Oh, this is probably less than coherent, but I’m going to just post in anyways…it’s getting late, and I don’t want to hang onto it until tomorrow!

Jimmy Moore pointed to an interesting blog post by Micki McGee on the social and economic forces that could be contributing to obesity in America.

Micki doesn’t advise people to give up their diets. But she does ask people to consider how environmental factors may be counterproductive to their weight loss efforts, and given that, she suggests social activism in addition to personal action. (The way the post is written, it’s hard to pull out some highlights. So go read the whole thing. )

I think this is a really important area of study. I was reading the latest issue of O magazine tonight, and came across the story of Adriette Ward. She’s used to weigh 290, now weighs 190, and is a doctor who treats obese children.

A lot of her story sounds very familiar, but this paragraph about life after the early stages of weight loss (not in the online version) really resonated with me:

Last spring Ward started to notice little changes in her behavior — she’d snack on seven crackers instead of five, not write things down in her food journal, cut corners here and there. And the weight loss started to slow. Then an ocean cruise with its 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet plunged her back into bingeing — and a 30-pound gain.

Adriette starts to do some soul-searching and starts doing the “who will I be when I’m thin” spiel and wonders if she began “subconsciously sabotaging” herself.

Well maybe.

For a while now, I’ve been looking at both the psychological and the physiological factors that lead to these kinds of episodes. I have been astonished that, with the success I’ve been having this year, I could let myself get so off-track at the holidays and have it be as if the three months preceeding hadn’t happened.

But while I’m not advocating that we give up personal responsibility or expect the government to solve all our problems, I think it is worth looking at how our culture may be either sending mixed messages at a minimum and almost sabotaging us on the other extreme (usually in the name of capitalism).

For example, marketers have figured out that putting the cookbooks next to the diet books in bookstores means more book sales. And most women’s magazines have a cover story featuring some new diet or weight loss story, and at the same time, featuring some less-than-healthy recipes (like chocolate cake) prominently.

I watched one of those shows on Discovery Health (I think it was the half-ton man) and the doctor who was treating the guy had a weight issue himself, and he used bariatric surgery to lose weight. He had a scary comment about a woman who had lost several hundred pounds through diet and said something along the lines of “I guarentee if you go back in five years, she’ll have gained it back and more. And if not in five years, then ten. And if not in ten years, then fifteen. This is a lifelong struggle.”

Yikes. Pretty damn depressing.

But the way I read that is partially that trying to eat healthy and be fit in our current culture is a bit like being a salmon swimming upstream. That could be hard to do for a lifetime. And so, as Micki suggests, part of our personal health and wellness activities might well benefit from including some activism to create a better environment for success in the future.