Why is everyone so goddamn FAT?

I have a question. Call it the question of the day.

Why is everyone so goddamn fat?

I’ve been wondering about this for a long time now. Everyone’s read the statistics, though as you may realize, I hate statistics and seldom quote them. But they do reflect a certain trend.

People are getting huge. I mean, HUGE. Sometimes I wonder where it’s all coming from. In the past ten or twelve years, the population has ballooned to the point where half of us are too damn fat, and a third of us are way WAY too fat.

If it’s only in the last ten years or so, what happened? As far as I can remember, back then everybody was obsessed with their weight. Everybody wanted to be thinner. There was diet book, after diet book, after diet book coming out and hitting the top of the best-seller list.

I had to ask myself: why keep buying these things, when you obviously can’t follow them? Why the endless search for the Holy Grail of diets, the one that will take weight off and keep it off forever and evermore?

Meanwhile, in the midst of this best-sellerism – which still goes on today, only in a more scientific, theory-oriented way (can’t eat carbs with protein, have to follow your blood type, primordial cave man diet, What would Jesus Do diet – presumably, consisting of loaves and fishes) – we’re getting so damn fat, it’s shooting past the upper limits  of the scale.

You see this reflected in all those weight-oriented TV shows like Biggest Loser and whatever-the-rest-of-them-are (I don’t watch them much, too painful). Shows that are seemingly unrelated, like Hoarders, give us examples of impoverished men and women who are somehow enormous, their bodies no longer in any kind of recognizable shape. Usually it comes out that they can’t cook anything because there’s no electricity – the rats have gnawed through the cables or something – so they live on McDonalds and throw the leftovers and wrappers all over the floor (which is nice for the rats).

I shouldn’t have watched this show at all, I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was like a circus side show: once I fell into it, I couldn’t get out. It was called Taboo and it explored the weird, weird, weird, weird things people do (including having sex with the Berlin Wall), always with some expert coming on to say “their behaviour falls within the realm of normal activity”. One of these “normal” guys, somewhere in his 30s and living on disability, was probably close to 400 pounds. His “thing” was to dress up and act like an infant, goo-gooing, sucking things, toddling around in enormous fuzzy sleepers and being fed glop.

Being fed? His “caregiver”, whom at first I thought was his mother, was probably at least 200 pounds heavier than the guy. Her body was just not in a human shape, at all. It was like a misshapen cookie that had melted in the oven, everything all over the place. When she stood, which was difficult for her, her stomach touched the floor, and her breasts reached past her knees. This was supermorbid obesity at its most shocking.

The woman had no upper teeth, and maybe that’s a separate post because an awful lot of people on reality TV have no teeth. It’s a related issue, maybe. Toothlessness may explain why this guy  lives on baby food, but what about the adult diapers? Does she change them, and – no, we won’t go there. It’s just too horrific.

But let’s turn to the more mundane examples of hugeness that we see every day. I just don’t remember seeing this level of obesity in the past. I don’t remember someone lumbering on the bus who weighs maybe 400 pounds, I mean a young guy in his twenties. And I can’t help but think how on earth he’s going to get to 40, or even 30.

There are theories. The weirdest one I saw involved wheat: there’s a scientist out there who says the new strains of wheat are designed to make you fat. Supposedly, if you give up wheat, i.e. go gluten-free like many people do anyway, the excess tonnage will just drop off and stay off.

                              (Original McDonalds hamburger)

 

There are portion sizes: yes, my-oh-my! My husband and I like to go to Denny’s, mainly because it’s relatively cheap and they know how to cook an omelette. But every time we go to Denny’s, we seem to see a family who are all of them huge: most heartbreakingly, even the small children who are encased in soft, puffy fat.

Look at the menu, and you’ll see why. The Grand Slam has been replaced by a sort of grotesque Grand-Grand-Grand slam with four eggs and six sausages and God knows how many pancakes. Reminds me a bit of their bacon extravaganza, in which they offered such greasy delights as a bacon sundae.

If you’re still hungry after being slammed, you can order deep-fried hush puppies (presumably, not the shoes) with ice cream and syrup for dipping. And Denny’s is hardly alone. McDonalds Quarter Pounder is now a Third Pounder. Most people who go to McDonalds can’t do math, so maybe they don’t realize how much larger it is. Wendy’s had a three-patty bacon cheeseburger which gave me chest pains just looking at the menu board.

