Jeanette DePattie - The Fat Chick

Back in June 2013 I posted a video of hers, saying I wanted to keep it here so I don't lose it in the future. Well, that one disappeared, anyway. (sigh) Let's try again.


 
Here she is on Katie Couric's show in December 2013 talking about why one shouldn't stop living until they reach some arbitrary weight goal.

 
Her New Year's Eve message about weight cycling. In this video she also announces some programs she's starting up in 2014.

And a call to make exercise a regular part of your life:

 
And don't forget her exercise DVD


 
and book on exercising at any size, both called The Fat Chick Works Out!

"No Longer Defensible" Post from Fat and Not Afraid Blog

This blog gets better each time I read it! Be sure to read the comments, too.

“No Longer Defensible”

June 25, 2013

 

 I don’t think there is a person who is connected to the wider world somehow (e.g., internet, evening news, newspapers) who doesn’t know that the AMA declared obesity a disease this week.  Many Fat Acceptance bloggers have written about it.
In the same week that this is happening, Time Magazine posted an online article about, well, about a sort of Fat Acceptance.  Oh, they didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was.

Why It's Okay to be Fat video by Golda Poretsky

Frustrated and Bored

 I found this old post sitting in my Drafts folder, the original date back in early September.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I know I've written this probably hundreds of times already, but I'm so frustrated at lack of weight loss and so bored with the bland meals I've been making.

New labwork shows that my thyroid replacement med is at the correct dosage (Doc doesn't care that I still have every symptom of hypothyroid, including a pulse in the 40's). No Hashimoto's disease. No liver problems. No parathyroid disease. But the labs DID show my vitamin d level is plummeting, something it shouldn't do in summer sunshine months, and a positive ANA, which may mean lupus. (sigh)

And what to eat? I had a few lapses in the low-fat vegan food plan, mostly because of being away from home for a good part of the day unexpectedly while caring for the elderly aunt with Alzheimer's disease (Who was finally admitted to a nursing home just 3 weeks ago), and a recent partaking of green smoothies, which are high in fruit as well as greens, which raised my triglyceride level. My HDL went down a bit, LDL went up a bit. But those lapses were no more in number or different from food consumption from previous lapses before other lab tests.

I also gained about 6 pounds in the 6 months between visits.

After getting the lab results I tweaked the food plan a bit to provide for blander, more boring foods. The idea was to make food so unpleasurable I won't eat so much of it. At least that's Dr. McDougall's philosophy - monotonous meals means less pleasure from them so you naturally eat less of them. Of course, it backfires. If a food is not tasty I still eat it, then go in search of better tasting food and eat my fill (or over-fill) of that to get the memory of the monotonous food out of my memory.

So I started eating even more off program foods. Cheese and roast beef sandwiches have had a particular pull. Or more higher fat/salt choices of on-plan foods, like nuts and stews.

And of course, every other web forum I go to tells me to run away from the starch based plant food diet as fast as I can, to avoid gluten, avoid starches, if I want to ever lose any weight. A few cardiologists' sites even say it's better to eat low fat dairy and meats than whole grains and potatoes. Are they trying to drum up business for their professions? They all offer links to as many peer-reviewed articles proving their way of eating is perfectly healthy, that meats and most fats don't raise cholesterol and people haven even lowered their cholesterol levels on their food plans; either that or they say cholesterol levels have nothing to do with cardiovascular health. They, too, show cardiograms with arteries clearing after a week weeks on their diets, just like Ornish and Esselstyn do.

Why Were's Still Fat, Explained Again

Another study, reported by Associated Press:

Not your fault! Hormones linked to weight regain

Oct 26, 5:10 PM (ET)
By MALCOLM RITTER

NEW YORK (AP) - Any dieter knows that it's hard to keep off weight you've lost. Now a study finds that even a year after dieters shed a good chunk of weight quickly, their hormones were still insisting, "Eat! Eat! Eat!"
The findings suggest that dieters who have regained weight are not just slipping back into old habits, but are struggling against a persistent biological urge.
"People who regain weight should not be harsh on themselves, as eating is our most basic instinct," Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne in Australia, an author of the study, said in an email. The research appears in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Weight regain is a common problem for dieters. To study what drives it, Proietto and his colleagues enrolled 50 overweight or obese patients in a 10-week diet program in Australia. They wanted to see what would happen in people who lost at least 10 percent of their body weight. Ultimately, only 34 people lost that much and stuck with the study long enough for analysis.

