I’ve just read two very irritating articles in the guardian. Both purport to be about feminism and dieting – but both make Linda Hirschman’s version of feminism look like it belongs in ‘Notes from the First Year.’ Zoe Williams article is called You’re Vain and Stupid and the first sentance says: “Women who fixate on their weight should relinquish their right to be taken seriously.” I don’t even know where to start with this – when did women even win the right to be taken seriously? But the real reason Zoe Williams argument is not feminist is because it asks the question ‘why do women fixate about their weight’ and answers it ‘because they’re stupid’.
Feminism’s most basic tenet is women’s problems are structural and political, not individual. “Because women are stupid” is rarely a feminist answer to any question.
Even more annoying was India Knight’s reply to Zoe Williams (who are these people? I don’t know either – apparently they’re people that guardian readers would have heard of) titled It’s not anti-feminist to go on a diet (thanks to Big Fat Blog for the link). This is a misleading start, because India Knight didn’t just go on a diet, she wrote a diet book. At least part of her living now comes in telling other women how to lose weight. If this article is anything to go by she drums up business by making fat women feel worse about themselves (she asks “Why is it good to be pleased that you look like a pig?”)
What is so awful, so anti-feminist, about her article, is the narrative she tells about being fat:
You may occupy a great deal of physical space if you’re very fat, but in everyday life, it’s as though you weren’t there. Sales assistants stare blankly through you. Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you “mate”. You wonder whether your children are embarrassed to be seen with you in public (the answer to that one is yes, probably). You wish you could go for a bike ride with them, but you’re too self-conscious, because you look like a potato balanced on an ant. You can only buy clothes in specialist shops, and these clothes are as undesirable as you have started to feel. Your self-esteem – well, I was going to say “plummets”, but it’s hard to plummet when you’ve reached rock bottom.
She’s right – it sucks to be a fat woman in our society, it really fucking sucks. But every single example she gives isn’t directly about being fat, it’s about how people react to fat people. Her argument appears to be that men treat fat women like shit, so the solution is to stop being fat. That doesn’t resemble any kind of feminism I know.
She reaches a low point when she suggests weight loss as a solution for an abusive relationship:
just as I cheer for the woman whose husband puts her and her weight down every single day. One of these days, he’s going to have to stop. One of these days, she and her new-found confidence aren’t going to take it any more.
On first glance this is relatively trivial issue, which reminds me about everything that irritates me about the Guardian. But it’s actually about a much more fundamental issue, which is how we define feminism. This is what happens when we suggest individual solutions for collective problems. We all need to find ways to live as best we can with the problems that living in a misogynist world creates and I’d never criticise anyone else for feeling the need to lose weight or obsess about food. These sorts of survival mechanisms are neither feminist nor anti-feminist, they’re what you’ve got to do. It’s when your survival mechanisms make life harder for other women, for example if you denigrate fat women and reinforce society’s idea about the relationship between morality and food, then that’s anti-feminism. I think Emma Thompson summed up this dilema brilliantly:
As an artist, you can choose not to sell women down the river. When I decide, for instance, not to diet myself into a starved condition to play someone like Dora Carrington, then that’s a political act. And I was being lampooned by male journalists, saying: Who would want to sleep with her? She’s not that kind of shape. So I paid the price, but I would never betray other women in that way. I just wouldn’t do it and I’ve never done it. She pauses…. God, I’ve gone on every single diet under the sun, but I’ve never got slender in a very particular way for any role.
No being a feminist doesn’t give us magic powers to exit from a world that’s obsessed with our bodies. But it does mean, at a minimum, that we have a responsibility not to add to that pressure. For Emma Thompson that means she didn’t lose weight to play Carrington, for most of the rest of us it’s simpler, but possibly incredibly different, we have to stop talking about food and our bodies in any way that reinforces the hatred other women have for their bodies.
That certainly includes writing a diet book or saying that fat women look like pigs.