Meantime, in spite of all the emphasis on fitness and going to the gym, people just don’t, for the most part: they park as close to the mall as possible to avoid walking for two minutes. I wish I could find the cartoon, one of the best ones I’ve seen, in which a couple in a department store has the following conversation:

“Now let’s see, where’s that treadmill they have on sale?”


”It’s way over on the other side of the store.”

“Oh to hell with it then, let’s forget it.”

Never once seeing the irony.

We save steps. I’m a walker – it’s the only consistent exercise I’ve ever done, but I’ve been at it for more than 20 years – and people are constantly trying to give me rides, even complete strangers. Needless to say, I tell them no. But there’s something about walking. It’s stigmatized. It’s just not done. Even cycling is better, but still seen as something of a fruitcake activity around here, something they do in Stanley Park, not the suburbs where a car is the only way of getting around.

I get mowed down regularly, which says something about the car-oriented society that I believe has evolved around malls. I have learned to look obsessively over my left shoulder to avoid that dreaded, heedless right turn. They don’t see me, so I have to see them to avoid ending up one inch thick on the pavement.

I get despairing sometimes, I really do. For the statistics aren’t good. Fatness is still escalating. This makes me wonder: where have all the fat people come from? They must have been much thinner than this a decade ago.

God didn’t just pull out a whole lot of enormous balloons and blow them up and launch them out there. Surely people have done this to themselves.

If the statistics have changed this alarmingly, it means that people who used to be normal weight are now increasingly overweight, or even obese. Women’s clothing reflects this change. It seems everything I try on is stretchy – not just a little stretchy, but stretchy like chewing gum, so that it doesn’t snap back and ends up like an exhausted rubber band

Not only that: sizes have changed. I’ve been fighting weight swings all my life, and in high school I often wore a Size 14 or 16.

Now I am sure I am fatter than I was then, and can wear a 10 or 12.

So what has happened? Can you guess? This is called “vanity sizing” , and it has been done to keep women from committing suicide over their appearance.

It was long ago that Oprah, having skinnied down alarmingly on some kind of powdered protein, suddenly proclaimed, “Diets don’t work!”. She seesawed up and down after that, then kind of settled where she is now, probably a good 200 pounds. She spent one show sitting in a chair and addressing her viewers about her weight. No narcissism there! Her personal trainer came on and said she had “unresolved issues”, but Oprah has always maintained that having people like Dr. Phil on her show was just as good as therapy.

Be that as it may.

I have no doubt that the massively obese have “issues” beyond just  trying to fit behind the wheel of a car. There is a strong connection between obesity and sexual abuse (as there is with any addictive behaviour). It’s burying yourself, really.  Not to mention lugging a huge burden around. The symbolism is very potent, and hands a clear victory to the abuser.

I’ve seen people come on talk shows who represent the Fat Acceptance Movement, and in every case they round up an expert (there must be a TV-related agency called Rent-an-Expert) who says obesity has no significant negative effect on health. Just as easily, one can find experts who tell us exactly the opposite. I’m sick of experts, myself.

I’m frightened of the escalation, because it hasn’t topped out yet, and I wonder when it will. Obesity is fast becoming normalized, and we’ve learned to accept it as never before.

When I was a kid, we had a neighbour named Ruth. My mother didn’t have friends so much as caseloads, so she befriended this woman along with the blind lady, the woman who was “barren” and could not have kids, and the lady with the hydrocephalic daughter. At my estimate, Ruth weighed somewhere between 250 and 300 pounds, but no more than that. She was considered huge, enormously obese, to the point that she seldom left the house. On the rare times when she did, people disapproved. They didn’t really think she should be showing herself, and if she insisted on it, why didn’t she wear a corset or something? For that was the age when even the thinnest women wore iron girdles to shape their bodies and keep things from moving.

Doesn’t happen any more. We don’t wear girdles, except for those awful Spanx things that cover you from neck to ankles and are supposedly “comfortable”. And even though they claim “anyone” can wear them, “anyone” does not include a woman who weighs 400 pounds.

Will we ALL be obese in twenty years? Will people start exploding from the internal pressure (I have actually heard stories of skin splitting: and what happens when someone who has had a massive tummy-tuck gets fat again)? Will gastric bypasses, which often backfire (look at Carnie Wilson) become as routine as tonsillectomies used to be? Will we require significant mutilation and the risk of death to try to regain some semblance of a recognizable human shape?

