I’m pretty sure that the reason so many people are so emphatically, sciencelessly loud about eating raw foods is because it works well as a healing modality.

i think it is possible to accept a range of weights as healthy and normal while still pointing out that yes, sometimes a person can be ‘too heavy’ and help them get to a more balanced weight for their body type and lifestyle.

“Too heavy” - what is this? What chart or measure can tell me this? If I’m active and eating well, what do you want me to do? Cut off a leg? That would certainly make me weigh less, perhaps even in the “range of weights” you’ve claimed you can identify for me that would be healthy. Lipo would too, but it’s been shown to do squat for health. Given just how little weight can predict in relation to lifestyle, I think it is ridiculous - and a sign of extreme ignorance and prejudice - that we continue to return to discussing it as a health issue. Even with PCOS. Weight loss has been shown to have many consequences for fertility as well (not to mention heart health and mental health - yikes!), so just showing that there is a relationship between weight - high or gained - and fertility problems doesn’t show that weight loss or “management” should be recommended. As mentioned before, these studies often don’t account for the fact that weight gain is the first symptom of problems for many women (often a symptom that shows up before diagnosis and then is, in retrospect, labeled a “cause” or “risk factor.”) Talk of risk factors is always problematic. Hell, being a woman is a risk factor for uterine problems. Maybe we should address that! ;)

For the record, I have PCOS, and instead of listening to the idiotic fat-hating doctor, I went and did my own review of the literature and consistently found that the well-controlled studies suggested moderately increased activity along with carbohydrate and insulin monitoring WITHOUT weight loss produced the best health outcomes.

More geared towards nutrition info:

Breaking the Vicious Cycle, by Elaine Gottschall

Eating Right for a Bad Gut by James Scala

Eating for IBS by Heather Van Vorous

What to Eat with IBD by Tracie M Dalessandro

More specifically cookbooks:

How to Cook for Crohn’s and Colitis by Brenda Roscher

The Creative Colitis Cookbook by Denise and Ross Weale - is all non-dairy (and low-fiber) recipes

cites?

Also, even if you can provide cites, you are conflating weight gain with weight. Being overweight is not the same as gaining weight, and unless you have cites showing that weight loss of steady weight cures fibroids, arguing that weight gain causes fibroids (again, cite?) means that weight loss cures them or prevents them is a non-sequitor. Both rapid weight gain and rapid weight loss can cause health problems, although the extent to which that is true is hard to disentangle from the fact that lots of health problems cause weight gain or weight loss.

However, Zoe Williams is generally an excellent writer and having heard her speak at a seminar I know that she is a good thinker and is far from being anti-feminist. In the article she is expressing her personal dismay at what women choose to focus on when they could be genuinely enriching themselves and I think it’s cool that she has a platform at the Guardian to debate feminist arguments.

Quite a lot of the “trivial” articles and opinion pieces coming out of the Guardian website are probably from Comment is Free which is a less formal group blog.

even the reviled BMI does have like a 20 or 30 pound ‘healthy weight’ range for most heights. there are wide ranges of healthy weights, and things do vary from person to person. but it isn’t always the best thing for them to be 100, 200, 300 pounds overweight. and i think it is possible to accept a range of weights as healthy and normal while still pointing out that yes, sometimes a person can be ‘too heavy’ and help them get to a more balanced weight for their body type and lifestyle.

I’m sorry that I’m going to be lazy and put off finding the titles til tomorrow, but I promise I’ll do it then. :)

Please recommend the specific cookbooks. There are a few, I know — Anthony Bourdain recommends one, but the name slips my mind.

(and Dei, you might want to check out some books on raw foods. It obviously won’t help with, um, cooked recipes, but it is at least a less-ideological way to work natural foods into more of your diet)

as for vegan infants, i was presuming the vegan mother would have a reduced store herself and not be able to supply much of anything to the baby, but you raise a fair point. i cannot offhand recall whether all instances of infant brain damage due to restrictive (usually vegan) diets involved breastfeeding mothers.

but hell, a diet that if practiced perfectly would damage your brain just doesn’t seem like something to be advocating. vegetarian diets are quite as healthy as anything vegan and you can always be sure you get every nutrient you need. although the raw meat diet is in some ways more friendly environmentally and w/r/t human labor costs, which is quite interesting in itself.

the uterine health thing is very near to me because i did not realise the state of women’s health in this country was so fucked. or how surprising some of the risk factors are for health problems. it’s just overwhelming and not talked about nearly enough, because nobody even knows what the problems are.

Does that mean “treating [someone] like a woman” is exactly equivalent to “treating them as a sexually desirable person”? I don’t want to pursue it if it would be a derail, but it struck me as very interesting.

I don’t believe I used the phrase “treating [someone] like a woman.” For me, there are two distinct categories of people: women whom I find attractive, and men or women whom I do not. The way I behave towards women in the first category is different from the way I behave towards people in the second category, but the way I treat men in the second category is not much different from the way I treat women in the second category.

With dieting, it’s more complicated, obviously, food being so central to health and psychology and social interaction and so on. As has been mentioned on this blog before, fat prejudice is at least partially a separate beast from misogyny. There’s also the issue that weight-loss dieting doesn’t actually make most people thinner. (I’m surprised we’ve not had the usual brow-beating from militant fat activists that occurs in most of these types of threads.) But the basic fact remains: when feminists make entirely valid criticisms of the unreasonable beauty standards of our society, they alienate an awful lot of women who basically do want women to have equal rights, but also want to be pretty. I don’t think that’s entirely an unreasonable or anti-feminist desire.

an infant has no such stores and would develop brain damage with a pure vegan diet. there are in fact vegans who suffer b12 deficiencies because they came from extreme dietary backgrounds of one sort or another and didn’t have a good store of b12 when they went over to veganism.

what’s funny about this is that veganism is basically impossible in a pure sense, because b12 doesn’t come from plant sources. but a human can obtain all necessary nutrients, including vitamin c and such, from raw or lightly seared animal flesh. go figure.

the emphasis on restrictive diets that are difficult to maintain without an infrastructure of synthetic alternatives is a curious one i have noted in many feminist and progressive circles. and this ties into a greater feminist issue regarding diet.

the best quality food, from highly organic sources (down to good quality air and water), generally requires on the plant side hand-weeding. guess who does that? it’s not the progressive young college student who gets her vegan-friendly food delivered from the local co-op. it’s a lot of little, brown, mexican or guatemalan women and men and sometimes kids.

if you’re getting your vegan soy substitutes from conagra, and your vegan vegetables from organic growers who use cheap immigrant labor, you’re part of the problem. i think a subtext missing from discussions of diet is the layered cost of actually eating healthfully consistently. it is very expensive to eat high quality food, whether one is vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore. and you STILL have a built-in underclass affording some people dietary privilege in addition to other kinds of privilege.

women are at higher risk for developing a host of uterine ailments if they are more than about 20 pounds overweight. weight loss sometimes IS relevant, and i think to say that nobody should even write diet books is very dangerous for women in general. sometimes a diet is necessary before moving on to establish a long term weight maintenance lifestyle. that’s just a simple fact of life, it’s sometimes needed. not sure how writing books for such people would necessarily be an evil thing.