If you search Google Scholar for "obesity epidemic causes," you get the same tired stuff you've been hearing for years: we're eating too much hyperpalatable calorie-dense food, exercising too little, and creating a dangerous spiral as we slowly strangle our pancreatic function and bork our bodies' capacities to respond effectively to glucose in the bloodstream. Maybe you'll see some speculation about mysterious environmental factors that we don't understand. Could it be something in the water?
The thing I did not see when I searched "obesity epidemic causes" was a thing that seems painfully obvious to me after reading Intuitive Eating: our go-to remedy, a short-term fix, is exacerbating the medium-term problem. It seems plausible to me that it is significantly worsening the long-term problem. Where's the science on that?
Because it is something in the water, so to speak. Virtually every woman who is currently alive has been hearing for her entire life that maybe she would be better, happier, more pleasing to the fellas-- if only she were a little trimmer. What's on the cover of every woman's magazine? Diet advice. What does every social media algorithm serve you up reliably if you are a middle-aged woman? Diet ads.
But what if mainstream approaches to dieting are the problem, not the solution?
Something like 80% of the time, people who go on diets regain the weight they lost -- often with a few bonus pounds on top, often with a panoply of hidden changes in the hormones that regulate weight. We don't want to think it's true; we certainly don't want to think it's true for us. Because we're going to do our diet RIGHT; we are embarking on a new slim-and-trim life! And yet, statistically speaking -- take it from your friendly neighborhood PhD -- 80% of people are going to fall in the 80% of people.
If we're concerned about obesity, maybe we need to stop recommending a behavior with the potential to worsen it. If the effect of the large majority of mainstream diets is that people wind up at or above their starting point, with metabolic changes that will make it harder to lose fat in the future, it's time to consider some different ideas.
Some time ago I posted a link to Casey Johnston's mind-blowing avocado post on Instagram. If you haven't seen it, it's worth your time -- not just to glance at, but to think deeply about (she has a longer blog post here in which she tells more of her story). As a society, we are pushing women and girls toward a mode of being that is ferociously bad for them. We are telling them to eat less food than their bodies need. A 1200-calorie diet is appropriate for a small child, but it is not enough food for a grownup! Why is Noom raking in a gazillion dollars a year telling people to eat like small children? We tell women to disregard their hunger signals in the name of "self-discipline," and we normalize this to such an extent that even MEDICAL DOCTORS proclaim themselves STUMPED about why their bodies keep taking over and demanding to be fed. I read that Jen Gunter piece when it came out, and I thought, "Oh, that does sound puzzling." I read it again this year, and now it reminds me forcefully of those nights when I have fallen asleep on the couch even though I really meant to get more work done: sometimes your body says, "If you keep refusing to listen to me when I tell you what we need, I'm just going to seize the wheel." A world in which a best-selling diet book suggests that women should tape their mouths shut to keep themselves from tasting the food they're cooking is a world with some serious issues about women and food. (The book, if you are curious, is Bright Line Eating; please don't read it, because it's terrible.)
It gets worse: our most "successful" diets erode muscle, because the pace of sustainable fat loss is too slow to attract clicks and adherents. Which further slows metabolism, which makes future weight loss even harder, which makes a sizable subset of women think they need an even more extreme regimen of low calories/lots of cardio.
We know that the bodies of Biggest Loser contestants were still in "OH NO, FAMINE LOOMS!" mode six years after their bouts of unsustainable public shaming disguised as health promotion. We know much less about what it is like to be an ordinary woman in this deeply messed-up culture, one who has spent literal decades saying, "I just need to lose ten pounds. Wait, twelve. Ugh, now it's fifteen. No, twenty." It seems likely to me that as lifelong dieters approach the last third of their lives, they face a number of added risks. Their fall risk is higher because muscle protects us against falls, and waving 5-pound dumbbells around doesn't allow a person to rebuild muscle effectively. Their hip fracture risk is higher, because appropriately sized muscles are important for maintaining bone density, and because "successful" weight loss in their youth may very well have contributed to disruption of the hormonal milieu in the years when they should have been building bone. Given the morbidity/mortality stats on hip fractures, we should regard this particular risk as a hair-on-fire emergency for aging women. Aaaannnnd because rebound weight gain may lead to more visceral fat storage, which is worse for you than subcutaneous fat, they may be looking at even more health risks connected to cardiovascular disease, the #1 killer of post-menopausal women.
So if long-haul dieting has the potential to raise a woman's risk of multiple life-threatening outcomes, why are women still getting the message that we should diet? It all makes me want to stand up on a soapbox and shout: WOMEN of the WORLD, let's RECLAIM our metaphorical AVOCADOS.
Strength training has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fitness. It started as a fun summertime thing to do with Joe, and then it changed my perspective on a bunch of stuff. After a year of not-always-diligent work, my scale tells me I am now 40% muscle. (The internet tells me that the average value for someone my age is 30%.)
On the one hand, it's pretty cool. On the other hand, I don't think you can live a half-century in this bizarro culture and not have some body-related baggage as a result. I feel a measure of ambivalence about the new shape of my body. It makes sense, on the one hand, that I would need larger shirts to accommodate the delts and lats and traps I have painstakingly built up over the past year. It does not make sense for me to (1) want to be able to do a pull-up and also (2) feel uncertain about having enough muscle to do a pull-up.
And yet here I am.
I have also acquired some fat this year, as the avocado diagram suggested I might, and the idea of a programmed cut (planned careful fat loss for a period of time that's short enough to avert compensatory metabolic changes) doesn't sit quite right with me at this point in the process of reconfiguring my relationship with food. So I am trying to practice body acceptance after a lifetime of telling my body that its current shape was not quite acceptable to me, and it is slow. But here is one thing I know for sure: I would rather be this shape and feel at peace with the ice cream in my freezer than go back to my former certainty that I needed to avoid all sweets every day in order to keep myself from eating ALL ALL ALL the ice cream.
Maybe I don't sound like a person who is quiiiite ready to be offering advice. (I suggest Fit is a Feminist Issue and the Progressive Strength blog if you're looking for online conversations about fitness -- this post was prompted by some thoughts from Marjorie last month. And oh! How did I forget Casey Johnston's Substack?) But if I were to offer advice to women in my age range, this is what I would say: let's normalize weight-lifting for middle-aged women; let's protect ourselves from falls and fractures. Let's keep showing up to lift heavy things even though change is slow. Let's make normal eating normal again -- the kind of eating in which we listen carefully to our bodies and make choices that are both sensible and satisfying.
Maybe the heart of the message I would want to share is this: it does not make us in any way "better" to chip away at ourselves with unsustainable New! Food! Strategies! that boil down to "eat less food than you actually need." No one is "better" because there is less of her. Oh, my friends, let's be less afraid to take up space.
Recent Comments