July 07, 2011 | By: Tara Tai

Aa Aa Aa

Of Love Handles and Losing Weight

Summer is officially here, which means warm days at the beach, two-piece bathing suits, flip-flops, a guitar and surfboard, and the occasional game of volleyball. It also means the cheerful metallic pings of an ice cream truck going around the neighborhood, cold milkshakes at the local diner, backyard roasts of hotdogs and hamburgers, buttery corn on the cob, and tall glasses of beer slick with condensation.

Oh my, whatever is a girl to do?

I have a confession to make: I started a new diet yesterday. It will be the sixth time this year that I’ve started trying to lose weight. But when I determinedly pushed away the sugar tin this morning and forced my hand toward the milk instead of the cream, I found myself drinking black coffee with a grimace that had more to do with the subject of weight loss than the bitterness of the cup.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m at a healthy weight, at least according to the BMI calculator stuck like a warning sign to the refrigerator door. Yet many Americans aren’t. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of 2009, thirty-three of the US's fifty states had obesity rates greater than 25%.¹ The statistics are slightly lower worldwide, with most developed nations boasting obesity rates between 10% and 20% (or higher).²

So if I’m technically not overweight, why do I feel the need to diet? It’s certainly not for health reasons. I exercise on a regular basis even when I’m not officially dieting, and while I sporadically slip up and enjoy three-pieces-of-cake days, on the whole, I eat two to three balanced, portion-conscious meals every day. Yet I’m still convinced that if I could just manage to get rid of that extra bit of belly fat, the stars would align, the sun would shine through, and a marvelously tight stomach would reveal itself.

Here are a few more numbers for you to consider. About 40% of teenage girls and boys³ engage in unhealthy weight control behaviors such as fasting, smoking, and vomiting.⁴ “Girls who diet frequently are 12 times more likely to binge eat.”⁵ Finally, more than 35% of the US is on a diet at any given time. All these statistics stand separate from patients diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia.

Contradictory? On the one hand, the US is one developed nation in a sea of developed nations that all definitely need to trim their muffin tops. On the other, huge populations of people, teenage girls especially, suffer daily from not only eating disorders but also related mental health problems (e.g. low self-esteem, poor self-image). Why does dieting seem doomed to failure? Why do the rates of obesity and eating disorders keep increasing in tandem with each other?

It’s a paradoxical problem, the former component of which (i.e., the rising rates of obesity,) has been the focus of many a political figure in the past year. In February 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama founded the Let’s Move! Campaign to promote healthier eating among America’s youth. More recently, Congressman Aaron Schock graced the cover of Men’s Health Magazine and pushed his own initiative: Fit for Summer, Fit for Life. The latter concern of rising rates of eating disorders has been less popular with politicians, but it has been championed by a few media sources, for example in the hit show Glee and in the independent movie Miss Representation.

How should the US and the world go about combating rising obesity rates without simultaneously enabling unhealthy weight-loss habits? At first, I posited that movements that focus on health are more effective than movements that focus on beauty. Juxtaposing the Let’s Move! and Fit for Summer, Fit for Life websites, I noticed that while Obama emphasized the word “health” and shied away from using pictures, Schock embraced images of built men and women cavorting on a beach and chose image-based words like “lean,” “fit,” and “in shape”. Where the two agreed was in the benefits of losing weight: decreased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and asthma, among others.

Yet I reconsidered this position. After all, the shorter-term promise of beauty is a more powerful motivator than the longer-term promise of health, especially in the young and the already healthy. Wasn’t I a living example of that? I diet to look better next month, not to shield myself from possible disease ten, twenty, thirty years from now. And if health were actually the ultimate goal, teenagers wouldn’t be skipping meals and taking up cigarettes to lose weight.

So I turned to a second hypothesis. As a writer, I am constantly aware of the power of rhetoric to influence perception. Is it possible that the word “diet” itself was hindering the progress of movements against obesity? Social and political cues, from 5’11” models weighing 117 pounds to the First Lady warning us of the consequences of overeating, spur us into “changing our lives for the better,” “grabbing health and fitness by the reins,” and adopting radical diet plans that cut out starches, sugars, meats, and all sorts of devilishly tasty treats. It’s no wonder that girls who diet often are more likely to binge. It is the same in eating as it is in science: An equation must be balanced. Maybe such extreme dietary changes cannot persist for long without being threatened by periods of equally extreme unhealthy consumption.

Then, ever the scientist, I looked up the word “diet”. In fact — and this is something I knew but forget often — “diet” means something habitual and experienced with regularity, not a drastic departure from the norm. How can you go on and off a diet, then? You can change your diet, but in order to maintain weight loss, you have to effectively “go on a diet” forever. And ever.

But that’s a depressing thought, almost as if saying that because habits are hard to break and balances are difficult to upset, dieting is near impossible. And even if you do change your diet, you could potentially end up following the typically detrimental and short-term “10 Rules to Lose 10 Pounds!” or denying yourself starches and sugars for the rest of your life. And that wouldn’t be quite healthy either.

Maybe the answer to all our weight and eating disorder problems is simply this: eat less, eat healthy, and exercise more. No more rules, no more pictures, and no more words than that. What do you think?

Image Credit: Nina Shi

References:

Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (2011). U.S. obesity trends: trends by state 1985–2009 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
BBC News (2008). Obesity: in statistics BBC Online Services
Split by sex: >50% (f.); ≈30% (m.).
NeumarkSztainer, D. I’m, Like, SO Fat! New York: The Guilford Press (2005), 5.
National Eating Disorders. "Statistics: Eating Disorders and their Precursors." National Eating Disorders Association (2011).

1 Comment

July 07, 2011 | 04:10 PM

Posted By: Amy Charles

Tara, there's good reason to be a little nutzoid with your regime. Depressing or not, "going on a diet forever" is precisely what healthy middle-aged and older people do. The thought gets less depressing as mortality becomes a more tangible presence, as parents and friends die and develop illnesses of obesity and inactivity. You look at your children, you consider what else you'd like to do and how you'd like to feel, and suddenly hotdogs don't seem like such a loss.

Rules, pictures, etc. serve as references. How do you know what "eat less" means unless you know what portion sizes are and how calorie-dense the food is? How do you know what "exercise more" means if you're not maintaining a sense of exertion and time spent moving?

Decoupling weight from radical self-judgment and assignments of worth, yes, I think that's a fine idea. But if it takes being a little crazy to be fit...I'd say go for crazy. Your body and mind will both thank you in 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

Of Love Handles and Losing Weight

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