If you were following the fat and food posts, you know that I recently have been doing some soul-searching with regards to the fat acceptance movement. I have a lot in common with many in the movement:

• I believe that dieting is harmful, and figure dieting is largely responsible for my gaining as much weight as I did. Most studies show that people who diet and lose weight gain it all back (and typically more).
• I think there is a considerable cultural pressure to lose weight, and that much of what is prescribed (diets, pharmaceuticals, weight loss surgery) benefits the weight loss industry far more than those who try these things. In addition, many of these tactics are downright dangerous (e.g., Phen-Fen).
• I think that a healthy weight range is far wider than what is pushed in government and insurance weight loss tables (Campos and Oliver cover this quite nicely).
• The “science” that proves that losing weight is helpful is questionable (also Campos and Oliver).
• I think weight in general, and BMI in particular, is a terrible measure of health.
• I think weight loss surgery (WLS) is risky and isn’t a long-term solution (I’ve heard that the average WLS patient gains half their weight back eventually).

So, with all this, why do I weigh myself? More importantly, why do I post my weight (and my weight loss) here? Am I not aware that by doing so, I may be encouraging people to diet, to cave to societal pressures, to undergo expensive surgeries ?

Well, I may, but I hope that any Act Boldly visitor will stick around and see the method to my madness. More about that, but first, a digression.

Did you know that Paul Campos, who wrote The Obesity Myth (a book cited by the fat acceptance site Big Fat Facts), lost 67 lbs while writing the book?

Actually, he’s not all that happy about it, and in the next-to-last chapter, writes:

How and why did I lose 30% of my body mass in the course of writing a book whose central purpose is to document the fundemental dishonesty and injustice of the war on fat?

In the chapter, he notes that he didn’t “diet,” but lost the weight by “becoming more aware of what I was eating and greatly increasing my level of physical activity.”

Campos did appreciate the apparent hypocrisy, and noted that:

If this book reads like an indictment of the diet culture, that’s because it is–and one of the things that makes me angriest about that culture is that a part of me remains so firmly in its grip.

So, why do I weigh myself? Perhaps it is because I too am firmly in the grip of a fat-hating culture. Yet, I’d like to offer a few words in my defense.

First, you’ll note that I don’t talk about how many pounds I have to my goal weight. That’s because I don’t have one. I certainly liked being in the 150’s years ago, for like Campos (who became a competitive runner at his thinner weight), I was really pleased with the level I reached in both rowing and skiing.

But, truth be told, I became essentially exercise bulemic to maintain that weight. Not at all a healthy idea, and one I hope to avoid repeating when I add exercise to my “choosing health” program (although Andrew Weil suggests that humans are by nature an addictive lot, and if you’re going to have an addiction, maybe making it a more “healthy” one is a useful strategy).

So again, why weigh? Well, let me turn to Campos. He writes (emphasis mine):

In the course of working on this book I’ve sometimes imagined I’ve caught a glimpse of another country. In this land, weight loss, when it took place, would be a by-product of developing healthier attitudes toward food and fitness rather than a goal in and of itself. Weight loss, in such a land, would be considered a positive thing to the extent that it gave evidence that people were pursuing healthier lives in general. In such a country it would be recognized that many heavier-than-average people already live healthy lives, and that most people who change their eating and exercise habits for the better lose little or no weight.

…

Perhaps, then, the last American diet–the one diet that would actually “work”–is that (anti)diet that would grasp the almost Zen-like character of this truth: If weight is not an issue, then weight will not be an issue. If you want to achieve a healthy weight, stop wanting to lose weight and start wanting those things–an active life, good food, and the calm enjoyment of both–that unlike weight loss, are unalloyed goods in and of themselves. If you can do this, you may well lose weight in the process, but far more important, you will get to a place where the weight you lose has been lost precisely because you no longer care, at some deep level of self-acceptance, whether you’ve lost weight or not.

I wonder if I’ve found this place: a place where choosing health results in a healthy weight for me? That said, like Campos, I won’t lie: I certainly did want to lose weight when I started this approach my to eating. Life at 350+ for me was painful, both physically and emotionally.

