I’m a longtime fan of Carol Lay’s cartoons, so when I saw a big new graphic novel by her at Powell’s, I was thrilled. I picked up Lay’s book and read a caption — “the ultimate anti-diet book” — and thought “yay!”

Imagine my disappointment to discover that the ultimate anti-diet book is just another goddamn exploitative diet book.

After reading the sample chapter on Amazon (pdf link), I slipped from being unhappy to being horrified. Carol Lay is 5 feet nine inches, and she says her weight stabilized around 160 pounds. By combining regular exercise with a very strict calorie-counting program, she’s been able to maintain her goal weight of 125 pounds for the last six or seven years.

I’m glad she’s happy. What pisses me off is that Lay claims this all has something to do with health. Maybe it does for her — every body is different — but there’s absolutely no evidence that a BMI of 24 (which is where Lay was at before she began dieting) is unhealthy. Even the official standards (which I consider to be nonsensical) consider a 24 BMI to be the upper limit of the “normal” or “healthy” weight category

18.5, Lay’s new BMI, is the lower limit of the “normal” or “healthy” weight category. But if you pay attention to mortality charts, it’s actually a less healthy BMI than 24 — and in fact, less healthy than all “overweight” BMIs and most “obese” BMIs. You have to have a BMI of 40 or above — in Lay’s case, that means she’d have to weigh 270 pounds — to have a relative risk of death higher than that of a person with an 18.5 BMI.

Here’s a table of some of the relative risks reported (it comes from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine;¹ if you have trouble reading it, click on the image for a larger version):

The yellow column indicates the relative risk of death for “normal weight” people (the heaviest set of “normal” weight people are used as the baseline; all other risk ratios on this table are in comparison to those folks). The red outlines indicate the areas where the relative risk of death is as low or lower for “overweight” people as it is for “normal weight” people.

My point isn’t to say that Carol Lay is going to die younger because she lost 35 pounds; there’s far more to health than BMI, and you can’t predict what’ll happen to a single individual based on an average for large groups. I certainly don’t want naturally thin people to freak out — if you’re meant to be thin, then it’s not unhealthy. My point is just that there is no reason at all to think that Lay is now healthier because she moved from borderline “overweight” to borderline “underweight.”

Yet Lay refers to “health” to justify her weight loss.

It’s not about health. It’s about pushing bodies to fit into an insane aesthetic that says that to be fleshy is to be bad.

What makes it worse is that Lay lays (sorry) out a course of action for her readers to follow:

The stories and information in these pages may help you to find the courage to lose old habits and make new, healthy ones. Then maybe you, too [can lose weight].

But Lay has no idea if her diet plan will work for folks in general; study after study has shown that most people aren’t able to lose large amounts of weight over the long term. And the consequences of failing to keep off weight can be dire, both mentally and physically. Just because Carol’s diet plan worked for Carol Lay doesn’t mean that it won’t fail the vast majority of people, like all diet plans do.

The real problem here isn’t that Lay weighed a shocking 160 pounds. It’s that she’s been taught to hate herself at 160 pounds, and to describe herself as “zaftig” at 140 (a BMI of 21). It’s that a major book publisher thinks that a memoir which endorses self-hatred at 160 pounds, and starving down to the very borderline of underweight, is worth publishing not as a cautionary tale, but as a self-help manual. It’s that our society has colonized our minds. It’s the same insanity that has the press criticizing Jessica Simpson for gaining eight pounds.

It’s not Lay’s fault that she thinks this way; she’s perpetuating the bullshit, but she perpetuates because of what’s been perpetuated upon her. But still… dammit. I really liked her cartoons.

1. Adams, K., et al., “Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons 50 to 71 Years Old.” New England Journal of Medicine, 2006. 355(8): p. 763-8.; I blogged about this study, and criticized it, here. (back)

I’ve complained that studies of weight loss diets have extremely forgiving definitions of “success.” Fatfu, in a terrific post that I only just now read (although it’s almost a year old), has a similar complaint. But she also whips out her calculator and tries to deduce one of Weight Watcher’s best-kept secrets — how many Weight Watchers clients lose weight over the long term?

38,000 people who reached goal weight per year sounds like a lot. But actually it turns out to be a really small number. I found a business article from back then that stated that Weight Watchers had 600,000 attendees in the U.S. in 1993. Divide 38,000 lifetime members per year into 600,000 and my calculator says that each year only about 6% of Weight Watchers members (give or take) reached their goal weight (presumably 94% failed).

Now before you get all impressed with Weight Watcher’s 6% success rate, let’s step back. For one thing, the successful 6% weren’t so fat in the first place. The 2001 study says that most were between a BMI of 25-30 (i.e. “overweight” but not “obese” - to use definitions I find silly). The 2007 abstract says the average starting BMI for that study was 27 - which is well below the average Weight Watchers participant. So in order to achieve goal weight the average lifetime member probably had to lose less than 10 lbs and would have to include a lot of people who had even less to lose. [...]

