I watch documentaries: Weight of a Nation (3 & 4)

Alternet has a piece up on Weight of a Nation, and it’s a more positive view of the series than I have of it right now. As I said, my biggest problems with part 1 and 2 was the fear mongering and condescension mixed in with facts about health problems and how those are related to obesity. Once again, I wish this documentary would treat weight more as a symptom of our culture than the cause. It’s what every diet ever tries to sell you: “Be skinny and all your problems will go away!”

But anyway, onto Part 3: CHILDREN IN CRISIS. [Note: this is the part I really super extra did not want to watch, but I'm doing it anyway.]

We start out with some adorable children and then, the first thing we’re told is about the epidemic of childhood obesity. There are a lot of forces working against healthy eating, this is true, but often times, trying to treat obesity in children is difficult because children understand things differently than adults. When you’re growing up, learning about food, you don’t have the tools to deal with how to make food choices yet. The proof of this is the rate of eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia) in children and teens is also rising. We’ve thrust kids into a bi-polar culture where you’re skinny or you’re a fatty. Add to that the crappy life phase of puberty, and you’ve got the perfect breeding group for bullying and the development of mental health issues. If we want GROWING children, who should be gaining weight, to be healthy, we need to stop shaming them about fat. Alright already?

Back to the white room interviews that still feel like the ‘before’ testimonials of dieting adds. The one girl says “being fat can hold you back.” I’m reminded of Vivya and her amazing purple top from the night before. We teach fat children they can’t lead full lives; this is independent of the health issues, and when we tell fat children they can’t live full lives, we effectively discourage them from being healthy. Sophia, the dancer, feels she can’t dance or perform at 5’5″ and 190 pounds, and then, they show 5 year old Sophia. Her mom says, “She was very petite.” She was five! She’s fourteen now, and it’s miserable, watching her family fat shaming her. You remember the crappy comments family members make about you growing up. My sister was very skinny growing up, so I was the ‘fat’ daughter. You remember it, trust me. Somehow, I don’t think this is the last fat child, especially fat girl, we’re going to see fat shamed by her family.

I had to wait a whole 30 seconds. Tiarra is an eight year old girl, rocking out on her purple guitar. She talks about how girls bully her and call her fat. To me, the bullying is the real problem, but they’re going to a health clinic instead. Here, we have a good moment, where the fact that companies advertise unhealthy food around the clock. Powerful, pernicious, predatory: these are the words I, too, would use to describe food advertising. We are affect by what we’re exposed to, and this does affect us all. We remember jingles, logos, and mascots.

Michelle Obama comes onto the scene, promoting the marketing of healthy foods. I’m enjoying this session because it doesn’t involve fat shaming children, but the creation of nutrition standards for food marketing to children. I would recommend this part because it goes after the source behind the symptom of obesity: agri-business and the way they advertise. There’s a lot of kick back against these proposed standards and regulations, and the strong standards were rejected. No progress, but it’s 2010 in Congress, so no surprise.

“It’s so hard to explain to a little why she’s developing so fast, and why she’s not like the other kids,” Tea’s mother says. And we have our next fat eight year old, and the problem is bullying by other students, but we also get a revealing fact: the mother feels stigmatized by having a fat daughter. Her parents say they want to keep her healthy, and they enroll her in a fitness clinic. There seems to be a solution here: the clinic has allowed her to make friends that don’t judge her.

School lunch time. Let me nip this one in the bud: the problem is schools are underfunded, cutting cost in every area. Public education is not in a good place, and by eliminating more funding from public schools, they’re going to cut back on staff and resources. This impacts how children are fed. Schools get extra money from agri-business and food companies if they serve those foods in the cafeteria exclusively. When schools are underfunded, they’ll look for other places to get money. As I said, the unhealthy food is a symptom, not the cause for the problem.

We also get a great oxy-moron: fresh frozen broccoli. In addition, the students realize the food is bad. Kids aren’t stupid, but they, like adults, are limited by their environment. Here, they do say that K-12 public education is under-funded, and that food budgets go first.

Pizza is a vegetable. The collapse of sanity in governing is more of a problem than the resulting obesity because it affects everything.

Tiarra is back. She drinks fruit juices, but they’re produced by the same companies who make soda. This sneaky point is explained. Don’t blame the juice and the fruit. Sugar is necessary, juice can be a good addition to meals. And now, fear mongering about the internet and changing technology. The same parents give us the line, “You never want to hear things are less than optimal in your child’s health.” What is this obsession with wanting our kids to be super humans? Is it the fear that your child will be a deviant, someone considered weird to others? As I said, the fat and health concerns a a symptom for this larger issue.

The cuts in PE are tied to the cuts in food lunches. When things are dropped, the most vulnerable goes first. It works the same way in society. When things fall apart, the vulnerable fall through the cracks. This is something that isn’t being talked about in this documentary, but I wish they could have used some of the time they put into fear mongering about fat into the focus on the external issues. It’s not about fat and judgment, and the focus on increasing PE in schools is also a decent segment.

Tiarra’s mother summed this up well: She has the knowledge but not the understanding. This is the trap of teaching children to be healthy. They simplify things, and by focusing on fat, I think you could end up teaching children that fat equals bad. The flip side of obesity is anorexia, and Tiarra’s mother is right: your children have the knowledge, but not the understanding to parse out morality from health and diet.

And with that, onto part 4: CHALLENGES.

We get a review of how disease has changed from infectious disease to chronic disease. I took medical history classes; we don’t want a return to the good old days of infectious disease. There is a reason we were so desperate to get rid of them. All the fat in the world is not worth the return of polio. And no, chronic disease has never been the norm before, and this could be because a lot of people died — quickly and suddenly — from infectious diseases. During the panic about obesity, let’s not lose site of the massive gains in health and longevity. As people age, and as we have populations that are living longer, our medical costs get higher because it does cost a lot of money to keep you alive in those last, poor quality years of life.

They say people don’t understand the stigma against obesity. The one doctor emphasizes how difficult it is to change your behavior, which is why people gain weight back after dieting. Evolution! We get the biology behind food cravings, and how humans came about in grasslands, in an atmosphere of scarcity. The shift to agriculture changed our diets and the way we lived, but the shift to mass agriculture is when things get interesting. It’s not solely that we shifted to industrialized farming, but it’s that the government provided (provides) subsidies to specific crops and industries. This new food supply focused on surplus, producing more food more cheaply. In addition, we have become more car dependent. Obesity is the end result of a various number of trends, and once again, I think the underlying circumstances are more important than focusing on obesity. Let’s fix government subsidies, not focus on losing those extra ten pounds.

