presumptions about being fat and perceptions about will power and the medias version of fat porn, that is using programming that encourages people to gawk at us as though we are freaks. he also talks about the food industries complicity and the American lifestyle. i'm posting parts of the 1st page here--be patient with the anti fat talk and stats at the beginning. i think he has to kind of establish that he is with the weight loss program in order that people listen to him. the rest really gets into what its really like for a lot of folks as fat people today and why what other people say and do to them is unfair to a great degree. i'm posting the 1st page here and the link to the entire article. interesting read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/beating-obesity/8017/2/?
Beating Obesity
By Marc Ambinder
By 2015, four out of 10 Americans may be obese. Until last year, the author was one of them. The way he lost one-third of his weight isnt for everyone. But unless America stops cheering The Biggest Loser and starts getting serious about preventing obesity, the country risks being overwhelmed by chronic disease and ballooning health costs. Will first lady Michelle Obamas new plan to fight childhood obesity work, or is it just another false start in the countrys long and so far unsuccessful war against fat?
IN 1948, CONGRESS doled out $5 billion to Europe in the first installment of the Marshall Plan, the World Health Organization was born, a simian astronaut named Albert I was launched into the atmosphere (he died), and doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts, an American everytown that once was a seat of the abolitionist movement, began a pioneering study of cardiovascular disease. Its initial results helped persuade the American Heart Association, in 1960, to push Americans to smoke fewer cigarettes and, a year later, to cut down on cholesterol. Today, thanks to a long-running public-health campaign, Americans have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, they smoke less, and fewer die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease fell by at least half in most developed countries.
Would that we had had similar success battling obesity. In 1960, when President-elect John F. Kennedy fretted about fitness in an essay for Sports Illustrated titled The Soft American, roughly 45 percent of adults were considered overweight, including 13 percent who were counted as obese; for younger Americans, ages 6 to 17, the rate was 4 percent. Obesity rates remained relatively stable for the next 20 years, but then, from 1980 to 2000, they doubled. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general announced that obesity had reached epidemic proportions. Seven years later, as the obesity rate continued to rise, 68 percent of American adults were overweight, and 34 percent were obese; roughly one in three children and adolescents was overweight, and nearly one in five was obese. Americans now consume 2,700 calories a day, about 500 calories more than 40 years ago. In 2010, we still rank as the worlds fattest developed nation, with an obesity rate more than double that of many European nations...
VIDEO: Marc Ambinder revisits his decision to have bariatric surgery
...If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale willpower versus the food-industrial complex debate. We need to understand what causes obesity, and what can really address it. And we need to try everything from rezoning fast-food restaurants and restricting food advertising to supporting new treatments and rewriting insurance policies. We wont summon the collective will to take these steps until we recognize that our attitudes toward obesity are as unhealthy as the condition itself. We dont want to look at fat people, much less pay for their medical care; we dont want to be contaminated by them. But if we want fewer fat people in our midst, then we, as a nation, must start by treating them without condescension or contempt, and recognize the real obstacles that stand between them and better health.
ITS FASHIONABLE in anti-obesity circles to borrow insights and metaphors from the 50-year battle against smoking. That struggle offers useful lessons, mostly in the sphere of politics, but the story arc of American tobacco is much less complicated: nicotine is a habit-forming drug packaged in a carcinogenic product that the tobacco industry promoted while hiding the truth about its deadly effects. Doctors knew that nicotine was addictive, and they had ways to treat the addiction. Raising the social stigma against smoking helped to curb the practice, as did higher taxes on cigarettes.
Obesity belongs in a different category of social illness. You cant become a smoker until you decide to start smoking. For all the peer pressure and advertising that helped turn many 20th-century Americans into walking chimneys, you dont have to smoke to live. But if you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese, Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me when I met him at an obesity conference in Washington last summer. This does not absolve individuals of the responsibility of trying to get more exercise and eat healthier. But it suggests a synergy between policy intervention and personal efforts to lose weight. Friedens tenure as New York Citys health commissioner from 2002 to 2009 was intensely productive and attention-getting: under his direction, the city banned trans fats from restaurants. And as anyone in Manhattan who grabs breakfast at Dunkin Donuts or other chain establishments knows, caloric content is strategically placed on menus. I am confident that the problem of obesity can be solved, Frieden told me. But whether it will be solved is a different question.
The rise in obesity is associated with a rogues gallery of individual, social, and technological factors. The Big Two, as scientists call the leading factors, are reduced exercise and increased food consumption: Americans are ingesting more and more calories than theyre burning. But underlying that simple energy-in, energy-out equation is a complex, and so far inexorable, interplay between powerful physiological and societal forces.
