But you want to read something that truly blows this out of the water? Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor (two women who each have a large chunk of my heart — and please note that Lucy is a DIETITIAN. Yes, fat-accepting dietitians do exist; here’s another one) have just published a piece in BioMed Central’s Nutrition Journal — which means the full text is available to everyone.

Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift.

Assumption: Anyone who is determined can lose weight and keep it off through appropriate diet and exercise.

Evidence: Long-term follow-up studies document that the majority of individuals regain virtually all of the weight that was lost during treatment, regardless of whether they maintain their diet or exercise program [5, 27]. Consider the Women’s Health Initiative, the largest and longest randomized, controlled dietary intervention clinical trial, designed to test the current recommendations. More than 20,000 women maintained a low-fat diet, reportedly reducing their calorie intake by an average of 360 calories per day [102] and significantly increasing their activity [103]. After almost eight years on this diet, there was almost no change in weight from starting point (a loss of 0.1 kg), and average waist circumference, which is a measure of abdominal fat, had increased (0.3 cm) [102].

Learn it. Know it. Live it.

And have an awesome weekend.

Shannon interviewed me for his podcast, On Hold with Atchka! If you want to hear me sound like a valley girl, repeat myself endlessly, and completely lose my train of thought due to a sudden caffeine deficiency…then, by all means, listen!

It’s my first time doing that sort of thing, though, so be gentle.

Second, despite never having actually been pregnant myself, apparently I had some things to say about eating during pregnancy when the lovely Ann Douglas asked.

(Extra-special-fun bonus: look for the quote in that article that most made me want to hit myself in the face! I bet you can figure out what it is!)

Third…I love you guys and I’ve missed you. I guess I needed a break from writing. It happens — but I always come back eventually.

So, in response to a loathsome editorial postulating that the extravagant air conditioning of public spaces is the fault of the fat, and presumably sweaty, masses, while simultaneously admitting that “thick, sturdy” folk also find the chill uncomfortable:

You’d think that Ms. Smarty Logicpants would use the same awesome powers of deduction that led her to conclude “overbearing air conditioning is because of fat people” to question the solidity of that reasoning, if FAT PEOPLE ARE COLD, TOO.

I am constantly cold in air conditioning, and I was even when I wasn’t fat. And I am no special fucking snowflake. Lots of fat people are just as cold as is Cepeda in these situations, where, I’d like to point out, air conditioning gets blasted all summer because the doors are constantly opening and closing and letting in 90°+ air.

-Melissa McEwan, Shakesville

Shakesville is an especially great non-Fatosphere place to find excellent writing on fat and social justice (as if you didn’t already know that.)

Good times! Kind of like camping, only inside and with more jackhammering and death metal.

So, my whining aside, here are a couple of links some lovely people have emailed me:

Third grader gets detention for possession of a Jolly Rancher. (From Elizabeth, who is lovely and knows everything there is to know about burning sugar to various stages of deliciousness.)

Dietitians of Canada (and the American Dietetic Association) has some interesting bedfellows — including Roche, makers of Xenical. (From Jenna, one of my former classmates who always asked the best questions in clinical nutrition, and will very, very soon be a kick-ass dietitian herself.)

Friend of the blog and all-around wonderful person Patricia has started blogging in English at More of Me to Love. She has some seriously great, practical advice for dealing with The Clothing Situation.

In other news, I’ve slowly been putting together the pieces to form an online class for people who want to learn eating competence, but can’t afford (or don’t want to do) individual counseling. If you think you’d be interested, you can sign up in the little email box thingy to the right, and you’ll get an announcement when the thing finally comes to fruition (maybe in the fall? Maybe sooner? I don’t know.) And if you have any ideas or suggestions for such a class, let me know in comments. It’ll help me to consider the various possibilities when putting it together.

Aside from all that, what’s up? What’s on your mind? Spread the love in comments.

Our friends Harriet Brown and Ellyn Satter are among them, along with confused crusader Kelly Brownell (I’m sure he’s perfectly lovely, really.)

And, in comments, the always-amusing Ms. M. Roth!

I’m having a catching-up-on-email day, so I should be hanging around to moderate comments and get into arguments. Read and let’s discuss.

Note: Please let’s not smear Roth (or anyone else.) I obviously disagree with her pretty strenuously, and I also think her tactics are in poor taste, but we should stick to the facts when discussing her and not delve into speculation about her personal life and/or psychological state. There’s still plenty to criticize without going there. She’s also a for-reals human person, and I’d prefer not to be unkind.

Fucking artificial pancreas, my friends. This is the natural evolution of the insulin pump. I am wondering if eventually they’ll be creating an artifical pancreas that also secretes glucagon. I used to have these conversations with people at work, because do you know how many people we saw suffering from diabetes? And not just the high blood sugar, no no no, but more often, the low blood sugar. Which can kill you right away, at worst, or just make your life fucking miserable at best. Which the artifical pancreas seems to have reduced by half.

The not-awesome

Let’s define more Canadian kids as fat! Based on WHO standards that are not always appropriate for North Americans. And not at all in response to recent stats showing that the “obesity epidemic” among children has probably leveled off, thus causing people with a major financial stake in treating childhood obesity to probably shit themselves during their tortured night sweats. Nope, not at all.

