HealthNotDiets Digest, Issue 10, 2018
March 4-10, 2018
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Happy reading!
Articles and Blogs
Brisbane mum designs cycling gear for curvy women
by Amy Mitchell-Whittington
"Brisbane mother and recent cycling convert Barbara Spooner was disheartened when she first went scouting for cycling gear [so she] decided to take the matter into her own hands and create an outfit that suited women with curves."
What Does Intuitive Eating Mean?
by Aaron Flores
"Intuitive eating is challenging and can difficult to understand. It’s completely opposite of how we’ve been taught to think about food. It’s not black or white, it’s gray, nuanced and there is no one “right way” which is why it can be so confusing."
Take Your Daughter to the Movies, Not to Weight Watchers
by Jennifer Weiner
“what I know for sure is this: I wish I had treated my body with love and respect....and insisted that the world needed to expand its views of what was acceptable much more than I needed to shrink.”
Eating Disorders & the Scourge of Perfectionism
by Amanda Robins
"But girls with anorexia are not people who have just taken their dieting too far. They are not malingering. They are suffering from a pernicious mental illness that can take over their lives and the lives of those who love them."
Social Cleansing and the End of the Obesity Epidemic
by Charlotte Cooper
“The [World Health Organisation] reproduces the idea that fat people can only ever be passive and grateful service users, not in the driving seat of our own lives. It is patronising, arrogant, about maintaining thin privilege, power and status.”
The Jane Brody Problem
by Harriet Brown
“Ultimately the trouble with Jane Brody and others like her [is that] they’ve taken their own culturally formed aesthetic preferences for medical truths and insist on inflicting them on the rest of us under the guise of health.”
Diets Backfire. Let’s Pave a Path for Our Children to True Health Instead
by Jill Castle
"True child health comes from the interaction of nutritious foods, effective feeding strategies, daily activity, adequate sleep & other health-promoting behaviors, rather than a focus on dieting. This is the path to building a healthy child, inside & out."
Not a Fan of Fat Shaming? Stop Thin Praising
by Afshan Jafar
"If we are interested in challenging the narrow definition of an ideal body type and weight, we not only need to put an end to fat shaming, we also need to stop thin praising."
The sudden collapse of coconut oil, 2015’s favorite superfood
by Caitlin Dewey
“.... some “superfoods” do have impressive, well-proven health benefits, and are widely endorsed by nutritionists, others are fads sparked by one or two isolated studies or championed by celebrity dieters.”
Cancer Research’s ‘obesity is a cause of cancer’ campaign ignores the very real issue of medical fatphobia
by Amanda Elliott
"As a fat woman, I know that the medical industry hates me."
Take The Cake: “Polite” Fatphobia Is Actually More Damaging
by Virgie Tovar
“Bold and straight-forward bigotry creates harm. Polite bigotry positions the bigot as morally superior, creating both harm and confusion around whether harm has actually taken place.”
A letter from your fat wife
by Anna Jones
“A few years ago I might have thanked you for loving me inspite of my fatness. But now I realise what you knew all along- that me and my body were always worthy of love, no matter our size.”
Why we need to take fat-shaming out of fitness culture
by Rebecca Scritchfield
“Everyone can reduce weight stigma by reducing body shame....don’t assume anyone’s goal is weight loss. Reinforce a positive, self-care mind-set, especially when someone shares any kind of frustration with past exercise experiences.”
Research &
Clinical Practice
Neat little paper published last week in the Lancet Public Health which concludes that willpower cannot have been the primary reason for the increase in the prevalence of larger bodies in the population. Anthony Rodgers, Alistair WoodwardEmail the author Alistair Woodward, Boyd Swinburn, William H Dietz, Prevalence trends tell us what did not precipitate the US obesity epidemic (2018) Lancet Public Health
“the very act of labeling is a process of othering, one that creates a distinction between us and them; which raises the question: who is entitled to do the labeling and why, and in what conditions is such a distinction needed?"
Meadows, Angela, and Sigrún Daníelsdóttir. "What's in a word? On weight stigma and terminology." Frontiers in psychology 7 (2016): 1527.
Good paper on the relationship between body weight, self-perceived weight discrimination, socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity in the United States. Ciciurkaite, Gabriele, and Brea L. Perry. "Body weight, perceived weight stigma and mental health among women at the intersection of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status: insights from the modified labelling approach." Sociology of health & illness 40.1 (2018): 18-37. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.12619/full
The research is clear. Encouraging adolescents to diet leads to harm and distress, and a burden that is then transferred to the next generation. This is something we in the field have noticed for a long time, and now it's been shown to be a real and significant phenomenon.
Please tell everyone you know, especially those who think that learning to diet as a teen is the same as learning to take care of yourself. Intergenerational Transmission of Parent Encouragement to Diet From Adolescence Into Adulthood, Jerica M. Berge, Megan R. Winkler, Nicole Larson, Jonathan Miller, Ann F. Haynos, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Pediatrics Mar 2018, e20172955 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2018/03/02/peds.2017-2955
NEW BOOK
The Wonder Down Under: a user's guide to the vagina
by Nina Brochmann and Ellen Stokken Dahl
“In the 20th century male explorers finally reached the North Pole; the depths of the deepest ocean; and all the way to the moon. It has taken until the 21st century for two women to plant their little flags on the uncharted vagina.”
“Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information...[and] false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information."
The spread of true and false news online, S Vosoughi, D Roy, S Aral. Science Mar 2018, 1146-1151
Shareables
There's a particular type of rage I get when I hear some 'expert', in the same breath, state 'it's the calories overall that matter in weight loss, so that's what you need to track', and 'whatever diet you choose it should be something you can stick to for life'. These two statements said together, endorse the idea of long-term calorie monitoring is a feasible, reasonable, 'normal' thing to do. Except that there are no studies to support any of those assertions in the long run.
Did you know that I have an educational podcast about weight science? Each twice-monthly 20 minute podcast unpacks weight science through a weight-neutral lens and is designed to be used as professional development education (an hour a month for only $5!) for health, counselling and fitness professionals. As a thank you gift to my podcast subscribers and as an ode to International Women's Day, I've just released a bonus podcast on the history of women's liberation and size acceptance in Australia. Interested?
Details at: https://www.patreon.com/UnpackingWeightScience
'Demystifying Definitions,
De-Myth-Defying Assumptions'
AUSTRALIAN WORKSHOPS!!
Bookings via www.healthnotdiets.com
Want these 'live'? Then follow me on Twitter (@FionaWiller), Facebook (@HealthNotDiets) and Instagram (@FionaWiller)
Want some training in the non-diet approach or unpacking weight science? Resources include books, courses, workshops and handouts: visit www.healthnotdiets.com
See anything you think I'd like to share or comment about? Post in the comments below or email me at fiona@healthnotdiets.com