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I agree with your premise, but disagree with your conclusion that no woman should ever write a diet book. Well, maybe it depends on how you define “diet” but it does seem to me that a feminist could write a book about our broken relationship with food, how women’s weight has become a means of social control, how the two interact in our consumer/commercial culture — but I think such a book could also give good information about nutrition and exercise. Indeed, what is missing from most books on the subject is the social context in which weight and consumption take place. Everyone talks about “emotional” issues related to food, further reinforcing IMHO the notion that women — especially fat women — are hysterical and eat because they are unable to control their emotional state. I think the NYT Magazine article on “nutritionism” did an outstanding job of explaining in short order how we’ve arrived at where we are with regard to food, and some simple steps that one can take as an appropriate response to reverse the situation. I don’t see elaboration of these subjects as totally off limits — but certainly, I agree that any self-respecting feminist should work very hard to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes, and I’m sure most of these books do not.
I should have added that most of these books do not make the effort to avoid reinforcing negative stereotypes. Which is to say that most diet books are indeed bad. OTOH, books like South Beach Diet are geared to people of both sexes — maybe that’s about as radical as the diet industry can get. Most of the older programs, like WW and Jenny Craig, are clearly aimed at women. Notice that the new SlimFast commercials are using more normal looking women, and stress weight maintenance and losing at your own pace. These are subtle changes but one can only hope they are harbingers of a saner future.
Heh. I want to put in for Barbara’s comment above.
I think a diet book should be a thing that teaches people how to use food to feel good and remain healthy, in the short and long term. That hasn’t got very much to do with weight. “Diet” = what you eat — not a “thing you go on to lose weight”. I’m a big fan of the English language and of the original definitions of words, and I believe in keeping actual definitions in mind when using words.
I for one would like to see more books aimed at decontextualizing food and the body from anything but the physical reality of the food and the body. Teach people how to look at their food and smell their food and actually connect with its existence, not its status as a signifier of image in any fashion.
Calling women fat and then stupid. Yeah, that’ll break the cycle.
If calling someone stupid resolves the problem Bush never would have gone to Iraq.
Like most of us, I hardly know where to start. So I’ll just natter on at random.
1. If being overweight is women’s fault because we’re “stupid”, why are (at least!) an equal number of men overweight? Does that mean we’re all stupid, and if so, “stupid” as compared to whom?
2. That a substantial proportion of the American (and look out, Europe, you’re catching up fast) population is overweight (by some standard or other) suggests that there is some society-wide problem at work here. Especially since more people are overweight now than they were a generation ago. (Does this mean we’re getting more stupid?)
3. News flash: your children are going to be embarrassed to be seen with you regardless of who you are or how you look. Because they’re embarrassed to have parents at all, they all think they sprang full-grown from the forehead of Zeus.
4. I guess Jenny Craig is “aimed at” women, but back when I was on Jenny (which really works, by the way, but costs the earth) there were at least as many men there as women.
5. Most of the men who “put down” their wives for being “fat” are more than a little porky themselves. I agree that this is abusive (!) and it might be more productive to show these creeps a mirror than to “cheer for” them.
6. It’s not anti-feminist to eat less. Or more. Or whatever. Any more than it’s anti-masculinist (is that a word?) to do the same. It is anti-feminist to in any way suggest that women’s weight is a problem that men’s weight isn’t. Or that our primary function in this life as women is to look “good” by someone else’s standard. Or that our appearance is so central as all that.
All my comments on this topic, by the way, are conditioned by who I am, to wit, a woman of German heritage. All my relatives of both genders have been overweight by anyone’s standard for as long as we can reckon, and quite a few of them died of it. I fight my genome every single day, and by and large (no pun intended) I’m winning. I fight partly because I don’t wish to die before my time of heart disease as my grandmother did, partly because I want to look better. To myself.
It is just as much my right to eat less than I otherwise would, and to eat healthier food than I would if I let myself (I firmly believe that the most wonderful food in the world is french fries), as it is someone else’s right to eat in some other way or to ignore the whole topic. It is NOT OK, by me at least, to write books which aim to make money (that’s why people write books, usually) by making women (or anyone else) feel terrible about themselves.
Huge generalization. This would be whom? Every man who ever intimates that he doesn’t find his wife’s weight attractive?
Myself, I don’t care for men whose tummies hang over their belts. Just a personal preference. (I don’t much like body-builders either, for different reasons.) As it happens, my husband is an ectomorph, so his tummy just about doesn’t exist. I agree that if he fell into this former category, and if I got mad about something else and pointed this out to him, this would be abusive, but I’m not ready to conclude that I would be thereby completely beyond redemption.