And what about the number we’re really looking for - how many people actually become “normal” weight long-term using Weight Watchers? It turns out only 3.9% of the golden 6% were still at or below goal weight after 5 years. By my calculations that means 3.9%*6.3% = 0.24% or about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years.

More recent numbers from Weight Watchers indicate that the rate might even be as high as 1 in a hundred. But that’s only after five years — and virtually all research on weight loss shows that “success” rates drop year after year. Just how low would the numbers be after seven years, or ten years? As Traci Mann wrote in an excellent American Psychologist article (pdf link) reviewing the evidence on dieting (hat tip to Fatfu):

Second, these losses are not maintained. As noted in one review, “It is only the rate of weight regain, not the fact of weight regain, that appears open to debate” (Garner & Wooley, 1991, p. 740). The more time that elapses between the end of a diet and the follow-up, the more weight is regained. [...]

Even in the studies with the longest follow-up times (of four or five years postdiet), the weight regain trajectories did not typically appear to level off (e.g., Hensrud, Weinsier, Darnell, & Hunter, 1994; Kramer, Jeffery, Forster, & Snell, 1989), suggesting that if participants were followed for even longer, their weight would continue to increase. It is important for policymakers to remember that weight regain does not necessarily end when researchers stop following study participants.

Dieting, for 99% or more of the people who try it, does not lead to long-term weight loss. Even the 1% who do lose weight, don’t typically lose enough weight to turn a fat person, into a person of average weight. So why is weight-loss dieting the advice given nearly all fat patients by their doctors?

Here’s something doctors don’t tell their patients: 41% of people who go on diets weigh more a few years after the diet, then they did before they began dieting.¹ Since I’m a blogger, not a scientist, I’ll go ahead and make the irresponsible comparison: Dieting is significantly more likely to cause long-term weight gain than weight loss. That’s a Surgeon General’s warning that should appear on every diet program and product on the market.

1. See page 224 of this article (pdf file). “Eight of the studies reported (or made it possible to compute) the percentage of participants who weighed more at follow-up than before they went on the diet. These rates averaged 41% and ranged from 29%… to 64%…” A few pages later: “From one third to two thirds of participants in diets will weigh more four to five years after the diet ends than they did before the diet began. This conclusion comes from studies that are biased toward showing successful weight loss… The true number may well be significantly higher.” (back)

Ezra Klein is one of my favorite bloggers, but when it comes to fat politics, he’s a reactionary. So it’s no surprise that Ezra favors Governor Patterson’s tax on non-diet soda (often referred to as an “obesity tax,” although Ezra didn’t use that term).

Quoting Nick Kristof, Ezra suggests that we’ll see a public health benefit from the tax on non-diet soda, similar to the benefits of taxing cigarettes. “If we can save lives while we raise revenue, why not give that a try?”

I’d suggest three reasons: First, snack taxes don’t work. Second, this particular tax will discourage thin people and people who drink diet soda from considering the health implications of their own diets. And finally, far from saving lives, fat-obsessed public health measures may actually make fat people’s health worse.

Reason why not #1: Snack taxes don’t work.

Meowser quotes from the book Fat Politics:

The reason why snack taxes don’t work is that the demand for food is relatively insensitive to price; economists generally predict that a 10 percent increase in food prices would only reduce food consumption by less than 1 percent. That means that if you want to reduce soda consumption by just 10 percent, you would have to impose a 100 percent tax; if you wanted to reduce soda consumption by half, you would have to make a can of coke cost about four dollars. Not only do such taxes do little to deter demand, but they would take more money out of the pockets of the poor.

According to Meowser, cigarette prices are now 10 times as high as they were three decades ago. Does anyone believe that we’re going to raise soda prices that high?

Reason why not #2: The Obesity Tax implicitly suggests that diet soda is healthy, which will discourage healthy diets.

There’s no strong empirical case for soda being worse for health than diet soda. Even if you accept the “fat is always bad! Thin is always good!” mentality, there is no evidence that switching from regular to diet soda will cause any fat people to experience significant long-term weight loss.

But by exempting diet soda from the tax, the obesity tax will encourage people to think of diet soda as healthy, and discourage critical thinking about the health effects of drinking (other than obesity). As Liss writes, “thin-but-unhealthy people are discouraged from thinking about whether regular soda is something they should cut out of their diets for any reason other than it now costs too much thanks to those damn fatties, and the simplistic associations between fat/unhealthy and thin/healthy are reinforced yet again.”

In Ezra’s comments, North writes:

I’m all for taxing soda, but I just want to remind you/everyone that diet soda is linked to ‘metabolic syndrome’ - which doesn’t necessarily include obesity, but does include major risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. So we really ought to tax diet soda, and the reason that’s not on the table has more to do with the stupidity of obesity politics than anything.

