The diet wars
What would you do if she were your little girl? At age 7 and 4 ft. 4 in., she weighs 95 pounds – clinically obese according to her doctor. At school the other kids make fun of her. It’s a problem.
A little more than a year ago, that was Bea Weiss, an overeater who failed to self-regulate, in the words of her mother, Dara-Lynn Weiss. You may have read about Bea in recent days. Fat no more, she graces the pages of April Vogue, along with said mother, who cut back little Bea’s calorie intake until she hit 79 pounds. Then she wrote the Vogue story. And then she got a book contract.
I’m not sure which of these details sparked the outrage, but news of Bea’s diet, her mother’s chutzpah and the book deal lit up the Internet like the latest news of a Lindsay Lohan probation violation. Much of the anger, at least initially, was heaped on Dara-Lynn for having the audacity to put her child on a diet. She was accused of humiliating Bea, setting her on a path of lifetime eating disorders and taking out her own obsessive-compulsiveness about food on her daughter. Slate labeled Weiss “self-absorbed” and “fanatical.” Jezebel called the story “The Worst Vogue Article Ever.”
All this for a diet that involved a weight loss of just a little more than a pound a month. That it also produced a healthier child, one who had achieved a significant goal and who was no longer the butt of fat jokes at school was nowhere to be found in the early reactions, though the points cropped up eventually. Had Dara-Lynn chosen to allow Bea to continue fattening up, she could have had her daughter taken from her under federal child welfare laws, which define neglect as “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm … or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.”
Granted, it is rare for the government to remove a child from parental custody on obesity grounds, but it has happened in New Mexico, Ohio and elsewhere, and presumably could have happened to the Weiss family, too. Imagine the outrage then.
Over the past few years, I have spent a good amount of time interviewing women in New York about their food and exercise habits for a book called The Manhattan Diet. My subjects happen to be some of the healthiest, longest-living women in the U.S. And in the course of my reporting, I discovered their secret: They work at it. They think about food and exercise and diet pretty much all the time. It’s fairly easy to lose weight (witness the endless parade of fad diet books) but is really hard to maintain that loss. It takes mindfulness, determination, will power, effort in cooking from scratch, in working out, walking, and yes, even self-denial.
For suggesting in my book that thinking a lot about what one eats is a good idea, I have been accused by bloggers and online commentators of being “pro-ana,” a term I never heard of until it was applied to me. It means pro-anorexia. I have also been described as supporting eating disorders in general, or less viciously, of just promoting unhealthy eating. (As a size 10, I have also been accused by readers of being too fat to dole out diet advice.) In pretty much every interview I’ve done about The Manhattan Diet – with reporters from the U.S., Ireland, England and Chile – I’ve been asked about my pro-eating-disorder stance.
Overweight? No pill will fix that
The following is a guest post by David Warner, a Philadelphia-based journalist and health writer. The opinions expressed are his own.
Would it not be wonderful if there were a pill for everything?
Have some kind of irritating bug? Pop an antibiotic, even if it’s a virus. Want to quit smoking? The heck with willpower, take something, wear a patch. Sex life on the wane? Men, swallow that little blue pill. Depressed? Can’t sleep? There are so many pills to choose from. Just watch all those late night commercials.
Overweight? There could be a pill for that as well. But you probably won’t be hearing any ad for it real soon. On Thursday, an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected a Vivus’ drug approval bid for their new weight-loss drug called Qnexa, saying it was too experimental because there was not enough data to warrant approval. One FDA panelist said approving it would amount to a “huge public health” experiment. The FDA is expected to issue a final ruling on Qnexa by October 28.
No question, obesity in this country is epidemic. It is a serious health issue, and there’s a laundry list of consequences for all of us. Heart disease, diabetes, some forms of cancer, high blood pressure and more. Even our kids are too fat, and, as with adults, that has adds social consequences as well. No kid wants to be the fattest child in the schoolyard, no adult wants to ask for the seat bealt extension on an aircraft. And no taxpayer wants to give you Medicare or Medicaid payments to help you with those diseases when you could have avoided them.
