HealthNotDiets Digest, Issue 30, 2018
- Fiona Willer
- Jul 29, 2018
- 7 min read
July 22 - 28, 2018
As always, if you like what you read here, please support the original author by liking/sharing/following/up-voting/subscribing directly to their feed.
Happy reading!
Articles and Blogs
8 Signs Of A High-Functioning Eating Disorder
by Lauren Schumacker
“asking yourself the question of how much of an impact your eating, food, and body image are having on you in terms of mental energy can be important in helping you determine if you should seek help or not.”
The proposal to weigh kids at school is misguided
by Kasey Edwards
“If these researchers want to come anywhere near our children, they need to come with more than a 50-year track record of failure.”
(There are links to two petitions about this below under 'shareables')
Study: Healthy obese people don't face increased death risk
by Allan Cone
“hundreds of thousands of people in North America alone with metabolically healthy obesity will be told to lose weight when it's questionable how much benefit they'll actually receive."
There is No Such Thing as a Normal Body: Celebrating Your Body in the Face of Fatphobia
by Gillian Brown
“the most powerful act of protest and resistance that we can make against fatphobia is to stand up and shamelessly celebrate our bodies.”
A psychiatrist reveals the ugly toll 'clean eating' is having on young women
by Olivia Petter
“At best, clean eating is nonsense dressed up as health advice. At worst, it is embraced by those with underlying psychological difficulties and used to justify an increasingly restrictive diet — with potentially life-threatening results”
The rise of the body neutrality movement: ‘If you’re fat, you don’t have to hate yourself’
by Anna Kessel
“We’re not promoting obesity, or telling people to be fat, we’re just saying, if you’re fat you don’t have to hate yourself.”
What the Japanese Can Teach Us About Body Acceptance
by Sara Fabian
“We don’t see others as they are; we see them as we are, and everyone is a reflection of ourselves. Carl Jung called it the ‘mirroring effect’: Everything we either like or dislike in another is a reflection of Self. How could we even see it, otherwise?”
Why facts don't change our minds
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Illusion of explanatory depth: “People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people...So well do we collaborate...that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends & others’ begins.”
How I'm Going To Make The Fashion Industry More Inclusive
by Dominique Norman
“I sometimes feel overwhelmed by my various intersections — Black, fat, queer, femme, with an invisible disability. My intersections are not uncommon, but they’re the experiences of those who have been missing from the conversation for too long.”
Meet the Subversive Sirens. These 5 women are bringing joy and inclusivity to synchronized swimming.
by Sheila Regan
“We respect the women that have done synchro before us, but we definitely want to blow up the whole idea that you have to look a certain way to do synchro”
To the writers of ”Insatiable”From a fat high schooler who stayed fat.
by Your Fat Friend
“as I watched the trailer, a heavy exhaustion settled into my bones. A fat girl...reduced to a plot device. The erasure of the lives of the millions of fat kids who become fat adults. The fantasy of fat failure and thin triumph. And the goddamn fat suit.”
No, You Shouldn't Ditch Your Fat Friends
by Ragen Chastain
“Worse than the fact that there isn’t any good research to support this, there is excellent research showing that friends are good for your health.”
'Dietland' Actress Nails Exactly How Netflix's 'Insatiable' Fails Fat People
by Jen Ponton
“Our teens already have to grow up in the hellscape we’ve created for them;...They are so fully bombarded with messaging that everything about their bodies is wrong-and this manifests as EDs, disordered eating, dysmorphia, and a whole slew of...challenges.”
Ellen Maud Bennett Obituary
"Her brief time diagnosed with inoperable cancer gave her mere days to live... A final message Ellen wanted to share was about the fat shaming she endured from the medical profession. Over the past few years of feeling unwell she sought out medical intervention and no one offered any support or suggestions beyond weight loss. Ellen's dying wish was that women of size make her death matter by advocating strongly for their health and not accepting that fat is the only relevant health issue."
