Category: FatnessInGeneral
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Meet the New Bras…
…same as the old bras…only from a new store. One that I’m not sure if I will order from again. While it was nowhere near the ordeal Lesley had with Avenue, it was its own sort of Special. Bras ordered? April 26, 2009. I send email to check on bras? June 10th, 2009. Email returned as undeliverable? June 10th, 2009. Call to check on order? June 10th,…
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Rethinking Thin and Mindless Eating
This Reason review of both Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss— and the Myths and Realities of Dieting and Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think does something one doesn’t often see in writing about the efficacy of diets: It recognizes that losing 10lbs is nothing like losing 100lbs. In Rethinking Thin, Kolata, a veteran New York Times science reporter, focuses on a…
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Today’s Logic Puzzle
In 2005, sources reported that: 3% to 5% of US adults were morbidly obese (BMI > 40) 25% of US adults were obese (BMI > 30) 66% of US adults were overweight OR obese (BMI > 25) Yet newspapers and television tend to illustrate articles about the “OMG Obesity Panic!!1!! Most Americans are fat!!!” with images of extremely fat people like myself. Are they perhaps afraid that MOST…
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Super Obesity!
Apparently “morbid obesity” isn’t obese enough! Some now refer to people with a BMI of 50 or more as “super obese”. For some reason I’m finding this amazingly humorous. Suddenly I want a Supergirl costume! :) Though seriously, it does make you wonder. Medical personnel spent years cautioning me that morbid obesity was OMG so much worse than just plain obesity. Is being “superfat” somehow less deadly…
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Hydroxycut, FDA, and “Diet Supplements”
Hydroxycut, produced by Iovate Health Sciences of Oakville, Ontario, is the latest diet supplement that has been volunarily recalled at the urging of the US FDA. In all, the Food and Drug Administration said it had received 23 reports of significant adverse health effects in people who used Hydroxycut, including one person who required a liver transplant. Other complications included heart problems and a kind of muscle damage that…
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More: How Very Obese People Are Almost Completely Sedentary…
Or rather, on how the “almost completely sedentary” in “Very Obese Adults Almost Completely Sedentary” is defined. The full text of the study isn’t freely available, but the abstract is linked in here. The results include: On average, subjects took 3,763 ± 2,223 steps. That implies a range between 1,430 and 5,986 steps a day. That’s a pretty wide range of data, and makes me…
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Very Obese Adults Almost Completely Sedentary?
For all the freaking out in the media about the obesity crisis, there’s not much research on folks who are very fat. So a study on folks with an average BMI of 53 shows some promise…right? Sorry. The headline: “Very Obese Adults Almost Completely Sedentary“. I’m not sure how many people are going to read beyond that, but if they do, here’s what they’ll find: Only 10 participants.…
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Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession
I’m reading Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. I think the book is trying to be shocking. The first essay is about fat in Nigerian culture (good if you’re female, bad if you’re male). Another is on the Andean legend of the pishtaco, a bogeyman whose objective is to extract fat from the bodies of his victims. But the one that’s boggled my mind is … Don Kulick‘s…
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Fat Clothing Catalogs…
In my experience, there are two kinds of companies that put out supersize/extended-size catalogs for fat women: Large companies with mostly imported mass-produced clothing, cheap prices, and a propensity for selling their mailing lists. Quality tends to be uniform. Examples: Roaman’s, Woman Within, Silhouettes, Lane Bryant Catalog. Small specialty companies that only do plus or supersize clothing. Often they design and produce their clothing in-house, sometimes even…
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Nice analogy on obesity frequency
Not new, but I’m quoting it anyway because I like it :) From an article on the obesity “health crisis” in the International Journal of Epidemiology: Imagine that the average IQ was 100 and that five percent of the population had an IQ of 140 and were considered to be geniuses. Now let’s say that education improves and the average IQ increases to 107 and 10% of the population has…
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Fat folks more likely to be Vitamin D-deficient?
I got a phone call from my RNP; my screening tests show no problems, but my vitamin D is still a little low. She suggested I continue to take a 1000iu Vitamin D tablet a day. During my checkup RNP also urged me to start taking a multivitamin again. I have, and it has 400iu of vitamin D too. So now I’m actually getting 1400 iu of…
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Being fat is just like carrying a heavy backpack, right?
I mean, everyone assumes it is, so it must be, right? Nobody needs to research this because we know what they’d find, right? Studies that simulate obesity in nonobese people suggest that putting on pounds substantially increases the metabolic cost of walking. When lean women walk with heavy, bulky gear strapped to their legs and bodies, [locomotion researcher Rodger] Kram says, “their energy costs skyrocket.” But in…
Living ~400lbs 