 

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New Breast Cancer Guidelines: :Yes! No! I Don't Know!

NEWS FLASH: Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care scores another good one in preventative medicine!

Listen, gals: you can forget about what your doctor has been telling you for the past 25 years.

You can forget about mammograms, unless you suddenly see an egg-sized lump poking out of your bra.

As a matter of fact, don't even look at the lump, because it's probably not there and will only cause you needless anxiety if it turns out to be nothing!

'Cause we all know women are anxious little chick-a-biddies who run around in circles if they think something will happen to their precious little boobies!

And we all know that 99 times out of 100, it's just nothing! They shouldn't worry about it! They shouldn't even go to the doctor, who won't do a breast exam on them anyway 'cause the Task Force has told them not to!

Well, all this new information has certainly clarified things for women, hasn't it? Personally, I feel a lot more secure in knowing the system isn't going to help me at all in the early detection of breast cancer. And it's such a relief to know I don't need to pay any attention to the state of my breasts, unless one of them turns blue or falls off or something.

SO. . . this wonderful task force has left women with so much freedom of choice, they now have THREE options they can follow in making their decision whether to pursue breast cancer screening, or just chuck it in the wastebasket where it belongs!

(Hint: only one of these three options is "right". We just put the other two in to make you feel like you have a little bit of control here, even if you don't.  OK, sweetheart? Now get back to your bloody rolling pin.)

Option A: YES!

Option B: NO!

Option C: I DON'T KNOW!

Now, who says this report doesn't clarify things? Repeat after me, the new Task Force Cheer:

Yes! No! I Don't Know!

Yes! No! I Don't Know!

YES!

I'm  still in favour of self-exams and mammograms, even if my doctor calls me a fussy little hypochondriac.

NO!

I'm not gonna touch those suckers any more! And now I won't have to put my tits in a waffle iron.

I DON'T KNOW!

I'm confused as hell. Should I leave them alone and just hope for the best?

It just gets worse, ladies. . .

YES!

NO!

I DON'T KNOW!

YES!

NO!

I DON'T KNOW!

And out of all this wonderful new information, we've come up with a brand new category which should fit everybody (not to mention make all our doctors happy!),  because we all know, don't we ladies, that one bra size fits all:

Let's pretend it isn't there. . .

and maybe it will go away!

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The Munchkin Suicide Conspiracy: SOLVED!

Did I say I was finished posting about the bogus munchkin suicide scene in The Wizard of Oz? Did I? Well, I'm sorry but I lied. I found this video today and HAD to post it. This, folks, is truth. We may have been taken in; we may have let Satan lead us astray. But with the help of almighty YouTube, the truth has been revealed: yes, brothers and sisters! Let the munchkin speak!


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Breast cancer: don't worry your pretty little head!

The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care says self-examination of the breasts is of little utility. Photo credit: ©2011 Thinkstock

Breast-screening guidelines fuel firestorm


New guidelines for breast cancer screening that recommend women avoid routine mammography until age 50 are based on faulty methodology and will result in an "untold number of lives lost" if implemented across Canada, the Canadian Association of Radiologists charges.

The guidelines, released Monday by the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, recommend against routine mammography screening for most women age 40 to 49, arguing the "harms and costs of false-positive results, overdiagnosis and overtreatment" outweigh any "significant reductions in the relative risk of death from breast cancer".

Aimed at settling more than a decade of contentious debate over the recommended frequency and value of breast cancer screening, the guidelines also say that clinical breast exams and self-exams have no benefit and should never be undertaken, and urge that women over 50 only have mammograms every two to three years, instead every one or two.

But critics say the data on which the guidelines are based is dated.

The recommendation against routine screening of women under the age of 50 who are at average risk of developing breast cancer risk is self-admittedly "weak," and based on "essentially antiquated" and "unbalanced" evidence, argues Dr. Nancy Wadden, chair of the Canadian Association of Radiologist’s Mammography Accreditation Program and medical director of the breast screening program for Newfoundland and Labrador. "The task force looked at studies that were over 25 years old [involving] equipment that is outdated and not even available anymore. There's been enormous changes in breast imaging since that time, [and] in addition radiologists' interpretation skills have improved tremendously."

Part of the problem is that randomized control trials have only been conducted on analog mammography, "because digital hasn't been around long enough," adds Dr. Christine Wilson, medical director of the Screening Mammography Program at the British Columbia Cancer Agency.

