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I've been meaning for awhile to sit down and write a review of Pattie Thomas's new book, Taking up Space. It actually came out in October, and I wrote a little bit on my livejournal at the time (here), but here's a full review...

This book rocked.

End of review!

Really. It is, I hope, seminal in the way that Paul Campos's 'Obesity Myth' (or should I say 'Diet Myth') has turned out to be. If you go to Amazon these days and look up his book, there are at least 20 others related to it, telling essentially the same story with a different angle or newer facts. I want Pattie's book to do the same thing, because it's the sort of book I've been waiting for. It's an Official Fat Chick Book that has something serious and smart to say - equal parts memoir and sociological study, as promised, but also a guide to living in and changing a world that really hates fat people.

That last bit is what makes it extraordinary and rocksome. I wouldn't argue that we don't need Paul Campos and others writing all those other books critiquing the 'science' behind the Obesity Crisis! Egads! - because we undoubtedly do need that kind of writing to debunk all the ridiculous legend-making about fat done by much of the mainstream media and the diet industry. Someone's got to point out that there's a problem with what we're hearing - and probably a lot of someones, if we're going to get anywhere near balanced, rational thinking on the subject.

But. Equally necessary are the people living fat and speaking out about it, particularly the folk like Pattie who can help connect both other fat and non-fat people to their experience. It's a weapon against hearts, not just against minds and science. It's a weapon for hearts, too - fat people's stories get told so rarely, except as the 'success story' of not being fat anymore. Those stories make it sound like the real person was the Skinny Chick Inside, and not the fat one afterall.

Pattie's story is absolutely nothing like that.

Read the book. I truly enjoyed it, and not just for what it represents - the writing is frank and thought-provoking, too.

And this Salon article about Torrid (whether it 'promotes obesity', I kid you not - someone actually went to the trouble of writing about this topic) was going so well. It was tracking nicely towards the conclusion that its own premise was absurd - which, well, it is.

Until the last page.

On the other hand, there's only so much that cool plus-size clothing can do. After all, it's not as if a teen who scores a killer corset is going to forget -- or not care -- that she's fat. "It's very painful to be an overweight teen, and clothes do not change that," says Janet R. Laubgross, a clinical psychologist in Fairfax, Va., who specializes in weight management. To some degree, no matter what they're wearing -- and no matter what "I'm big and beautiful!" banners they're waving -- they're still suffering. "I think they're trying to convince themselves," Laubgross says of some teens who say they feel 150 percent fine about how they look. "I'm glad they're being acknowledged as real people who deserve to dress nicely, that they're feeling like they do matter. And it's great that they can say, 'Well, this looks nice.' But it's still 'nice' from the fat-girl store."

Once, just once, I would have liked the article to mention that it's entirely possible that fat people are hot. Even hotter than not-fat people. Particularly when you consider that Torrid's line starts with average-ish women's sizes [12 aka "0" - reimagining the world into a place where 0 is the baseline and everything above or below is counted forward or back from average, I guess], and average-ish women, their fat and thin counterparts are all getting some. Clearly actual human beings think actual human beings of a wide range of sizes are hot.

I mean. This is not the cause of fat activism. The cause of fat activism is, among other things, that you have to go to a Fat Girl Store in the first place (although, if every store had a specific size range, that might uncomplicate things nicely). This is simple reality talking. Beauty standards are bollocks when you look at what real people are attracted to, and it is not - I repeat NOT - inherently less-good to be fat.

Honestly, given some recent LJ conversations, I think it may be more-good to be fat [I don't know why I'm suddenly all 1984 with my adjectives here.], as fat people sometimes seem to have a better or at least more visceral grasp on the gaping chasm between "beauty standard" and reality.

Of course, the woman in that quote is a "weight management" expert, who counsels people into feeling like shit and losing weight. In other words, she makes a living on the false promise that it is in fact ungood to be fat, no matter what. And hey, it might work for the people who come to her. Maybe their lives are better after losing weight, or maybe their lives would have been just fine if they'd seen a plain old therapist. I don't know.

But.

I'd just like it mentioned ONCE. I'd like such articles to accept the possibility for even a milisecond that fat teenage girls might have no worse self-image than teenage girls who aren't fat. It could even be dismissed, if it were just said. Even said really apologetically, like the "being fat might not be unhealthy" comment the author snuck in:

To be sure, weight itself is not universally toxic; many plus sizers are quite healthy -- possibly more so, in fact, than the skinnies who live on Whoppers "because they can." But being overweight has been linked to all manner of serious problems...

I'd like a media outlet to briefly stop delegitimizing girls' [and women's and everyone's] experiences in general, honestly. It drives me insane that media coverage of such things never gets the reality or breadthof people's experience. Cause the more we saw that some folks' experience of being [insert "other"-branded trait here], the more that would spread. It would just take an effing sentence.

Everyone knows I didn't care for Supersize Me and its general wrongheadedness (and if you don't, by all means go back to last fall's blog and read up). But as I was reading some random other thing on the admittedly quite biased consumerfreedom.com, I came across this:

MTV viewers may remember Spurlock's short-lived show ''I Bet You Will,'' whose motto was ''stupidity pays.'' With cameras rolling, Spurlock paid a man to gulp down an entire 24-ounce jar of mayonnaise... Not surprisingly, the show featured an ''Official Puke Bucket.''
from ''Super Size Me' Is Just Another Sick Reality Show' - which, well, it kinda is

The op-ed piece is obviously not a factual circus of fun, but I at least assume it wouldn't use totally made up information. I didn't know that (about the bucket of puke show). And it explains so much about the presentation of that movie: it's all geared to the shocktainment of the "money shot" of some dude puking in a bucket (or, you know, on the street - the location is immaterial).

Sorry for making you read the word "puke" so many times there, kids. But it intrigues me that, as I was going back through some of my fat/health posts to bring you my scintillating commentary on Super Size Me, the image of people vomiting is a big part of the media representation of fat. I think it's not-so-subliminal messaging. Every kid knows vomit is gross, right? And fat people are gross, too! So bring on the puke bucket!

What I was originally reading, by the way, is a news bit on that largely unsupportable theory that kids getting fat means they're going to die younger than their parents. The truth? No, they're not. Even the CDC says kids born last year can expect to live longer than mom and dad. But you'd be better off reading Paul's summary of the whole thing than bothering with the Consumer Freedom peeps. They're entertaining, but well, it's a little "pot? this is kettle... you're black!" when they call the Everyone's Dying! study peeps scare mongerers.