In the rush to be mean to fat people, we’ve forgotten that for most people, weight is genetic;¹ that there’s no reliable way to make a skinny person fat or a fat person skinny; and that eating quality food and getting healthy exercise are what’s actually linked to good health outcomes. (Being overweight actually exercises a protective effect against a large variety of illnesses.) Instead, we have a national moralistic crusade against obesity which leads us to an obsession with reducing the number of calories people take in. Which in turn leads policy-makers to the mistaken conclusion that sugar sodas, but not diet sodas, ought to be taxed.

The choice to tax regular soda but exempt diet soda — as well as the choice to refer to this as an “obesity tax” — is a choice to focus, not on improving health, but on fighting fat (and soda’s alleged connections to fat). This law doesn’t address making people live longer, or feel better; it addresses an aesthetic preference for thin bodies over fat bodies.

(By the way, North — who blogs at To The Lighthouse — did a great job arguing in Ezra’s comments. As did Jasper. Yay North and Jasper!)

Reason why not #3: Public health measures which focus on fat may make fat people less healthy.

Kate writes:²

….Calling this an “obesity” tax, as opposed to yet another “vice” tax, makes it quite literally about the punishment of fat bodies, rather than of “bad” habits that could be held by anyone. Not only are they once again conflating “fat” with “unhealthy,” they’re conflating “fat” with “vice” — reinforcing the message that fatness automatically equals a conscious decision to engage in (arguably) self-destructive behavior.

That the obesity tax will encourage prejudice against fat people is, in and of itself, reason enough to oppose the tax. But a recent study³ suggests that worrying about being fat is actually more damaging to good health than fat itself is. (Curtsy to The Fatfacts Wiki.)

Researchers who looked at a nationally representative group of more than 170,000 US adults found the difference actual weight and perceived ideal weight was a better indicator of mental and physical health than body mass index (BMI).

“The obesity ‘epidemic’ might have a lot more to do with our collective preoccupation with obesity than obesity itself,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Peter Muennig of Columbia University in New York City, told Reuters Health. “We still need to focus on healthy diet and exercise as public health officials, but we need to take fatness out of the equation. Were we to stop looking at body fat as a problem, the problem may well disappear.”

Some researchers have suggested that stress due to stigmatization could be a factor in the health problems obese people have, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, he and his colleagues note in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health. [...]

“There needs to be a realization among public health officials and medical professionals that the messages we are giving the public could be doing more harm than good,” Muennig said.

There are all sorts of public health measures that Ezra and I can agree on: measures to make vegetables more affordable and measures to make cities more walkable, for instance. But laws like this one, which add to the stigmatization of fat people, are harmful and shouldn’t be supported.

1. North’s use of the word “genetic” was the subject of some discussion. I agreed with Jasper that while genetics isn’t the only cause of fatness or thinness, “an individual’s propensity to get fat (or remain thin) given the nutritional and exercise environment of modern society is mostly genetic.” (back)
2. Kate also wrote “Being fat is not behavioral; it’s existential.” Someone in her comments suggested making that a t-shirt, an idea I really like. (back)
3. Muennig, Peter et al, “I Think Therefore I Am: Perceived Ideal Weight as a Determinant of Health,” in American Journal of Public Health; March 2008, Volume 98 Issue 3, pages 501-506. PDF file (3MB). (back)

I never smoked. Oh, I puffed on probably three cigarettes over the course of my life, and in my callow youth I would occasionally light up a cigar. But I was always very leery of getting hooked. This was due in no small part to my dad, who was a smoker until about eight or nine years ago; during my childhood, he told me repeatedly that he didn’t want to smoke, but that he was addicted, and that he wished he’d never started. That left an impression on me, and since I didn’t want all of the health risks of smoking, like lung cancer and heart disease, I figured it was a bad idea to start.

Alas, not all kids are like me. Some actually start smoking, and some continue to smoke into adulthood. How to scare kids into not smoking is a perennial topic, never mind that we’ve pretty much won that battle. Now, Finnish researchers have a new weapon in the war on smoking: shame.

No, not shame of smoking — silly! No, the researchers suggest fat shaming! Because no matter the behavior, it’s always a good idea to threaten that it will make you fat in the end:

Telling teenage would-be smokers that lighting up may make them fat down the road may be a more effective deterrent than harping on the risks of heart disease and cancer from smoking, hints research published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Well, this must be a study of teens’ attitudes about smoking and fat, right? Of course not — the study doesn’t appear to say anything about whether telling teens they’ll gain weight if they smoke is a more effective deterrent than telling teens they’ll die of lung cancer. I suspect that’s because it isn’t a bigger deterrent.

But at least the study shows that there’s a serious weight gain involved, right?

In a study, Finnish researchers found that smoking during adolescence strongly predicted the development of abdominal obesity in adulthood, among both men and women.

