Soap Oprah

Today StatsCan released a report on the correlation between men, money and fat:

While research has shown that people in higher income groups generally have better health than those in lower income groups, this is less the case when it comes to overweight among men.

New findings suggest that differences in food consumption patterns may be associated with overweight among more affluent men.

Since the early 1980s, the largest increase in the prevalence of obesity has been among men in higher income groups. In 2004, the odds of affluent men being overweight were about twice the odds of men in the lowest income group.

StatsCan suggests that, because richer guys eat out more often than the lunch bucket crowd, they gain more weight. Could be. Could also be that they are more sedentary, drink more, have better expense accounts. The thing is, they apparently don't do much to counter their weight gains.

Which is where it gets interesting:

These patterns did not hold for women. Although women from higher income households were more likely than those from lower income households to eat out, they were no more or less likely to be overweight.

This suggests to me several things. Affluent women have more time to work out, either because they make more time because of the social pressure to be thin or have fewer time constraints thanks to having hired help, or both.

Poor women, on the other hand, resort to fast food, which can be a cheap and easy way of filling your kids' bellies, especially if you're pressed for time because of work and long commutes on public transit. Poor women can't work out like rich women can, mostly because they can't afford gyms, trainers or even to venture out at night for a jog in a dicey neighbourhood.

Dicey neighbourhoods are also notorious for not having decent grocery stores that people can walk to. I wouldn't want to have to put in 8 hours making hotel room beds and cleaning bathrooms, find a supermarket, and then trudge home on a series of subway trains and buses with heavy bags of groceries. Would you?

So what has this to do with Oprah, her latest weight gain and today's treeware column?

Everything.

That's because of the key phrase from StatsCan: ''Although women from higher income households were more likely than those from lower income households to eat out, they were no more or less likely to be overweight.''

This seems, to me at least, that, for women, weight is a very different issue.

Here is my column, in full, with some links:

I've always told my friends that if I were to win the lotto, I would immediately pack up the dog, drive to my favourite spa in Utah and not come back until I'd hiked and biked off all the excess pounds.

They'd be welcome to join me, of course.

So many of us BMI-busters believe that, if we only had the bucks to hire the personal chefs, trainers, shrinks and pill prescribers, we'd be as thin as the "post-baby-weight" Angelina or as buff as the post-bizarro Britney.

If we didn't have to work, keep house and cook dinners the family will eat, we too would have the hours and hours that Madonna and Gwyneth devote to their bods.

But it's not that simple, as Oprah shows with her "How did I let this happen again?" confessional cover story in the January issue of O magazine.(For a gallery of photos, go here. -- AZ)

There she stands, in a hideous purple workout ensemble, gesturing to her hard-body 2005 six-pack sexy self – in white spandex, no less – at "a toned 160 pounds."

Now she's at least 40 pounds heavier, which was no surprise to her fans, who could see the weight creep into her face, boobs, arms and butt.

The economy is crashing, the ice caps are melting, people are being blown up, but literally hundreds of stories have been published in the past week about how Oprah "felt like a fat cow" standing between Tina Turner and Cher. Some have been supportive, some mean-spirited, and some exploitative – as in "If only Oprah bought my diet book!" "No mine!" "No mine!"

So what is there to add?

The thing is, I feel uniquely qualified to weigh in because I have been there, done that, can't fit into the T-shirt.

As faithful readers will recall, in 2002 I did my own personal reveal right in these pages, showing off a 110-pound weight loss.

A year later, I discussed taking off the last 10 pounds, making for a spectacular 120-pound drop.

But last January, I confessed to gaining back 45 pounds.

It doesn't take much to do that. An extra glass of wine with dinner, a spoonful of peanut butter or a chunk of cheese is all it takes to put on 10 pounds a year.

Cutting back on activity obviously also takes its toll. During my weight loss, I worked out almost every day, pumping heavy iron and doing long sprints on the Stairmaster. Now I barely manage two hours a week – pushed by my trainer, Sebastien Rahman – as well as a daily four miles walking the dog.