On the Today Show this morning and on MSNBC, there's coverage of recent studies that question whether dieting is any good or not: they basically say Weight Watchers is the only viable plan, but the NY Times article on essentially the same topic comes pretty close to condemning dieting as a practice and goes a little further into examining the reasons people diet - like the fact that just going on a weightloss diet often makes people instantly feel like happier, better people, without any results at all.

I started watching the Today Show three years ago after the whole terrorism thing shocked me out of my liberal news-bubble of NPR and into watching CNN, which totally disabused me of the idea that the media is liberal. Cause, whoa. It's not. I don't know if it's me too far to the left or the conservative talk radio phenomenon being too far to the right, but CNN? Disturbingly hawkish, in my view. NBC's morning news is much lighter fare, and widely watched in a way that makes me feel I'm Being America by tuning in.

I'm sure y'all don't care what morning television I watch and why, but seeing this covered by the Today Show felt pretty significant to me - as if America in a large, capital-lettery way were finally starting to get the message about fat. Just barely, but starting. That's something! The Times article, even though it was more thought-provoking, feels less significant because the Times has already covered some kinda radical perspectives on fat and food and stuff. To hear "well, maybe diet programs aren't the swellest; we don't know" from Today, bastion of weight loss surgery (if you don't know the show, the weatherdude's WLS was very highly publicized and praised), feels like major progress - even if it is heavily qualified as "commercial" programs "other than Weight Watchers".

Oh, joy! Another pat solution to the Crisis of Obesity, Egads! You just need to sleep more! [I apologize in advance for the oversimplifications and impossibly immature language that appears throughout this post. I'm rubber, and you're glue. Also, bonus points for those who recognize the title's origin.]

This is actually a month old, but it's been re-circulating via email and various websites for whatever reason. The study itself isn't compelling (really, couldn't people whose whole job is to study fat find ANYTHING else to talk about?), but I find the language used in reporting it just plain stupid.

For example:

The study, presented at the meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, analyzed data from 18,000 adults and found that those who slept less than the recommended seven hours a night had an increased risk of obesity. People who slept for less than four hours per night were 73 percent more likely to be obese than those who slept for seven to nine hours. Getting five hours of sleep or less decreased that risk to 50 percent, and getting six hours or less decreased it even more to 23 percent. ---from the text of the study, as quoted in nearly every press-release spouting article that covered it

I may be cynical here, but I expect the story would have read quite the opposite if the study had found a connection between more sleep and fatness. That story, I imagine, would have run something like: "Proven: fat ass fatty fatpantses really are lazy snoozebutts" - or possibly something ever so slightly more mature-sounding.

But the language must still be all about causation, don't you know!

The language turns it into "if you only sleep 5 hours, you are going to be fat, Mr. Fatty Fatpants!", doesn't it? It seems like 73 percent more likely to be obese is likely to be read by the average layperson (i.e. me) as 73 percent more likely to get fat and dieeeeeeee. Why can't the reporting spell out what they found more clearly? As in, "We looked at a big old data dump [They used one of the NHANES data sets] and found that being fat and not sleeping very much seem to be related. We don't know why, because we never know why." - okay, maybe leaving off that last snarky bit for serious new venues.

I joked a while back that I'd like to have my very own huge set of data that I could manipulate and infer from, and it turns out that I could probably do that with a combination of the NHANES stuff and census data. But I was joking, people. I don't expect serious science to be all about the data dredge. The Obesity Crisis, Egads!, however is all about the data dredge. There's a good article at Tech Central Station about why the data dredge is totally uncool - if, you know, a good time - which you should read if you're intrigued by the Obesity Crisis, Egads!'s scientific backup.

I look at this stuff as progress, though. The more useless the science gets, the less the average person's going to pay attention to it. Right?

Right?

Last week a story about taking diet pills being linked to having gay kids circulated around the net quite a bit. The articles annoyingly never seem to highlight any biological reason why the study's hypothesis would even be considered [Presumably there must have been some - was it just too complex for the press to grasp?], which leaves you with just a vague idea that not having "control" over your weight might be somehow linked to not having "control" over your kids' queerness.

Sigh.

But improved by Ampersand's couple of posts relating the bias against fatness to the bias against gayness (though I would substitute "queerness", as the same questions apply to bisexual and genderqueer folk). It's not a new comparison to make - both are characteristics for which a person may face discrimination; both are also subject to a lot of inconclusive research as to their cause. But Amp starts by presenting research showing why fat isn't as simple as calories in/calories out (a good summary of the research, and important, given that his audience seems to be completely unfamiliar with the subject) and continues on to analogize fat and gay (intriguingly, he doesn't have to present research about the "why" of gay - which implies that his more "mainstream", largely liberal, audience is much more familiar with the debate over the root of homosexuality than with the debate over what makes a person fat).

It's clear when I read these discussions elsewhere that I am shockingly radical. Much more radical than I ever think of myself as being.

So, Amp's presentation of the research is - as always - tremendously useful. But he wades too far into the idea that one's discrimination-inducing characteristics must be unchallengeable and inalienable in order to be defended against discrimination. Not true! I believe the queer community made a pretty stupid political mistake when it took the route of saying gayness is something one is born to (although this remains a key point in individual queer identities - it's not a useless idea, just a bad political gambit). What if it isn't? What if gayness is as much about behavior as identity? What if identity is mutable? What if one can choose to be queer?

Does that make it okay to hate queer folk? The people who answer "yes" to my rhetorical question are going to think that way no matter what the community argues about the cause(s) of queerness. Positioning gay as the new black (racially) made the debate less about civil rights and more about whether a group deserves civil rights on the same grounds as racial identity.

What the fat movement could bring to this debate is to fight from a whole different angle. Prove that simply being fat doesn't make you a drag on the economy, maybe - because that undermines the favorite argument for anti-fat politics. But don't get bogged down in the "how did we get here?" science. It doesn't matter. If people get fat by choice, and being fat doesn't hurt others (and maybe even if it does - asshats of any size still get rights, and they hurt everyone), then there is no reason to discriminate against fat folk.

Really, the most effective argument in favor of any minority group's rights is more analogous to the right to religious freedom than anything else - one chooses one's religion, and that's a defended choice. Period. No "are people born Catholic, or do they choose it?" debate needed.

