Posts Tagged fat-hate

Last October was the last time I weighed myself regularly. I weighed around 170-175 lbs. Since then, I have not counted calories or, really, even stepped on the scale. I have just eaten and drunk whatever I wanted, pretty much whenever I wanted. Spurred by a friend’s LJ post about her dieting efforts, I weighed myself yesterday, just to see what had happened in the last ten months or so. My weight: 172.

I do want to be clear that I’m not bragging or anything like that. I’m not showing off, “hur hur, my metabolism is awesome I can eat whatever I want and not gain weight!” Actually, for many years, my weight hovered around 165-170, pretty much no matter what I did. Once, in a frenzy of effort, I exercised and counted calories to get it down to 155, but… you guessed it… it crept back up to about 165 and stayed there. Until around last October or thereabouts when it went up to around 170-175 and stayed there. So, I have both “failed” at dieting and gained weight before.

So what is my point? If I can go a whole year without counting a single calorie or thinking twice about what goes into my mouth, and at the end be pretty much exactly the same weight that I started out at, what must that say about the power of the metabolic processes that are maintaining my weight? I guarantee you there were days in there where I consumed 4,000 calories. You know, “bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s then ate the whole thing over pound cake,” kind of days. “Ordered a large pizza then ate all eight slices instead of leaving four for leftovers,” kind of days. Somehow, it all worked out in the end, and I weigh the same as I did a year ago.

The basic premise of dieting is that if you eat fewer calories than your metabolism burns, then you will lose weight. And, strictly speaking, that’s true, but the problem is that it treats the amount your metabolism burns as a fixed number, which it isn’t. Studies have concluded that the body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down in response to increased or decreased calories. The degree to which this happens varies depending on the individual, but in one study, some participants had to consume as much as 10,000 calories a day in order to gain weight, and then quickly lost it without any particular effort once the study ended. These people were certainly outliers, but they were not mutants. Your body and mine probably works the same way, even if the threshold above which our metabolism could not compensate, and we would begin to gain weight, is less than 10,000 calories a day.

If weight gain or loss was as simple as “calories in – base metabolic rate” then the chances of my ending up the same weight after a year of not monitoring my food intake would be nil. Every day for the last year, some part of my biological process has moderated my desire to eat food and my metabolic rate in order to keep my weight where my body “wanted it” to be, without me even being aware of it. Kind of like breathing or blinking my eyes. I don’t think about either of those things very often, but they keep happening. I can take conscious control of them, but it requires a lot of attention and effort, and pretty soon I go back to not thinking about them, which is the way my mind and body normally work.

Counting calories in order to lose weight is like trying to consciously breathe or blink your eyes 20% slower than you normally would. All day. Every day. For the rest of your life. Could you do it? Yes, if you really wanted to. Would you do it? Probably not. You’d be out of breath and dry-eyed all the time, and at some point, you would just say, “fuck it.” And who could blame you? Who wants to be out of breath and dry-eyed all the time? Who wants to be hungry, physically weak, grumpy, and measurably worse at tests of cognition (all effects of dieting) all the time?

The reality is that weight is 70% heritable. That means that weight is more heritable than breast cancer, mental illness, or heart disease. You can do things to influence your probability of getting cancer, mental illness, or heart disease. If you know you are at risk, you can avoid exacerbating factors. But in the end, we all understand that some people are going to get these diseases through no obvious fault of their own. It’s just genetics. This is the same treatment that we should give to weight.

Here is a link to an article with more on this topic.

This whole Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines thing is putting fat-hate front and center on the Blogosphere. It coincides with me starting to read Shapely Prose, so fat-hate issues are front and center in my mind, and you get to hear about them.

I feel like I have a lot to say about the issue, but I am going to try to keep this post down to just one main point: the “Bunsen burner” theory of metabolism. The theory goes something like this: the body burns fuel, like a Bunsen burner. If calories in is less than calories expended through metabolism and exercise, you will lose weight. Therefore, you are fat because you eat too much.

Fat-haters use this idea to put fat people’s weight into their control, which then justifies the fat-hate, since apparently what we learned from Teh Gays is that it’s okay to be hateful to people if the thing you’re being hateful over is a choice, but not if it’s innate.

I confess to having used this argument in discussions about weight. It made terribly good sense at the time. It’s basic thermodynamics, right? If you have a fuel source with so many calories of energy, and you burn off that many calories, plus some more, the extra calories have to come from somewhere. The thermodynamics are sound, but the Bunsen burner theory of metabolism is total bullshit. The human body is not a black-box in a lab.

The first flaw in the theory is that the human body uses calories for a lot more than just maintaining weight. For example, if you restrict calories, many people’s cognitive function will suffer or energy levels decrease before they reach a point where they begin to lose weight. You can’t pick and choose. You can’t say to your body, “Dear body, please take those calories from my fat and not from my brain-function.” Imagine that, on a given day, my base metabolic rate is determined to be 2200 calories, and from that point on, I begin to consume only 2000 calories, a 200-calorie deficit. Who’s to say that I won’t be 200 calories stupider, slower, grumpier, and weaker without losing any weight?

This brings up a fundamental flaw in the very idea of the base metabolic rate, which is the basis of the Bunsen burner theory. The BMR is defined as the amount of calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, therefore if you eat less than your BMR, you must lose weight. Can you see the circularity in this definition? If you’re eating your estimated BMR and not losing weight, the doctors and scientists will say, “Your BMR must be lower than predicted.” Then they’ll restrict your calorie intake until you start to lose weight and say THAT’s your BMR.

So, calories in minus my BMR equals weight gained or lost, right? But BMR is defined as, “the amount of calories below which I will lose weight.”  So, let’s just substitute the variable in that formula, as they used to say in algebra. Calories in minus whatever number it takes to make me lose weight = lost weight. Uhhh… yes, I suppose that’s true. It’s also a tautology, and so not very interesting from a practical perspective.

Somehow, “Calories In < Calories Expended = Weight Loss,” sounds very reasonable, but it sounds pretty stupid when you translate that to, “In order to lose weight, restrict your calories until you begin to lose weight.” Thanks. Next you’ll tell me, “In order to be able to live in a vacuum, hold your breath until you no longer need to breathe.”

In closing, to the person with whom I argued in favor of the Bunsen burner theory: I was wrong. You were right. I was stupid and bigoted. I’m sorry.

On a side-note, the next time you hear somebody debating whether people are “born gay” or “choose gay-ness,” please for the love of whatever you find holy, remind them that it doesn’t matter, because who you love and fuck is nobody’s business but your own, regardless of why you’re choosing to love and fuck them. The whole “innate vs. choice” debate presumes that the only reason we shouldn’t punish a person for gay-ness is because the person had it imposed upon them, like some sort of birth defect. This is equally true for fat people.