For me, as someone who’s been through the mill with a lifetime (a short one, as I’m 22, but nevertheless) of dieting & cycles of starving and binge-eating, food plays a huge role in my actual fatness, but a relatively insubstantial role in my conception of myself as fat. I didn’t get fat until I got fucked-up about food, and I didn’t get fucked-up about food until I decided I was fat.

I am seeing your blog for the first time, due to the link Paul provided in the forums at Big Fat Blog.

Reading this entry reminds me a little of my own experience, though I wouldn’t say I was ever a compulsive overeater/binger. As far as resources go, I know you’ve probably got a whole program worked out, or maybe a team of health professionals, since it sounds like you’ve got some health complications as well.

But I wanted to say that I recently saw a dietitian who’d been trained in Ellyn Satter’s (another dietitian) methods called “Treating the Dieting Casualty.” You sound like you might describe yourself as such.

Anyway, I found it to be an interesting mix of size acceptance philosophy, with, of course, emphasis on health and nutrition. My dietitian told me that of COURSE it is possible for people to lose weight…she just didn’t think it was the best, overarching goal to have. I don’t know your situation, but if you’re interested in nutrition counselling, I’d highly recommend finding a dietitian trained in this method. I think if you email the folks at http://www.ellynsatter.com they can provide you a referral to someone in your area.

And also, regarding the milkshake study, I actually met one the researchers who did it (Janet Polivy.) For me, it was like meeting a rock star (I’m working on my bachelor’s in nutrition.)

Good luck, Beth!

Also, at the risk of being difficult, I think that many (most?) FAers realize that reducing calories can cause people to lose weight. What it seems that some believe is that people who lose weight by dieting overwhelming gain it back and then some. This is certainly what I believe.

I couldn’t agree with you more about that Big Fat Blog guy. He is heartlessly manipulating all those poor lonely women who are desperate for male acceptance.

In “Losing It”, Laurie Fraser also writes about an experiment done with a group of people given a milkshake to drink, supposedly to rate the taste. They had previously filled out a questionnaire to sort out which of them were restrained eaters (dieters) and which were not. The researchers measured how much of the shakes was consumed by each participant. Those who were not restrained eaters ate less lunch after drinking the shake but among the dieters, the more of the shake they drank, the more lunch they ate afterward. They weren’t eating according to hunger, but according to how badly they felt they’d broken their diets.

These researchers went on to do 8 more years of research. They found that dieting disrupted people’s physical sense of when and how much to eat, and led to overeating. Not only did the dieters eat more than non-dieters in experiments where they had to eat a high-calorie snack, breaking thier diet, but they ate mroe than non-dieters when they believed the snack was high-calorie, even when in fact it was low-calorie.

Over and over the researchers found evidence of the “what-the-hell effect” of overeating after breaking a diet. Dieters were also prompted to binge in response to emotions, alcohol, anxieties, and anything else that disrupted their strict sense of being “good”. Dieting teaches people to ignore the physical feelings of hunger and they learn to rely on external rules to control their eating. They inevitably break those rules. Dieting is emotionally disempowering and causes people to lose the eating skills they were born with.

“And I am convinced that years of dieting screwed up my metabolism, messed up my body chemistry (e.g., insulin resistance), contributed to my inability to treat food like a normal person, and was largely the reason I got as fat as I did.”

Beth, are you sure we’re not twins? I’ve been saying this for the past half-dozen years or so of struggle. I have yet to speak with any physician (I’ve been to three endocrinologists, two gynecologists and an internist, and I live with a psychiatrist) who will even examine the possibility that dieting [and, for me, excessive exercise] can wreck one’s metabolism.

Learning about insulin-resistance and finding a way to eat that’s compatible with the condition has been key for me. Unfortunately, because of my past working-out history, I also need to be much more active than I’d like. It’s working, though.