They showed a picture of a pomegranate during the hunter-gather part. So, here you go.

If you have to pick one episode of Weight of a Nation to watch, this is the one. It focuses not on weight loss, but on the broken farming system and the businesses that are keeping it that way. There are problems associated with growing only one crop (corn, soybeans, wheat) including serious damage to the soil. The industrialization of food is damaging because the corn is a commodity and not viewed as food. The point is made that, if farm subsidies were eliminated, we would probably get a healthier populace because the price of junk food is so heavily subsidized.

CHALLENGES finally gets to what this entire thing should have been about: there are health risks correlated with being obese, but we live in a framework that encourages everyone to be systematically unhealthy, and it’s the pervasive lack of available healthy options to the average American that is the problem. Personally, I think this is because Americans don’t really value health for everyone. If we did, our preventative care would be better. The benefit of making health care more wildly available is that preventative care is put within the reach of those who need medical help the most. Better health care leads to more interaction with health care professionals, who can act as dissemination of health facts throughout the population.

There is a moment right out of the first season of Parks and Recreation. A group of Latina women build the only park in their zip code for their low income neighborhood. It’s an amazing moment that shows we’ve created an environment where we encourage people to be sick. I said it before, but obesity is one symptom, but often the one we focus on the most.

To finish off this post, here is Gretta Christina talking about the conflict between her fat acceptance and her decision to lose weight. I’m not a denialist, there are connections between fat and health. I think we focus too much on fat, get obsessed with the weight we’re carrying. The argument HAES mentions for being concerned about this documentary is that it puts fat bodies into a war they never wanted to be part of.

With a few welcome exceptions, no one seems willing to bring a critical lens to bear on these issues. As a fat person, I am tired of being engaged in a war that I didn’t start and that uses my body as cannon fodder. As a health educator, l deplore the damage done to people’s health and self-esteem by our cultural war on obesity and I deplore the misinformation about health that masquerades as “public health messaging.”

No one lived a healthier life by feeling unloved and terrible about themselves. Fat stigma, making fun of fat people, and concern trolling fat people doesn’t make them thing, it just makes them miserable. Thin people have heart attacks, get cancer, and get diabetes. We live in the age of chronic illness, and there is only one person who knows what you need, and that person is you. You’re a grown adult, and if you’re lucky enough to have good health insurance, you can find health professionals who can help you decide if weight loss is necessary. Gretta decided to lose weight because she had exhausted other options when dealing with her knee. But she didn’t do it through hating herself.

But I also see it as none of my freaking business.

I do think weight loss is both possible and worthwhile. But I also think that the cost-benefit analysis isn’t the same for everyone. Weight loss was really freaking hard: it wasn’t as hard as I’d initially thought it would be, and it got easier with time, but it still took some extremely hard work. And I had everything going for me: easy access to healthy food, money for things like healthy food and a gym membership, a health-conscious city to live in, a supportive partner who was going through the process with me. Not everyone has all that. And even people who do have all that still may not make the same cost-benefit analysis that I did.

So if some other fat person looks at the time and work and emotional effort that weight loss takes, and decides, “Nah, that isn’t where I want to put my energy”… I think that’s a reasonable decision. As long as they’re making it with their eyes open — as long as they understand the costs and risks of fatness, and decide that they’re willing to accept them — then I support them. To me, that’s the essence of fat acceptance. Their body, their right to decide.

And in a totally freaky paradox, fat acceptance has helped me lose weight and keep it off. My years as an FA advocate have actually given me essential tools for weight management.

I’m going to give the final words of this article to the New Last Sane Man in Weight of a Nation: Dr. David Altshuler (geneticist and endocrinologist). When talking about obesity, stigma, and health, he says, “If we define obesity more problem, it’s not just a problem of health, it’s a problem of society. It’s a problem of society. And what I mean by that is that it’s a problem of how society treats people who are obese.”

I watch documentaries: Weight of a Nation (1 & 2)

I’ve had health on the brain this week, so I decided to watch “Weight of a Nation” because I’m a masochist. I wonder if it’s a documentary like “Game Change” was a documentary.
This is a pretty basic break down of what is wrong with the documentary, but let me elaborate.

The first episode is called “Consequences.” The first minute is people talking about how they crave big macs, but they do drop in the fact that we rely on cheap foods. The idea that we need to fix the American diet with collective action is solid, but we don’t need to go on a national weight watchers program.

And then, they open the thing with the BMI. There are so many loopholes in the BMI, and it has been proven to NOT be the best correlation between weight and health. The BMI is a measurement of weight to height, not weight to blood pressure or weight to insulin levels secreted from your beta cells in your pancreas. Maybe the biggest indication that BMI isn’t a solid indicator of health is that we can set the cut offs arbitrarily. The Body-Mass-Index is an equation — a chart — and the cut offs are arbitrary. Not ‘flipped a coin’ arbitrary, but this study, and others like it, found that people who are over weight can live longer and have health risks similar to those in the average range. The two categories with the highest correlation to mortality are underweight and obese II (BMI under 18 and BMI over 35). If you looked at a bell curve of the population’s weight, it should be encouraging if the average weight has the highest rate mortality. If underweight people or obese II had the highest mortality, we would be screwed, too, because it’s really hard to hit those tiny, little corners of a bell curve. In addition, we’ve changed the BMI markers since the 1960s. Our definition of overweight and obese have changed. If you shift your parameters, change how you’re filtering information, then your data and the results it gives you will change.

During the videos of the Bulagusa study, you see them measuring people’s waist and using calipers to measure body fat. There is a stronger correlation between percentage body fat and waist:hip ratio and waist:height ratio, but correlation doesn’t equal causation. That’s statistics 101, so tuck it away in your brain the next time you read about something being linked with something else. The best example: ice cream sales and murders are at an all time high in the summer. Is ice cream making people commit homicide? (Hint: Nope.)

I support that people contributed to the Bulagusa study, and the one woman did mention her mother and grandmother had a history of heart disease. I don’t want to harp on this too much, but genetics plays a huge role in how much you weigh. I’m not going to fight out nature-nurture in this post (and those studies and any studies with humans can be notoriously difficult), but we should under estimate our biology. This is why fat and extreme diets (I’m talking to you, master cleanse) don’t work; our bodies want what they want, and to quote Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way.”