The thing is, like Oprah, I made both my weight loss and gains public, and I said I would share my journey down the scale with you this year.

I failed, dear reader.

Sure, I dropped 20 pounds by Easter but, after a summer filled with vodka coolers and ice cream, I'm right back where I started, although I still feel fit. (Sebastien says I am stronger and have more stamina than thin clients half my age, so that's something.)

As Oprah explains, the problem isn't money, or time, or support. It's about "maintaining a sense of balance and well-being," she writes, admitting to her all-work, no-play lifestyle.

She has a media empire to run while I have a mere media cubicle, but our problems are similar.

Both of us seek solace at the bottom of a bag of chips, swallow our anger with sweets and nourish ourselves not with self-love but with the same unwavering judgment we impose on the world's injustices.

Like Oprah, I vow to take better care of me in 2009 – and to be more honest about it with you.

So here we are then. Not much more to add but that it's kind of pathetic that women of tremendous accomplishment such as Oprah are obsessed with their weight. Strong women, who have total control over so many aspects of their lives, can't seem to control what they put in their mouths.

And anyway, why does it matter? If you're fit, strong and healthy, as I am, so what if you're not a size 2?

But it does.

A friend wrote to me today to say:

no body ever really talks about this kind of pressure on femmes in the activist community cuz progressive awesome kick ass. grrls are supposed to be immune to beauty/body pressure or something. i remember really liking my thinner self but (for me, but i was starving all the time while trying to look kick ass AND save the world) you always gotta be honest where you're at in life.

it's just good to have someone talk about things honestly.

I also heard from a dozen women readers who gained it all back, and then some, after following crash diets, including paying for injections at a popular weight loss clinic franchise. UGH.

In this upside down world, where it's more acceptable for men to be fat than for women, where pudge is a sign of affluence for men but women can never be rich enough or thin enough, you'd think a feminist like me would say, aw the hell with it.

But we don't.

It's a sickness. This month alone, one woman in Belgium put up her newborns for sale so she could get lipo while a British woman drank herself to death, on a water diet. meanwhile, in so many places in the world, women can barely feed their families, let alone themselves.

Oprah is bound to rake in more dough off her excess avoirdupois, as her magazine flies off the shelves and viewers tune in to see how she's making out on her new regime. Good for her.

But there's something so very wrong about this culture when not even women allow themselves to have womanly bodies.

Off your feed

Most of today was wasted on thinking about Skinny Bitch, the vegan-with-a-vengeance diet bestseller that's all about insulting women and making them feel guilty about the cruel abuse of the animals whose flesh, milk or eggs land on our tables.

As if we don't have enough issues around food, you know?

Don't get me wrong: I am all for significantly cutting back, or even cutting out, all meat, poultry and most seafood. My reasons are partly humanitarian and partly environmental. It's green to eat green. I haven't had veal in 30 years, loathe lamb and I don't touch pork anymore. (I never got over Babe, and I believe pigs are so intelligent that killing them is like slaughtering dogs.)

That said, I continue to enjoy cheese, although I eat it sparingly because of its fat content. I only buy eggs from chickens that are free-run and given organic feed.  And I avoid those fish which are endangered.

That's the good. The bad is that I eat a lot of chicken. The ugly is, I will never give up putting milk in my coffee.

I do pretty well, considering. That's because, having grown up in a Greek-ish family, I quite enjoy the Mediterranean diet of fruit, veg, whole grains, legumes, nuts, olives and fish.

If Greeks (in Greece) are among the longest-lived people in the world, they can thank (a) their mountainous country which forces them to climb a lot and (b) their Orthodox religion which has so many ''fasting'' days on which you have to lay off animal products that, 200 days a year, you're virtually a vegan.

But back to Skinny Bitch.

(When friends go on and on about how it opened their eyes to the cruelty-to-animals industrial complex, I have to ask them how they can then justify their leather shoes, suede bags, lambskin jackets or down coats. I'm a fat bitch, I guess.)

In yesterday's edition of Salon, Julie Klausner does a fierce job of flailing the Skinny Bitch authors, Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin.