Let’s use surgery to combat social stigma! Because reducing stigma itself wouldn’t actually, you know, make money for anyone. Because that would involve making physical objects more universally accessible and teaching people not to be so fucking cruel to people who don’t look like them. Instead, kids who’ve already survived brain tumours should probably just suck it up and have some more surgery.

Let’s pretend that sugary drinks cause pancreatic cancer! Except the researchers go on to say that the association only existed among people who drank soda pop, and likely because people who drink that amount of soda pop probably have other, not-so-great health things going on. People who drank other sugary drinks (i.e. fruit juice) didn’t have the same risk. Also? The study didn’t control for smoking. In case you hadn’t heard, smoking probably causes cancer. Lots of types of cancer. One of which is pancreatic cancer.

That sound you just heard was me smacking myself in the face and falling off my chair.

Do you think, perhaps, drinking soda pop could be associated with smoking? I don’t know. What I do know is, if I were researching the link between pancreatic cancer and sugary drinks, I’d probably fucking look into it.

In an unprecedented show of concern, The Academy for Eating Disorders (AED), Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), Eating Disorder Coalition (EDC), International Association for Eating Disorder Professionals (IADEP), and National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) have joined forces and are urging focus on health and lifestyle rather than weight as a measurement of well-being.

“There is concern that we have lost sight of avoiding harm in the process of addressing obesity,” AED President Susan Paxton, PhD, FAED states.

Eating disorders practitioners have long been, in my experience, proponents of body diversity and Health at Every Size approaches, since these philosophies are essential to helping people recover from eating disorders and body image crises. In fact, I often advise people who contact me looking for a dietitian or nutritionist to search for those who specialize in eating disorders. Why? Because they are more likely to be familiar with and supportive of Health at Every Size, and less apt to promote weight loss.

And because these organizations are well-known and respected, I am extremely pleased to see them coming out against programs like Lincoln University’s — which would require students with a BMI over 30 to either lose weight, or pass a “healthy lifestyle” class in order to graduate — and firmly in favour of valuing health over weight.

Five or six years ago, I spent a year volunteering at a local eating disorders community centre. As soon as I walked in the door and saw the murals on the walls, and the signs saying “Please don’t talk about your diet,” I felt right at home. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt I was in an explictly size-friendly space. It was an experience that made a deep impression on me in my fledgling efforts at self-acceptance and activism.

Though I was surrounded mostly by thin people, I was never uncomfortable being the fat lady because I knew we all struggled with the same cultural pressures, the same messages, and we were rebelling against a common enemy — the forces in our society that tell us we are not worthy of food or self-love. There was a simultaneous feeling of subversiveness and support. We were in it together.

Make no mistake — these are our sisters and brothers, fighting a parallel battle.

Because, you know, fat people enjoy making themselves sick just to annoy everyone, and to drive up healthcare costs. (It’s all part of the secret fatty agenda. If you haven’t been coming to the clandestine meetings, please email me.)

What we don’t often hear — because, at least up till now, it doesn’t seem to be as much fun, or get as much funding — are the other associations that can be drawn between fatness and health.

So, without further ado, I present you a few tidbits from this morning’s headlines:

• How income inequality leads to obesity – Researchers Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have been studying income inequality for years. Their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, contains a hypothesis that recent increases in body weight could be due to increasing inequality.

• Indeed, food insecurity (a.k.a. “not getting enough to eat”), is often associated with obesity, especially among African- and Hispanic-Americans.

• And, at the same time obesity has been epidemicized, fad diets, and orthorexia in general, seem to have taken off. (Ignore the fact that Prof. Hawkey appears to be kind of a bonehead when it comes to “obesity,” and focus on the association he’s unwittingly drawing here, and his astute criticisms of apocryphal diets.)

• Oh, also, weight gain in adolescents is associated with drinking diet drinks. Yeah, diet drinks. I know. And they think it’s because diet drinks mean they were dieting.

So…yeah. Something for obesity researchers to gnaw on, HUR HUR.

(ETA: Also, sorry for spamming the feed this morning — I’m adding some old posts to my archive, and they all go out over the feed whether I like it or not.)

Lincoln University has a new policy whereby students with a BMI over 30 are required to either lose weight or take a “Fitness for Life” course. Since they’re obviously too fucking dim to understand anything about nutrition or fitness, given that they’re fatty-fatty-fat-fats. (Relevant MetaFilter post. And NPR blog post.)

Okay, I know you know this, but let me just state, for the record: I am really goddamn fat. I’ve also just completed about four years’-worth of classes that focus on nutrition and fitness. And, now that I know a thing or two about nutrition and health — I’m still really goddamn fat.

(Thank you to Charlene, who emailed this in.)

ETA: Here’s a more in-depth analysis of the school policy’s legality and implications.

A new study claims that “Self-control [is] key to preventing childhood obesity” – except what I think they’re actually talking about is promoting eating competence by not restricting children’s diets. But I’m sure measuring self-control is WAHAAAAY better for getting research funding.

(Here’s the abstract to the actual study. I need to read the whole thing still, but I reserve the right to be pre-emptively pissy about these things.)

And, lastly but not leastly, the mystifying “Stop picking on fat people” appeared in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal.

I read it and immediately thought, “Buuuuuhwhat?”

Like, I’m sure it means well, but there’s a lot of stupid shit in there, including many lulzy references to how much food fat people eat. (To wit: those fat people sure do eat a lot!) And the author compares fat people to “workaholics, alcoholics or garden-variety idiots.”

Awesome.