Even your rich kids aren’t protected from THE FAT. Poor children, by the way, were never ever protected to begin with.

And now, onto heritability! I promised I wouldn’t talk about genetics, but I lied. Did you catch that number? Obesity is a composite of genes, it’s heritable, and 60-70% of your risk for obesity is already with you when you’re born. Wait, Mr. CDC man, how did we jump from this to “but it has a small effect on obesity in the population.” Your individual people (data points) make up a bell curve. If obesity is mostly heritable, we can control about a third of our weight on the population level. They’re paying a lot of lip service to genetics in a documentary that wants to be about the environmental factors of obesity. I would prefer 70% of this documentary to be about genetics, and then we can talk about the aspects of environment that actually contribute to that last fluctuation in weight.

But onwards! To Brooklyn! And we get another salient fact about obesity rates: the poorest counties in cities are the most obese. And then we get the dreaded “1 in 3 children are overweight or obese”. Also, see what they’re doing: they’re grouping together at least 2 groups of the BMI scale. If they grouped together average and underweight, would the data say “2 in 3 children are average or underweight”?

“Is Bogalusa special, or do we just have 35 years of data on this city?”

This is what I would call a statistical rhetorical question. To logic this one out, they said the study was one of a kind, and then they implied that study could be extrapolated to the entire country. As a bonus, a concerned school nurse is worried about “the obesity.” They refocus it with blood pressure, but damn, I feel bad for that child. There’s nothing worse than getting shamed by a school nurse. And then we get the quality line of “They’ll be on dialysis when they’re in their 30s.” The jumps in logic are amazing. Okay, if you’re looking at obesity in one of your most obese states, the data will be anomalous. Bogalusa’s rates diverged in the 1960s, but look at the national levels. They’re rising, but they’re leveling off, and there was a fall in the levels of childhood obesity between 2000 and 2005. In this period, Bogalusa’s rate of obesity continued going up.

At 30 minutes into part 1, we get some dissections. I love dissections, but the two hearts they compare are interesting, but they’re comparing two very different specimens. Hypertrophy is the thickening of the heart muscles. This does lead to heart failure, by the way. Even in the healthy specimen, you develop fatty streaks in your arteries.

We get pictures of fat people while a man talks about how we need fat for metabolic purposes. Then, we get talk about men as hunters and women as providers. Can we not use the words “elegantly designed?” Also, the most appalling moment in part 1 goes to the comparison of beautiful paintings with photos of modern fat people. The context is that the way we used to store fat was elegant, but now, it’s just gross.

“I’ve battled my weight my entire life.”

That is the sentence of doom. She’s been trying dieting her entire life, which is maybe why it hasn’t worked. When you fight your body and refuse to eat, you’re fighting your very physical existence. It’s damn painful, by the way, but we’re talking about the NIH study now. The woman admits she yo-yo diets, but she doesn’t want to stay obese because her cholesterol and body fat increased. Also, to get obese, she ate an extra 1000 calories from fast food. Yes, if you do it that way, I can see how you’re health would go to shit. Now, we get to the hitch: two people who have the same BMI and weight can have drastically different levels of health because they’ve got more fat on their liver. This is the most important point that Health at Every Size makes, and your health vitals are more important than your weight.

Maybe I was wrong. Handing that woman, who already seems to have issues around her weight, a blob of ‘fat’ was the most appalling part of this documentary. The study then put this woman on another diet. As a scientist, I think an interesting control group would have been to get a person to gain 10% of their body weight through eating healthy but calorie dense foods. I wonder what those results would have looked like, but that hypothetical study doesn’t seem to exist.

Oh good, we get ‘fat people are stupid’ and can’t perform ‘important cognitive operations’. It’s hidden amid a long list of diseases correlated to obesity. Let’s be clear: Type II diabetes is the one associated with obesity, and it works in a feedback loop, which is partially explained in the documentary. Type I diabetes is associated with people being underweight or with no weight difference. They explain the basic mechanisms of diabetes well. I don’t appreciate how they parse every pound the older man with diabetes gained throughout his life. It comes across as extremely condescending when you’re introduced to his current health condition. But their wedding picture is super cute.

I’m just going to quote HAES for the part about the costs in health care.

“If everyone was thin, would we still have this social problem?”

* There are problems with the way we produce food, and inequities in how we distribute food.
* We are living in an environmentally unsustainable way.
* We don’t have a functional healthcare system.
* The baby boomers are a big demographic group who are living longer and will cost more in their final phase of life.
* Our schools are struggling to feed, educate, and exercise our children with too few resources.
* The demands of making a living leave little time for caring for ourselves and each other.

Hedgehog break! Little hedgehog, big hedgehog! Love them both!

I’m done with consequences, which had more science than I thought it would have. Onto part 2: CHOICES!

People are filming the intro, which sounds like a diet add. Shit, they just asked the one man “Why are you fat?” And now, we get into diet pills. I like how they show the vintage weight lose add (RDX magic pills!), and then, have a fat man ask if there is a magical pill because he’s fat and lazy, get it? I’m only 5 minutes in. At least they brought back the MRI machines. They’re showing fat people pictures of burgers and cake. Good job, science, for proving ‘fat people like cake.’

Dr. Brownell speaks some truth: there is no miracle diet. Also, who doesn’t want to hear ‘eat more fruits and vegetables?’ Maybe it’s still the juice diet talking, but there are lots of fat people who eat fruits and vegetables. The chef they feature tells her story, and it’s full of how people (her mother, mainly) fat shamed her into buying a scale. She gets asked, “How were you able to do it?” I’m having flashbacks of “SuperSize Me.” I like Yolanda, and she seems awesome and loving herself, but it’s sad that she has to be in a weight loss group that mimics AA because I want her to be doing more awesome things with her time. I like how they’re talking about how Yolanda ‘tricks’ herself with KitKats. It’s also depressing how she describes eating the second half of a KitKat as ‘an accident.’