Many women, hoping to get saucy advice from two stunners about staying slim, have felt duped by the offerings of what the authors proudly tout as a "manifesto." Aspiring Bergdorf blondes buy copies of "Skinny Bitch" at L.A. boutiques, only to be blindsided with accounts of live cows skinned alive on the assembly line. At least when a Hare Krishna gives you a vegetarian cookbook in the airport, you know -- thanks to their flower-wielding characterizations in Zucker brothers movies -- that they are cultish wack jobs. But Barnouin and Freedman, under the ruse of weight loss expertise, alternate concern for animal abuse with reader abuse.

The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors' advice accounts for much of the book's humor, including quips like "you need to exercise, you lazy shit," "coffee is for pussies" and "don't be a fat pig anymore." It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. "When you have an eating disorder," she told me, "that's the voice you hear in your head all the time."

Thanks to "Skinny Bitch," women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation -- penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. "If you eat crap," they chirp, "you are crap."

That pretty much says what I feel about the book. But hey, women will subject themselves to any amount of abuse  -- even self-abuse -- in their quest or desire to be thin.

Which brings me to this, a column by The Guardian's Kira Cochrane, who today launched a series about her own struggles with weight.

Taught from a young age that looks and size are all-important, women often learn to keep a check on their eating, and each other's, too, before they even reach kindergarten. So, for instance, you hear grandmothers tell their three-year-old granddaughters that they'll never get married if they don't cut out the cake. You hear one schoolfriend (OK, me) being asked by another how much she weighs, to which the only reasonable answer, of course, is to subtract 10lb from the actual amount and announce the revised figure. Being met with a look of disgust and "Oh, how awful" told me all I needed to know. Next time I'd subtract 20.

As an adult, the conversations often become less vicious, but descend instead into a soul-sucking round of apology and reassurance. A constant run of dialogue between women that starts, "Oh, I'm so fat" (meaning, "Do I look fat? How much do I need to deny myself today? How long can I leave it before I ask this question again and make it clear to everyone around me that - yep, that's right - I don't actually like myself all that much?"), to be met by the reply, "No! You look amazing!" (meaning, "You look fine, same as usual, and please respond similarly when I assail you with this question.")

I understand why women engage in these conversations, and why we feel that if we don't apologise for the space we take up, we're afraid that someone else will get in first and cut us down. I understand, too, that for some women these conversations are actually a way of highlighting just how thin they are, thus shoring up their place in some vast unspoken pecking order. And while I find it utterly depressing that a woman would feel that her weight - or lack of it - represents her major achievement, given that we live in a society in which women are, on average, paid 17% less than men, make up only a fifth of MPs, a 10th of leading company directors, and have little choice but to watch in horror as less than 6% of reported rape cases end in a conviction, I can understand why women often don't feel that they or their abilities are really valued, and try to assert whatever small slice of power they can through drawing attention to their body by denigrating it. I understand it, and I don't blame anyone who does it, and I have done it myself, but I also really hate it. It is boring. It is tiring. It is sad.

Cochrane has some great insights, and you should read the whole thing.

As for Skinny Bitch, really, you don't need the book. There are plenty of vegan websites that offer the same information without your getting abused by, well, two skinny bitches.

No soup (or sandwich) for you!

Remember Seinfeld's Soup Nazi? Well, looks like the state of Mississippi is considering a Food Gestapo.

Lawmakers have proposed legislation that forbids restaurants and food establishments from serving food to anyone who is obese (as defined by the State). Under this bill, food establishments are to be monitored for compliance under the State Department of Health and violators will have their business permits revoked.

House Bill 282, if passed, will be effective this July. Just letting you know in case you're planning a road trip for BBQ or chicken-fried steak.

I am tried to imagine how this would work, since Mississippi regularly weighs in as the fattest state of America.

For 2006 Mississippi has once again claimed the title of fattest state, while Colorado repeats as the leanest. Louisiana remains at number four, but its three-year obesity average climbed more than any other state, by 1.8%, with a one-year 2005 obesity percentage just barely below Mississippi’s.