The intro to the cookbook _The Garden of Vegan_ is really amazing. One of the authors talks about how she had an eating disorder and how, after starving herself into ill health for years, she finally began to see food as fuel, became vegan and had a much healthier relationship with food. You could argue, after reading the intro and other non-recipie writing in the book, that it’s a diet book (or at least a how-to guide for vegans, which is a kind of diet, although not normally what one means by that).
If there was going to be a feminist diet book, her perspective would be where to start.
The only thing I see about men that you quoted is, “Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you ‘mate.'” Do you mean that not treating a woman as if you were attracted to her is treating her like shit?
bean, can you link something about your opinion of vegan? I’m curious.
I know several vegans; most of the ones I know don’t look or act like they’re getting enough to eat, or the right things, or something. One guy in particular – OK, he was thin already – but now he looks like a skeleton, and if he were any more laid-back he’d fall over.
But maybe the ones I happen to know aren’t representative?
(Apologies for being off-topic.)
Les: Sarah Kramer & Tanya Barnard are both absolutely amazing. They were hugely inspirational for me in getting my relationship with food back to something approaching healthy. I’d recommend reading what they have to say in GOV and also what Sarah says on her own in La Dolce Vegan to anyone who wants to start getting rid of all the crap we get put in our heads about food. And I don’t mean just vegans: I’m an omni who eats mainly vegan food for health reasons (I’ve got IBS, asthma and PCOS and I can tell that when I eat vegan stuff, I feel A LOT better), and their ideas have helped me think some things through.
Susan: Those don’t sound like any vegans I’ve ever known/had contact with. In fact, the people you know sound as if they’ve decided to go vegan without finding out anything about nutrition* or how to cook properly. If you’re curious you could always check out Sarah’s site at GoVegan.com or Isa Chandra at PostpunkKitchen to find out about what vegans who actually have a passion for food.
*not that I’m saying vegans in particular need to know about nutrition….hell, we could all use some real information so we can make choices that make us healthier–by which I DO NOT mean “thinner”. Meat eaters may not tend to look weedy, but that doesn’t mean a lot of them aren’t making unhealthy choices.
Bean: “Joey Ramone [sigh]”??!?!? I knew I always liked you. Joey is God.
Damn “to find out about what vegans who have a passion for food ARE LIKE.”
Thanks, crys t and bean, I’ll go check it out.
Anyone, vegan or not, who pushes a food trip on anyone else, guilt-trips anyone else about food and/or takes on airs about what they will or will not eat is a pain in the butt. But that behavior is hardly confined to vegans, or to any other group especially.
I’m not into the evangelical pushing of food choices, either. I must have had amazing luck over the years, because I have NEVER come across a vegan or vegetarian who tried to cajole, insult or shame others into giving up meat. Every single last one I’ve ever met has been cool about it: they’d explain their choices if asked, but otherwise didn’t really bring it up.
And yeah, as Bean said, not all vegans are thin by a long shot. BTW, that is one thing that both Barnard & Kramer have brought up in their books: that they are not about weight loss, and also that there are healthy vegan diets (as in “ways of eating”) and unhealthy vegan diets. As someone, somewhere pointed out, eating nothing but potato chips and Coca Cola would be vegan, but no one in their right mind would recommend it as a healthy option.
I’ve also got add here that most vegans I’ve talked to are vegan for ethical reasons, not health ones–though most of them do try to inform themselves about healthy eating.
And Brandon, what Bean said: being treated as a human being who is worthy of being communicated with is NOT the same as being treated as if you were hot stuff.
And I also have another question, in regards to Susan’s remark about preferences: why is it that so often when issues of how shittily society treats fat women come up, someone inevitably brings up “personal preferences”? I don’t want to jump on Susan in particular here, because this has come up many times in conversations I’ve had about this, and I think we really need to think about it. As a couple of posters did here in this thread, many people seem to equate treating women “well” with treating women as “sexy” or “desirable”. Yeah, of course, there are times when I want someone to look at me that way, but that’s not every day, with every person I have contact with. In fact, most of the time, I very definitely do *not* want that type of reaction.
So, why is it that we tend to think of treating women well with treating women as sexually desirable? Or that treating women badly means rejecting them sexually?
