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Possibly the best nonfiction I’ve read this year.

The book follows a large-scale, 2 year longitudinal study on two groups: one following the Atkins Diet, and the other, a traditional low-fat diet. This description is deceiving, however. Not only does the author take time to reveal the history of dieting (fascinating -just about every diet I can think of has been around for at least 200 years) she also presents some very damning evidence from top obesity researchers over the last 50 years. Their findings? Well, if we cared to listen to them, the diet industry would have been done for many years ago.

Some findings, in point form (please forgive lack of citations –  I don’t have the book with me now).

1. Starvation causes food-related neurosis.
After first starving a couple hundred healthy, non-obese consciences objectors during WWII to determine the effects of a diet reduced by 50% of its calories, researchers found that the participants all developed strange habits, rituals, and obsessions about food- including stealing, sneaking and binging. This was later found to be true of obese dieters put on reduced-calorie liquid diets. No matter your weight, starvation will cause your mind to react in a way it thinks will increase your survival: obsession with food. Food neuroses last a long time – well after the diet was over participants still binged and felt they had little control over their constant, insatiable hunger.

2. It’s not about metabolism.
Skinny people have fast metabolisms; fat people have slow. Right?
Nope. Besides there being a wide variety of metabolisms, metabolism is apparently not a factor or thinness or fatness for most people. In the rare case of a underactive or hyperactive thyroid, yes, this will usually effect weight. But it’s not unheard of for a overweight person to have a faster metabolism than the next skinny person. Metabolism is also a changeable factor – sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down.

3. Diets – ancient assumptions, repackaged.
2,000 years ago, the dieting fad was “eat less, exercise more.” When that doesn’t seem to get everyone at their ultimate leanness, even today those people in question’s “willpower” is brought into question – and even their mental stability! Against all science has been trying to tell us, we, and everyone benefiting from diet and exercise fads, would like to believe that the only person to blame for our less-than-emaciated physiques is ourselves. THIS diet will really do the trick. THIS time I’m really going to get those pounds off- and keep them off. NOW that I’ve dealt with my emotional issues. NOW that I’ve figured out the REAL culprit of weight-gain. And yet… why does my best friend have such a hard time KEEPING on an extra five pounds?

4. We each have unique “set” weights which we likely inherited.

LALALALA*ICAN’THEARYOU*LALALA.

Okay. It’s time we all get our heads out of the sand about this one.
Imagine a balance teetering back and forth until it comes to a rest. In the case of your body, that could be your set weight. When you have lost weight so that you weigh less than your usual weight, it seems all too easy – cruel, almost – for the pounds to come back. And when you weigh more than that weight, it’s not an outlandish challenge to lose the pounds – until you get back to your familiar weight, where the weight-loss slows, and then stops. Does this sound familiar? I’d like to introduce you to your “set weight.” Being 10lbs more or less than your set weight, according to these researchers, is a huge and constant battle, one which your body will adjust its metabolism accordingly to foil you (see previous point). Hence, it’s just as hard for me to lose five pounds and keep it off as it is for my friend to gain five and keep it on.
Also, it would seem that body weight is even more heritable than some of the most heritable characteristics, such as breast cancer and mental illness. Identical twins, even when separated at birth, are almost guaranteed to have similar set weights, and even store fat in the same places.

5. What does this all mean?
Well, first of all, it means we can predict what the Atkins and the Low-Fat dieters found over their two-year period.
At first, the pounds came off quickly and without too much struggle. Then they slowed. Then, as the pendulum began to swing the other way, to the dieter’s dismay and confusion, some of the pounds came back, settling at the dieter’s set weight – even though the dieter’s diet had remained consistent throughout. It turns out that the body’s “thermostat” for calorie consumption is a magnificent machine, and will do your calorie-counting for you in order for it to keep you at the weight it wants you to be. If that means it has to slow your metabolism and/or make you so ravenously hungry that you unconsciously “cheat” the diet, so be it.

6. Fat is not the enemy.
How did we come to have such a hateful relationship with fat, anyways?
Most people will point out that being fat is unhealthy.
Not so, according to now-acclaimed health staticians. In fact, overweight people live the longest – longer than very thin people, and longer than “normal” weighing people. Of course, the bell curve starts to go down around extreme obesity, just as it does with extreme thinness. Around the turn of the 20th century, life insurance companies thought that weight was directly correlated with health and so started having all applicants be weighed with an expensive contraption they invented for weighing humans – unheard of, at the time. Soon being weighed and equating a low weight with health was common practice. You have an insurance company to thank for your bathroom scale.

7. The Gibson Girl was a drawing – and you can, too!
How about idolizing images of almost unearthly tall and thin young women? Ones that we have to find out of a million, starve, and then Photoshop in order to have the “right” proportions? And yet most girls by the age of 8 now (!) feel bad about not personally achieving?
The author believes it started with the Gibson Girl. Who was a drawing. A sketch. A fabrication not based on any living being. But she represented something powerful – the ultimate, aloof, beautiful, independent all-American woman. Something amazing happens when you take equal parts nationalism, the desires (real or invented) of women, the desires (real or invented) of men, and embody them in one unattainable ideal of beauty, and then proceed to use that ideal for every other marketing campaign of the decade.
Shit, yaara, as they would say in India.

7. Feeling good.
Not surprisingly, most people felt the most energetic, healthy, and good about themselves when their weight was at the lower end of their set range. This probably means that getting a nutritious diet with plenty of veggies and fruits and living at least moderately actively feels good- no surprises there. So there is SOMTHING to be said about willpower, diet and exercise. Just not that they’re going to make your fabulously, Gibson Girl thin, if only you were a person of greater mental and emotional integrity.

I think this is magnificent. Now, if only we lived in a culture where body size, shape and weight were expected to vary greatly. If only we celebrated that. If only we stopped scapegoating every fat person as everything that is wrong with our society – heck, they might be the healthier, longer-living of all of us. And if only we could give up on trying to obtain this ideal and – cliché as it is -look at ourselves naked in the mirror and realize that, yes, this is it for life. And be okay with that.

It’s been over a hundred years of dying to be thin. Can we get off the hamster wheel, now?  What can we do today and for the rest of our lives to re-shape our society so that it is safe to live in again for all body types? Not only safe, but wonderful?

Thanks for reading, y’all!

Clay