On a personal level, I almost can't handle reading the damned comments on posts like this. When people argue that I'm flat-out lying about how much I eat and exercise (and that any fat person who stays fat is doing the same), the urge to verbally gouge out their eyes is too great. But it would accomplish nothing - these are people who wouldn't believe me if they lived in my house for a month; they'd assume I was bingeing undercover or something, because they mysteriously have some part of their identities caught up in the idea that fat people are morally inferior. Arghhhhhhhhh.

Reading the Tech Central article on Ancel Keys actually made me laugh, aloud, at work. It's not so much funny ha-ha as funny strange, or even maybe funny sad.

Keys, you see, did the Minnesota Starvation Study during WWII [He's also the k-rations dude, if you're interested.]. That study continues to stand as evidence of what semi-starvation (dieting) does to the body, basically turning you into a food-obsessed binger who regains weight and loses strength with each starvation (diet) episode. Which any lifetime dieter could tell you about, anyhow. And you become completely uninterested in pretty much anything else, which any actual starving person - and, you know, Maslow - could probably tell you. If they were interested in being that political, which they probably wouldn't be. And you end up with physical problems that you never fully recover from.

So far, you're just seeing the sad and not the funny, right?

The funny is that Keys, whose research condemns dieting, still thought fat people were disgusting and lacked willpower. So, he figures out that dieting is bad and makes you fatter and that fat had no independent health effects, but he still attributes fatness exclusively to overeating and finds it very, very icky. What's not funny about that? And, you know - sad.

It's basically our cultural concept of fat. Despite whatever evidence may exist to the contrary, we want to believe that fatness deserves punishment and is unhealthy and that we can buy our way out of it with diets. Because it's just so much eeeeasier if that's true.

And it's just so perfect that an article on Keys, of all people, should point that out so clearly.

I usually don't (won't) watch any reality television. Television is better if it either collects something, information or art or whatever, or just appeals to my fantasy.

But last week I watched the "Loser" weightloss show (and blogged it), and this week I found myself watching it again.

I want to draw some connection between this show and Kathleen LeBesco's latest. I was disappointed in the book a bit - it doesn't have a lot that seems new and drastic to say, and I loved the transgressiveness and inversion of Bodies out of Bounds. And really, how much did I need to re-hear the point that Judith Butler's insights on queerness and gender apply to fat, too? Seems obvious.

But LeBesco's perspective on fat "apologism" is a good one. It doesn't matter politically if you contextualize it as a genetic fact or a choice, as long as you step away from thinking of fat as a disease and a debilitation in and of itself. I said that a couple of years ago, and I'm pretty sure the others I've learned from have been saying it for much longer. Some things bear repeating.

This television show is strangely compelling. I think anyone who can watch it without revulsion is hoping for a transformation. Probably most people aren't thinking of the transformation I'm thinking of, though.

Last night, everyone lost a lot less weight than the first week. Yeah, I've seen that cycle before. I bet all the fat people on the show did. They voted off a woman who weighed maybe 175 lbs (pretty tall, too) and didn't lose weight; they decided that small people had less weight to lose. That's the barometer they go with when they vote off team members, who they think has the most capability to lose more, based entirely on what they weigh. They cry a lot, which makes sense - they're in the worst sort of boot camp, and it's not like they can really rely on their team members for support. I suppose the show is aiming for sniping and such. It's pretty revolting. It intentionally plays the emotions. It wants to be revolting.

So, the first week they leech all the water out of their bodies, and the second week they lose a little weight. Exercising most of each day, eating a lot less than normal, basically giving up all sense of normal routine and their own community; it's no surprise that they're pissed they don't lose more. It doesn't seem like anyone notices that these results say a lot about the complexities of people's response to food reduction and exercise. We're not calorie-processing machines. That's what I would want people to take away. It's more complicated than that. People build muscle, too. Muscle is heavier. I wanted to grab and shake someone and say "IF YOU FEEL HEALTHIER, MAYBE YOU ARE" when she started crying about how she felt so good but she was just bad because she wasn't losing 20lbs every week.

The women they voted off this week and last get shown at the end of the episode with how much weight they lost or kept off. I wonder if they think 10 lbs is failure or success, you know? If they think that 10 lbs is worth handing weeks of your life over to someone else?

We must feel so badly about the body. As a culture, I mean, we must feel terrible and hateful things to want so badly to change this little quantifiable number. To make it smaller; to make making it smaller this overarching focus. It seems like something's fundamentally broken.

I don't think that combatting the science of the Obesity Crisis! Egads! is really about apologism. I think Kathleen's wrong about that one. The audience is different. The science is our olive branch to the people on the "Loser" show and the people who are thinking the same things but not on television. People who haven't had the realization that weight gain or loss isn't all about willpower, but might be happier if they did. Maybe you need to have that before you can start to wonder whether fat is really all that bad or not.

I started to care about these people, about the things they represent in the rest of us. That's why I keep watching this show. I want them to feel better. I want to understand better how they came to conclude that this was the thing to do.

I want - I want more people to look up and look around them and wonder why they have to waste all this time and maybe, well - revolt. And I kinda want the big quiet black man to win or to stand up and walk out.

Where is that from? "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" - that's from something, right? Maybe a commercial from the eighties. But - for what?

In all seriousness, I can't believe I watched the entirety of NBC's deeply pointless Biggest Loser last night. My excuse is that I was also doing my clubbells, which took me a lot longer than the 40 minutes it was supposed to, but still not nearly an hour and a half (the length of this show). The workout is mentally involving, and while I like having something to look at, I don't pay a lot of attention. Yeah.

Trust me, I paid enough attention to this show, though. It was about as contrived and ridiculous as the average "reality" show, with the added bonus of spreading some misinformation about fat and weight and such. It's essentially one of those "people live in a house and vote each other off" shows mixed with the most aggressive fat camp ever mixed with that show where people eat bugs and stuff (lots of shots of giant piles of donuts and fried chicken looking really icky). They fat camp it up, they get weighed, the team who loses less votes someone off. They cry and vomit, often at the same time.

I started out thinking it wasn't that bad, silly but not stupid - that is, that the concept was overworked, but the essential message was okay. Because they did start off talking about living more healthily (a self-involved fixation for a lot of us, self included, but one with a positive intent). For instance, the players were all greated with all the food each of them had eaten for the prior week, laid out on a table. There were a lot of donuts and cheeseburgers. And sure, eating a dozen donuts over a week, not so good for you (particularly not so good for your energy) no matter what you weigh.

From there, though, it became more and more apparent that, whatever "healthy" meant to these folks (both those producing and those participating), that was ultimately much less important than the appearance of "healthy", aka THIN(ner). Very Darcy/Mr. Wickham of them.