I understand why Yolanda is in this documentary. She’s amazing and likable, and she does say some sensible things. She notes she didn’t realize how much food she was eating. I’ve been there because it’s so easy, for people at every size and athletic level, to slip into eating mindlessly. She’s right that it does take thought to plan meals, and if you’re stressed and rushed, you just don’t put the time into it. This is where poverty and working link up with obesity; we don’t promote a culture where you can eat well easily. I can bet my entire fridge they’re going to cover school lunches later, but I think back to early in the year when the Congress defined pizza as a vegetable. We need to meet facts and make real vegetables and good food available to the people who need it most and not just ‘foodies’. I think of college culture and the ‘freshmen 15′ because the life style in cafeterias is to eat and eat more. Get pizza with your friends, fill your tray in the cafeteria, only the boring people diet, and everything goes when you’re drinking. Classes are stressful, and the culture is ‘fast and cheap’ writ large. Your individual choices only happen within that framework.

Back to the diet commercials; everyone admits to trying all of these diets. OH GOD, THE MASTER CLEANSE REARS ITS HEAD! We get the line, “Just eat a little bit less and move a little bit more.” How condescendingly obvious.

Macro-nutrients! I love them, they are the best. While calories are the base line, our bodies interpret eating these molecules differently. Yes, you can subsist on twinkies and lose weight because ‘calories’, but you’ll be malnourished. Even if they don’t want it, a brownie goes them for killing the idea that you need to cut one nutrient from your diet. You don’t! You need all of them, so eat them all, even the dreaded carbs and fats.

I feel for the woman who says she feels her body is fighting her weight lose. Well, yes it is because your body doesn’t like to starve. And yes, you can lose or gain 10 lbs or a certain percentage of your body weight ‘in a weekend’ or over a few months and then drop it just as easily. Us humans aren’t divorced from annual cycles and normal fluctuations. They do acknowledge that you have to eat about 20% less to stay at a lower body weight that someone who never had to lose weight. They acknowledge these eating habits, eating 20% less, have to be maintained FOREVER because this phenomena doesn’t go away.

A woman blames herself for being fat, and it’s sad. I would hate to be filmed for this documentary. They’re talking about fat people like they’re another species, and then, these people are asked to talk about how terrible their lives are. That’s a shit deal right there.

Dinosaurs never dieted because life finds a way.

What is bothering me the most is the condescension is wrapped in moments that really humanize people. Vivya’s story about being teased in school is heart breaking. She expresses the torture of growing up fat and dating while fat. She says she feels like she’s limited because she’s obese. While there were really terrible parts of this documentary, I would have watched the entire thing about Yolanda and Vivya become happy and more fulfilled humans. I liked them, and I wanted to see them living happy and amazing lives.

The vintage exercise adds are amazing. I loved the man lifting barbells in a suit. So many 80s jumpsuits! Can we stop equating every minute you exercise with the amount of food you eat? “I ate a cookie, now I must run 3 miles!” is a guaranteed way to hate your run. “I cringe when I see the biggest loser.” Me too, Only Sane Man! It’s brutal to watch people crash diet and hate every minute of their exercise.

The diet adds are back, and the people are talking about snacking and the extreme constraints during work. I said it earlier, but I’m going to say it again: we don’t have a culture where the average person is encouraged to eat well. It’s not easy for your average worker to work 40-60 hours a week and lose weight. You could say it’s almost impossible, really. The one woman said she only got a half an hour for lunch and bathroom breaks. One way to fix this would be to prioritize workers health, but in the first episode (CONSEQUENCES!) we’re shown that people are more likely punished for BMI by employers and government by being charged more in health care premiums.

The link between stress, poverty, and obesity is explored. The problem is not fat, but it’s the fact that we’re stressed. Yes, when we were hunters and gathers, we needed to replenish our fat, but getting mauled by tigers or getting hurt in a world with no medicine meant death was on its way. I can’t say I’m looking back with nostalgia on the good old days when I could eat pizza in exchange for having to hunt down my own mammoth. Instead of focusing on fat and weight loss, how about stress reduction as the focus? I would watch the follow up documentary, “Strung Out.”

Words not not use: stress soup, fat growing machine.

The man who owns a brick of how much weight he’s lost has a ticking count down clock play while he sits at the table and weights to eat. While the man was a little wonky, his story was the perfect example of how to screw up a documentary on people learning to enjoy food. They could have showed him sitting there, meditating over his food, but they added a ticking clock. That clock says, “You must wait X minutes before eating!” It puts the moment back into one of those ‘fad diet’ feels. “Wait 5 minutes and just sniff your food, and you’ll magically lose weight!”

“I sat down on a toilet seat and it broke,” one woman says at the beginning of the bariatric surgery part. I don’t know how I feel about this part, but it’s those peoples choices weather to undertake this surgery. It’s a serious choice and thankfully one I’ll probably never have to make. The judge who opts for bariatric surgery says why he’s doing it. He also mentions that, because it’s a surgery, he had to sign a last will and testament. It’s a small drop, and they site the statistic as a 1 in 300 fatality. If you’re not squeamish, watch the surgery because you get the idea how major it is. He’s in there for over 3 hours, and as I said, that’s not a light choice to make. They don’t half-ass this part, and to have this procedure, I imagine there would have to be very serious medical problems associated with someone’s weight. The man says he went through 6 months of discomfort, and the surgeon recommends “radical, behavioral change” after the surgery.

In the end, CHOICES had some very high points. There are points about people living better lives and connecting with friends and being amazing people. At the same time, the documentary undermines some of these moments by being condescending, and then, you get to really see how the fear of fat and fat shaming impact people’s daily life. These people are ashamed to look back on how fat they were, and it’s difficult to watch because so many of these people are so amazing. One idea that keeps coming up is that people under estimated how much they were eating, and it’s such a cliched idea, but the documentary wanted to hammer home the point that fat people must be stuffing their faces. I wish they would have included fat people who were healthy while they were fat and who were just fine with their weight. That said, there were fat people in this documentary who were living healthy lives, but this is — of course — after they lost some weight. This part suffered from a lack of fat, happy people who weren’t obsessed with weight lose, but were living a healthy life at their set point. The fact that many of these people didn’t get fat by stuffing their faces with pizza and donuts is apparent, and they go into the science and reasons why it’s difficult to keep weight off, but I think they hit the wrong conclusion. They jump from ‘stress’ to ‘mind less eating’ too quickly, and I wanted an entire section on how we, as a society, don’t value the average person’s health. Maybe that’s coming up, but you can only make an individual choice as far as the framework of your world and society allows you to.

