Living ~400lbs

I found these useful & thought that you might too.

Charlotte Cooper compared psychics with weight-loss sellers

Weight loss industries rely as much on showbiz bravado as psychics, including the use of simple, vivid images that draw people in, such as the Before/After transformation archetype.

That psychics, and weight loss companies and advocates, are types of industries that are unregulated and know they are peddling junk. Brown talks about psychics investing in the lie of their profession because people need the comfort of the belief that their loved ones are still with them, they frame their work as being good for people, kind. But Brown also points out that this is exploitative and that people should decide for themselves what they need. I think the diet industry is similar, framing the products and services they sell as part of a “comforting” fantasy of escape and transformation. 

Shapely Prose has a frustrating (but useful) post on how chemotherapy dosing can be inadequate in fat people.  

Yeah, folks, apparently giving women with ovarian cancer chemotherapy dosages based on their actual weight, rather than their ideal weight, leads to increased survival rates, effectively eliminating any significant difference between the survival rates of fat and non-fat women. 

Some of the discussion turns on how fat doesn’t absorb chemo at the same rates as other cells, but there’s a world of disconnect between “let’s estimate lean body mass vs fat and adjust for less absorption” vs “let’s treat the real body and not all this repulsive fat that is sitting in a backpack and getting in our way”.   Sigh. 

On a more positive note, there’s the terrific comments in the “Reverse Resolutions” thread on Shapely Prose, about the really good things people did last year.