Rosie Waterland on Fatphobic Netflix Show Insatiable (VIDEO)
via Tonightly
I’m So Tired of Being Told that my Fat Body is Going to Kill Me
by Ijeoma Oluo
“I am a human being and my body is a part of me. I deserve to live or die with the freedom to love myself — my whole self — without fear. Please stop telling me that I’m going to die, because that is actually killing me.”
Eating My Way to the Other Side
by Linda
“This is what dieting does to the brain. If you’re not obsessive about certain foods and eating in general before you start dieting, you sure as hell will be when you’re in the thick of it.”
Does Criticizing Our Own Bodies Damage Our Kids' Body Image?
by Alexis Conason
“the more that children were exposed to family “fat talk,” the less likely they were to eat mindfully or to appreciate their body either generally or in terms of how their body functions”
Can Gen X Women Love Their Bodies?
by Amy Keller Laird
“for the women of Generation X — those of us born between millennials and baby boomers, now in our late 30s to early 50s — the loud roar of body positivity is more like a whisper. It’s like we don’t exist.”
The summer of (self) love! Plus-size women happily celebrate their curves by openly posting images of body parts that they would normally hide for empowering social media movement
by Danielle Loellner
“One body positive brand is encouraging plus-size women to celebrate their figures in new campaign”
This Brand Says Self-Harm Scars Belong In The Body Positive Movement
by Rachel Lubitz
“When you put an image like this [with self harm scars] out there, there can be the beginning of a conversation about this and the creation of a community full of helpful, supportive people”
CW: self harm scars and discussion
Research &
Clinical Practice
"Perceiving oneself as being ‘overweight’ is counter-intuitively associated with an increased risk of future weight gain among US and UK adults."
Robinson, E., J. M. Hunger, and M. Daly. "Perceived weight status and risk of weight gain across life in US and UK adults." International journal of obesity 39.12 (2015): 1721.
Wow this was such a thought-provoking paper. It discusses how researchers had been absolutely disinterested in the psychological and behavioural changes of research animals used in 'calorie restriction for longevity' studies preferring to focus on the biochemical and physical changes that the animals had. It's authors include eating disorder academics and they scoured the literature for mentions of behavioural/psychological impacts in the animals and found that if any were there at all, they were made in passing or as footnotes. They argue that what is there clearly mirrors the experiences of people with eating disorders, and that the 'calorie restriction for longevity' researchers have overstated the benefits and ignored or suppressed the risks in humans. _____ I can't help feeling sad for those poor hungry animals as well as angry that psychological outcomes were so readily ignored in their search for the 'holy grail' - extended longevity. _____ If you have the time and inclination it's a fascinating (and long) read, but be prepared to finish the paper feeling quite sombre. It is relatively old now and I'm not across what has come since, so you may also like to consider it insight into a particular time in history. _____ Here's another quote that almost made it onto the meme: "A substantial body of evidence already demonstrates that [calorie restriction] with excellent nutrition, [calorie restriction] with middling nutrition and [calorie restriction] with dreadful nutrition all lower blood pressure, glucose, insulin, body temperature and central adiposity, in humans as well as in animals. We are prepared to stipulate that CR will produce each of these desirable changes just as reliably when called ‘Calorie Restriction for Longevity’ as when called ‘semi-starvation’, ‘anorexia nervosa’, or a ‘very strict diet’." _____ AKA: the 'benefits' attributed to weight loss are due substantially to the calorie restriction that is required to lose weight, not to the lower weight itself. _____ Vitousek, Kelly M., et al. "Caloric restriction for longevity: II—The systematic neglect of behavioural and psychological outcomes in animal research." European Eating Disorders Review: The Professional Journal of the Eating Disorders Association 12.6 (2004): 338-360.
Soapbox & Shareables
Petition 1: https://www.change.org/p/professor-steven-allender-children-should-not-be-weighed-in-schools
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