AT the very end, the Only Sane Man breaks my heart by saying “You never know what attempt will keep it [weight] off.” That’s right, keep yo-yo dieting and one day, you’ll lose weight. This is a terrible message. There are parts where actual changes in health are mentioned, but the focus on weight does drive me nuts. The weight obsession comes from weight being something easily accessible for everyone to see. You can’t measure cholesterol easily, and not everyone is going to prick their fingers to test daily blood sugars, so weight is the barometer we use to eye ball someone’s health. But that’s just what we’re doing, eye balling it.

I’m taking a break, but I want to watch parts 3 and 4 later. Go read the first link from Health at Every Size. They’re more coherent about the problems in this piece, but I bet they quoted Jurassic Park less.

I hope we get a moment where they discuss how many calories you burn running away from dinosaurs.

Day 3: The Breaking of the Juice

I wasn’t quite as perky this morning, but I still don’t remember a time I’ve been this energetic on this little caffeine. Anyway, I can tell I’ve dropped some water weight, but I’m not surprised by that either. However, after 3 days of fasting, I think I’m going to break it tonight. The thing is, I miss chewing things. My body is sending up little crazy signals telling me I should be chewing, and I’m totally okay with that.

As a note, before I launch into the list of things I learned from this little experiment, I’m glad I didn’t pay for this cleanse. I thought about it, laughed at the price, and then read the pages of health information. Let’s just say the health field is filled with people who have a loose grasp on anatomy. Your stomach is acidic, but your pancreas pumps out enzymes that lower the pH of your food when it enters your small intestines, and this part, where the digestion takes place, is at pH 8. And your liver, for the last time, does not need detoxifying. If your liver and your kidneys were not working, you would be dead. If you want to lose actual weight, a juice cleanse isn’t for you. I wouldn’t go on this cleanse for more than 3-4 days. These companies suggest you eat vegan before you go on your cleanse, so they’re effectively prepping you for a week long commitment. If you put your body into starvation mode, your standard of health will decrease. A few days at depressed calorie intake on a cleanse should be fine, but don’t go the master cleanse route and fast for two weeks. You will lose muscle weight, and you’ll be less fit and healthy. So let’s stop talking about ‘detoxing’ and try to figure out what this means in terms of improving health.

On the flip side, I didn’t do this cleanse to start eating pizza and nachos again. I’m going vegan for this week and eating the remainder of my veggies and fruits. I read articles about people whining about how hard juice cleanses are and how terrible juices taste and how they weren’t healthy and how only nutty people cleanse and they’re just going to eat a fat steak now. If you’re going to do this, work with an open mind, and for all that is amazing, don’t do the master cleanse. Use a nice grapefruit juice to replace the SPICY LEMONADE.

Here are some takeaways from my DIY juicing experiment.

* I don’t eat enough fruits and veggies on a regular basis. I live in a culture where it’s permissible not to, and it’s easier to get good tasting non-vegetable food.

* I have improved energy, but I didn’t notice anything major with my skin. Some people say their skin gets ‘glowy’, but I didn’t see that result. I did have some digestion issues early on, but those cleared up. I don’t own a scale, but I did drop some water weight. I was able to run errands, work out, and go to work for days 2-3 of the cleanse without problems.

* Green juice is the answer to my fruit juice woes. I went into Whole Foods, and the two green juices I found (one being Naked) listed 5 fruits as their top 5 ingredients. I think the mostly-veggie green juice is what makes all of these juice cleanses work. My green juice included 1 kiwi, 1 apple, and a few handfuls of spinach and kale. I would consider adding parsley or celery in the future, but this recipe is simple, and it’s as many veggies and fruits as I eat during a normal day. I have effectively doubled my veggie/fruit consumption per day with an extra 15 minutes of work.

* You can do juicing with only a blender. I was skeptical I would be able to make this work with a blender because every other person who wrote about their DIY juicing had a juicer or dropped several hundred dollars to buy one. I can confirm that with a blender, pasta strainer, a funnel, and a bottle of some sort to keep the juice in you can make decent juice. Just make sure to add water, a bit of lemon juice (if desired), or coconut water to the veggies in the blender.

* I like to eat some fruits and veggies whole. I’m not going to grind up my other pineapple. I love pineapples! I was so sad when I had to throw away the pulp from the pine apple/cucumber drink. I love eating those two things raw, and my strawberries have been patiently waiting for this fast to be over.

* That said, I can expand the amount of fruits and veggies I eat everyday by blending together fruits and veggies I don’t like to eat whole. The perfect example is grapefruit. I loved the grapefruit/apple drink. I drank it right now, and I want more grapefruit juice. The same goes for kiwis and carrots. I can get cheap veggies and fruits, mix them together, and increase the amount of veggies and fruit I’m eating.

* I’m still skeptical of store bought juices. There are some good brands out there; I’m obsessed with juice now, so I went out and looked last night. I would consider buying some of those brands, but the majority of easily available juices aren’t vegetable based, and even the natural ones are designed to be very sweet by adding concentrated fruit juice. The only juice I found that listed vegetables as the first plant ingredients were tomato/carrot juices. We’ve designed our juices to include no pulp, too. As a rule, when you drink a bottled juice, it shouldn’t be clear. Juice isn’t soda, and the fibrous parts are good.

* I want to try one of the green juices from the cleansing companies. I couldn’t find any, but maybe in the future I’ll be able to try one. I want to know what the physical difference is between the green juice I made and the ones those companies are selling. That said, I wouldn’t pay to do this cleanse. Not $60-$80 a day for a labeled bottled and juice I could make myself. I spend that much money on my entire grocery bill, and I still have food left over I’m not going to juice, and I could, if needed, do two to three more days of just juicing on what fruits and veggies I have. I also don’t feel comfortable supporting the companies selling these cleanses because the websites do promote a lot of pseudo-science and feel-good anecdotes as supported health claims.

* The DIY method is definitely cheaper, and I can fit parts of it into my budget. I can make the green juice for under $20 a week, and with $25, I can make an additional fruit juice. I liked the cashew milk, but I think I’ll just stick to my cartoon of almond milk because it’s less chunky and has less calories. That said, 1/4 cup soaked cashews, 1 banana, cinnamon, and nutmeg with a splash of almond milk would make a great alternative to sweet and salty desert cravings.