Is it just a generalised thing, because we assume that women are dying for sexual approval from every man they meet, or that we assume all fat women are desperate, or what?
Susan, if you or anyone can recommend a vegan cookbook that does not lecture, I’d be grateful. I’m yet to see one that doesn’t start with a polemic and as all I want are good recipes, that makes them a total do-not-bother for me. Vegetarian cookbooks that fit the bill I’ve been able to find, which is great. [I eat everything, but do like finding good food].
Anyway, to return to the topic at hand, I did see that article (bought the paper — alas, much as I want to love The Guardian I find their commentators too annoying to do that often), but only skimmed it. I thought it pretty much in the vein of articles describing with breathless horror the trials of not shaving one’s legs or of donning a fat suit, all served up without critical thought on the parts of their authors or anything in the way of a feminist counter commentary from the paper. I’d have settled for plain common sense.
Maia, your post does make me think that I should do more than roll my eyes, wonder unkindly about whether there’s an IQ ceiling for commentators and lifestyle writers and actually stake an interest in seeing that one of the few papers that ought to be championing actual feminism do so. What though I can personally do, though, now that’s a disheartening thought.
The main problem with veganism is that you can’t make a good souffle or crepe worth a damn. Other than that, it’s a diet choice: you can be a healthy, unhealthy, fat, thin, etc vegan.
Admittedly there are fewer options so it’s harder to “cover” things you need. Any diet which restricts foods requires more attention to detail to make sure you eat what you should to stay healthy; it’s harder to trust to the “it’ll all work out” theory of omnivores. But there’s nothing inherently unhealthy about veganism AFAIK (I recall reading that it’s quite difficult to maintain during some phases of childhood and is better suited to adults, though I may be wrong in that recollection).
If dieting is feminist-compatible, then so is writing diet books. Currently, most of the books in the “diet” genre are unethical and exploitative because they sell bad advice to people who are desperate. (Feminists have done a good job of pointing out the ways in which gender oppression contributes to that sense of desperation and self-loathing.)
If you define a diet as a gimmicky short-term weight loss regimen, then I guess all diet books are ethically questionable. On the other hand, I don’t see anything wrong with writing out a nutritionally sound eating and exercise plan that can help people lose weight while becoming healthier and better nourished. Gabe Mirkin’s low fat/high fiber eating and exercise programs are examples of feminist compatible “diet books.”
Bean:
You’re right—I missed the part about husbands putting their wives down (which, I agree, sucks). I assumed Maia was commenting only on the excerpt that preceded her comment.
Anyway, I read “Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you ‘mate'” not to mean that men literally ignore fat women, but simply that we don’t give them the special attention that we give attractive women—i.e., that we treat them more or less as we treat men. Which is consistent with calling them “mate.”
If the goal of the book is to help people lose weight, the book implies smaller bodies are more desirable than bigger bodies. I cannot fathom how that is compatible with feminism. If you want to provide nutrition advice, provide nutrition advice. Don’t denigrate fat bodies in the process. GOOD nutrition will lead most people to maintain their weight but feel better. Some will gain. Some will lose. But any book where weight change (often loss) is the goal implies that certain body shapes and sizes are better than others and that is antithetical to feminism.
veganism= no B12. kids raised vegan generally get the b12 by playing in the dirt (and eating it) or by eating unwashed/not fully cleaned vegetables and grains, if vegans try to tell you kids can be raised vegan jes fine.
a ‘pure’ vegan diet placed on say an infant would result in brain damage. or would be a problem for an adult who ran out of the supply of b12 they built up pre-veganism. veganism is not a diet with staying power over the long term, whereas a vegetarian can comfortably manage 30, 40, 50, 60 years and infants can thrive on a vegetarian diet with no risk of brain damage. b12 literally does not come from any plant source whatsoever, no matter what a vegan may tell you.
i mention this at length because a lot of vegans violate their own ethical dietary principles in this instance (and myriad others, but that’s a digression) or take ‘analogues’ that don’t have any human-usable b12.
on another tangential note, but related more to the actual post, you all need to read books about fibroids. those pretty much represent what writing there is on women developing a balanced and healthy relationship with food and lifelong healthy diet and exercise practices. there’s some new-agey hippy dippyness in some of them, but they manage to pretty much not even mention men’s opinions of women’s bodies (except if it comes up from a male gyno or naturopath/etc, and that a technical opinion), but rather focus on women listening to their bodies and eating healthy good food for themselves because healthy just FEELS better. and those books also don’t encourage obsessing about weight or trying to crash diet it away (obesity is a high risk factor for fibroids). they promote balance and contentment and a healthy overall lifestyle. if that’s not suitably feminist, then i guess i don’t know what anyone means by that word here.