Wadden contends that more recent observational and community studies indicate that there are "definite benefits" to screening younger women using digital mammography.

This is the kind of news report that makes my blood boil, triggering a sickened, terrified feeling that bubbles up from deep within.


The powers-that-be have once more muddied the waters in the realm of women's health care and disease prevention. Oh, and it won't be the first time! I'm old enough to remember the time - and this went on for years and years - when medical studies "proved" that hormone replacement therapy protected women from heart disease. In many cases it was prescribed to middle-aged and older women for that reason alone.


People listened to this without questioning it, doctors adopted it as policy, and all went merrily along, with uncounted women dropping dead from heart attacks due to "unknown" factors. Maybe heredity? Inability to handle stress? If doctors even looked at the fact that these women had been on estrogen for ten or fifteen years, they simply did not see it, demonstrating the bizarre blindness all too common in what passes for women's health care.

Then someone bothered to do a study. But it had to be halted in a hurry, because the women taking the estrogen were dying of heart disease at an alarming rate.



Yes, that's right. Dying.


Can a task force be wrong? Can studies be flawed? You bet they can. Already charges have been levelled that the data in this ludicrous study came from dinosaur technology, analog equipment that is now obsolete. We don't even watch TV like that any more, so why is it OK to do life-or-death studies the same way?

But what sets my brain on fire is the insistence that women should not go to their doctors for a routine breast exam at regular intervals unless there is raging breast cancer in their immediate families. And it gets worse. The breast self-exams that I've been told to do every month - yes, every month, not every two or three years - are now strongly discouraged on the grounds that it may lead to that horrific possibility, a "false positive".


This, the study insists, will only lead to unnecessary anxiety about nothing. We'll just worry our pretty little heads. We'll get all upset about losing a breast, like women do. If we think we feel a little lump, or for that matter a big one, we might (silly things!) become afraid we have cancer and be dead in a few months, then rush off to our doctors to get a professional opinion.


The answer? Don't do the self-exams.

For years and years (and years!), I felt infuriated about being badgered to DO the exams after every cycle.  Like most women, I felt tremendous guilt about forgetting to do them. The message seemed to be that the onus for early detection was on us. If we missed a lump, if one somehow turned up at our yearly checkup, well then. . .


The implication was that we could have done something about it much, much sooner if we'd only had the sense to know our own bodies.


That was back in the golden days of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and the seizing of women's health care back from the patriarchy. But now I don't know what the hell is happening. It's as if I am being told NOT to know what is going on in my own body, in my own breast tissue, so I can tell what's normal and what isn't.


Why? The answer seems to be, it's better not to know. It only upsets us. We fret. We trot off to doctors. We even insist on mammograms, which have vague negative side effects that no one ever spells out.


Want to know the real reason?


Dollars.  It costs the medical system to give us those tests.

Never mind how much it costs us (though having a cancerous lump slowly and insidiously grow from barely perceptible to Stage 4 without our awareness might just cost us a little.) It costs the system to deal with these pesky little "false positives". I don't know how much; I don't have figures. But since this so-called study appears to be deeply flawed, yet is STILL being pushed at us as gospel, I feel a hidden agenda at work.



I've had bullshit statistics rammed down my throat for too long. Whenever the conclusions on women's health care suddenly lurch into reverse, I notice there is never an apology for the confusion and dismay and anger it causes. We're simply updating what "we" know.


Save me from this "we". It doesn't exist. "We" is Orwellian, a herd thinking that is always extremely dangerous because it is so often based on bias, not to mention bullshit. I honestly don't know how "statistics" like this can even be released, let alone  followed. Would you walk into Future Shop and try to buy an analog TV? Isn't breast cancer just a little more serious than that?

My worst fear is that next time a woman tries to book a mammogram, she won't be allowed to because she's considered too young, or not enough time has elapsed since the last one. Or perhaps doctors will begin to say, "No, I won't do a breast exam on you until you're over 50," leaving us to cope with that pea-sized lump we weren't even supposed to detect.



A breast exam at a doctor's office takes about a minute, maybe two. How much does that cost the system? If there's a "false positive" and the patient has to go for a mammogram and finds out there's nothing there, the result for her is immense relief. Why would the system want to take that away that peace of mind?