The program was intense. On average, the participants lost almost 30 pounds during the 10 weeks, faster than the standard advice of losing 1 or 2 pounds a week. They took in 500 to 550 calories a day, using a meal replacement called Optifast plus vegetables for eight weeks. Then for two weeks they were gradually reintroduced to ordinary foods.
Despite counseling and written advice about how to maintain their new weights, they gained an average of 12 pounds back over the next year. So they were still at lower weights than when they started.
The scientists checked the blood levels of nine hormones that influence appetite. The key finding came from comparing the hormone levels from before the weight-loss program to one year after it was over. Six hormones were still out of whack in a direction that would boost hunger.
The dieters also rated themselves as feeling hungrier after meals at the one-year mark, compared to what they reported before the diet program began.
Experts not connected to the study said the persistent effect on hormone levels was not surprising, and that it probably had nothing to do with the speed of the weight loss.
People who lose less than 10 percent of body weight would probably show the same thing, though to a lesser degree, said Dr. George Bray of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.
A key message of the study is that "it's better not to gain weight than to try to lose it," Bray said.
Why would a dieter's body rebel against weight loss? It's an evolutionary holdover from earlier times, when weight loss could threaten survival and reproduction, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity expert at Columbia University in New York. So "it's not surprising at all" that our bodies would fight back for at least a year, he said. "This is probably a more or less permanent response."
People who lose significant weight not only gain bigger appetite but also burn fewer calories than normal, creating "a perfect storm for weight regain," Leibel said.
He said avoiding weight regain appears to be a fundamentally different problem from losing weight in the first place, and that researchers should pay more attention to it.
The study was supported by the Australian government, medical professional groups and a private foundation. Proietto served on a medical advisory board of Nestle, maker of Optifast, until last year.
---
Online:
New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org

Weight Truisms from Weighty Matters Blog

An obesity medicine doc from Canada has a blog called Weighty Matters, and in this blog post he has "Twitter sized weight management truisms."
 This one is my favorite of them all:

Your best weight is whatever weight you reach, when you're living the healthiest life you actually enjoy.

Now THAT is what the Health At Every Size movement is all about!

Pattie Thomas has a book out called Taking Up Space: How Eating Well and Exercising Regularly Changed My Life. If you click on this link it'll take you to a preview of the book, a place where you can read the book, page by page, as if it's on one of those electronic book readers like Kindle.

I recommend this book for everybody. Great read.

The Inevitable Effect of Scare Mongering

What did they THINK would happen with the shaming of fat folk of all ages and nearly mandatory bullying of fat kids by not only their peers but people in command positions, such as parents, teachers and doctors?

Children as young as 5 suffer from eating disorders; 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat

By Lindsay Goldwert
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, August 3rd 2011, 4:00 AM

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2011/08/03/2011-08-03_children_as_young_as_5_suffer_from_eating_disorders_81_of_10yearolds_are_afraid_.html#ixzz1TxojVcJm

Could children as young as 5 become anorexic?

While it seems hard to believe that at that age there could be awareness of a link between weight loss and appearance, British health authorities have reported 197 kids 5 to 9 years old have been hospitalized for eating disorders.

Data from 35 hospitals showed that 98 children were age 5 to 7 at the time of treatment and 99 age 8 or 9.

Numbers spiked with approach of adolescence – around 400 were age 10 to 12, with more than 1,500 13 to15, according to Agence France-Presse.

Because many hospitals do not release data on their patients, many experts believe these numbers may underestimate the problem.

Susan Ringwood, chief executive of the eating disorders charity B-eat, said the latest figures reflected "alarming" trends in society, with young children "internalizing" media images that seemed to reward only the thinnest.

"A number of factors combine to trigger eating disorders. Biology and genetics play a large part in their development, but so do cultural pressures, and body image seems to be influencing younger children much more over the past decade," Ringwood said. "The ideal figure promoted for women is that of a girl, not an adult woman. That can leave girls fearful of puberty, and almost trying to stave it off."