In particular, they found that girls who smoked at least 10 cigarettes daily during adolescence had a 3.4-centimeter larger waistline as young adults, on average, than did girls who had never smoked.

3.4 whole centimeters? Shocking! That’s almost one and one-third inches! Why, ex-smokers must weigh five or six pounds more than non-smokers!

[...]

“And most interesting,” said Saarni, the apparent link between smoking during adolescence and being heavy later on was independent of the young person’s own body weight — meaning that those who were heavy smokers had greater waist circumference even within the same body mass index (BMI) levels as their non-smokers peers.

Oh, crikey, can we just stop now? Guess what — ex-smokers have a tendency to gain some weight. That’s due to a lot of things — nicotine is a mild stimulant, ex-smokers often eat a bit more to replace the behavior of sucking on a cigarette, whatever — but it’s not exactly a news flash. My dad gained some weight when he quit smoking; so what? He also avoided going down the path of my grandpa, who died of lung cancer. I think he made the right choice.

At any rate, ex-smokers tend to be slightly heavier than people who never smoked. Are there health risks involved in this? Or, you know, anything that anyone should be concerned about?

This research, Saarni added, “gives a tool” to highlight the risks of smoking to adolescents and young adults “by showing the unhealthy effect on the body shape.” This can be an important deterrent, “because usually young people find cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes or even cancer so distant risks that they have very little impact on ones smoking behavior.”

Yeah, because the kid who thinks she’s invulnerable to a heart attack is going to worry that smoking can make her weigh up to ten pounds more than she otherwise would.

I mean, really, is this going to sell? “If you start smoking, you’re at risk for cancer and heart disease, and you’ll die early — oh, and if you quit, you might gain a few pounds.”

That won’t work. What I just did was convince my hypothetical teen smoker never to quit smoking, because, you know, he might gain a few pounds, which is terrible because there is nothing worse than being fat. Because, you know, there just isn’t. It’s enough to make me want to start smoking.

Via Rachel and Meowser, I learned of a study, “Eating Behavior and Obesity at Chinese Buffets,” published by the academic journal Obesity. The nice folks at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab emailed me a copy of the study.

In a nutshell, they sent “trained observers” to various Chinese buffet restaurants. 213 patrons were spied upon for behaviors such as sitting in a booth or at a table, using chopsticks or forks, placement of napkin, how much was left on the plate, how many times each bite was chewed, etc.. The study authors theorized that these behaviors caused higher weights, but admitted that they couldn’t establish the direction of causality.

Personally, I don’t mind creepy spy studies like this one; a restaurant is a public place, and I like my science creepy. (If the researchers could indulge me with an occasional “bah hah hah!” laugh and gigantic goggles, so much the better.) But the methodology and thinking behind this particular study are jaw-droppingly awful.

The post is going to be very long, so I’ll first list some highlights:

1) There’s no reason to think visual assessments of weight by secret observers are accurate — and the citations the study used to support this methodology are, when you look them up, inapplicable.

2) Nothing in the study protects against the observations being tainted by bias and stereotypes about fat people.

3) Their sample of “normal” weight people included underweight, and even severely underweight, people.

4) A theory they describe on page one — that fat people go to the buffet more often — is not only not tested for by the study, the study is designed to exclude buffet trips from the study’s results.

5) Some causal connections speculated about in this study incorporate ridiculous anti-fat stereotypes. For instance, the study assumes that chopstick users “probably always eat with smaller utensils” when at home, and that people who don’t put their napkins on their laps lack “table manners” and therefore lack “careful consumption monitoring.”

Details after the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

The dance scene really begins two minutes into this video (after a really odd bit of abled-characters-pretending-to-be-disabled-for-comic-effect which falls completely flat). In the scene, Steve Carrel, playing Maxwell Smart, asks a fat woman to dance. The audience presumably expects a routine making fun of how clumsy a fat woman dancing is; the twist is that she dances wonderfully.

(In “Get Smart,” there are also a few brief fat suit gags — flashbacks to Steve Carrel’s character before he lost weight. Those uninspired gags, where were another instance of The Absent Fatso, aren’t the subject of this post.)

The fat woman is played by the wonderful Lindsay Hollister, an actress with a fat-positive attitude who I’m always glad to see in a role. Hollister enjoyed the part:

Especially being, obviously, a big girl and a character actress, these kinds of roles don’t come up often, especially in such a huge film.

To have it be fun and positive and not degrading was like a dream come true.

I was thrilled by the scene the first time I watched it. But, on rewatching, I began to wonder.

Much as I liked seeing Hollister, she’s not a dancer. (She moves through the choreography, but she doesn’t shine in it.) There are fat women dancers who have spent years working at dancing (I’ve seen fat dancing troupes a few times), who would have been physically much more impressive in the role.¹ Combined with the reliance on special effects to provide the big lift at the end of the dance, the scene seems to me to be saying “look, fat people can dance,” but at the same time saying “only in a movie, which is why this is funny, this could never happen in real life.”

