I love the graphic above, and the accompanying article posted below:

It’s a Lifestyle Change Alright
         by Ragen Chastain, danceswithfat

Harriet Brown wrote a fabulous piece for Slate called “The Weight of the Evidence:  It’s time to stop telling fat people to be thin.”  It is making the rounds on social media again, and I shared it on my Facebook wall.  Immediately (and completely predictably) someone jumped in and attempted to win Diet Bingo all in one comment:  She kept going back to the idea that weight loss doesn’t work if you go on a diet – it only works if you make a lifestyle change.

This is a line created by the diet industry to blame their clients when almost every single one of them fail at weight loss. It doesn’t matter whether you call it a diet, a lifestyle change, or a flummadiddle, the evidence still says that by far and away the most likely outcome is weight regain, with a net gain coming in a close second and long term weight loss a very, very distant third.

The diet industry manages to grow every year (now making over $60 Billion a year) despite the fact that their product is so terrible and ineffective that they are required to have a disclaimer that it doesn’t work every time they advertise it.

I think that one of the main reasons for this is that they know that most people will lose weight short term and gain it back long term. They’ve managed to take credit for the first part of this process, and blame their clients for the second part. Even though it happens to nearly every client they still manage to say, with a straight face, that it’s just that nobody does it right.  Dude.

Even those outlying anomalies who do manage
to achieve sustained weight loss often do it by making
maintaining weight loss into a full time job. 

From Harriet’s piece:

Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable:

She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.

“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.”

It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.

And it’s important to note that people dedicate this kind of time and energy to maintaining weight loss AND still regain the weight.  So when people say “It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change” what I hear is “It’s a lifestyle where you diet all the time” and it still probably won’t result in a thinner or healthier body.

Harriet Brown is the author of Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It (2015)  Body of Truth is an inspired and inspiring, well-researched book about our cultural obsession with weight, our fetishization of thinness, and our demonization of fat. It is a compelling read which will make us think more deeply about the attitudes we have about our bodies and our health.  Here's a link to DietHobby's Book Review.

Today I am reading …. and thinking about …. the book, “Crazy Good” by Steve Chandler (2015).  I became interested in learning more about this author’s viewpoint after reading the article below.

One drink is too many for me,
but a hundred is not enough.
               by Steve Chandler


The problem in my life starts when I think I have to add something to this present moment to make it better.

Addition is seductive. It’s a lot like addiction. The words look a lot alike. Look too quickly and you'll mistake one for the other.

How much addiction comes from the lure of addition? The myth that tells you…whispers to you…that you have to add something to your life to make it a happier experience.

Let me add this strong drink to the chemistry in my brain and body. Now let me add more drinks. (One is too many, a hundred is not enough.)

It’s simple addition! And it leads to misery.

What if I were brave enough to turn my addicted life around? What if I were strong enough to experiment with subtraction? Subtraction! People fear it. What would be left? Just me?

Adding muddies the water. . .subtracting makes it crystal clear.

Some people have what they call food addiction. Carb addiction. Addiction to bread and sweets. Emotional eating, they call it. But what if I subtracted flour and sugar from my diet? (Versus the addition of a dangerous amphetamine diet pill that races my heart and speeds up the already-circular thinking in my brain...and soon turns into an addiction.)

What if I subtracted my drug, my alcohol? What if I were brave enough? Subtraction leads to freedom. It takes these chains from my heart and sets me free.

Addition: addiction.

For the word addition to become the word addiction, I just have to throw a “c” in there. You know “c.” It stands for cocaine, or cannabis, or cognac, or cookies, or catastrophe, or chronic alcoholism.

I’m not enough. I have to add something to me…something from the outside world.

Byron Katie talks about being addicted to love and approval. There are clinics for sex addiction and romantic love addiction.

Yes I have a happy marriage but I myself am not happy so maybe if I just added this one adventurous romantic love relationship to my life.

I read the tabloids to keep up with what addiction can do to people. Famous people in celebrity rehab. All of them. Adding like crazy. Look at Oprah’s five beautiful homes!

Ben Affleck has a good marriage to Jennifer Garner (I’m putting my groceries on the conveyor belt slowly now so I can read all of this) and he decides to add to that a romantic relationship with their nanny. In the following weeks and months I read all about custody, betrayal, heartbreak, financial penalties, bitterness…..in other words a major life hangover. So much for adding.

The famous beat generation author and drug addict William Burroughs killed his wife playing a William Tell game at a drugged-up, drunken party. He was the author of the books Naked Lunch and Junkie. He was actually a brilliant man, and never so brilliant as he was in his later years when he was clean and sober and said that there wasn't anything, any feeling, any high, that you could get on drugs and alcohol that you couldn’t get without drugs and alcohol.

And that’s because that treasure of good feelings is already in you. The drug (and I always include alcohol as a drug) just breaks down the barriers. It releases what’s already there. It took me awhile, some years clean and sober to find out that he was right. But you can go faster than that. Through meditation and working with others and an ongoing spiritual practice you can find out faster than I did that you can have an even happier life than you did at your best drunken moment.

I used to believe I had to add drugs and alcohol to my system to feel the things I wanted to feel. If I wanted to feel more relaxed or more courageous or more confident in a crowd of people, it was never going to happen unless I added something to my system. I did get (most of the time, at the beginning, until it turned really dark and desperate) the feelings I wanted. But they were all-too temporary.