In the US, 42% of girls from first to third grade want to be thinner, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.  Fat fear starts early – 81% of 10-year-olds say they are afraid to put on weight.

Eating disorders are psychologically and physically lethal – they carry the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.

With AFP Relaxnews

Telling it like it is

Today's Thin Lines comic strip. Fantastic!

Quote of the Day

Or, "Why I know I will NEVER be able to lose any weight."

Said by a 30-something person who exercises a few hours per day:

"I learned years ago I am one of the very unlucky ones -- to maintain weight I cannot eat over 30-40 TOTAL carbs and not more than 700 calories! "

Off to Buy Another Exercise Video

The weather this summer has been BRUTAL, and again next week we're going to break heat records.

For the first time in about a decade I've been using my rescue asthma inhaler because my peak flow readings have been dropping, I get the feeling of not being able to take a deep breath, I get short of breath just sitting there, and I have so much mucus that those little creatures in the Mucinex commercial are vacationing there.

Because of all this, I'm having a difficult time getting my daily cardio workouts in. I've gone back to gentler workouts, like Richard Simmons' BlastOff and Silver Foxes,

Leslie's Gentle Mile and older adult workouts, even Linda Izzolino's More to Love Fitness (which just whipped my fat ass this morning because I moved up to 5 pound weights instead of my usual 3). I still do my qigong, usually Robert Bates' Fun With Qigong

or even Thich Nhat Hanh's Mindful Movements.

But I want more. I get bored easily and need variety in my workouts. Which is why I'm finally going to order Jeanette DePati's The Fat Chick Works Out DVD and possibly her exercise/bio book, too. She has 2 very short clips (less than a minute each) on her web site that show the workout itself (I really wish it was at least a minute each), but I also found this interview clip of her on YouTube that shows her giving an outdoor class:





If this weather - and asthma symptoms - continue I'll probably be making a visit to the doc to have him change my meds around again. I hate doing that - this combination has served me well for over 10 years now - but I guess I need a steroid boost to make it through these air quality alert, high heat & humidity days. Yecch!

Why Dieting Makes You Fat - a.k.a. Setpoint Theory

The article in this link on the Big Fat Blog is one lady's opinion, one that I, and thousands of others like me, subscribe to. Dieting Makes You Fat! Period!

More "Childhood Obesity Epidemic" Stupidity

It was bad enough when they wanted to put fetuses on diets by giving overweight mothers a diabetes drug to reduce the amount of nutrients the growing baby gets. Now they want infants and toddlers to exercise excessively! Yes, INFANTS!

To fight obesity, even babies should exercise
Jul 11, 1:54 PM (ET)By MARIA CHENG

 

LONDON (AP) - Preschoolers, even babies, need daily exercise, the British government says in its first-ever exercise advice for its youngest citizens.

In a new campaign against obesity, Britain issued guidelines on Monday saying that children under the age of 5 - including babies who can't even walk yet - should exercise every day.
The new guidance from the British health department said kids under 5 who can walk should be physically active for at least three hours a day. Officials also said parents should reduce the amount of time such kids spend being sedentary while watching television or being strapped in a stroller.

Pudgy toddlers are also a big concern in the U.S., where the Institute of Medicine last month issued diet and activity recommendations for youngsters. It said preschool-aged kids should get at least 15 minutes of exercise for every hour they spend in child care and suggested the US government create dietary guidelines for babies from the time they're born until they are 2 years old. About a third of American adults are obese.

Like the British, American experts say parents should limit the amount of time babies spend in swings, bouncy seats or other equipment while they're awake.

In the U.K., officials said the recommended three hours of activity for kids under 5 should be spread throughout the day. Officials said the children's daily dose of exercise is likely to be met simply through playing but could also include activities such as walking to school.

For babies who can't walk yet, the government said physical activity should be encouraged from birth, including infants playing on their stomachs or having swimming sessions with their parents. It said floor-based play encourages infants to use their muscles and helps bone development. The government said children's individual physical and mental abilities should be considered when interpreting the advice.