There are also a couple of fat gags in the scene — the big sight gag of Max lifting the fat woman over his head, and the two men rushing in from the side to push her up from the dip. I’m not sure what I think of this, either. The anti-fat humor that bothers me most, is anti-fat humor that says “fat people are disgusting” or “fat people are slobs” or “fat people are gluttons” — humor that seems to me to be based on unfair stereotypes.

I’m more comfortable with fat gags which say “fat people are heavy” or “fat people are physically wider,” because these premises are true. We should be able to laugh at genuine differences — if the gags aren’t meanspirited.

In the end, I’m starving for positive images of fat people — and even more, for positive images of fat people’s bodies. I loved this scene, despite its flaws, because it is so physical. I love that they put Hollister in a sleeveless dress. And I loved that, in a current, crass comedy, there was a fat character gag that wasn’t based on degrading the character or finding her gross. But in a saner, fat-positive culture, I don’t think the scene would seem so great.

1. Of course, could those women have handled the acting parts as well as Hollister did? Probably not. (back)

Kevin Moore criticizes a slew of hacktacular cartoons about obesity and health. Needless to say, I agree with Kevin — and would even if he hadn’t quoted me extensively. (ahem).

(You should go read the whole post, if only to check out the incredibly awful Batman cartoon. Base-jumping? What the heck does that mean? And how long did it take most readers to recognize that the thing he’s standing on is a scale?)

But I do have one minor objection — a nit-pick, really, nothing more. Kevin writes:

As my friend and political cartoonist Barry Deutsch has pointed out many times, fat people are easy targets, perhaps the last “safe” target (along with the mentally ill and poor Southern whites) for comedians and other humorists to treat as an “other”, that slightly less-than-human category of people who deviate from The Norm and thus deserve mockery and marginalization.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never said that fat people are “the last safe target,” because I loathe that phrase.

Everyone thinks they’re the last safe target.

Just last week, I read MRA Glenn Sacks saying that “males are the only politically acceptable target.”¹ This right-wing blogger claims that white people are the last “safe target.” That one² thinks Sarah Palin, as a white conservative woman, was the “safe target.” No, wait — “the only safe target is the straight male”!

Of course, it’s not just anti-feminists and right-wingers who use the phrase — plenty of my allies use it too. Fat people are safe targets; the poor are safe targets; trans women are safe targets; undocumented immigrants are safe targets; black women are safe targets; and so on.

And let’s not forget the “last acceptable prejudice” — a distinction shared by Mormons, suburbanites, children with Down syndrome, Catholics, women, homosexuals, elderly people, rednecks, and probably a hundred others.

I completely agree with the general points made by many of these folks (pretty much all the ones on the left), but can we please stop using the “only safe target” and “last acceptable prejudice” framings? Taken literally, these phrases positively scream “oppression olympics!”, and they’re virtually never accurate.

1. By the way, referring to men and boys as “males” is something that, according to some MRAs, is a sign of misandry, when feminists do it. (back)
2. Phrase (c) 2008 John McCain. (back)

The creators of the forthcoming Watchmen movie have been emphasizing that it’s faithful, faithful, faithful to the graphic novel, even going to the trouble of releasing teaser posters recreating the comic book’s teaser ads from decades ago.

Judging from those posters — and from the trailer — the movie seems, in a missing-forest-for-trees way, faithful to Watchmen’s surface elements and story, although I think the comic’s strengths are fundamentally unadaptable.¹ But I couldn’t help but notice one glaring change: Dan — aka Nite Owl’s — waistline. In the original comic, Dan (pictured above) was fat.

The actor who plays Dan — Patrick Wilson — is claiming that Dan wasn’t at all fat, just soft. Uh-huh.

I don’t want to make too big a deal of this; it’s just a movie based on a superhero comic. It’s just…. irritating, another straw on a (not yet broken) back. Pudgy Dan is an un-person. Pudgy Dan will do for an experimental comic, but for a movie with millions on the line, we can’t have it — not even when the director is spending months publicity patting himself on the back for being so darned faithful.

1. From Wikipedia: Moore and Gibbons designed Watchmen to showcase the unique qualities of the comics medium and to highlight its particular strengths. In a 1986 interview, Moore said, “What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating”, and emphasized this by stressing the differences between comics and film. Moore said that Watchmen was designed to be read “four or five times,” with some links and allusions only becoming apparent to the reader after several readings. Gibbons described the series as “a comic about comics”. (back)

Several people have requested a poster version of “Fat Monologue.” I’m terribly pleased people want such a poster. So I’ve set up a page for it on Zazzle.

Please be warned, I honestly don’t know how these posters will look; I’ve never had one printed at Zazzle. So this is an experiment. Zazzle lets you choose for yourself the paper stock, and also the size you’d like it in. My advice is to get the least expensive paper stock, unless you’re a big spender, but avoid the 11″x16″; at that size, I think the text would be hard to read once the poster was hung on a wall. Either the 15″x22″ or the 23″x34″ should be fine.