But as Burroughs found out, the drug itself doesn’t directly produce the feeling. It just removes the barriers in the brain to the treasure that’s already there. And there are other ways to remove those barriers, thank God and the people who will help you.

Steve Chandler is a formerly suicidal, now recovering alcoholic; an adult child of alcoholics.  At age 71 he is now the author of more than 30 self-help books.  He is also well-known as a master success coach, and public speaker.

See Article Below:

 

Why being 'overweight' means you live longer: The way scientists twist the facts.
             by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, M.D.

I have been studying medical research for many years, and the single most outstanding thing I have learned is that many medical "facts" are simply not true. Let's take as an example the health risks of drinking alcohol. If you are a man, it has virtually become gospel that drinking more than 21 units of alcohol a week is damaging to your health. But where did the evidence to support this well-known "fact" come from?

The answer may surprise you. According to Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, the level for safe drinking was "plucked out of the air". He was on a Royal College of Physicians team that helped produce the guidelines in 1987. He told The Times newspaper that the committee's epidemiologist had conceded that there was no data about safe limits available and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't". Smith said the drinking limits were "not based on any firm evidence at all", but were an "intelligent guess".

In time, the intelligent guess becomes an undisputed fact. On much the same lines, we have the inarguable "fact" that being overweight is bad for your health. I should say that, by definition, being "overweight" must be bad for your health – or we wouldn't call it overweight. But we do not define overweight as being the weight above which you are damaging your health; it has an exact definition.

To be overweight means having a BMI of between 25 and 30. Not as bad for you as obesity, but still damaging. Why else would all hospitals and doctors surgeries have BMI charts plastered on the wall with little green squares, orange squares and red squares? Green is normal weight, orange is overweight and red is obese. Even Wikipedia confirms this: "The generally accepted view is that being overweight causes similar health problems to obesity, but to a lesser degree. Adams et al estimated that the risk of death increases by 20 to 40 per cent among overweight people, and the Framingham heart study found that being overweight at age 40 reduced life expectancy by three years."

You can also find papers in prestigious medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) with the following headline: "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity." That certainly suggests that overweight is bad for you. However, if you look more closely at the paper in Jama, we can find these words: "Overweight was not associated with excess mortality." (My italics). Perhaps more extraordinarily, what the researchers actually found was that those who were overweight lived the longest; they lived longer than those of "normal" weight.
 
You may be surprised to find that you can have a paper in one of the world's leading medical journals entitled "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity", which found that overweight people lived the longest. After studying medical research for as long as I have, I am far from surprised. I regularly find that the title of a paper, the abstract, and even the conclusions often bear very little relationship to what the study actually found.

Perhaps you think I am being selective and only choosing one misleading paper. Well, here are the conclusions of another study done in Canada in 2010: "Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ (BMI > 35) are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality." I love the way they couldn't bring themselves to say "normal" BMI. They had to call it "the acceptable BMI category". This, I suppose, helps to fend off the inevitable question. If people of normal weight have shorter lifespans than those who are overweight, why do we call them normal? Surely we should call them "mildly underweight", at which point we would have to call people who are now considered overweight "normal".

You can see a further example of the weird strangulation of the language occurring a year earlier. In 2009, a German group did a painstaking meta-analysis of all studies on overweight and obesity that they could find. As with most other researchers, they found that being overweight was good for you. Of course, they didn't phrase it in this way. They said: "The prevailing notion that overweight increases morbidity and mortality, as compared to so-called normal weight, is in need of further specification."

In need of further specification? An interesting phrase, but one that hints at the terrible problems researchers have when their findings fail to match prevailing dogma; if the prevailing consensus is "if your BMI is between 25 and 29, it is damaging your health and you should lose weight", then you challenge this at your peril. The end result of this is that the titles of scientific papers can end up twisted through 180 degrees, while in others, the prose becomes ever more tortured.

Despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated quite clearly that "overweight" people live the longest, no one can bring themselves to say: "Sorry, we were wrong. A BMI between 25 and 29 is the healthiest weight of all. For those of you between 20 and 25, I say, eat more, become healthier." Who would dare say such a thing? Not anyone with tenure at a leading university, that's for sure.

In truth, this discussion should not quite stop here. For even when we get into those with a BMI greater than 30, those who truly are defined as "obese", the health dangers are greatly overestimated, mainly because of the widespread use of what I call the statistical "clumping game". Obesity researchers are world-leading experts at the clumping game. In most studies, the entire population is divided ("clumped") into four groups: underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese – obese being defined as a BMI of 30 and above. That means those with a BMI of 31 are clumped together as part of a group which includes those with a BMI of 50 – and above. What does this tell us about the health problems of having a BMI of 31? Well, absolutely nothing.

There is no doubt that becoming heavier and heavier must, at some point, damage your health and reduce your life expectancy. Where is this point? Well, it is certainly not anywhere between 25 and 30, and it could be even higher. Indeed, I have seen research on Italian women showing that a BMI of 33 was associated with the longest life expectancy. In other studies, where obesity was actually further sub-divided, those with a BMI between 30 and 35 lived longer than those of so-called "normal" weight.

So, while I cannot tell you when "obesity" becomes a major health problem, I can definitely tell you that being "overweight" is the healthiest and most "normal" weight of all.



Malcolm Kendrick is a Scottish medical doctor, author of Doctoring Data (2015), and The Great Cholesterol Con (2008).