Lindsay this argument doesn’t follow at all. There are many things that it is feminist compatible to do, but not feminist compatible to advocate.
For the record I think that it’d be really hard to write a feminist book on nutrition, within a western context (obviously the issues are completely different in other cultures). Ideas that connect morality and food and food and control are so hegemonic that I’m not actually convinced it’s possible to write in a way that undermines those ideas.
My issues with veganism as usually practiced are a whole ‘nother issue (and are probably things I need to have out with my vegan friends before I write about them on-line).
Anyway, I read “Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you ‘mate’” not to mean that men literally ignore fat women, but simply that we don’t give them the special attention that we give attractive women—i.e., that we treat them more or less as we treat men.
Now for me, that’s another whole can of worms all in itself. Does that mean “treating [someone] like a woman” is exactly equivalent to “treating them as a sexually desirable person”? I don’t want to pursue it if it would be a derail, but it struck me as very interesting.
Fact is, if a woman (or man) is eating healthily and maintains a decent activity level, they will be healthy — even if they are fat.
Yep! Bean’s got it.
The trouble with disentangling this whole thing seems to be body type and the fact that not everyone is exactly alike. Medical science has a lot of trouble with that principle (see Mismeasure of Woman, by Carol Tavris, for some blatant examples.)
I’m fairly sure that the experience which has happened to me has happened to some other people as well: I figured out how to eat what my body needed, and stopped eating food that made me feel bad, and my metabolism started running at optimum levels, which means I lost some fat, because my metabolism apparently prefers that I keep a little fat on me but not a lot.
I’ve also seen the same experience happen to other people with different body types, and it goes like this: you figure out how to eat what your body needs, and stop eating food that makes you feel bad, and you wind up having more energy, losing an annoying minor health condition or two, aaaannnnnd… staying at the same weight.
Because not everyone is exactly alike, medically and metabolically. Some people’s bodies say, “Store up for the winter!” Some people’s bodies (like mine) say, “Have a little padding and be wimpy” and there’s really quite a wide range.
Yes, I know there are technical terms (ectomorph, endomorph, mesomorph) but I’m veering away from them because it’s plainly obvious to me that there are more than three body types in the world. But the principle holds that good health will almost always be a result of eating well; what weight results from eating well only has to do with what weight your body carries at optimum status.
As regards veganism: I’ve met thin vegans, fat vegans, healthy vegans and anemic vegans (the healthy ones do tend to be the well-educated ones.)
I was raised vegetarian. My mother was vegetarian during her pregnancy; she was told to take iron supplements, and insisted on a blood test first. She found out that her iron level was actually higher than the average omnivore’s, and though “eat meat” is frequently advice for healthy skin and nails, I’ve always had remarkably strong fingernails — people comment on this. This leads me to theorize that perhaps having low doses of certain nutrients, iron among them, might lead to a “stingier” collection process, but I don’t know this for sure.
Oh, to give some context to my comments in this and any nutrition thread: I’m a bit of a nutrition fiend (one partner calls me, “Spirit of chaos and proper nutrition”) ever since certain personal research revealed that a person could go from having chronic mysterious symptoms of B vitamin deficiencies, digestive problems and kidney stones, and the inability to eat anything spicy or acidic, to being in perfect health as long as he avoids dairy products. I resolved that I didn’t want anyone I loved, or even liked, to be that miserable again, even if it means annoying people with the Encyclopedic Ambush (a special class ability! — *has been playing too many video games.*)
Lack of time and inability to cook well in a short amount of time are the real devils of adopting a healthier diet for many people. The problem with being a vegan is that it requires even more attention to recipes and cooking. It can work, and certainly, it can be worth the effort because there are a lot of good vegan cook books out there, but it can be doubly difficult to make the switch from a poor to a healthy vegan diet because of the time and commitment involved to make food you love. Here is a link to the post punk kitchen, which is a vegan cooking show on public tv: http://www.theppk.com/
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bean, b12 simply cannot be obtained in a vegan fashion. any fortified anything by definition is not vegan. and most vegans, because they adopt veganism in their teens or 20s, have a large store of b12 from childhood diets containing animal products (or eating dirt/dirty vegetables, for that matter).