Ludicrous! The whole thng is ludicrous. And to me, it smacks of a not-so-subtle wrenching of control away from women and back to a medical system that has let us down time, after time, after time. Why does this bother us so much?  Why do we get all anxious and whiny and trot around doing "unnecessary" things to protect ourselves?



Because women die, that's why. They die. And we don't want to.

How often have I heard that most women find cancerous breast lumps themselves? I don`t have statistics rattling around in my head, but I`ve been hearing it for decades, quoted as an unassailable fact. If it`s true, and I believe it still is, how on earth can any study, anywhere, be so primitive, so flawed, so horribly disrespectful to women's wisdom and women's right to manage their own health care? Worse than that, how can the medical community blandly swallow it as accepted procedure?


I want an answer to one more question.

If all this disrespectful garbage becomes policy, which it may well do, how many small lumps will go undetected because we're really not supposed to touch ourselves there?



How many significant lumps won't be detected because our doctors will politely tell us they don't do breast exams any more until we are well past menopause?


How many deadly lumps will go undetected because our mammogram clinic will suddenly refuse our request for a screening test?  

To conclude, I can`t help but make the inevitable analogy to men's health care. My husband had a possible cancer scare a couple of years ago. Now, every six months, he goes in to see a specialist who does an uncomfortable manual test on him, just to make sure everything is still OK.


Applying the rules of this new study, he should not be going in because the exam might lead to a false positive, which could cause him "unnecessary anxiety" (read: which could take up the doctor's precious time). Instead, he's given the exam, mostly for his own peace of mind.

I hate this stuff, I really hate it. It stirs up fury in me. Fury because women are going to die from this, to actually die.  Even one death is too many, but my intuition (and haven't we been told for years to listen to our intuition?) tells me there will be many. It's the health care system instructing a woman to stick her head in the sand, because it's really better for everybody if she doesn't know.


But there are certain advantages to being dead, aren't there? The best one is, you can't complain.


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The Sister Wives exodus: a very costly publicity stunt

An obsession's an obsession, am I right? Remember the Dead Munchkin Hypothesis that lasted, I think, five posts? I promise this one won't run as long (though it keeps coming back for more).


I stumbled upon an article that opened my eyes, wide, about the reality show Sister Wives: you know, the one I keep blathering on about. Their much-publicized flight from Utah to avoid criminal prosecution for their "lifestyle" turns out to be more hype than reality.

I don't know what came first: their exodus from Eden to the Promised Land, or this report which claims they were never really under threat of prosecution in the first place.


"In new legal papers in their court case, the Browns are requesting that the law they’re being prosecuted under be dismissed. That probably won’t happen, but they probably won’t get prosecuted at all either. The prosecutors have mentioned that they are trying to get the case dismissed, since all of the wives have entered into it by their own free will and there isn’t any incest, underage marriage or tax or welfare fraud. So Kody uprooted everyone, took his kids out of their school, giving them three days notice (and telling them not to tell their friends goodbye), and hightailed it to Vegas, all based on his own paranoia. He could have just stayed put and ridden it out. At least he created a great new plot line for his reality show, right?"

I couldn't have said it better myself. But is Kody Brown man enough to admit he made a huge, damaging mistake? What would happen if the family decided to return to  their megahouse in Utah? Nothing, probably, by the looks of it. But pride has a way of keeping people nailed in place.

At this point, it looks like nobody's happy with the move. The teenagers are so bitter and angry that I wonder if one of them isn't going to just plain bolt. You can't casually uproot a kid from this kind of exotic background: he won't find new friends readily, if at all. If the stigma of polygamy doesn't get him, the stigma of having a jackass father who flaunts his screwups on national TV will.

Like some bizarre latter-day (!) Brigham Young trailing a host of obedient wives and children, Kody has made all the decisions here, though as usual the wives pretend to be independent agents. The family seems to be on the verge of cracking apart. Polygamy for the most part must happen under glass: it's a bizarre way of life that makes most people profoundly uneasy. Outside the protective bubble, the spotlight can be pretty glaring.

Divorce won't happen, marital breakdown won't happen, but mental health breakdown is already taking place, and will only escalate. For all his patriarchal posturing, Kody Brown is about fifteen years old emotionally. He acts impulsively, not thinking how his dashing off to "my Plymouth Rock" (his grotesque name for Las Vegas) will affect the large circle of women and children whose security depends on him. Narcissism has a steep cost: but never to the narcissist, who inevitably hands off the damage to the vulnerable souls in his orbit.

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