Why chasing an hourglass figure is a fool's errand.

 

ursus@zdeneksasek.com | Deposit Photos

It's close enough to New Year's that we can talk about resolutions, right? And people still automatically write "I will lose weight this year" as one of their resolutions, right?

Perhaps capitalizing on this trend, BBC Science Focus magazine has an article in its latest issue called, "Key weight-loss mystery solved: New research suggests fat cells have a 'memory'". (I would love to give y'all a link to this article, but it looks like you have to subscribe to see the articles in the latest issue. I have access through Apple News+, which I have found to be a decent news aggregator.)

The article quotes Dr. Ferdinand von Meyenn, assistant professor at ETH Zurich's Department of Health Sciences and Technology, on a recent study conducted by him and his team. They looked at a group of people, some of whom were "living with obesity" (their phrase) and some who weren't, who had lost 25 percent of their body mass index, and compared the differences in DNA sequences in their fat tissue before and after the weight loss. What they discovered -- brace yourselves -- is this: "The body really fights against [weight loss] and wantes to return to its original weight. The adipose tissue is programmed to want to regain that weight." 

As a reformed yo-yo dieter, I am here to say: No shit.

He goes on to say that people who lose weight and can't keep it off aren't weak: "There really is an underlying molecular mechanism driving gaining the weight back."

As the same reformed yo-yo dieter: Also no shit. 

We have discussed this several times here on hearth/myth. To save you from trawling through years of posts, I will give you the link once again to Wikipedia's article about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was conducted toward the end of World War II. The idea was to find the best diet for people who endured starvation during the war to make them healthy again. But first, the researchers had to create starving people. So they recruited a bunch of guys and put them on a starvation diet. Long-term dieters would recognize the result: many of the experiment subjects quit, many others cheated, and a significant number developed mental illnesses ranging from depression to hysteria: "Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Sexual interest was drastically reduced, and the volunteers showed signs of social withdrawal and isolation."

The point being that yeah, fat cells want to be fat again. Duh.

You would think that could be circumvented by getting rid of the excess fat cells. That procedure is called liposuction, and it was all the rage in, oh, the '80s or '90s. It sounded great 'til people started getting infections from having it done in sketchy clinics. Nowadays, it's recognized as plastic surgery and not a weight loss option, and patients are advised that if they don't watch their diet, the weight can come back -- because as it happens, it's not just the fat cells themselves that remember how big and robust they used to be. Our bodies have developed a system over centuries to survive famine -- it's called adaptive thermogenesis -- and they interpret diets as just another famine. Which is why all those guys in the starvation experiment went kinda crazy. Also, vacuuming out some fat cells doesn't do away with your body's ability to make more fat cells to replace them.

Dr. von Meyenn says we should be focusing on obesity prevention instead of trying to cure it after it has already happened. That's not much help for those of us for whom prevention is too late.

Here is the one thing I know for sure to be true, after decades of dieting: Diets don't work. And chasing that hourglass figure will probably just leave you disappointed, depressed, and thinking about food all the time. And that's no way to live.

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These moments of anti-dieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

And we're walking.

So I thought I'd post this week about a couple of...oh, let's call them health-related things. 

First: I bought a treadmill. It feels a little like admitting defeat to say that. I mean, the weather here in Santa Fe is about a million times better than it is in DC -- why not just go outside for a walk? Yeah, well, I've been here for about a year and a half now, and going outside for a walk is just not happening on any sort of regular basis. It's partly due to the pandemic; when I lived downtown, going outside was a little scary, what with unmasked tourists of unknown vaccination status wandering around every time I stepped outside my building. But another part of it that I need to have a purpose for a walk. Walk to the library or the post office? Sure. Walk to a museum, or around inside a museum? I'm so there. Take a walk around the block for exercise? I've got better things to do. 

Then, too, as I mentioned last week, the annual legislative session has begun. So for the next month, more or less, I'll be working seven days a week with no breaks during the day. Essentially, I sit at my work computer for nearly every daylight hour.

So if I had any hope of getting exercise at all, I knew I needed to get a treadmill. Here's what I got.

Lynne Cantwell 2022

It's a Urevo 2 in 1 under desk treadmill. I don't intend to use it as an under-desk machine, as I don't have a sit-stand desk, but it will definitely work that way. The handle folds flat around the back end of the machine.

This machine has very few bells and whistles. It has no programmed routines and no incline adjustment -- not even a manual one. There's a power switch under the right front edge, and a tiny remote that starts and stops the belt, as well as raising or lowering the speed in .2-mph increments. With the handle in the upright position, there's an additional set of controls: incremental increase and decrease buttons; a pause button; two buttons to bring the speed immediately up to 3 mph and 6 mph, respectively; and a big orange emergency stop button. There's also a tiny ledge for your phone.

For me, the ledge is an excellent feature. I'm not big on watching videos or listening to music or podcasts while I walk, but I do like to read, and my Kindle Paperwhite fits fairly securely on that ledge. (The backrest would fit the Kindle better if it were a little taller, to be honest; I may jury-rig something eventually.)

