mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

Here we go, a compendium of all the issues various skeptics have raised concerning the so-called "obesity epidemic." The first page of the article mainly covers various contrarian opinions and studies, including the infamous "obesity paradox" in which researchers grudgingly admit that fat people actually survive some conditions better than thin people. But it's the second page where things really get down and dirty--where the article starts following the money to see who stands to profit from the war on obesity--and who might even be feuling the war to benefit their own bottom lines:

"Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem." According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills."

Obviously, there are indeed health benefits to taking off a reasonable amount of weight in a reasonable way--I'm proof of that. But the so-called War on Obesity, as far as I can see, is not about reasonable (let alone inexpensive) approaches to the problem. It's about scare tactics, knee-jerk rejection of data that doesn't fit the official party line, and big profits for the medical, pharmaceutical, and diet industries.

Splurging; recovering; mmm-yoso-ing; plateauing (weekly weigh-in)

Alert visitors to this site will hopefully have noticed--and followed--the link to the blog of my fellow food-blogger Kirk a.k.a. mmm-yoso. Kirk and his crew do an excellent job of covering all sorts of fascinating little mom 'n' pop hole-in-the-wall eateries, especially those specializing in ethnic cuisines, in the greater San Diego area and beyond. I've been a fan and frequent commenter on mmm-yoso for some time now, so it was probably only a matter of time that I became a contributing blogger over there. You can check out my maiden post on mmm-yoso here ... and there should be another one from me going live any day now.

You'll see that this next mmm-yoso post will feature a meal that, erm, doesn't conform all that well to my everyday food routine. It was, in fact, a planned splurge--although a rather bigger one than I think I had originally intended. Oopsie. But hey, these things happen, and it's actually quite simple to recover from them: all you do is just eat more lightly and deliberately for the next few days. That's it. No drama, no freakouts ... just takin' care o' bizness.

In the bad old diet-think days, such overly splurgy splurges would have been the source of much hand-wringing and self-recrimination, often leading in turn to a bad attitude and a what-the-hell might-as-well-really-blow-it-out binge. Nowadays, though, I have banned guilt and self-recrimination from my weight-management philosophy. It's amazing how easy it is to do a course-correction when you're not making yourself crazy over having wandered off course in the first place.

And as a matter of fact, when I did my weekly weigh-in today, I was back on (or still on) that same plateau I've been holding at for over a month now:

• Yesterday's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.29

So there you go. Status quo maintained, senseless panic avoided. Much more pleasant--and productive--than the old way.

Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com

Link: Networks of genes behind obesity - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.

Even though the whole philosophy of disease-ifying weight continues to bug me, I confess to being intrugued by this kind of research. As I had already started to surmise as just a Scientific American level layperson, this research demonstrates that the body's genetic regulatory systems are not just a simple set of on/off switches, but an incredibly complex system rife with multiple feedback loops, redundancies, and ohter complexities. So when you're talking about the impact of high levels of body fat on overall health, it's only to be expected that there are numerous different command-and-control gene networks involved in mediating that impact. Which would suggest  why most current medical solutions for obseity, which typically tend to intervene at just one point in what turns out to be a complex cascade of biochemical events, tend to backfire in all the ways that they do--it's like pulling just one pickup stick out of a whole pile and not anticipating that the rest of the pile won't shift around or even come tumbling down.

As I read between the lines of this article, I also note more evidence for the fact that adipose tissue is not just an inert "container" for body fat, but living tissue like any other bodily tissue, with its own unique genetically-supervised functions, including feedback loops that influence other tissues of the body.

I've also learned, from long experience of reading these kinds of articles in mass media, that things can often get oversimplified. So I went and looked up the abstracts of the original scientific research papers on which this article is based. At least to judge from the abstracts, the NBC article seems to be more-or-less on track--though unfortunately one can't see the full texts without shelling out bucks. But if you want to check out the abstracts, you can go here and here.

Sigh--the diet pundits have re-discovered carbs

Link: Why carbs are the new diet craze - Health - MSNBC.com.

Oh, I just love it when the diet industry pundits suddenly "discover" a nutrient that's been there all along. But apparently, at least according to this Wikipedia article, resistant starch is a legitimate nutritional entity, a category of starch distinct from both soluble and insoluble fiber, which plays its own role in keeping one's system regular and one's appetite sated. Interestingly, I've always enjoyed my bananas on the green side, and don't mind eating cold leftover potatoes as a snack, never dreaming that these foods are apparently rich in this so-called resistant starch. Who knew? I guess my bod had been intuitively zeroing in on this type of starch all on its own, without the pundits to guide me.

Weekly weigh-in: still plateauing

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.3 lb

Still on that plateau ... steady as she goes ...

Oh yeah--forgot about the cane!