One of the most telling moments in the show involved one of the women breaking down because she DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO EAT (her caps, not mine). And we were just talking in the body_positive community about the possibility that America has collectively dieted itself out of touch with real eating. Fascinating - there it was on screen. The bummer, though, is that the approach being taken on this show (layering on rules) is exactly why people have a hard time knowing how to eat in the first place. It doesn't seem to me (from years of dieting and watching others do it) that dieting rules only beget more dieting rules and rule-breakers.

But the approach, despite trainers' assertion to the contrary, is clearly not centered on giving people a new approach to life - dude, they work out basically 8 hours a day. Which could be a new approach - essentially making exercise and food-counting the only things you have time to do - but is really just an intense diet program, one so intense that most people couldn't maintain it as a lifestyle (and therefore, presumably, these people will go back to being their old fat selves - possibly ditching the whole thing the first time they gain a pound). This is only emphasized by the insane weightloss people experienced the first week - some of them lost as much as 5% of their body mass, indicating they could have lost muscle as well as fat. Ick. The shows powers that be took measurements and body fat percentages and such, but the participants were only accountable for the pounds, thus reinforcing the idea that a scale number is a good measure of your health and value. See? Not just silly, stupid, too!

I wonder what would have happened if a size acceptance advocate had snuck on to the show as a participant. I guess they would have been voted off, whether they also lost weight or not - because a key part of the show seems to be the participants' willingness to humiliate themselves. Seriously. The trainers think of exercising until you vomit as a good thing. If a thin unfit person did this shit, we'd think (quite rightly) s/he was bulimic. But if a fat person does it, I think we're supposed to assume they're being served appropriately.

Sigh. Not watching THAT again. I will say, other than the panicked attitude towards their size evinced by the participants, the show is no worse a blow to good health and reasonable thinking than anything on the morning news. And it's probably no worse at trading on humiliation that any other "reality" show for trading on humiliation.

Why do we like this stuff? I have to find someone who watches such things and ask. I don't get it.

This past weekend I rented Supersize Me on a whim. Thanks to the invention of the "movie pass" at the video store, I now feel I can watch even movies I know I'll hate bits of, and actually get more value for my dollar (if, perhaps, less value for my time).

It was not as bad as I had expected.

Last entry I mentioned wanting to write down all the steps I'd taken where my body imagey stuff was concerned, for posterity or for the curious or whatever. I tried not to draw too many conclusions as I wrote it (to just let events stand for themselves), but that didn't work out so well. Really, when you're talking about memory, how do you go about distancing what happened from what you think about what happened?

So, here goes. I've tackled it as a complete history, cause that was interesting to me. If you're looking for advice on living, I would skip way past college if I were you.

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, a guest blogger is bringing up all the same well-intentioned ideas about the Crisis of Fat (Egads!) that everyone trots out. [link via Crooked Timber and BFB]

Now, it turns out that:

Feminists and liberals have transformed a legitimate medical issue of the poor into identity politics for the affluent,” [author and friend Greg Christer] told me, “which I find the worst kind of narcissistic behavior.

Greg Crister, by the way, wrote a pretty good book (Fatland) that is in part an indictment of food industry and diet culture and economics, but instead chooses to focus on the lack of "personal responsibility" that fat symbolizes and the pathologization of fat as the disease (not the symptom). I think he ought to consider using some of that money from his book to travel from place to place re-educating the people who made fun of him (Jay and Silent Bob style); it might make him feel better.

But then, I think the binge and purge ethic that dominates our culture, part of the generally pornographic sale of the body, is in fact the worst kind of narcissm.

On to the problems implicit in the posts and associated comments, all of which were at least politely worded, if offbase (a vast improvement over, say, MetaFilter).

Well intentioned but misguided idea number one: fat is a disease. Fat in and of itself is not a medical issue for most people (even for some who think their fatness causes their other health problems, the causes are more complex than that). It isn't an accurate predictor of any individual's health. Are there unhealthy fat people? Sure. Are there healthy ones, too? You bet.

Treating fat itself as a disease misses the essential physical activity and nutritional issues that lead to ill health in both fat and thin folk (and sure, there's correlation between those issues and becoming fat). As Eileen touched on earlier in the comment thread, we're basically thinking of a symptom as the disease itself. That's a fundamentally flawed approach. It leads us to prescribe weightloss dieting (which for many people is a sure way to gain weight) and treat gastric bypass as a medical necessity - because we think FATNESS, not the host of things that might have led to it, is the cause of unhealth. Treating the root symptoms is something Medicare/Medicaid could and should cover (if you believe there should be government subsidies for medical care at all, as any contracted illness or injury could be considered a "lifestyle choice"). Weight loss surgery? I have a problem with that - not because of my latent libertarianism, but because it seems like stupid medicine.

Well intentioned but misguided idea number two: fat means we're a wildly out of control culture where people - particularly the middle class - won't take personal responsibility for anything. This just doesn't fit with the number of people on diets, the number of people selling diets, the number of people with gym memberships, etc. - the shear volume of things we buy to make us less fat seems to say that at least we'll take responsibility for becoming unfat (no matter the cost, and in the easiest, fastest way possible, please).

But this one is also true, just not in the way it sometimes gets interpreted. As Crister's book points out, we are pretty wild with the consumption. Ironically, though, we're wild in part for things that alleviate our embarassment about our symbolic overconsumption, those Last Ten Pounds.

Well intentioned but misguided idea number three: fat will melt away if you become physically active and eat less/better. For some people, it will. For some, it won't. For most of us, better health will result no matter what. The body is not a simple calorie machine, so healthier habits don't necessarily have any impact on weight whatsoever.

The thing is, fat hate is so engrained for many of us that we want to see body size as somehow moral, or at least indicative of health. If you're going to spend so much time and energy on what you eat, how you move, what you wear, it ought to have some greater value, right?

Fat activists and feminists who engage in discussion of body politics aren't doing so to distract from the very real problems of inactivity and bad food consumption or from the drastic socioeconomic inequality that attends those problems; what we're trying to do is dispel the notion that a judgement of someone's personal worth (including health) can be easily made based on appearance.

If a social program is to solve the Crisis of Fat (Egads!), it can't just be a promise to surgically defattify individuals - it needs to address the problems - from low wages to long work weeks to poor education to lack of parks and sidewalks and low-cost fitness facilities and a general failure to take time to play and enjoy life (including our food) - that are the joint causes of ill health (the real problem) and the phantom fat crisis.