Day 2: the Juicening

I had a variety of expectations going into this “drink your veggies” experiment. On waking up after day 1 (really, day .5 because I started this at around 2 pm Saturday), I’m surprised because I slept the same amount/sleep schedule as normal, and I am wide awake. Not ‘toothpicks propping open my eyelids’ or ‘wired on a large coffee’ awake, but ‘I actually got up when my alarm went off instead of sleeping through it for half an hour’ awake. I’m limiting myself to 1 cup of coffee (I measured it!) a day to keep any caffeine withdraw headaches away, but I think I could have done without the coffee this morning. I can’t remember a time in the last several years I could have said that. I thought I would wake up and say, “Screw this. I need to be awake to go to work.” But here I am, and I was in lab at 8 am.

With that said, the one down side I’m having also surprised me. I thought without eating fat or dairy last night, I would feel less bloated, but this isn’t the case. My stomach felt a bit tender this morning, but it’s not abnormal for me to feel nauseous in the morning. I thought I wouldn’t be bloated, but I didn’t find that to be the case, at least when I woke up. With that said, maybe allowing more pulp in the juice is causing the bloating. I plan to remedy this by making a citrus based juice later. I think the high alkali content of the green juice might be bothering my stomach.

Breakfast. Mmmmm.

Anyway, I drank my green juice for breakfast this morning. I wasn’t clear on what I was drinking, so I’m going to break down a little what I’ve done so far. From what I can tell, these juice fasts are built around the green juice. I’m starting to understand why: you’re drinking liquid spinach and kale. I drank 2 very pulpy green juices and 1 coffee mug of cashew/banana juice last night. I blended all my ingredients, so they’re probably WAY more chunky/pulpy than their counterparts you would get from juicing programs. I made 3 bottles of green juice and used 2 recipes of cashew juice to make 3 servings. I left the cashew mix less strained, but I did a fair job straining the green pulp. I put it into a pasta strainer and pressed it down. Then, I added more water to the pulp and let it sit over night, which is how I got 1 grande iced coffee serving for breakfast. (See: the handy plastic cup I didn’t throw away.)

Green juice:
- 1 large handful of kale
- 1 large handful of spinach
- 1 average sized kiwi, peeled
- 1-2 Granny Smith apples, whole
*The recipe I took this from says to add 1 banana. I didn’t do that on the first day, but maybe I’ll try the green juice with a banana.

Banana-Cashew Milk
For 1 bottle:
- 1 cup of raw cashews, soaked in water for 2 hours
- 1 banana
- 1 cup of water
- a pinch each of cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg
(I used WAY more water to dilute 2 recipes of this to 3 servings. I drank one serving last night, but I’m going to try and make the remaining two servings last as lunches today and tomorrow. We’ll see.)

Pineapple-Cucumber Juice:
-1 Pineapple
-1 seedless cucumber
*You could add apples and cut back on the pine apple. This one was hard to strain, and I made only 1.5 bottles from this ‘double’ recipe.

Grapefruit-apple-coconut Mint Juice:
-1 grapefruit
-1 red apple
-1/2 container coconut water (natural, unsweetened)
-Sprigs of mint
(I peeled the grapefruit and chopped up the apple, and blended it all together. This juice was to replace the lemonade, and it strained really well. The mint might make your stomach feel better. I a full bottle plus a bit more out of this recipe.)

Here are pictures of ingredients and how I strained them and filtered them. That said, I would embrace the pulpiness of these drinks. I went to Whole Foods, trying to find a packet of the cleanse drinks sold nationally, but they didn’t have the bottled drink versions. I really want to find a comparison ‘green juice’ to see how my blended version stacks up. From what I can tell, the green juice is what is making the difference for me.

Recipe for the pineapple-cucumber drink. I didn’t end up using the apples.

Cucumber and pineapple straining. It’s actually a very delicious juice, but it was the hardest to strain.

1 plastic cup of cucumber/pineapple for dinner and a bottle for work tomorrow!

The apples and grapefruit in the blender beside the coconut juice.

My final product of grapefruit/apple/mint/coconut juice. It’s very good, and the citrus balances out the more bitter juices.

Life experiments: Juice cleanses

I’m taking an exciting vacation in ten days. I’ve been saving money and doing work, putting the trip as far back in my mind as possible so I don’t get distracted. I’m not the type of person to check out until I’m out the door and hoping a plane. This is why, when I went shopping yesterday, I had one of those moments where, I realized for me, I had let myself go.

It started with my hair. I looked in the mirror and realized my hair was two colors. Two freaking colors. I had the tacky bottle dye job (saving money) and the root re growth to show how little I’ve cared for…oh, the last six months. To top it off, I was bloated and decided to wear skinny jeans out. And I didn’t wear make up because I care a lot less about putting make up on when I spend my entire day alone and working with rodents. This is just how it works, people.

“Letting myself go” is a relative term, and a phrase I kind of hate, even as I realize what it means. Basically, to cut down stress, I take an approach to let the little things (laundry, cleaning, putting on make up) slide unless the occasion is important. Think ‘job interview’ or ‘giving a presentation.’ There should be room in life to not care about trivial things. We should give ourselves the freedom to go after goals without the nagging voice of “Do the laundry! Have the perfect house! Paint your nails!” ringing in our heads. I have things I want to do that are more important than devoting a chunk of time and money to chasing this high-maintenance version of femininity. For example, read 18 things to consider before moving in with your boyfriend, and please, for the love of all the things, let me know if you’ve known ANYONE who hangs up their flip flops. In addition, if you have ever made a cut bow in your toilet paper or decorated your freaking trash can with bows, let me know so I can say there are people in the world who’ve actually done those things. I do not believe these type of people exist, and if they do, I’m certainly not friends with any of them. I hate wasting time, but that said, I have a baseline of femininity, and I express it in some culturally typical ways.

That said, I had the ‘crap, I fell below my own personal level of femininity’ moment standing in a Macy’s dressing room. I called the hair salon on the bus ride home and made an appointment. My hair is a single color. Sometimes, life is that easy. I lucked out and got a woman who had a lisp, so she didn’t try to make idle chatter with me. I went to a very good stylist, but she talked way too much. Idle chatter bores me, and why are you asking me about super personal things? Just because you’re touching my hair doesn’t mean you’ve become my magical confidant.