I chose Zazzle, by the way, because they have a rep for somewhat higher quality printing than Cafepress (at least on their shirts), and because they do have one line of t-shirts which goes up to 5x or 6x. If all goes well with this poster, I may add other products (probably prints of selected political cartoons, or a t-shirt of some of the “Alas” bighead figures — let me know if you have suggestions.)

This is a comic I did many months ago (or was it over a year ago?), for a gallery show. Because it was designed to be viewed on a wall, it’s kind of hard to look at online — the panels kind of spiral around rather than going in straight, easy-to-scroll through rows.

I don’t do comics playing around with weird layouts often enough. Thanks to Mandolin for her help with this one.

Anyhow, you can look at the very large pdf file (which is maybe the easiest way to view it, because you can use the little hand tool to move around), or if you prefer look at the large jpg file.

UPDATE: You can now buy a poster of this, if you’d like.

Nice to see this short piece in the Sunday Magazine:

This is a core argument of fat acceptance: that it’s possible to be healthy no matter how fat you are and that weight loss as a goal is futile, unnecessary and counterproductive — and that fatness is nobody’s business but your own.

Many fat-acceptance activists prefer a new approach to dieting that focuses on nutrition, exercise and body image. A new book out this fall, “Health at Every Size,” by Linda Bacon, a nutritionist and physiologist at the University of California at Davis, outlines this approach, which is less about dieting than a lifestyle change that emphasizes “intuitive eating”: listening to hunger signals, eating when you’re hungry, choosing nutritious food over junk. It encourages exercise, but for its emotional and physical benefits, not as a way to lose weight. It advocates tossing out the bathroom scale and loving your body no matter what it weighs. [...]

Several studies suggest that if the aim is getting healthier rather than slimmer, then in the long run the “Health at Every Size” approach works better than dieting. In 2005, Bacon led the only randomized control trial to date that tested this hypothesis physiologically. She randomly assigned half of the 78 subjects, all women, to a “Health at Every Size” group; while they lost no weight, their healthier behavior led to lower blood-pressure and cholesterol levels, which stayed low even two years later. In the weight-loss group, more than 40 percent dropped out before the six-month low-calorie diet ended, and at the two-year follow-up, the average dieter had regained all her lost weight, and the only measurement that dropped was one for self-esteem.

Scientists who study obesity at the cellular level say genetics determines people’s natural weight range, right down to the type and amount of food they crave, how much they move and where they accumulate fat. Asking how someone got to be so fat is as meaningless as asking how he got to be so tall.

Another thing I liked about this piece: the illustration that went with it was not a photo of headless fatties. What next, an article about comics that doesn’t use “Pow! Bam!” in the headline? (Is that even legal?)

From Obama’s big health care speech:

Under my plan, we’ll make sure insurance companies cover evidence-based, preventive care services – weight loss programs, smoking-cessation programs, and other efforts to help people avoid costly, debilitating health problems in the first place.

“Weight loss programs” and “evidence-based… services” are mutually exclusive sets. There is no weight loss program which has been shown to bring about substantial, long-term weight loss in a peer-reviewed study.

A real evidence-based approach would lead to the conclusion that “weight loss programs” are useless, and in some cases can even do great harm.

That said, I think Obama’s health plan might be beneficial to fat people on the whole, because it includes “outlawing insurance company discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.” If being fat is considered a “pre-existing condition,” then this would do an enormous service to fat people who are typically turned down by insurance companies.

From the New York Times:

Often, a visit to the doctor’s office starts with a weigh-in. But is a person’s weight really a reliable indicator of overall health?

Increasingly, medical research is showing that it isn’t. Despite concerns about an obesity epidemic, there is growing evidence that our obsession about weight as a primary measure of health may be misguided.

Last week a report in The Archives of Internal Medicine compared weight and cardiovascular risk factors among a representative sample of more than 5,400 adults. The data suggest that half of overweight people and one-third of obese people are “metabolically healthy.” That means that despite their excess pounds, many overweight and obese adults have healthy levels of “good” cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose and other risks for heart disease.

At the same time, about one out of four slim people — those who fall into the “healthy” weight range — actually have at least two cardiovascular risk factors typically associated with obesity, the study showed.

The bang you just heard was MeMe Roth’s head exploding.

Wow. You remember the awesome “Is Barack Obama too skinny to be president?” story from yesterday? It just took a weird turn:

Here’s the on-the-ground research that enabled Ms. Chozick to pose such a bold and allusive query:

Welcome to Yahoo! Message Boards

Amy Chozick starts a thread:

Is Obama too skinny to be president?
15-Jul-08 06:04 pm

Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his “no excess body fat”? Please let me know. Thanks!