I've been reading to find more information on who diets, partly because I've seen a lot of people imply recently that poor people are fatter because they don't diet and exercise (which wildly contradicts my own experience as a former poor person) and partly because I just wonder about things.

Something interesting from my first round of research:

Dieters segmented by HOUSEHOLD INCOME

less than or equal to 130% of poverty
Percent of total: 16.2
Percent dieting: 15.2
Estimated total dieters at or below 130% of poverty (based on US census data): 5.07 million

more than 130% of poverty
Percent of total: 83.8
Percent dieting: 16.7
Estimated total dieters above 130% of poverty (based on US census data): 28.8 million

[from: Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Sept 2002 v102 i9
p1247(5)
Americans on diet: results from the 1994-1996 Continuing Survey of
Food Intakes by Individuals. (Research). Sahasporn Paeratakul; Emily
E. York-Crowe; Donald A. Williamson; Donna H. Ryan; George A. Bray. Calculations based on the study excerpted from Google Answers.]

So, as of 1996 at least, poor people were only a tiny bit less likely to be on a diet than non-poor people.

Interesting, huh? Of course, we still don't know what those diets are specifically (and I haven't located the full text of that study for free yet), and it's still clear that poor people seem to be fatter.

So why is that? More to come as I find it.

If you're on any size acceptance lists or boards (on a side note, it's remarkable how all these sites focus their discussion on more or less the same things, and just have different approaches to the same issues), you've probably seen the worst article ever written.

The author says a lot of unfounded, rather mean things about fat people. And poor people. And southerners. It would be funny if it weren't clear she thought these things were true.

I think the point she started out wanting to make was this: poorer folk really are getting fatter and possibly less healthy, and we fail to recognize the class issues in this; also, the people who are most concerned with dieting these days seem to be wealthier people who have been duped into believing they're fat when they're not. I think she's actually wrong on the latter point, but if she'd actually written an article about these two competing trends instead of trying to be as clever as possible in her "editorializing", it might have been an interesting read.

And yet, what is the point she actually makes? That poor people are icky and slaggardly, and fat people don't read.

I find this interesting, because the source is a Charleston, WVA resident. Charleston is a coal town, a town with an overwhelming feeling of industry and poverty and at least one giant Wal-Mart. Experientially, it seems like the people of Charleston are fatter than average. It also feels like they're a lot poorer than average, and that the rest of the world ought to be paying attention to this.

Maybe we should be doing some more research.

Like, what are the statistics on people in industrial towns getting on weight loss drugs like Metabolife and such? It seems like my midwestern fat relatives have done that, and weightloss surgery and fad diets a hundred times. The influx of the South Beach and Atkins diets into my "higher class" professional workplace is relatively recent, but my aunts were on Scarsdale decades ago. Is it possible that diet marketing has a class consciousness? I don't know, because I tend to tune it out. But I wouldn't be surprised.

Like, how much do wages affect health or weight gain? I don't know how many of the fat folk in Charleston work more than one job, or weird hours, or whatever. I don't know how changes in the energy market around America impact their coal and manufacturing jobs and pensions and the care they get to give their kids. And I don't know if they're just fat, or if they're also unhealthy.

I don't know if it even matters that poor people are getting fat and rich people are getting more diet-obsessed (if that's even true). But if you're going to talk about it, you ought to present some information or at least ask some questions.

Cause otherwise, you're just rewriting the worst article ever written.

I wrote a little in my LJ about watching other bellydance/raqs sharqi/whatever students perform and how much the experience of dance training has distanced me from external body projects. That is, I do not think of my body as fat, or at least not of fat as problematic, in the context of training.

It's not an experience of being totally divorced from appearance [it's not that noble], but of recognizing exactly what you are as attractive in movement. Most belly dancers are beautiful. Except that they're not, as far as predominant cultural norms are concerned.

When you think about it, though, how much of your personal feelings about what is and isn't attractive matches perfectly to what you've been told? Not much in my case; I don't know about you. It's no big shock that people can be beautiful and not meet whatever the norm or ideal of your culture may be.

Most of the belly dancers I know are at least in their thirties, and many of them are quite a bit older. And size-wise, they're all over the place. The only common physical characteristic I can see is that even us beginners pretty quickly develop more prominent bellies than other folk. One of my friends has a particular fondness for belly dancers, a fondness that verges on pervy, really. Whatever.

As I thought about the belly dance thing, I assumed that the supportive, all-female environment was a key component of this "yay! my body!" thing. I don't doubt that the environment helps, but I realize that I also have this attitude in the context of all my other physical training, and in play or art - which constitutes the vast majority of the "exercise" I get.

[A total side note, but I've noticed recently that I use "the ______ thing" a lot. Sorry about that, lovely reader. Think of it as an homage to the use of "the ______ question" freaking everywhere in early 20th century political writing, and not in fact a sign of my own sloppy articulation.]

I remember, dimly, times in the past when I treated exercise as a punishment and kinda sought out the worst, most suffering-inducing, ways to exercise (not intentionally). And those are the times when my thinking most aligned to "ew, I'm fat and gross and bad" where things bodily were concerned. Which makes me wonder if the gym isn't hazardous to your mental health. Movement is undoubtedly good, but if you're moving and hating it, maybe you end up hating your body. And conversely, if movement is pleasing, maybe your body seems more attractive for its physical talent.

Not to mention all the other cool stuff that fun movement does for you.

You should read Go Animal, which is all about being healthy by having more fun.

I've seen this happen in movements and groups since I've belonged to either. Everyone would like for the group they belong to to perfectly represent them. So we fight over representation, over the simple fact that a group can't (and shouldn't) have one homogenous opinion. Everyone gets upset. Some people bail. Things change.

People and democracy are imperfect. I don't think I've ever been part of anything where this didn't happen.

I wonder if this is a uniquely Western problem. That is, if the problem is trying to coalesce a group out of people who place a premium on individuality and individual contributions. I find the frustration of group participation less... well, frustrating, when I think there might be a global explanation for why people act in mode X when mode Q would be so much more effective. [In a completely unrelated vein, it just hit me that a coalition is what you get when people coalesce. Which is obvious, I suppose. They're good words.]

Direct democracy is problematic.

I say this because leaderless groups I've belonged to seem to suffer this problem of coalescence pretty much constantly, while groups with recognized leadership seem to not suffer so much (unless the leadership is contested). It's nice to be able to look up from the group and see someone pointing: This is the direction we're taking. This is what's next.