"It's vital that parents introduce children to fun and physically active pastimes to help prevent them becoming obese children, who are likely to become obese adults at risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers," Maura Gillespie, head of policy and advocacy at the British Heart Foundation, said in a statement.
Nearly a quarter of British adults are obese, and experts estimate that by 2050 about 90 percent of adults will be heavy.
According to a 2008 health survey that used devices to measure how much people actually exercised, officials found only about five percent of Britons meet the government's minimum physical activity advice - about 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise every week, including some every day.

For children aged 5 to 18, Britain recommends at least one hour of exercise, but that should include intensive activities to strengthen muscles and bones.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises children and teenagers to get about one hour or more of physical activity every day.

Another Boring Update

I'm sorry of my blog is beginning to look like it's just a collection of videos gathered from various web sites, but I really have nothing new to say.

Each day I debate over what food plan - if any - to follow, from Dr. Fuhrman's very restricted Eat to Live program to the very liberal and freeing  Overcoming Overeating's philosophy, and everything in-between. It doesn't make a difference on the scale. I've gained weight some days I followed Eat to Live and lost weight on days I ate everything not tied down.

I'm still getting in as much aerobic/cardio exercise as my sciatica allows, a minimum of a half hour a day. Out of the last 6 weeks I did not exercise only 4 days. Burn out? Possibly, but my doctors insist I exercise that much for heart health and their futile hopes I lose weight by doing more than they tell other patients to do.

A new injury to my every growing list is a tendinitis or ligament injury on my left hand from twisting it weirdly while carrying bags of groceries up the three flights of stairs to my apartment. It first happened a few weeks ago, and this weekend it happened again, and again with grocery bags. I feel guilty making my husband and son carry everything, but I guess I'll just have to sit back and let them do it all for a while.



Still not getting along with the elderly relative with early Alzheimer's disease. The last time we visited I walked out, telling my husband I'll meet him at the car, when every 2 minutes she would moan loudly begging Jesus for death, complaining she's so lonely, yet refusing to have people over, locking out the homemaker, and the few people who do visit her (us, mainly) she makes their lives a living hell. Yesterday again she refused to open the door to let the homemaker in (but still has to pay for the whole 3 hours), and before he even heard about it my husband was discussing with a co-worker that he's ready to just hand all her paperwork back to her, get our names off the bank accounts and power of attorney forms, and let her do what she wants, since she refuses to do anything that needs to be done or we suggest she have done.

And before I start getting nasty-grams about caring for the person-with-AD, let it be known that aside from her short term memory loss, this woman has been like this her entire life! Her own mother used to cringe when she heard she was coming for a visit and would sometimes leave the house rather than be home and let her in. Her sister (my m-i-l) would end every phone call in tears. Her own husband waited as long as possible to take his retirement (was forced to go, actually) then immediately got himself part time jobs so he would be out of the house when she was home because even he couldn't stand being with her for hours at a time. She has alienated every other family member and any local acquaintance she ever had. One woman, a bit younger than her but in bad shape medically, has complained that this aunt has the nerve to insist she do her shopping for her, that she take her places in her car at a moment's notice. She as happy when her doctor told her she could no longer drive because now she had an excuse to tell this aunt NO! It's the antics of this aunt that put me in the hospital 2 years ago with stress cardiomyopathy!

ARGH!

So, nothing new, just SSDD, as the gang in Stephen King's Dreamcatcher would say - Same shit, different day.

Another One Bites the Dust II

I know I said I was going to stop obsessing over my weight and what I eat, but as I also said, it's hard to break a decades-old habit. Since I started reading the new book by Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, I've been thinking about dropping all the healthy carbs the McDougall program says to eat and start loading up on animal products.

Then I saw a few posts from adamant low-carbers saying that while the food plan may work quite nicely in the beginning for weight loss (as most weight loss food plans do), eventually the weight loss stalls and regains happen. It happened to the #1 low-carber in America Jimmy Moore, according to this blogger, and back in 2009 the blog called Diabetes Update said the same thing.

