Hindsight

I get so incredibly frustrated with our incredible blindness to the past. I do it. I am a historian to a degree, and I know that I read about the past with rose colored glasses sometimes. But the incredible, blind spot that seems to overtake people when it comes to health and diet is just absolutely amazing.

We consistently hear that our diets are to blame for grave unhealthiness in this country, which of course is "caused" by obesity. It is true that our diets are more plentiful than they ever have been. But here are other truths:

1. We have a more varied diet than at any time in the history of the planet. My people were farmers 100 years ago. They did not have olive oil (which is so heart healthy). They did not eat greens (jello when it came along was a salad). They ate corn and white flour. Their fruits and veggies were primarily canned for most of the year in sugar and salt. They used lard consistently and drank milk straight from the cow.

2. There was no consistent refrigeration, yet, during the summer which meant that meat went bad more often, and people would sometimes still eat it (why do you think the French came up with so many heavy sauces?). Fish, unless your creek or river was stocked, was rare.

3. Water was not purified very well. Most people got water from wells on their land. Since they also had their livestock and their outhouses on the same land, imagine how nummy that must have been. Water born illnesses killed a lot of people before modern water sanitation services.

None of this was helpful to the overall health of people, indeed the life expectancy was about 58 in 1900, whereas today it's 77 years. That seems to speak for itself.

Stuck

I've had a recurring dream lately.

In the dream, I'm going up into this room in a tree house. It's a room I've been in before, but now the staircase is much harder to navigate and it becomes clear that I'm going to have trouble getting up around the stairwell.

Last night, In my dream, I tried and got stuck. I didn't push too hard because I didn't want to end up like Pooh in the picture above: half-in and half-out.

I'm sure that there is a deeper level to my dream, but the surface message is that I feel too big. I'm the biggest I've ever been and this time I've gained it around my stomach and arms and in my thighs (why does it never go to my breasts where I might be able to move up to a bigger cup...you see I can rarely find a 42B or 42C, but if I could just get to a D cup, then I'd have no problems finding a 42D).

Clothes fit not so well and I don't like to wear uncomfortable clothes. I confessed to S that I was worried that he was not attracted to me anymore. This is patently silly, since he really has not changed his behavior. But I think what I was saying is that I don't think I'm attractive and I can't imagine him doing so either.

I want to find myself attractive. Because I'm really not willing to diet anymore. There is too much evidence I'm finding that leads me to believe that dieting does dreadful things to our bodies and can cause us to get fatter in the long run. I want to learn this intuitive eating bit and really embrace my body. But it is so hard to do. I feel stuck. Can anyone unstuck me?

Angel

I got an e-mail from a friend today. It had the tagline "Because I care..." Then it was this:

Heaven has sent you an angel.





















Heaven didn't want her, so they sent her to me. I don't want her, so I'm sending her to you!

I responded, of course I did:

"Hey there: I know that this e-mail was supposed to be silly andfunny, but to someone who is obese, it feels a little like it's making fun of me and people my size. My body doesn't look like that, but S' body looks very similar. I find her beautiful. I'm not sending this to make you feel bad but to hopefully just raise your awareness that such things can impact people in another way. So I'll be keeping this angel because I want her. Peace, Spins"

Now that I've sent it, I wish I'd worded it more strongly. I was so horrified at this. I can't believe that someone could send this and not see how offensive it was. Even more so because the woman in the picture is so obviously fierce and proud of her body.

I recently had an experience with the person where I was left feeling invisible. I thought this was a random experience that was partly due to miscommunication. But again, I feel invisible and I wonder if the appelation of friend is appropriate, if she cannot really see me.

I hope, at least, that she can see what I wrote and take it in.

Two conversations with the parents

I was in Minnesota to visit my family over Thanksgiving and I had two extremely frustrating conversations with my parents. I know, somewhere in the back of my head, that they are only to be expected given the all the hype, but I still wanted to pull my hair out.

The first: My mother was talking about some recent knee pain that she's been experiencing. To put this in context, my mother is 67 and is obese. She hasn't always been obese. She was once terribly underweight. She's never been comfortable with the weight she gained and she's been a yo-yo dieter since her 40s.

My mother commented that she was certain that her weight did not help her knee and if she could just lose 80 pounds (yes, she stated 80 pounds), it would be better. I was aghast - not that she wanted to lose weight or that she correlated weightloss with less knee pain, but that she expected at her age and relative dis-ability due to her knee pain to lose and probably maintain that loss.

So I asked her, do you really think that's going to happen? It's good to test reality.

Well, no, she said, but it would help.

I pointed out that since this wasn't likely to happen that maybe other avenues of relieving the pain would be worthwhile...like physical therapy or something. It was apalling that she thought of weightloss as the primary means of alleviating her pain.

The second: I pointed to my mother's cat, Max who is as big as a house, and said to my father that I thought that he was a good argument that not everyone is the same size or can maintain at the same size. Max is a supersize cat. He started out as a regular size kitten and in a year grew huge.