This is all by way of introduction. I commented on Tish's entry about the problems of coalescence on BFB that other social movements aren't any more in agreement, even on essentials, than we are.

What other movements have is action, organizations that will point you to the problem and the action you could take to solve it. It's a form of leadership and direction. It's the fight. Whether that fight be for overtime pay protection, reproductive rights, marriage rights, equal pay, accessibility to buildings. Someone has a list of demands. It's not a list approved by everyone in the movement, but at least there's something to fight for.

There is an aspect of any fight that should be education and conversion of people. That's the glacial current of social change. But education is really the recruitment arm of any movement. You change attitudes so people demand and make changes to the How Things Are.

The problem with fat activism is that there's no easily followed map to the fight. Sometimes it feels like there is no fight, nothing to be demanded. Just talking and educating people for the fight that isn't.

How does a movement get out of recruitment and into the fight? Kell had an idea. What are our demands? What is our plan of action? Who is pointing the way to the fight?

I've been meaning to expand on something I posted awhile ago in response to Steph's social vs. individual responsibility piece. She was, essentially, wondering how we manage to see some problems as social and others as exclusively a matter of individual incapacity. I haven't built much of what she said into this, so you should read her stuff first for this to make any real sense.

I'd theorize that we're at different points in our understanding of difference based on race (or gender, even) than we are with addiction or size. So, all these social questions might follow the same path ultimately. We think of them first as pathological, then as individual, and finally as global/systemic issues.

My theory assumes that a wide range of social issues follow very similar patterns. Because this pattern moves at the pace of social change, it's not something we actually experience happening, which is why I sometimes feel so surprised that we're where we are with reference to equal pay vs. say, fat acceptance.

The cycle is essentially this, with the phases overlapping:
1. Demonize the "other"/minority group upon which the issue centers as a biologically/scientifically inferior class. Investigate with mad science that people will make fun of in 100 years. Create panic about "other" condition and treat as illness.
2. Recognize individual members of the "other" as more-or-less equally human as the majority. Attempt to address their issues while keeping them clearly distinct from the majority, mostly by "taking care of them".
3. Stereotypes of the "other" are idealized in popular culture. Declare victory.
4. Individual representatives of the "other" form coalitions and demand actual parity of rights.
5. The "other" voice becomes visible in mainstream culture, particularly popular culture. Some essential equal rights are granted. Declare victory.
6. The "other" coalitions realize they're still shafted and insist on true equality. This gradually seeps into mainstream culture, where the problem is recognized as bigger than ever suspected.
7. Insist that victory has already been declared, ergo the war is over. Backlash against the "excessive" rights granted the "other" ensues.
8. Actual change does, in fact, continue - at a geologic pace.
9. Create new "other" group and start over.

Where race was concerned, we had to start by arguing ourselves out of the idea that people who weren't "white" were a subhuman species first, then "take care of them", then defend essential civil rights, and as a result of that come to see racism as a systemic issue (for the most part), which we are still dealing with. Gender issues parallel this; no surprise considering the parallel time tables of civil/women's rights in modern Western culture.

With addiction, we first transitioned away from blaming/hiding the issue with individuals to an attitude of "taking care of them" and are still, I think, adjusting to that. We're a long way from adjusting beyond step 2 with reference to addiction, mental illness, and disability - and progress is complicated by the individual nature of those conditions.

With fat, we are still at the point of trying to talk our way out of thinking fat is something akin to subhuman. And, as much as #1 sounds like I wrote it just about fat, if you look at the "woman condition" or the "mind of the Negro" arguments from the 19th century, they are freakishly parallel. Gayness as an identity started as a pathology, too. You could argue the same of reproduction, particularly where the teen mom is concerned. There's a remarkable strain of concern with "clean living" and "health" in Western culture starting with the Enlightenment at least, if not earlier.

This is, of course, wildly theoretical and in no way backed up by any serious history. But it does provide an explanation of sorts for the way we get from thinking of a problem as just about you to thinking of it as a question of rights/equality.

As a token of thanks to the five (yes, count them, FIVE, y'all know me so well) people who have independently sent me a link to the Guardian's publication of parts of Paul Campos's new book, I bring you...

Pattie Thomas's excellent interview with Paul as published on Big Fat Blog this week. Better even than the excerpts I've seen of his book so far (which I will absolutely be buying ASAP), the interview does a really nice job of placing the fat panic in its appropriate political context. And of beginning to lay out some solutions to the political problem of fat hate.

Purely as a blogger, I often hate when Campos has something new to say. I always end up just chiming in with something like "Rock on, Paul Campos!" and "Way to go Mr. Smarty Smart!" - not exactly scintillating stuff.

To the five people who sent me this article, I apologize for not thanking you individually and recommend you buy his book. Paul's book, by the way, is The Obesity Myth. And, if your bookstores are anything like mine (giant chains and locally owned used book shops), you may not be able to find it there. I suggest demanding to see the store manager, personally. ;)

I've been reading Glenn Gaesser's Big Fat Lies (see link and picture on right), which is kinda pissing me off. But it has a lot of very important information in it that I think any of you who aren't already part of the size acceptance movement need to read.

Yeah. So, read it.

When you're done, pop over to the Big Fat Blog bookclub discussion on it and talk about what you learned. Or didn't learn. Or, as in my case, what made you angry.

This is why I don't feel fat: fat people cannot love themselves, so we are told; fat people cannot love their bodies. But I do.

Someone told me that this is supposed to be healthy for fat people, to see themselves in their minds as less fat than they are. Because fat is so evil? It is, we seem to think. Fat is all these other things, this judgement on a person. I don't even mean just the weight the word carries - the very act of carrying so-called extra fat on your body is evil, whether you call it fat, curvy, of size, whatever. You can't euphemize away the existence of fat and the badness it implies.

So, yeah. I can see why, knowing that you're not all the baaaaaaad things that fat is supposed to be, it would make sense to think you were physically smaller. It would, really, be a quite sane thing to do on the way from fat-hate to self-love.

When I think about it that way, it disturbs me less that I have this several-years-old idea of the size of my body. See, despite eating more and more healthily (though exercising inconsistently), over the past five? eight? years, I've just gotten steadily larger. My picture of myself in my mind hasn't grown at the same rate, so I'm surprised by photos and mirrors sometimes. Frequently. For a long time, years ago when I first started getting fat, I bought clothes I thought fit but were really too small. That, fortunately, stopped. Everyone should have clothes that fit them. [Could this shallow belief be the cornerstone of my politics? I mean, if you add up gender politics, fat politics, defense of workers and such, ultimately you could be talking about everyone having cute clothes that fit. Hee hee.]