Those of us who had been dieting for weight loss for decades KNOW that this happens, no matter what food plan is followed. Calories in/calories out doesn't account for the metabolism slowing down to accomodate the lower amount of calories to maintain homeostasis, that as time goes on, if we want to continue to lose weight we must eat even less, exercise even more. For those of us who have to eat 1000 calories and under plus exercise an hour or more a day just to lose 1 pound a week, it's impossible to eat less, do more, than that. Already at that level we're running into nutritional deficiencies and the long term problems that go along with them, as well as setting ourselves up for musculo-skeletal system injuries. Recent articles on-line are saying how my generation, the Baby Boomers, are getting joint replacements in record numbers. Yeah, it's my generation that's over-working our bodies in the quest to lose weight, to stay young!

Doesn't it just make more sense to follow the Health At Every Size guidelines and just stay off the scale?

Another Reason Not to Even TRY to Lose Weight

I never heard of Dr. Sharma or his blog before today, but what he writes here makes perfect sense and goes along with my declaration earlier today that I'm no longer even going to try lose weight. He's talking about a lecture he had attended.

Here's the blog post, and here is an excerpt from it:

One of the key underlying problems is that when people lose weight, their energy expenditure does not simply fall to that of the energy expenditure of a person ‘naturally’ at that lower weight - it drops to levels far greater than expected.

Thus, a formerly-obese person burns 20% less calories than a never-obese person of that lower weight - or in other words a 200 lb person, who loses 40 lbs burns about 20% fewer calories than someone who is 160 lbs, but has never been obese. On top of this, the formerly-obese person experiences hunger, cold intolerance, and other behavioural and metabolic changes that make sustaining this lower body weight difficult.

Size Serenity

On the Yahoogroup SizeWisePlus, someone asked for another phrase to describe how we feel about our fat bodies, and long-time member Liz suggested "size serenity."

Yeah, that sounds good.

And here's our theme song to go with it:

Take THAT, Dr. W (my cardiologist)!!!

Measures of clinical adiposity and cardiovascular risk

5 May, 11 | by Alistair Lindsay

The importance of clinical measures of adiposity (such as body-mass index [BMI], waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio) in calculating cardiovascular risk remains controversial.  For example, both the World Health Organisation and the United States National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recommend assessment of BMI, however several common cardiovascular disease risk scores (e.g. PROCAM) omit adiposity measures.  In this analysis, the Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration analysed records from 58 prospective studies to determine the separate and combined associations of BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio with the risk of first-onset cardiovascular disease.

Individual records were analysed from 221,934 people in 17 countries; serial adiposity measurements were made in 63,821 people.  Hazard ratios (HRs) were calculated per 1 standard deviation (SD) higher baseline values for three clinical adiposity measurements: BMI (1 SD = 4.56kg/m2), waist circumference (1 SD=12.6cm), and waist-to-hip ratio (1 SD=0.083).  Hazard ratios for cardiovascular disease were 1.23 for BMI, 1.27 for waist circumference, and 1.25 for waist-to-hip ratio.  Of note, adding information on BMI, waist circumferece, or waist-to-hip ratio to a cardiovascular disease risk prediction model using conventional risk factors did not significantly improve risk prediction, even when the three measures were considered in combination.

Conclusions:

In this analysis of 58 prospective studies, clinical measures of adiposity, such as BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio, did not improve cardiovascular disease risk prediction over the use of conventional risk factors such as blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol.

• The Emerging Risk Factors Collaboration.  Separate and combined associations of body-mass index and abdominal adiposity with cardiovascular disease: collaborative analysis of 58 prospective studies.  Lancet 2011; 377:1085-1095.

Rad Fatties Tweet About Fat Hatred

Instead of me going on and on for a long time and getting tongue-tied (finger twisted?), just read this post on the Fat Heffalump blog, then take a hop over to Twitter and read these messages with the theme #thingsfatpeoplearetold. I don't use Twitter so don't know if "theme" is the word I'm looking for, but you get the idea.

So much fat hatred in the world!

Calories In = Calories Out = Bad Science

The Dances with Fat blog has a great post about the fallacy of this commonly held false belief.

An excerpt:

Besides which, a BMR-type calculation would be reasonable  if we were a lawnmower.  We can calculate the fuel needs of a lawnmower and then have a reasonable expectation of how much grass it can mow and what will happen when the fuel runs out.
Ready for a blinding flash of the obvious?  Our bodies are not lawnmowers.