Nevada’s three-year obesity average was the only one to drop against last year’s numbers, by 0.1%. All other states’ three-year averages rose.

According to the single-year 2005 survey figures, Mississippi becomes the only state with more than two-thirds of its population (67.3%) either overweight or obese.

At this rate, restaurant staffers themselves must have weight issues.  So would they be allowed to eat where they work? Would  one fat person have to tell another fat person that they're too fat to be served?  Would there be a restaurant still in business?

But this is not the craziest thing I've read today about weight loss. Nope. Because here comes the deepest darkest slimming secret of the celebs!

As every dieter knows, a moment on the lips could spell a lifetime on the hips.

But now the adage has been turned on its head, with the creation of a lip gloss that claims to help women lose weight.

Sold under the slogan "Always on the lips. Never on the hips", Fuze Slenderize gloss is said to be oozing with ingredients that curb the appetite.

If you have to have it, I suppose it's available online.

But if you ask me, the only way to lick a weight problem is by eating less and moving more.

Find some great food advice here.

As for my progress, what can I say? On Saturday I was down 8 pounds but then came two days of birthday partying.

I'll weigh myself tomorrow.

Reduced to a cliche

OMG, this blog is so over. I should be celebrating my avoirdupois, not trying to perdredupois, according to today's New York Times.

Blogs written by fat people — and it’s fine to use the word, they say — have multiplied in recent months, filling a virtual soapbox known as the fatosphere, where bloggers calling for fat acceptance challenge just about everything conventional medical wisdom has to say about obesity.

Smart, sassy and irreverent, bloggers with names like Big Fat Deal, FatChicksRule and Fatgrrl (“Now with 50 percent more fat!”) buck anti-obesity sentiment. They celebrate their full figures and call on readers to accept their bodies, quit dieting and get on with life.

The message from the fatosphere is not just that big is beautiful. Many of the bloggers dismiss the “obesity epidemic” as hysteria. They argue that Americans are not that much larger than they used to be and that being fat in and of itself is not necessarily bad for you.

Well, there are some benefits, quite apart from having the best chance of winning on the next installment of Survivor. And, as many of these bloggers argue, eating a balanced diet and working out won't make every body a size 2. You can be fat and fit, as I am.

But I am not signing on to the fat acceptance movement.

What I will buy into is the idea that we don't all have to conform to impossible standards and that, if we don't look like a runway model, we are deserving of hatred and scorn.

In fact, if you check out the bloggers today, you will see that they have already been targeted for derision, thanks to the Times report.

Fat acceptance bloggers contend that the war on obesity has given people an excuse to wage war on fat people and that health concerns — coupled with the belief that fat people have only themselves to blame for being fat — are being used to justify discrimination that would not be tolerated toward just about any other group of people.

“I’m not surprised there are so many of these blogs now,” Ms. Richardson said. “Anti-obesity hysteria has reached a boiling point. Blogging is a way for people to fight back.”

It's also a way to avoid exercise.

I speak from experience.

Welcome to the ''Fatosphere.'' In a show of big girl solidarity, I give you ... Mika.

Hallafreakinglujah!

Three pounds down. Hip hip less of me! I know this is not a weighty feminist post but I did say that I was going to be sharing my gains and losses here.

Happy dance TGIF time.

That is all for now. Back to work for the treeware edition.

Fat Chance

Here's a new study that suggests that self-esteem and emotional well-being are very much related to obesity, at least for teen girls. The emphasis is mine:

Adina R. Lemeshow, S.M., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Tobacco Control, and colleagues assessed questionnaires completed by 4,446 girls age 12 to 18 years in 1999. In addition to reporting their height and weight, television viewing habits, diet and other factors, the girls answered the following question: "'At the top of the ladder are the people in your school with the most respect and the highest standing. At the bottom are the people who no one respects and no one wants to hang around with. Where would you place yourself on the ladder"'" Girls who placed themselves at five or above on the 10-rung ladder were compared with those who ranked themselves at or below four.