Now we've had other cats. These cats have had the same access to the same amount of food as Max and, while they might have been slightly bigger than they would have been on the street, they weren't huge. In fact, the variety in cat form in our household has been amazingly diverse.

My father's response to this was that he thought I was wrong. Everyone can lose weight and maintain a weightloss, was his argument, if only they are obsessed enough.

My father is also 67 and obese. He's tall and large and has been tall and large since leaving the army in his 20s. He's bigger than he ever was, yes, but he's never been "normal weight" for his height.

My father went on to explain that dieting was so problematic because you had to keep eating. If he could only figure out a way to stop eating, then even if he did slip from being obsessed, he'd be okay. He would have eliminated food.

So, I responded, you should become an anorexic.

Yes, he replied without irony, that would probably work.

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. On a positive note, I'm pretty sure that my father will not stop eating and become anorexic.

Causality

I work in dialysis. The 2 leading causes of kidney failure are diabetes and high blood pressure. So I shouldn't probably be suprised when the "obesity epidemic" comes up as a topic, but as a social worker I find it hard for it to be discussed without its attendant issues of system of discrimination.

We had a social work meeting for the social workers in our region yesterday, and a woman began talking about it as a cause. It was so frustrating. There was no space in the meeting to be able to challenge the idea of the "epidemic" or discuss with more nuance some of the social and cultural issues that go into size and the medical industry.

It was dropped so casually, as though we would all understand and accept that large bodies = unhealthy bodies. I'm all for keeping track of your health. I'm going to more doctors lately than I care to. But I have excellent insurance and a job to pay for medication and co-pays. I have no fear of the medical establishment. I have had doctors who reflected what I looked like, what I sound like and what my lifestyle is for most of my life. I trust them.

This to me - this lack of access, and lack of trust of the medical community for people of color is huge and needs to be addressed more urgently than does the so-called epidemic that is so hyped....then perhaps we can tackle lack of access to fresh, affordable foods and exercise facilities/resources.

Height and Weight

Over at Shapely Prose, there is a challenge to share your body weight as a way to start being honest about what particular weights look like on people. The Rotund upped the ante with a guess-her-weight exercise. I don't have a full-length photo or I might be tempted to do the same.

But here's a picture of me at the Reno Balloon Races....



In this picture, I weigh about 250 (I haven't weighed myself since I got sick, so it may be a little more). I am 5'6".

Life Expectancy

Since starting this blog, I've been very ill for most of the time. I think I'd like to write more sometime about weight and being ill, but the idea of writing about this thing that has sucked the life out of me (seemingly, not really) is a daunting proposition. So I'm blogging about something else.

It's occurred to me, oh these many months, that there is something wrong with the scare tactics that are being used to draw people into weight loss. We are getting fatter, the "experts" insist, and this is bad, bad, bad for our health. Researchers write that we fat folks will die young, messy deaths if we don't lose weight. Never to mention the unmentioned Gilbert Grape-esque threat that we will be too large to move from our king sized beds when we kick it.

I don't think I'll speak to the fear of dying fat right now. I'm on the scent of the living, if you will. You see, I'm a big fan of random internet-ness...most particularly quizes or things that tell me randomly that my porn name would be Missy Emerson. So several years ago, I remembered doing one of those life-expectancy calculators on the web.

I was, at the time, in the midst of a weight loss endeavor. I was, also, almost suicidally depressed and drinking to solve this, rather than sensibly approaching my doctor for an antidepressant. I remembered, at the time, being safely close to the national average for life expectancy.

So I started to wonder, had gaining back those 41 lbs really diminished my life expectancy drastically? Was I really going to die at young age? Was there a significant difference between my life expectancy at the weight I was currently at and the "ideal" for my height according to the BMI ranges?

While I didn't remember the exact years I was told I could expect to live, I was easily able to re-configure the information on a calculator at MSN Money. My life expectancy at the time was 62 years old.

So my life expectancy today, with added weight but no drinking? 67 years old. The calculator tells me that I would live to be 77 if I dropped 100 lbs. I should be impressed, I suppose, but does that 10 years really mean anything - or the calculators?

Both my parents are overweight. They are both inactive, generally, although my mother still works. Both are considered obese. My mother has heart disease (long standing, she had her first heart attack at 41 when she was underweight and chainsmoking) and my father had cancer about 5 years ago (successfully treated with surgery) and has had several strokes. I would like to be more vigorous than they at their age, yes, but my sense is that this has more to leading an active lifestyle than it does to do with their weight.

Indeed, the illnesses from which they suffered are what predisposed me to a lower life-expectancy. If my mother hadn't had heart disease and my father hadn't had cancer, I would be living to a fat and happy 88 years, according to the same calculator.

The only immediate family members (even the fat ones) I've had who have died before the ripe age of 80 were the result of suicide. I've, happily, discovered the joys of antidepressants and feel the urge never again to succumb to that hell without a pharmaceutical fight. So I'm guessing that if I exercise, eat fruits and veggies, don't smoke or drink, I'm in for a long and feisty life.