Start with our bodies. Molded by evolution in the Pleistocene era, when grains and meat were not easily acquired, they are hardwired to store as much energy in reservefatas possible. Some scientists think that the brain tries to regulate our caloric intake and metabolism to keep our weight within a range that is heavily influenced by our genes. This set-point theory argues that an obese persons body will actually defend an excessive weight. An alternative hypothesis, settling-point theory, argues that body weight settles into a range determined not just by genes, but by their interaction with learned behaviors and environmental cues.
External physiological factors also play a part. Start by blaming your mother: recent research suggests that your likelihood of obesity may be shaped by how much she ate during pregnancy (mothers who dieted or overate were more likely to have babies at risk of obesity later in life) and whether she smoked (smoking may suppress appetite, but it correlates with fatter offspring). Obesity is also correlated with lack of sleep, with exposure to certain chemicals (like bisphenol A, used in making plastic bottles), even with the type of bacteria that is found in our intestines. And, of course, we adapt, not necessarily in the most healthful way: a high-fat, high-sugar diet can alter the composition of the bacterial flora to persuade our gut to signal the brain to eat even more.
When we subject our Pleistocene bodies to our modern era, in which corn is cheap and animals are killed by others and safely prepared, the effect on waistlines might seem predictable. But why did the obesity rate accelerate in the United States beginning in the 1980s, setting us apart from our peers in other developed countries? (Though the Mexicans and the British come close.) Did Ronald Reagans declaration that its morning again in America prompt us all to start eating bigger breakfasts?
Sort of. Over the past two decades, as the U.S. economy shed manufacturing jobs, work has become more sedentary for many people; the decline in the real minimum wage and thus labor costs (which account for one-third of the cost of fast food) has made that Happy Meal even happier; and the pressures and distractions of modern life have driven us away from our hearths and off to T.G.I. Fridays. The average American spends half of his or her food budget outside the home, and the concept of a regular mealtimewhich correlates with healthful body weighthas been consigned to the dustbin of Nick at Nite sitcoms. (When a group of Italian economists recently divided the number of calories consumed per day by the amount of time spent preparing food, they found that Americans consumed 42 percent more calories per minute of food-prep time than Europeans.) Portion sizes have increased at restaurants and at home: Brian Wansink of Cornell University and Collin Payne of New Mexico State University reviewed all seven editions of The Joy of Cooking and found that, since 1936, the calorie counts for one serving of 17 out of the 18 recipes that have been continuously publishedincluding macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, and apple piehave increased by 63 percent.
Food companies like to keep us happy, and theyve figured out which molecular combinations make our mouths water. Cheaply manufactured, energy-dense, sugary and salty snacks now crowd our refrigerators and pantries. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has written a book, The End of Overeating, that accuses the food industry of manipulating the levels of sugar, salt, and fats in food in order to create a neurochemical addiction. Over time, these hyperpalatable foods change our brain chemistry in ways that make us overeat. Other researchers have discovered that withholding sugar from rats seems to bring on symptoms similar to those produced by drug withdrawal. Food companies have also done their best to turn food into entertainment: we barely blink at fast-food commercials that lure kids by offering free toys with their meals. Even the non-food economy has learned the benefits of having food around: according to researchers at Tulane University, a fifth of furniture stores, for example, serve up candy and other high-calorie snacks. As Kessler puts it, Its socially acceptable to eat at any time. That wasnt the case four or five decades ago.
Those at the base of the socioeconomic pyramid have been most exposed to these changes and have the fewest resources to resist or counteract them. In fact, obesity has become a marker of sorts for lower socioeconomic status. The lower your educational attainment, the more likely you are to be obese. In the United States and other developed countries, where access to food isnt usually a problem, poor people tend to be fatter than wealthy people, and Americans living in rural areas tend to be more obese than Americans living in inner cities. (In 2008, the five states with obesity rates of 30 percent or more were Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee.) Black children are more at peril of becoming obese than white children; black women are more than 50 percent more likely to be obese than white women. At the current rate of increase, epidemiologists noted in a recent article in Obesity, it will take less than 30 years for all black women to become overweight or obese. Obesity rates are above average among Mexican American boys, as they are among Hispanics generally. Obesity rates among young American Indians tend to be nearly twice the national average.
Untangling correlation and causation is difficult, and many of the causes overlap. But obesity researchers increasingly believe that material disadvantages best explain the spread of obesity among poor people. Populations with less access to health care, for example, tend to receive less preventive care like nutritional advice or weight-loss regimens. Many poorer neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets and more fast-food franchises per capita. The food sold at bodegas, small markets, and convenience stores in inner cities is frequently of poor quality and cheap. Whats cheap? Well, as obesity researchers like to point out, over the past several decades, fresh-fruit and vegetable prices have risen significantly while prices for sugary processed foods have dropped.
to read more click on the link: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/beating-obesity/8017/2/?