Just look around in any public place. A crowded street, a city bus, a shopping mall. We’re huge.
A paradox of plenty – hunger in America
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Call it a paradox of plenty. In the world’s wealthiest country, home to more obese people than anywhere else on earth, almost 50 million Americans struggled to feed themselves and their children in 2008. That’s one in six of the population. Millions went hungry, at least some of the time. Things are bound to get worse.
This the bleak picture drawn from an annual survey on “household food security” compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in mid-November. It showed the highest level of food insecurity since the government started the survey, in 1995, and provided a graphic illustration of the effect of sharply rising unemployment.
This year’s picture will be even bleaker – the unemployment rate more than doubled from the beginning of 2008 to now, at 10.2 percent the highest in a quarter century. It is still climbing, and for many the distance between losing a job and lack of food security is very short.
In keeping with the American predilection for euphemisms, the word “hunger” does not appear in the report which classes food security into several categories, from “marginal” and “low” to “very low.”
Marginal food security means, in the lexicon of the USDA, “anxiety over food shortages or shortage of food in the house.” The second category, low, means “reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet,” but not necessarily less food.
The most severe category, “very low,” used to be labeled “food insecurity with hunger” and is defined as “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.” That applied to around 17 million people, up from 12 million in 2007. Black and Hispanic families and single-parent households are the most affected.
This is the result of corporate citizenship. Corporations are citizens under our law. They use their well payed lobbyists to champion their interests. While the interests of true citizens are sold away.
The price, a career in politics that is profitable and long.
Term limits need to be instituted in the legislature. The courts must strike down corporate citizenship. Only when the legislature is composed of people who truly wish to serve the interests of the citizen, will meaningful change begin.
Corporate interests give lip service to “values” and living a in a morally upright society where everyone is respected. But at the same time they destroy society by stealing money intended for the honoring of contracts and call it “profit”, and by their blatant disregard for those who’s lives have been decimated by their corruption and greed.
Meanwhile our politicians feed this diseased economy for their own profit. They prove their disgust for the citizenry by not even having the honor to limit their terms for the good of the nation they claim to love so much.
The result is that companies can get away with degrading our food supply. They get away with throwing thousands if not millions, of families into destitution. And they are free to profit from the suffering they cause and are encouraged to do so. This they call economic growth. And we are supposed to believe that this is good for us.
Where are the people of reason who see this? They should be speaking more. They should be making their voices heard and their presence known.
One or two voices pointing out the obvious won’t do it alone. The rest need to speak up as well.
Why do we do this weird delicate dance with fat people? We don’t do it with smokers. We’re open about calling smokers…. self-destructive people. Yet the stock photos in articles and CDC reports on obesity universally show fat adults from the neck down so as not to identify them embarrass them. We act like it might be a ‘glandular issue’ even though most doctors agree, that makes no sense. It’s just plain old lack of self-control, coupled with plain old laziness.
Like most people, I got fat in my 30′s. I have since lost it and and I am slim again. At no time when I was gaining weight, eating McDonald’s french fries did I think, “I can’t help it. It’s my glands.”
And it’s not just the fries. You really just HAVE to know calories if you want to lose weight. For example, a whole wheat bagel (390 calories) will make you roughly twice as fat as a typical glazed donut (190 calories). Counter-intuitive, but true. And that’s WITHOUT putting the cream cheese on the bagel.
So it’s not just a matter of eating more ‘whole foods.’ You can get perfectly fat on whole foods or organic foods. A bowl of organic oatmeal with real maple syrup and walnuts (sustainably harvested) has the same calories as a big mac (540). Whole foods have their other benefits, but if you’re talking weight control…. it’s ONLY about the number of calories in vs. out. Not how many were carbs vs. fats. Not how many were ‘empty’ or what the glycemic index was. None of that matters in weight control. Just the number of calories. Eat the donut. Enjoy life. Stay skinny. Just don’t eat too many