And I was concerned about my weight. It’s all well and good that Campos and Oliver expose the myth that overweight and obesity aren’t the health risk they are portrayed to be, but in most cases they aren’t really talking about people like me. My BMI at my top weight was 66…quite a bit higher than the BMIs they refer to in their books.

Indeed, in his foreward for Pattie Thomas’ book Taking Up Space (which is “about being fat and the physical, emotional and economic costs of trying to pass for thin in a culture and society that wages war on fat people”), Campos writes re the Flegal study in JAMA last year:

First, almost all excess risk associated with body mass is found in two groups: the underweight, and the extremely fat.

The study conclusions say it this way (emphasis mine):

Underweight and obesity, particularly higher levels of obesity, were associated with increased mortality relative to the normal weight category.

For the JAMA study, “higher levels of obesity” were those with a BMI higher than 30. We don’t know if this is a linear trend, or if it’s really that those of us in the much higher BMI range can account for most of the increased mortality.

So my BMI was 66, and studies show an “increased mortality” compared to normal weight or overweight people. Yikes.

Now of course, we don’t know that it’s the weight that is responsible. It could easily be the years of dieting or the quality of the diet and/or lack of activity. And we don’t know whether losing weight will help me. But as a member of the 40-plus BMI club, I hope people will excuse me for not being that comforted by studies like Flegal’s…the news isn’t exactly that great for me.

So,I said that I attributed much of my excess weight to dieting. This is one of the reasons I’m not dieting currently. What I started out to do was 1) control my compulsive overeating and 2) eat healthier foods to provide a better fuel for my body (I now love SuperFoods Rx).

My theory was that if I started eating healthier, I would not only stop eating compulsively, but I would lose weight. And so, I’ve been experimenting with this new approach, which involves eating healthy foods. And been weighing myself. Sure, I don’t need the numbers on a scale to tell that I’ve lost weight. Loose clothes do that pretty well.

So, perhaps I want compliments, just as Campos did (”I loved the compliments I got from people–usually women–about my weight loss”).

But I like to think that part of my rationale for posting my weight loss is in the spirit of Campos’ last American diet: if I can show that eating for health results in a reasonable weight, then perhaps others might see that there is an alternative to more harmful methods of weight loss.

Of course, to be fair, what I’m doing is both really easy and really hard. This plan is not dissimilar to diets: it works great when I’m doing it, but it’s pretty easy to get sucked back into the eating patterns that got me to 375. This is one of the reasons that I work as much on wanting to eat healthy as I do eating healthy.

Wanting to do it makes it trivially easy. What is hard, for me at least, is when physiology (cravings due to insulin, serotonin, dopamine, etc) or psychology (e.g., emotional eating) combine to move healthy eating out of the picture. I’ve struggled with that occasionally (typically post-vacation), so the last thing I want to do is make it seem like I’ve found something magical, and in fact, I’ve worried about this in the past.

So, if posting my weight here makes it seem easy, and seems to promote the idea of dieting, nothing could be further from the truth.

Some very, very nice people in the fat acceptance movement have gone back and forth with me about my need to weigh (or at least to be public about it), and have given me lots to think about. For now, at least what I’ll do is link to this post in the future when I talk about numbers, so there’s some context and at least a reference to alternate approaches.

I will also continue to look at how what I do may still be due to my own internalized fat demons. Although I must say that the conscious fat loathing I felt at 375 is now mostly gone, even though, at 270-plus, I still qualify as morbidly obese. Part of that has to do with how I feel on a daily basis, which, given my healthy diet, is pretty darn good.

Also, as I’ve mentioned, having experienced Abe Lincoln’s “when I do good, I feel good” (and having started to see it almost as a mantra of sorts), I have a lot less anxiety than I did, when I was looking only to external forces to “save” me from my pain.

So, if this is a sensitive topic for you, my apologies. Like I say in the banner and in the about page, this is a journey, and maybe I’ll be thinking something completely differently a year from now. You are welcome to stick around and try and share with me if you like, or pass if you don’t.

But for now, I want to see where choosing health is going to take me, and I’m going to write about it here, warts and all.

Update, 4/4: See an interesting discussion on the intellectual dishonesty, fat politics, and weight loss.