Until recently, I still found my image surprising (and yes, sometimes unattractive, I'm sad to say). In photos more than mirrors. I think photos are more relatable to the bidimensional figures we see in various media.

I tend to think of it as unhealthy and dysmorphic, a sign that I didn't really own my body or something, but maybe it's not entirely. Maybe it's also the healthy view to take in a world suffering from a sort of mass body dysmorphia. I know I had more moments of thinking I was hot when I had less of a grasp on my size.

Since I launched the effort to change the way I eat and move (eating a bit less of better food, and making exercise a truly regular habit), I've come to have a different picture of my body. I'm a lot fatter than I thought. Now my mental picture and the mirror/photo are more in line. Well, huh.

Which makes me wonder - while I don't think I place any more or less negative judgement on my fatness than I did before, does everyone who shifts to a healthier lifestyle or (ick) goes on a diet start to see themselves as fatter than before? Or does exercise and treating yourself a bit better just resolve your mental picture to the one others see? If the former were true, it's no wonder people treat exercise as punishment and talk about themselves in terms of goodness and badness; the whole process of exercising might be bad for your self image, even if you approached it healthily & not from a "must lose 20 pounds" standpoint.

In any case, the trouble I find with seeing a fatter me is that sometimes I also feel "fatter" - that is, more of all the things we associate negatively with fat. While I feel better in every other way from the changes I've made (and I did make choices oriented around health, not weightloss), it's as if the improved health has opened up a little vein of self-directed fat-hate in me. Which in turn makes me feel and act a bit self-absorbed at times.

It's unsettling. I'm not even positive this causal relationship exists between the positive attention I've been giving my body and the negative attention that followed it, but I'm bothered by it.

Livejournal is like this whole other world.

And, given that, I thought I'd point out a discussion that I spent really an embarrassing amount of time on today: feminism, fat acceptance & weight loss. You should read the comments on both the post on the feminist-rage community and my own post.

The comments say a lot about the politics of personal choices, a lot about the supposed conflict between healthy and fat and why fat is still a feminist issue.

I just find that I like to read what other people have to say on the subject, others who are at least enlightened enough to support either size acceptance or feminism, if not both.

Not too many years ago, two women talking on Monday morning about how they had been bad over the weekend might have been referring to some sort of sexual escapade. Nowadays they would most likely be talking about going off their diet and eating something that wasn't on their good food list. From Tech Central Station - read the rest of the article.

This hypothetical situation represents a lot of the issue with the "obesity crisis" for me. It's not really about fat.

I know, I've said it before. And the likes of Jean Kilbourne (despite my annoyance with her doomsdayishness) have said it quite a bit. But I think I have some new insights now.

It comes back, in a way, to education. I'm coming to believe more and more that our current approach to education creates problems for a lot of people around acceptance and good/badness. Obviously, I'm not just talking about school systems, though they're a big part of this - parenting tendencies, media influences, all of these things have a tendency to divide people into gradations of fit with the norm or goodness - essentially, grades.

If you combine that predilection towards numerical indications of goodness of fit with a religious tradition that also focuses on sin and purity, I think you have the essence of Americans' twisted fixation on dieting.

It's all about sex, yo. But you know that. It's puritanical fear that indulging in what we like is so very very bad for us, which also abreacts into this need for distance. Sex is for procreation or it's dirty; fill up absurdly on fast food.

But it's better than sex, this food obsession. Because we can talk about it. It's considered perfectly work-appropriate; you can always talk about who has and hasn't lost weight and how much and how, in great detail, you did it. Diet talk is all about grades and numbers, and feels just nosy and prurient enough to satisfy our urges for naughtiness while reassuring us that we're fine and upstanding.

Plus, as I am constantly saying, it's the perfect distraction from anything else we think we can't help - crises personal and global alike.

A survey from some people thinking about starting a plus-size magazine.

This is so the next to last straw. And people wonder why feminists talk like all guys are nasty uneducated skeezydaddies sometimes. They're not, generally speaking, but sometimes...

See the second question:

2. Do you consider men's magazines such as Maxim, Razor, and King exploitive to women?
- Yes, the women in these mags are sluts!
- I do not have a strong opinion
- No, there is nothing wrong with a little sexuality

Not only did they misspell "exploitative" and use it with incorrect grammar (one thing is never exploitative TO another but exploitative OF something), but the question betrays an appalling lack of understanding of objectification. Or perhaps, too strong an identification with the ideas that objectification sometimes produces. That a woman whose image is exploited sexually (by herself or someone else) is inherently a slut. Generally, when we say something/one is being exploited, we're talking about that thing/person as a victim or tool.

Exploitation turns people into objects that you can then ascribe your own fantasy traits to. And I assume these guys are doing exactly that - they sort of vaguely [mis]heard some feminist criticism of men's magazines, and then translated it to stupidguy-speak. The funny thing is, I'm not actually wildly opposed to the idea, though I do think it reflects what most of the men's magazines they mention are actually about - namely half-naked chicks, but the approach to asking me what I think is so icky I just want to respond back "You're nasty! Nasty! Go away!"

But then. My theory is that the survey is actually a joke, and the magazine doesn't and will never exist, because a real magazine would have editors who could actually, you know, edit copy.

On the other hand, there are people like Paul to make fun of half-naked chick magazines like this (make sure you take a look at the pictures).

[Something funky seems to happen with the link when you click instead of cutting & pasting. It's http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=63404369275.]

One of the lists I belong to is DTMWSIB, which is essentially a size acceptance group with a focus on fashion. There is, however, a fair amount of self-congratulatory supportive posting going on at any time (basically, the "you go, girl!" think). It's generally sweet and positive and friendly and I can't really fault it, even if it talks a lot about boys and modelling and beauty - part of size acceptance is being able to see yourself as beautiful, which often means conventional means of gaining appearance-based approval.

However. Today I read this in one of the posts:

Eventually a guy will come along and make you feel so unbelievably beautiful...and by then, hopefully you'll know yourself that you are.

I think my boyfriend can attest to the fact that it's virtually impossible for someone else's attraction to you to make you believe yourself attractive. But that is not the source of my annoyance. My annoyance is that, once again, the size acceptance folk are showing that fat isn't actually a feminist issue. That is, you are assumed to be content with your size if and when a man loves you for and/or despite it. Sure, you might get there before you feel the love of a good man, but he'll cement it for you.