I was hobnobbing with folks during coffee hour after services at my hippy-groovy Unitarian Universalist church this morning when one of my fellow church members flags me down and asks: "Hey, so you're totally doing without your cane now? How is that happening?"

Heh. I almost forgot that people who know me are still catching up with the fact that I'm not using a cane much anymore. I still keep it in the car, because sometimes at the end of a day of shopping or whatever, the muscles around my left knee get fatigued and need a little support. And sometimes I use it the day after I've overdone things and the knee is letting me know it feels a bit unstable.

But otherwise I'm pretty much free of it. And the more I walk around without it, the more my endurance increases, as well as the strength of those key muscles around the knee that keep the joint aligned and supported.

The little meniscus tear is still in there, and still occasionally starts clicking and attempting to lock the knee. But it's doing it less and less. I can't help thinking that the way I was walking with the cane, which inevitably throws one's body out of alignment, was exacerbating the meniscus tear. Now that I'm using the cane less and less, my body and thus my knee are in more normal alignment, so it's plausible that this is putting less stress on that little wedge of cartilege in there so that it doesn't get all irritated and inflamed as often.

It's too easy for me to take this change for granted, but it really is a big huge deal--and it's a direct consequence of having taken off all that weight that was slowly but surely pulverizing that knee to bits. So--hurray for me! And hurray for friends who spontaneously notice such things! Hey, I'm not proud, I'll happily take all the ego-strokes I can get.

Weekly weigh-in: plateau? bottom? And whither this blog?

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.32 lb

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I've been plateaued at 192 pounds for about a month now. You'll also remember that I had vowed I was going to let my weight find its own natural stopping point, without doing any extraordinary alterations to my routine to force my weight lower.

So I'm wondering now: is this it? Have I reached my body's natural preferred stopping point? Not that I'd be changing my current routine one whit, any more than I planned to change it if I weren't at bottom. In fact, this may well be a moot point from a practical standpoint--I've got a healthy routine, it's working for me, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.

It does, however, make me wonder what I should do with this blog from this point forward. After all, it's no more exciting for me to keep entering essentially the same data week after week than it must be for you folks out there to read it! And the truth be known, I pretty much laid out the bulk of my philosophy about healthy weigh management--and vented the bulk of my angst about the dieting industry--in these first two years of blogging.

So I'm considering expanding the focus of this blog, from a personal weight-management journal to a more wide-ranging blog about my interests in food. This would of course still include my weigh management routine--after all, I'm not going to stop any of my disciplines just because I'm changing the blog's focus. And if something should change about my weight management routine, of course you'll hear about it here right off. And I have occasionally mentioned my other food interests here from time to time. I'd just be bringing those other interests more into the foreground.

I'm not sure exactly how and when these changes will start showing up on this blog, but watch this space, and sooner or later all will be revealed.

Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com

Link: Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com.

I confess I had been getting increasingly irked at the strain of innuendo among certain health pundits to the effect of "those awful inconsiderate fat people, costing the rest of us so much in inflated insurance and medical costs because of their unhealthy lifestyles." But, as one person is quoted in this article, this study “throws a bucket of cold water” onto that whole line of fear-mongering: statistically, thin healthy people actually cost the system more over their lifetimes than fat people.

Of course I don't want heavier people given short shrift in any way when seeking real, useful medical help for their health issues. But, again as the article says, I'd like to see that help offered for the right reasons--not because of some blame-the-victim mythology about how many healthcare dollars society erroneously believes fat people are "wasting".

But I also think the article doesn't go quite far enough. I'm willing to speculate that the cost differences uncovered by this study may well have been known all along by the health care industry. Hell, those insurance companies do their managed-care cost savings analyses on every little thing these days; so I find it hard to believe that it's escaped their attention that long-lived healthy people generate more revenue for them than obese people.

I can't help thinking: if I were a Machiavellian health-care bean-counter, aware that fat people aren't costing the system/bringing in as much revenue as thin people, how would I suggest the company take advantage of that disparity? Would I recommend to my bosses that "curing" fat people be less of a priority because they don't earn the company as much (which is how they used to treat us)? Or perhaps that the company participate in this new-fangled War on Obesity, diseasifying fat and coming up with costly new "treatments" so that it contributes more to their bottom line (which is this brave new world of super-expensive bariatric surgeries and medically-supervised fasts)?

Thnk that's overly cynical? Well, considering such health-insurance practices as taking claims for major--and expensive--health care crises as a cue to find any flimsy excuse to cancel the claimant's policy so the comapny doesn't have to pay up, thus dooming the claimant to medical and/or financial disaster, I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to imagine other egregious ethics violations on the part of this industry. There's just been too many examples of the bottom line trumping patient needs to leave me anything other than cynical.