Big Tobacco -- sorry, Big Food -- fights back.

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Toward the end of my time in DC, I was in a bad way. I had been on and off diets for about 50 years, losing hundreds of pounds, only to gain them all back, plus some. I was on two high-priced drugs for type 2 diabetes, one of which was Ozempic. I knew that diets didn't work, and yet every doctor I saw told me I needed to go on another one. When I resisted, I was called noncompliant. The whole dance stressed me out and gave me a binge eating disorder. 

Then a therapist told me about health at every size. The idea is that the scale is not the be-all and end-all -- that your weight doesn't matter as long as your blood pressure, etc., are fine. I glommed onto the idea like a life preserver. The therapist sent me to a dietitian, who recommended a book called The F*ck-It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. (The publisher put the asterisk in the title, not me.) A lot of what the author wrote made sense to me, so I decided to try eating whatever I wanted, whenever I was hungry.

My fasting blood sugar shot up to about 180. (Note to those who know nothing about blood sugar readings: a fasting reading of between 70 and 100 is normal; 200 is high; at 400, you need to go to the E.R.; and if it's as high as 600, you could go into a coma and die.) I started to maybe think I was being sold a bill of goods -- that as a diabetic, maybe I couldn't eat whatever I wanted. When I broached the subject with the dietitian, I was a titch confrontational -- but the upshot was that she didn't know whether a fasting blood sugar reading of 180 was dangerous for a diabetic or not. We parted ways immediately. Very shortly thereafter, I also parted ways with the therapist who'd sent me to her.

This was not my first run-in with dietitians and nutritionists, although it was the most egregious. So this past week, I wasn't terribly surprised to see this article in the Washington Post: "As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice". It's a gift article, so feel free to click through and read it. The bottom line is that big food manufacturers like General Mills are co-opting the health-at-every-size message and turning it on its head. They claim to be empowering people to reject fat shaming and eat anything they want -- including, of course, Big Food's highly-processed products. To get there, they're enlisting dietitians as social media influencers, even to the extent of paying them to promote the manufacturers' products. (That link is also to a gift article. Both are the result of a new partnership between the Post and The Examination, a nonprofit news organization that specializes in coverage of public health issues around the world.)

The worst part is how these food manufacturers are distorting the health-at-every-size message. Its roots are in the 1960s civil rights movement, according to the article; the original goal was to promote equal access to healthcare. By 1995, the movement had come up with "intuitive eating" as a way for people, including those with eating disorders, to learn to listen for internal hunger cues that diet culture had taught them to ignore. 

As interest in intuitive eating increased, Big Food began to pay attention. Clearly, the industry is scared that the anti-diet movement, along with the success of drugs like Wegovy (aka Ozempic formulated for weight loss) in tamping down desire for junk food, are going to upend their business model. After all, obesity has been deemed a healthcare crisis. So the industry is manipulating the movement's message by "essentially shift[ing] accountability for the health crisis away from the food industry for creating ultra-processed junk foods laden with food additives, sugars and artificial sweeteners," as last week's article says.

This looks suspiciously like the sort of propaganda that Big Tobacco employed for decades to convince its customers that its addictive, cancer-causing products weren't really that bad, and were even healthy.

Last fall, according to the Post/Examination article, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a number of influencers and food industry trade groups for not being explicit about who was funding the influencers' posts. But that just means the influencers have to be clear about who's paying for their messaging. They don't have to change their advice.

I'm not trying to discredit all dietitians. I'm sure many of them offer nutritionally sound information and don't take kickbacks for social media posts from anybody. But we've received so much terrible information about nutrition from "experts" over the years -- eggs cause high cholesterol (LOL, nope), margarine is better than butter (actually, the trans fats in margarine make butter the better choice), high fructose corn syrup is fine (not so much), dairy fat is bad (that one's being disproven, too) -- that, well, just be careful about whom you listen to. Especially if it's a paid influencer on social media.

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By the way, I didn't lose any weight on Ozempic. See, Ozempic makes your appetite go away. But a big appetite was never my problem; my problem was binge eating due to stress. I ate whether I was hungry or not. It wasn't until I retired, moved cross-country, and started low-carbing that I've lost weight and kept it off.

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These moments of doughnut moustrapping have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A body image myth, debunked.

John Hain | CC0 | Pixabay

For the past several months, I've been working with a dietitian to get my eating back on track. Recently I had a revelation that I want to share with you.

I want to make it clear upfront that I'm not looking for dieting advice. I've been dieting off and on for 50 years. No kidding. At the age of eleven, tired of my brother teasing me about being fat, I went on my first diet. I lost 20 pounds that summer. Of course, later on, it all came back -- and then some.

By the time my kids were tweens, I'd yo-yo-dieted enough times to know that dieting doesn't work. And I told the girls that. Too bad I didn't follow my own advice.

Over five decades, I've counted calories and fat grams; I've done NutriSystem (800 pre-packaged calories a day!); I've done Weight Watchers a whole bunch of times. Almost always, I've lost weight. Often I would lose 30 or 40 or 50 lbs. in less than six months. I am really, really good at losing weight. I've had a lot of practice.

But then I'd plateau forever, and I'd get sick of eating so little with no results. So I'd drop the diet and the weight would come back.

It happened so many times that I ended up hating my metabolism. I'd joke about my Eastern European peasant genes that were so good at getting through my ancestors through famines. But really, I felt like my body was betraying me. I couldn't control it, and I hated it.

So anyway, the dietitian recommended to me this book called The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. The author is Caroline Dooner. It took her a lot less time to get fed up with diet culture, and to conclude that dieting doesn't work, than it took me. But she connected the dots in a way I hadn't thought about before, and it only took her repeating it 20 or 30 times before I finally got it.

Here is what I realized at last: My body hasn't been betraying me when it packs on pounds after I drop the latest diet. My body has been trying to keep me alive.

Dooner cites a World-War-II-era study on starvation. The aim was to learn how to rehabilitate starving people, once the war was over. So they recruited 36 mentally and physically healthy conscientious objectors. At first the men received about 3,200 calories per day -- which was considered normal for men back then. A few months later, the men's diets were cut in half, to about 1,600 calories per day. In those days, 1,600 calories a day was considered semi-starvation; today, we consider 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day to be adequate for people on a diet.

Think about that for a minute.

And then think about what happened to those semi-starved guys: They lost interest in everything except food. Their heart rates slowed down, they were cold all the time, and they had other physical ailments. All of them suffered from depression and anxiety. Their sex drives deserted them. And they experienced body dysmorphia -- in other words, they had wrong ideas about the size and shape of their own bodies and others'. When the experimenters began feeding them again, the guys who got a lot of food -- 5,000 or even 10,000 calories per day -- made the best recoveries. And even then, some of the subjects said they felt hungry for months or years after the experiment was over.

You can extrapolate a lot from this. I mean, just about everybody's been on a diet at some point, which means we've all practiced self-starvation. And a lot of us have yo-yo'd back to where we started, and then some. And most, if not all, of us have believed ourselves to be weak-willed and lazy when it happens -- not to mention judgmental of others.

Expand that to our national preoccupation with what we're eating and what everybody else is eating. And a diet industry that makes more money every time a dieter fails. And a medical establishment that thinks anyone overweight ought to be on a diet. And you might begin to wonder whether our obesity epidemic hasn't been caused by chronic dieting (among other factors, of course).

As for me, I've started by apologizing to my body. Instead of hating it, now I'm grateful to it for keeping me alive. And I'm never going to deliberately starve myself again.

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These moments of well-fed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.