Ew. Part of my issue is the tone, too. Eh.

Maybe what I inferred from that clip isn't what was intended. And hey, I know that this particular group is diverse enough to include some people who just Do Not Think The Way I Do - I've talk about that before, actually. But it still disppoints me that all the things I believe are so closely aligned aren't connected in others' minds, too.

Maybe I've devolved into some sort of humorless drone, but I have to say I'm not as keen on this Big Girl's Guide to Life book as I might have guessed I'd be. The DTMWSIMB list sent out an article/interview with the author today. And, um, ew.

I think it absolutely rocks when people take independent routes to get something done, so I applaud the woman for getting her book published. But the things it laughs about are so sad. On one hand, it's funny and a smidge empowering, but on the other hand, it's not making things any better.

It's like the dumb-ass anti-feminists joke thing - laughing it off is sometimes okay, but it's ultimately complicit in the suckiness of The How Things Are.

Par example, selections from the "Ultimate Big Girl List of Fashion No-Nos", which snarkily but quite clearly reminds us that big folk need to be covered up:

1. Anything featuring horizontal stripes. Double Wides R Us. Not.


2. Red sequined hot pants with black fishnet hose. Steer clear of this wardrobe selection, please. Keywords to avoid are ‘hot’ and ‘fishnet.’


3. Belly shirts. Big Girl bare navels are not the wildly exciting stimulus you believe them to be, ok?

Funny, okay. And there's some really absurd, hilarious diet advice. But we're so used to hearing this kind of shit as insults. Is voluntarily reading and writing jokes about your sub-class role in society useful? It is subversive, in a way - if you do something with that subversion.

Maybe my frustration is just, as the author says, that she "doesn't promote fat power"; she's all about finding ways to survive The How Things Are by laughing them off, not by changing things. What little I've seen of the book doesn't promote power or anger at all, but it seems to deal exclusively in things we ought to be really, really angry about. And, well, that's weird.

Then again, maybe there's more to it. I'll have to check it out at a bookstore some time soon.

This year I've decided to do something about the new year exercise and diet craze that everyone else seems to do around me every year.

I'm going to join in!

It's not what you're thinking. I'm going to join in, but in a subvert-from-within way. I'm a big fan of subversion from within.

I mentioned on the LJ that I've joined up with this office fitness competition. The jist of the competition is that you get points for the minutes you spend exercising each week. The team with the most points wins, and gets taken out for cheeseburgers (which I actually don't eat at lunch anymore - trying to avoid the dairy and red meat; they make too much phlegm).

See, I exercise quite a bit, or at least I do now. I've been following my semi-rigorous plan for a couple of months, so I'm not really changing anything by getting involved in this competition. Unlike some of the other people, I am not going on a fad diet (South Beach, this year) and I don't need to worry about cheating or failing because the exercise isn't a temporary thing for me.

While others are using the whole competition thing to motivate them to exercise where they don't already (which is great - or it would be, if they weren't so focused on short-term weight loss), I'm thinking more politically. I want them to know just how much I am fit and fat. That the two are not opposites, but quite often coexist happily.

This would be, despite the politics, a rather shallow goal. Except. Because I'm part of the "fitness challenge" thing, I end up taking part in a lot of fitness-oriented discussions, which give me more opportunities to talk about fat and health and to encourage others to like themselves just a bit more. And that's good for me.

Plus, I want to win.

I figured a listing of "fit or fat" cities published by a "fitness" (read: weightloss) magazine like Men's Health would be based on some wildly false assumptions. You know, like "fat is the opposite of fit".

What I didn't figure is that the list would be based on such odd criteria. I guess I just assumed that there would be some measure of actual fatness and/or fitness taken. But no!

I haven't been able to find the full list of criteria used to assess each city online, but Paul pointed out some key flaws. It seems like a lot of inferences are made about how "fit" or "fat" a city's people are based on factors that only have the possibility to influence them one way or the other - air quality, climate, number of fast food restaurants, parks or gyms, commute time.

I don't doubt that easy access to the tools of a healthy lifestyle could encourage people to be healthier, but any rational person should question a study that relies on vaguely related factors to measure its object.

The sad thing is that this study could be useful - it could encourage cities to provide more resources like parks, playgrounds, free and cheap access to fitness and nutritional resources. Instead, by promoting fat as the opposite of fit (instead of, say, unfuckingfit as the opposite of fit) you get things like the mayor of Houston hiring a former body builder and shiller of nutritionally suspect supplements to promote a city-wide diet campaign. At least that's what we hear about - maybe Houston did actually improve the resources available - but that won't sell diet magazines and fuel the anti-obesity fears of Americans.

Big shocking news! Dieting is bad for kids. And, you know, everyone.

"I would argue that dieting is the primary cause of weight gain," says Waterhouse. "Let's be realistic. If diets worked, we'd all be thin instead of fatter than ever before."

While Debra Waterhouse, the woman who is interviewed in the MSN article, seems to be mostly a diet subscriber herself (see her list of diet books), she manages to dispense some pretty sane advice.

So, awhile ago I subscribed one of my lesser email addresses to the South Beach diet list. The idea being that, while I have no interest in dieting per se, that particular diet book appeared to have some practical advice on eating well and interesting healthy recipes in it, and I figured the list would occasionally send me something of value.

It does. Um, occasionally.

Today it sent me what sure seems to be horrible misinformation.

The average American eats between 2,000 and 8,000 calories - just for Thanksgiving dinner. And it's filled with bad fats, bad carbs, and bad sugars.

Can someone who isn't starving or accustomed to training to bulk up actually eat 8000 calories in a sitting? Even at a major feast? That's like three heaping plates of everything one might traditionally eat at Thanksgiving, each of them drowned in fatty gravy.

That just seems absurd.

But not as absurd as the diet's other claim to fame: the promise of losing nearly 15 lbs in 1-2 weeks.

If, as the email claims...

Most American's [sic] will gain 5-10 lbs by New Year's Day

Then the assumption is that you can lose 1-3 times as much as other people will gain in one fifth the time. That just seems shaky to me.

Of course, if (as so many people do) you go on this diet and fail to meet its inflated claims of instant, permanent weight loss, you'll be buoyed up by the regular emails you'll receive explaining how the failure to lose weight is, in fact, your fault. You didn't really cut out the bad foods. You didn't exercise enough. You have some other sort of health problem and should see your doctor (perhaps for weight loss surgery?).

Absurd.