A reply is posted:

Re: Is Obama too skinny to be president?
15-Jul-08 10:21 pm

Yes I think He is to skinny to be President.Hillary has a potbelly and chuckybutt I’d of Voted for Her.I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.

Amy responds:

Re: Is Obama too skinny to be president? 16-Jul-08 09:12 am

Love your response and your username (onlinebeerbellygirl). Would you mind shooting me an email so I can ask you a few more quesitons? My email is [redacted] Thanks so much!

-Amy

The entire rest of the brief thread consists of people saying that the question is stupid, and/or making fun of Chozick.

Just like the internet reaction!

This is unbelievable shoddy journalism, the kind that would get you in trouble at the Hicksville Poultry-Gazette,  and should get you fired at the Wall Street Journal.

Next: Is Barack Obama too handsome to be president? An in-depth look at a blog I just created says yes!

You have got to be kidding me:

Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn’t give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

“Listen, I’m skinny but I’m tough,” Sen. Obama said.

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

You know, I’m sure this will be a problem. I mean, it’s not like being skinny is still held up as the ultimate ideal for all Americans. Being fat is the new “it” thing. Why, I understand Seattle Sutton has fled the country for more tolerant Canada, while the last health club locked its doors last week. Plus, as a fat guy, I can tell you that all fat people hate skinny people, because nobody knows better than fat people that your body type is far more important than the ideas you have, the skills you possess, or the personality that animates you.

Snark aside — no, Wall Street Journal, Obama’s skinniness is not a deal-breaker. Indeed, as anyone who has engaged in American society can tell you, it’s an asset. There’s a reason Mike Huckabee wasn’t considered a presidential contender until he had bariatric surgery lost a lot of weight through “willpower.” This nation is far from embracing the idea that one’s body type does not correlate with one’s worth as a human being — and that includes a number of fat-hating fat people, who will be happy to tell you at length why Obama’s skinniness is a strength.

As for me, I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to care whether Obama was fat, thin, or trapezoidal. I just want a president who will wind down the Iraq war and not set the rights of women and the GLBTQQ community back 30 years. And given my choices, I think that I’ll pull the lever for Obama, whatever he weighs.

(Via Kevin Drum)

In comments, Daran (whose site is likely to infuriate most “Alas” readers, so don’t click through if you don’t want that) pointed out this study:

EAST LANSING, Mich. — New research led by a Michigan State University scholar refutes commonly held stereotypes that overweight workers are lazier, more emotionally unstable and harder to get along with than their “normal weight” colleagues.

With the findings, employers are urged to guard against the use of weight-based stereotypes when it comes to hiring, promoting or firing.

Mark Roehling, associate professor of human resource management, and two colleagues studied the relationship between body weight and personality traits for nearly 3,500 adults. Contrary to widely held stereotypes, overweight and obese adults were not found to be significantly less conscientious, less agreeable, less extraverted or less emotionally stable.

It’s sad that this sort of research is necessary at all, and I’m sure on this blog the reaction will be “well, duh!” But probably the research is necessary, because the fact is that employers discriminate on exactly this basis:

“Previous research has demonstrated that many employers hold negative stereotypes about obese workers, and those beliefs contribute to discrimination against overweight workers at virtually every stage of the employment process, from hiring to promotion to firing,” Roehling said.

Of course, research alone can’t change many minds, because the prejudice against fat people is not based in reason. But it’s another piece of ammo that can be used to push people in the right direction, I think.

Although this article doesn’t note it, other research has shown that the wage penalty for being fat is larger for fat women. This is seemingly because men have to be very fat to be discriminated against as much as women who are only a bit fat.

(There are some spoilers in this post.)

I was bewildered by the plot point about bone mass. The writers went out of their way to establish that generations of living in low gravity have reduced bone mass to the point that people can no longer stand upright — until the plot called for them to stand, at which point, they stood. It was especially hard to buy how easily all the humans were standing on Earth at the end; they should have been writhing in agony after reaching Earth. And they definitely should not have been able to walk.

It bewilders me, because they could have avoided the whole problem by not bringing it up in the first place. I’d be quite happy to accept a movie just ignoring the problem. But why explicitly bring up a problem in the script just so they can fail to solve it?

The best part of the movie — the first forty minutes or so, before the plot leaves the planet’s surface — presents a world in which humans are entirely absent (although the evidence we were once there is all over the place). And it was pretty damn cool, because humanity wasn’t the subject of the movie; it’s a movie about robots. Then, in the final act, suddenly the plot became human-centric. It’s as if the humans writing the film couldn’t stand letting the story be centered on non-humans.

The film would have been better if it were indifferent to the fate of the humans. I would have loved it if all the humans had died in the course of the film, but the ending was nonetheless happy because Wall-E and Eve lived happily ever after. (Why should they care what happens to the meat?)

* * *

FAT

A lot of bloggers have been commenting on the politics of Wall-E. On the up side, conservative bloggers hate this film, so gotta love that.