The average body mass index (BMI) among participants was 20.8 in 1999 and 22.1 in 2001. In that two-year period, 520 of the girls (11.7 percent) had at least a two-unit increase in BMI. "After adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, baseline BMI, diet, television viewing, depression, global and social self-esteem, menarche, height growth, mother's BMI and pretax household income, adolescent girls who placed themselves on the low end of the school subjective social status scale had a 69 percent increased odds of having a two-unit increase in BMI during the next two years compared with other girls," the authors write.

Well, I suppose if you're lonely and unpopular, you're less likely to get out, more likely to see comfort in the fridge, and probably get rejected even more often as you gain weight. It becomes a vicious circle.

The question is, what to do about it?

It's not just a vanity issue. The implications are longterm, and affect all aspects of a young woman's health and well-being.

Fat-sucking Mom eats 12 year-old daughter

Now this is sick. You gotta view it to believe it.

I'm not saying that there aren't all sorts of societal pressures on young girls (in particular) to look a certain way. And I can certainly understand how unhappy an obese preteen can be.

But hello? How about a weight loss camp first? Some counseling?

If you ask me -- and I assume that, if you're reading this that you are asking me -- that a sixth grader who got to be this size has issues that can't be solved with the wave of a liposuction wand.

If my mother were like that, I'd be hiding in the closet sneak eating entire turkey dinners just to spite her.

Hey, maybe that's how 12! year! old! Brooke Bates got to be 218 pounds in the first place.

The tragic thing is, she will gain it all back -- and in the strangest places.

The doctor and the parents should be charged with child abuse.

 

The Other F-Word

Okay, a confession.

One of the reasons I started up this blog is that I think it might motivate me to lose the 45 pounds I have gained since Christmas 2003. I figure that, if I share my figure issues, as well as my store of fitness and nutrition knowledge, we can do this together.

Or at least that's my hope. (Watch my video!)

Play video

The irony is, one of the reasons I put on those pounds is because I spent way too much time in this chair and at this computer. I should be hitting the treadmill, not the keyboard.

The other irony, I don't really NEED to lose weight. I am perfectly fit and healthy, with a good waist-to-hip ratio, a crazy low resting heart rate, the blood pressure of a teenager, excellent blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels and the ability to do non-stop full-body push-ups, jump squats and standing lunges for an hour -- and then go for a run.

Like too many other women, I hate the way I look.

Yet, 50,0000 years ago, I would have been a goddess, able to pump out those babies and easily skedaddle across the African plains behind the mammoth-hunting men and ahead of the people-eating predators.

But times and fashions change, and this is an era in which Jennifer Love Hewitt is FAT and Tyra Banks is FAT and Britney Spears is FAT and most of the internutters who attack women call me FAT (Look 'em up on the right-wing blogs) because being FAT is supposed to be so bad that girls would rather get hit by a truck than be FAT.

(More of my weighty thoughts here.)

To be honest, I think this obsession with weight keeps women down. We are so focussed on our butts, we can't concentrate on our careers or studies. We can't think straight because we're too goddamn hungry, or counting calories, or beating up on ourselves for eating that cookie.

Oh, of course there are FAT men too. But, unless they're walking cardiac arrests, fat guys get much more of a pass than fat women. How many blogs are devoted to men's bodies?

So why my New Year's resolution?

The truth is, my clothes are too tight and I can't afford to drop several thou on everything from new coats to new bras. Anyway, large size clothes for women look and feel like crap -- still -- and are overpriced. Plus my joints are not getting any younger. I don't want to join that long waiting list for knee surgery.

Finally, it's really not healthy for me to sit here all the live long day.

Big bottom line: The scale going up is getting me down.

So here I am. Broadsides, and broad all over.

But, this year, that's going to change.

Right?

Hey, what are YOU doing at the computer? Get up! Get out! Get moving!

But first, let me know what you think.

UPPITY DATE (4/1/08): Uh-oh. I may need to lose 50 pounds. I have yet to weigh myself post-holiday. Today's the official start date!