I come home from the salon, and the second issue smacks me in the face: I’m bloated and feel terrible. This is different from the hair and femininity issue, but they’re all tied up in that knot of self-image problems. I looked up this article about DIY juice cleanses, which I read and made fun of a few months ago. I know what it means to cut water weight. I know how much water weight I can cut in a two day period if I absolutely need to hit a number on a scale. That said, ‘quick’ weight loss is just that: water weight and maybe a pound of real weight. The safest amount of REAL weight you can lose in a week is around 2 pounds while being completely functional. Even then, your body wants to sit at a specific weight, and it’s best not to fight nature. Eat veggies, get protein, drink water, and you land where you land weight wise. That said, when your diet (my diet…) goes to shit, you feel it. And man, I am feeling it. For me, it’s that I’ve started bad snacking habits. They crept in at work, and eating more sugar just causes me to crave more sugar. Couple this with a general increase in my cravings for dairy, and it’s the perfect storm of bad eating.

And this is how I read an article about juicing five times in a row before deciding that I was going to try it. Granted, I’m going to try the juice part for about 2-3 days. I’m going to try a slew of different recipes, but that’s the goal: lots of raw veggies and a bunch of water to reset my palate. Because when I’m too lazy to cook chard, something is wrong. When I let other foods squeeze out veggies in my food budget, I need to reset the baseline because it’s skewed.

The rough idea is to take the do-it-myself approach. (Money. Saving money is awesome.) I spent my week grocery budget on raw product and a box of unsalted cashews. No cheeses, no pasta, nothing else. Just fruit and veggies. I made the ‘green juice’, which seems to be the foundation of every juice cleanse that exists. And…well, kale has a really powerful after taste, even when it’s mixed with kiwis and granny smith apples. I also made the banana-cashew-lots of water-cinnamon drink to take to work for lunch because I’m going to need some substance at work. I played “will it blend?” with a variety of veggies, and I’m going to tackle more recipes tomorrow.

I have vowed to not eat anything more solid than the juice pulp for two days. The only exception is coffee, and even then, I need to drink only a cup to prevent headaches. Also, I will not do the master cleanse. If I want lemon juice, I’m gong to squeeze a lemon, add agave nectar, and dilute it with water. Why, why or freaking why, you would think ‘hey, I know what this lemonade needs! Cayenne pepper!’ I know what the intended affect is, but your liver and kidneys are pros at filtering toxins from your body. Cleansing, in the most literal sense, isn’t eliminating any magical toxins your liver and kidneys didn’t get to first.

My goal is to reset my palate quickly. I don’t own a scale. I don’t care how much weight I gain or lose. I just need to feel better, and a fair amount of that comes from a slippery-slope cravings slide. Once again, cravings are a personal thing. What I consider ‘normal cravings’ isn’t universal, but you can reset your cravings. The sugar in the fruit part of the drinks should work well enough to put a cap on the sugar cravings. After I finish the initial pulp n’ water days, I want to make a real focus on eating raw food. This isn’t because I believe cooking magically makes food unhealthy; it doesn’t, and in many instances, cooking allows you to absorb more nutrients from veggies. Basically, I want to stop being lazy with how I’ve been eating. There’s no magical bullet, I’m well aware, but the goal of feeling ‘less crappy’ is one I’m going to prioritize this week.

Living while introverted

I am an introvert. Surprise, I know, being part of that half of the population. It’s like being a woman. Flip a coin, and you could probably guess my gender and particular social inclination. The most common reactions to being an introvert are “You’re not shy!” or “But you go out a lot!” Well, yes, but here’s the thing: I require ridiculous amounts of me time. I need large chunks of space and time to myself to be creative and to just think. I’m not a ‘group work’ person. It’s not because I don’t like other people, but it’s usually because, if I work in a group or with a group, I still need swaths of time to go off and work on my own. Introversion has little to do with being shy and all to do with enjoying silence and a sense of open space in the world.

And this is why I hate “how to fix your life, you shy introvert!” type help articles. I read them because I’m a masochist. This is the latest piece I came across. The article should have been about ways to make sure you get out of your house more because it’s about how to get out of your house in the age of extreme creature comforts. It’s more about being lazy than about being introverted.

I hear you! I’m a total introvert and the creature comforts of home are usually a lot more enticing than a social outing. The amount of awesome that you can stuff into a small house makes it incredibly hard to get out and leave. The fact most people have a big flat screen TV, can stream just about any movie or TV show on demand, and can automate the delivery of pretty much everything makes it easier than ever to stay cooped up inside. Still, social interaction is good for you, so let’s take a look at some ways you can motivate yourself to get out of the house every now and again.

There’s the assumption introversion never means leaving your house. Wrong and wrong. I go outside a lot, work a job, go for walks, travel, and all kinds of other things, but I’m still an introvert. I can do a lot of these things without interacting closely with other people. I guess the reason I like my little apartment is because I crave my own space. Even when growing up, I craved my own spaces, little places where I could go, think as long as I needed, and feel completely comfortable. It’s about me time, not about vegging in front of the couch. There are out door places, places away from my apartment, that qualify as ‘me’ spaces. I had this seat in the library I always tried to sit in because I loved its location. I felt completely comfortable in that corner, tucked away from loud groups of people, and I did a lot of solid work there. At home, I loved my swing set. I had my swing, which was different from my sister’s swing, and I would go out there and swing for hours. Seriously, I was obsessed with swing sets. If my sister came out, we would play, but I liked to get out there alone and just swing.

This is introversion. This is not being shy but an in your bones need for solitude.

That being said, being an introvert doesn’t make you better. It really doesn’t. Being a women doesn’t give me magical estrogen powers. It’s a 50:50 population split. Flip a coin, it’s just like that. As a society, we put a lot of value on extroversion because it’s essential for community building. In case you were wondering, as social animals, humans are all about community building, so this is why we do prize extroverts, but once again, flip the coin. You’re not better, just different.

That being said, what if you’re an introvert who wants to interact better with people? What if you want to learn how to socialize in a way that makes sense for you? “Must I fake it?” on the ‘Since You Asked’ blog by Cary Tennis is the best advice I’ve ever read about how to be an introvert in a world that values extroversion. Here is the question and the best part of the answer, but read the entire thing.