On the down side, it’s been getting a lot of criticism from pro-fat blogs, and rightly so. The Chicago Tribune review (via Big Fat Blog) summed up the film’s take on fat:

Awaiting the word that Earth is once again habitable, the ship spends year after year in space, sustaining the last remaining humans–blobby, pampered creatures who never get out of their whiz-bang flying loungers long enough to look at what they’ve become.

My take on this is that although there was annoying fat bigotry built into the film’s concept, I’ve seen much worse. I was able to enjoy the film despite the fat bigotry.

But it’s going to depend on one’s individual taste. Wall-E’s fat characters aren’t contemptible, repulsive slobs, like Fat Bastard, nor — despite the constant sipping of drinks — are they food-obsessed like Homer Simpson. Instead, they’re presented as huge infants: round, helpless, cheerful and friendly. So unlike Jessica, I didn’t find it all that wince-able, and enjoyed the film.

Fatshonista points out that Pixar apparently changed the film to make it less anti-fat, compared to its initial conception.

My Pixar friend said that essentially, the idea is that humanity was supposed to spend just 5 years on the luxury spaceship, but got trapped for 700 years, and because of the super-artificial situation (it was meant to be a total vacation to recruit people into going), got dependent in an artificial way. Originally they were apparently designed to be rather more gross and creepy, and had no intelligible lines; both of those were changed by the team working on the movie because of concerns about what it would suggest about fat people.

Now, the equation of sloth + fast food = fatties is still at the heart of this, and is undeniably problematic.

I liked this comment from Rethink:

Pixar tries to suggest in one throw-away moment that the people are fat because they have been in space so long and lost some bone density, but the much clearer message is that they are chunky because they are lazy and eat too much (and several times the characters’ large size is used for visual jokes). A clear sign that Pixar recognized the nastiness of their message is that they chose not insult their target audience: kids. There are no children, let alone overweight children, at all on the ship — we see only babies and chubby adults. [And good luck finding images of any of the chubby characters in Disney's advertising for the film or the film's official website.]

More ironic still is that the film’s criticism seems to be levelled at the very folks who are viewing the movie — you and me, sitting there, doing nothing, watching a screen while consuming buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. The movie wants us to know that mass consumerism will doom this planet and its people. And you can show your support for that message by going out and buying all the Disney tie-in products and toys that will be filling your store shelves, and eventually your landfills, in the next 6-12 months.

I also think this post from Red No. 3, responding to defenders of the film, is good:

….irregardless of what sci-fi talk about bone density was snuck into the film, audiences took the characters to be fat and ultimately the audience interpration matters more culturally than the filmmakers intent. Intent is nice, but if that intent was not effectively communicated to the audience, it doesn’t matter. Just look through what the reviews say. From professionals to amateurs, people talking about the film have consistantly identified the future humans as “obese”. And of course they do, because that is the visual language the film is using, complete with cues about the characters’ gluttony and inactivity.

More fat-and-Wall-E blogging: Professor What If and Feministe.

* * *

GENDER

I haven’t seen much discussion of the genderization of the robots in Wall-E. Essentially, Wall-E is presented as male, while Eve is presented as female. Visually, this is done by constructing Wall-E of machinery that resembles construction site equipment — rusty, dirty, treader tracks and forklifts — while Eve is rendered to resemble a Macintosh computer — smooth, curved lines of white plastic. (As methods of making a robot femme goes, it could be much worse. Actually, it’s extraordinary they resisted the impulse to either color Eve pink, or to give her a bow or eyelashes.)

I wish the gendering hadn’t been done; it would have been wonderful if Pixar had shown a romance that wasn’t gendered at all. But still, as Professor What If says, props to Pixar for making Eve tough and strong (she rescues Wall-E several times during the film), for making Wall-E nurturing, and for not making Eve’s toughness a threat to Wall-E.

(And in case you’re wondering, no, this movie doesn’t pass The Bechdel Test.)

* * *

RACE

Oh, and although I’m sure folks will rationalize it (”in the racist Earth society, the people rescued and sent into space were disproportionately white!”), it bothered me that humanity, as presented in Wall-E, is overwhelmingly white. (I think some background characters were people of color; every single human who had a speaking role was white).

In a science fiction movie — and one that didn’t face any real-world casting limitations — there’s no excuse for not presenting humanity as it is. To reflect the actual make-up of humanity, most of the humans in Wall-E should have been Asian, with substantial minorities of Europeans, Africans, and Latin@s.

Via Sweetmachine:

The inaugural Fat Women of Color Carnival will be held over at saskaia.livejournal.com on July 23. The theme is general and open to anything pertaining to being a fat woman of color and our experiences in our communities, experiences on how our fat and bodies are racialized, myths about fat women of color, and so on. Please link all entries here by July 20. Please promote as applicable and appropriate.