I hear you, fitness fanatics: "If you can read while you exercise, you're not doing it right!" Yeah, well, pish-tosh. My legs are moving, aren't they? Is this better than sitting on my butt all day or not? That's what I thought. Go away.

Anyway, I've had it for about a week and it's working out great. I'm glad I got it.

The second thing I want to talk about tonight is Noom. You may recall -- although you probably won't -- that I signed up for an app called Noom Coach back in 2017 and told y'all that I'd report back on how it went. Then I never did. Want to know why? Because I didn't lose any weight on it -- or at least none to speak of.

I was reminded of my brief fling with Noom earlier today, when I read a BuzzFeed News story about the app. Like many other things that started out as weight loss programs, Noom now promotes itself as a "health and wellness tool." In the article, they interview the authors of Intuitive Eating, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. (Intuitive eating was also mentioned in an article in Bon Appetit this month; that one is a fun read about how diet foods have evolved since the 1980s, and I highly recommend it. Although the BuzzFeed article is fun, too. Heck, read 'em both.)

One of Noom's marketing claims is that the program is based on science. It includes a lot of psychological tips and tricks for sticking to the plan, most of which I knew before I started using the app. But at bottom, Noom requires its customers to lose weight by severely restricting calorie intake, just like every other diet. And as Resch told BuzzFeed News: "They’re telling you it could be mind over matter, but it’s not possible. The survival part of the brain is going to do whatever it can to keep you alive... You can learn how to have power over [other habits] but not something that's so physiological and neurochemical. You cannot overcome that unless you're priming yourself for a very serious eating disorder."

One of the biggest dangers with this program -- or really, any weight loss program -- is the emphasis on the number on the scale: if it's not going down, you feel like a failure. Back when I did Weight Watchers (which now calls itself WW because it's about "wellness," doncha know), we were told about ways to track our progress when the scale wouldn't budge (waist circumference and so on). But the weekly weigh-in was a much bigger thing, and it was demoralizing when I hit a plateau. Noom requires a daily weigh-in, which is ridiculous for women -- our weight fluctuates with the time of the month.

Interestingly, Noom is changing tack -- it's marketing to men now. It turns out that men haven't heard all those little tips and tricks that are so ingrained in women's diet culture. But the risk of psychological damage is just as real for men as it is for women. 

Diets don't work, folks. Regardless of whether the purported aim is "health and wellness" or weight loss, you're being set up to fail. 

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Oh, hey, here's another thing I learned this week: If you're a woman who has hit middle age and you're suddenly struggling with belly fat? Don't make yourself crazy over it. It's a physiological change that hits nearly all of us in the years leading up to menopause, and not only are researchers just now beginning to understand why, they've yet to figure out how to get rid of it. Swell, huh?

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These moments of walking blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! And get some better masks!

A year of low carbing.

Never fear -- I am not going to turn this into a diet blog, or a dieting blog, or a lifestyle change blog, or any permutation thereof. I don't pretend to be an expert on anything except myself. And I'm not trying to become an influencer, nor am I looking for sponsors.

I also didn't mean to start this post with a disclaimer, but there you have it.

I just wanted to let y'all know about a thing I've been doing for almost a year now. It's a low-carb diet, kinda sorta, and I kinda sorta came up with it myself -- which is to say it's not keto or Atkins or carb counting or any of those. 

If it's anything, it's based on an out-of-print book called The 30-Day Diabetes Cure. The link is to Amazon but don't buy it from them (how often do you hear me say that?) because they're charging a ridiculous amount for it; try Better World Books instead.

Some background: I've had type 2 diabetes for about ten years now. For a long time I was in denial -- mainly because the first thing any doctor will say to you, when you turn up in their office as diabetic or pre-diabetic, is to lose weight. But I'd been dieting since I was eleven years old and had lost hundreds of pounds, only to see them all come back -- and bring friends. At last, I concluded that diets don't work, and that in fact they only serve to line the pockets of the diet and fitness industry. But doctors don't want to hear that. If you tell a doctor that you're not going to go on a diet, they label you as uncooperative -- or worse.

I tried to cooperate -- a little. I went to see a dietitian, who tried to sell me meal-replacement shakes "to jump-start your weight loss." That's a diet, honey, so nope. Later, I saw another dietitian, who tried to get me to track what I was eating and how much and all that stuff. "Does that feel like a diet?" she asked me. Hell, yes, it does, and it's exactly what I swore I'd never do again. She eventually passed me off to another dietitian, who seemed enthusiastic when I mentioned low-carbing (I'd read online that it could work for diabetics - here's a recent study), but of course she wanted me to track my carbs and -- all together now -- THAT'S A DIET.

What I needed was for somebody to tell me which types of foods to stay away from. But nobody wants to do that, and I have a feeling it's because they're in cahoots with the food manufacturers and Big Pharma -- industries that would rather sell you highly processed foods, fake sweeteners, and expensive drugs so new that there are no generics for them. But that's a whole 'nother blog post or three. 