Question :

I was wondering if you could give me some meta-advice. See, I’m quite shy and introverted socially, so I have difficulty in making friends or moving beyond a superficial level of acquaintance. I read self-help books and the like — I’ve even had a little counseling — for advice in how to amend this, but I’m seeing this apparent dichotomy in such advice that I don’t know how to resolve. On the one hand, they say that to make connections with people you should turn your attention to the other person, ask them questions about themselves and their lives, and so on. On the other hand, they say you should always try to “be yourself,” don’t try too hard, act as comes naturally to you. But with my personality, I have to “try hard” to generate conversation, to think of questions to ask people, and to not revert to going on about my own inane opinions if nothing immediately springs to mind (to say nothing of ignoring the feeling of artificiality produced by this strategy). If I acted as came naturally to me I would not be talking much (except to people I already know).

Answer:

The uneasiness of the introvert in a social situation has to do with the signals you are getting from the rest of the people that you do not exist. So assert your existence. You needn’t do this in any obvious way. Just feel your toes. Feel your hips. As you stand in a circle of people, feel your breath. Look at the other people. Allow yourself to look at them and think about them. Notice how their mouths move, how their eyes change, what kind of hair they have, what their skin is like, what they are wearing and where it came from. Regard them. Hold your space. Do not worry that you will be called upon, or that you must be ready with shallow patter. Just calm down and observe. Be a million miles away.

This holding of your own space is a form of quiet aggression that can redress the imbalance between the extroverts and the introverts. Yes, the extroverts command airspace. They say phrases. Their faces move. But you have the right to your own thoughts. If what they are saying is ludicrous, you do not have to laugh and pretend. If you make them uncomfortable, they will find some other guacamole.

Putting on that natural face

About a year ago, I signed up for a make up tutorial at Sephora. I was buying lip gloss and nail polish, and they roped me in with ‘get a free sample bag!’ I am a sucker for sample bags, especially when they come with a basic make up essential like mascara because hey! One less thing I have to buy. When the time came, I had a prior obligation, so I called my friend and said, “Hey, want free make up?” This friend agreed to go, and when they got back, they got the reaction of “Oh, you look nice, but you look better without make up.” This is partly because my friend has amazing skin, but this reaction…it occurs so often, in so many venues, we just let it slide by.

We say, “Look natural” or “I prefer natural beauty.” There is nothing wrong with wanting to push back against the world where men and women measure their beauty against photo shopped models. No one, not even models, look like models. You don’t need to look like a model, and neither do I, because I cannot be photo shopped into real life. However, there are standards in business and certain industries to conform to a cultural beauty standard. If you don’t want to confirm to standards, then don’t, but every cultural has beauty standards. We create, remake, and unmake beauty standards, and these things are largely out of our individual control, created by a collective mind over a personal choice. An obvious example is how, back in the good ole days of feudalism, voluptuous, pale women were considered the ideal beauty because it signified they didn’t have to work and had plenty of food. Today, in an industrial society, thin and tan women are considered the ideal beauty because they have money to afford choice food and can be outdoors and not sitting in an office all day.

Since money and leisure time influence our views on attractiveness, the current ‘natural’ beauty trend makes more sense. We want women who are effortlessly beautiful, which is the signifier they have leisure time to look good all the time. We also want women who look natural, someone who has enough money to have lived a good life, a life free from the stresses of poverty.

As funny as the comic is, I think it speaks to the idea that, if you don’t wear make up, you don’t know what it looks like when people do wear make up! Hell, I wear make up, and I can’t even tell how much make up a woman could be wearing at any given moment. For the record, ‘natural’ make up can include all of the below: moisturizer, concealer, foundation, light eye shadow, lip gloss. ‘Heavy’ make up includes all of these, plus usually eye liner, mascara, and blush. Some people don’t use moisturizer or concealer, but count it up. Even without those, foundation, light eye shadow, and lip gloss are usually the ‘standard’ most women use for day make up. Emily over at xo Jane says it best:

But even more than being annoyed by the implication that there’s one right way to be sexy, I’m dubious that men have even the slightest idea what they’re talking about when they say “no makeup.” Most guys I’ve dated couldn’t explain the difference between a skirt and a dress, so forgive me if I am hesitant to believe they fully grasp the uses and appearance of various cosmetics. In fact, I hypothesize that they actually don’t know the difference between no makeup and natural-looking makeup.

****

Most of the time, when men say they prefer “natural beauty,” they don’t mean that they’re ready for us to start leaving the house the way we roll out of bed in the morning. They mean that they want us to look perfect without appearing to try.

Basically, it’s a trap.

There’s also an article where Zooey Deschanel is filmed without make up. This is probably a signifier of the ‘natural’ beauty trend, where lovely women are photographed.

Wizard fuckery. Because there is no other title for this

There are days when magic happens. I popped open my blog statistics today, and this screen cap is what I beheld.

I feel like I won the Ig Nobel Prize. People search every odd combination of words on Google, but I feel privileged that ‘what kind of wizard fuckery is this’ brought one person on earth to my blog. I feel I need to define ‘what kind of wizard fuckery is this’. It’s only reminding me of the Amy Winehouse song “Me and Mr. Jones” right now.

In which American politics feels like a Greek myth

The Ouroboros is a famous symbol, even though you’ve probably never heard the name. I’m going to do you a favor and just show you the picture.

"Isn't that the ring Aragorn wore?"

Now that you see it, the wordy, Greek name takes on meaning. The Ouroboros devours itself; the snake symbolizing fertility and eternity. The Ouroboros isn’t necessary a Greek-only idea; it’s present in other cultures as well. Jung latched onto it, attributing our ‘primitive ego’ as the ultimate symbolism of the Ouroboros. I wanted to smash my head into a wall listening about the contraception debate. When it morphed into the Limbaugh vs. women-as-caterpillars, who get vaginally probed after being stripped of health-care, debate, I reached a whole new level of astounded. I found my shock morph into indifference as one asinine story about women morphed into another equally moronic response. Then I knew what was happening. American politics, at least on women’s issues, morphed into an Ouroboros; we are literally devouring ourselves, retreading the same group. Nothing is too extreme any more; we are numb to the insane, but amid head line after headline, I try to let go of my own tail because I do need to care. If I don’t care, I know I’m at risk of repeating mistakes in my own life, but as a culture, if we don’t care, we will remain stuck in this political environment until we consume ourselves.

And now, I end this depressing post with an adorable, underground mammal!

Pictured: fuzzy incarnate