Anyway, this book: A clerk in a vitamin-supplement store here in Santa Fe recommended it to me. "Diabetes is all about what you eat," she said. And I thought, if this book will tell me what to eat to bring my blood sugar down, I'm in. So I ordered a copy and read it. Then, a year ago this week, I started doing it.

For the first ten days, you get no sugar, no alcohol, and no carbs. Most veggies are okay, but no fruits. That's supposed to bring your blood sugar down to normal. Mine was pretty high at the time, even with the super-expensive drugs I was on, so I didn't get to normal in ten days -- but my readings did drop a significant amount. So I kept doing it.

It's been a year, as I said. I've been off the super-expensive drugs for months. My blood sugar is still not quite normal, but it's close. I've lost about 25 pounds and have kept it off, which is huge for me; if I were concentrating on losing weight, I would have given up in frustration months ago.

Here's a funny thing: I'm not interested in sweets or high-carb foods. I suspect it's because I'm not eating them, so there's no craving to trigger. In fact, I can taste hidden sugars in restaurant foods now -- and I don't like them.

That doesn't mean I'm eating bland meals. Here's my dinner tonight: ham and provolone with brown mustard on almond-flour rolls, broccoli slaw, and a dill pickle spear. 

Lynne Cantwell 2022

The key is to include lots of veggies and make most of your food from scratch. But I'm not a kitchen slave; the broccoli slaw dressing has five ingredients and whipped up in about two minutes, and the slaw itself came in a bag from Trader Joe's.

I'm not saying this will work for everybody. But it makes sense that if eating carbs raises your blood sugar, not eating them will lower it. And I've never had a doctor, or a diabetes educator, or a dietitian flat-out tell me that. I had to find out on my own. 

So now I've told you.

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These moments of non-dieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed! Wear a mask!

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.

Counting calories.

I've posted here before about weight loss, but not for quite a while. That's because I decided to quit trying to lose weight. I've been dieting, off and on, for nearly 50 years. At first I counted calories, then carbs, fat grams, and Weight Watchers points.

For a short while, I was on NutriSystem: prepackaged foods, a bunch of supplements, and no bananas. Seriously, no bananas. It had something to do with the way their diet handled potassium intake. I lost weight on it -- but anybody would. It was an 800-calorie-a-day, high-protein diet. They achieved the protein numbers by putting protein powder in everything -- even the prepackaged hot chocolate mix.

I've managed to stay away from gimmicky diet aids -- Ayds "candies" (remember those?), Slim-Fast shakes, fasts and cleanses, fen-phen. Haven't done any of them, ever. In most cases, I'm glad. I've also glad that I've never fallen for the siren song of bariatric surgery; nearly everyone I know who's had it done has gained the weight back, and some have had medical complications, to boot.

I've met with nutritionists several times over the years. I even signed up for a clinical trial for some weight loss drug, but I quit when the nutritionist gave me information that conflicted with information that another nutritionist had given me years before.

In short, over the years, I've lost hundreds of pounds...and gained them all back.

So I related to the New York Times story that came out this past week. It turns out that Weight Watchers has an image problem. People are tired of thinking about their weight. They're tired of thinking about food all the time. Instead, people today want to be healthy. They want to be strong. They want to eat clean (whatever that means).

Weight Watchers solved their problem by reinventing their program yet again (they tweak it every couple of years, anyway) and hiring Oprah to be their spokeswoman. Sign-ups skyrocketed. I highly doubt whether their results are any better, though, and here's why:

Diets don't work.

We have known this for years. One big reason is this one, from a Psychology Today article published in 2010:

Obesity and overweight can be conditions that are caused by early life trauma... In one early study of 286 obese people, half had been sexually abused as children. In these cases, "...overeating and obesity weren't the central problems, but attempted solutions." For these people, therapy might be a prerequisite to healthy weight loss.

Programs like Weight Watchers address physical hunger. They focus on the scale -- on measurable results to show investors and prospective clients -- and they basically tell you that if your problem is emotional eating, you just need to change your attitude, gosh darn it, and here are some tips for that.

Of course, there's a lot of recidivism in diet programs. As the author of the New York Times article says, if you want to be successful at Weight Watchers, you basically have to resign yourself to being a member -- counting points every day -- for the rest of your life.

No wonder I got discouraged and quit.

Unfortunately, that means the pounds have come back. So I'm trying something slightly different this time. It's an app called Noom Coach. You can download the app for free, but to get full use of the features, you have to pay for the coaching and group meetings. So far, I've been using it for a little less than a week. I haven't learned anything that I didn't know already, and the group chat feels a lot like a daily Weight Watchers meeting (for good or ill). But it's easy to log my food and the app does the calorie counting for me.

That's right! I've come full circle. I'm back to counting calories.

I'll let you know how it goes.

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