an infant has no such stores and would develop brain damage with a pure vegan diet. there are in fact vegans who suffer b12 deficiencies because they came from extreme dietary backgrounds of one sort or another and didn’t have a good store of b12 when they went over to veganism.
what’s funny about this is that veganism is basically impossible in a pure sense, because b12 doesn’t come from plant sources. but a human can obtain all necessary nutrients, including vitamin c and such, from raw or lightly seared animal flesh. go figure.
the emphasis on restrictive diets that are difficult to maintain without an infrastructure of synthetic alternatives is a curious one i have noted in many feminist and progressive circles. and this ties into a greater feminist issue regarding diet.
the best quality food, from highly organic sources (down to good quality air and water), generally requires on the plant side hand-weeding. guess who does that? it’s not the progressive young college student who gets her vegan-friendly food delivered from the local co-op. it’s a lot of little, brown, mexican or guatemalan women and men and sometimes kids.
if you’re getting your vegan soy substitutes from conagra, and your vegan vegetables from organic growers who use cheap immigrant labor, you’re part of the problem. i think a subtext missing from discussions of diet is the layered cost of actually eating healthfully consistently. it is very expensive to eat high quality food, whether one is vegan, vegetarian, or omnivore. and you STILL have a built-in underclass affording some people dietary privilege in addition to other kinds of privilege.
women are at higher risk for developing a host of uterine ailments if they are more than about 20 pounds overweight. weight loss sometimes IS relevant, and i think to say that nobody should even write diet books is very dangerous for women in general. sometimes a diet is necessary before moving on to establish a long term weight maintenance lifestyle. that’s just a simple fact of life, it’s sometimes needed. not sure how writing books for such people would necessarily be an evil thing.
I think some of this argument is a little bit like the argument over shaving legs or breast implants or similar. Feminists might argue that women shouldn’t have to alter themselves to be more sexy to men. But in reality, many women like to adorn themselves. Partly they like it because attractive people have an easier time in this patriarchal society than ugly people, and that difference is more extreme for women. But I suspect it’s also partly because people in general just naturally prefer to be thought attractive than otherwise, even if the standards for “attractive” are really skewed.
With dieting, it’s more complicated, obviously, food being so central to health and psychology and social interaction and so on. As has been mentioned on this blog before, fat prejudice is at least partially a separate beast from misogyny. There’s also the issue that weight-loss dieting doesn’t actually make most people thinner. (I’m surprised we’ve not had the usual brow-beating from militant fat activists that occurs in most of these types of threads.) But the basic fact remains: when feminists make entirely valid criticisms of the unreasonable beauty standards of our society, they alienate an awful lot of women who basically do want women to have equal rights, but also want to be pretty. I don’t think that’s entirely an unreasonable or anti-feminist desire.
Nick:
I don’t believe I used the phrase “treating [someone] like a woman.” For me, there are two distinct categories of people: women whom I find attractive, and men or women whom I do not. The way I behave towards women in the first category is different from the way I behave towards people in the second category, but the way I treat men in the second category is not much different from the way I treat women in the second category.
I think that our ancestors were what we probably should become: flexitarians — mostly vegetarian with some (probably not daily) meals made out of meat. A friend of my daughters is a vegan, and figured out that one of the things she could eat is a McD McFlurry — it has no dairy in it. That’s the problem with veganism, in a nutshell — it can rely just as much on artificially manufactured ingredients of dubious nutritional and ecological value as any other dietary regime. One of the good things about post punk kitchen, IMHO, is her insistence that a vegan diet starts with vegetables, not cheese made out of soy milk. I am not a vegan, by the way, but I strive to cook as much as I can using vegetables.
bean, the weight gain is specifically linked to the uterine ailments. i am not talking about correlations w/r/t to heart disease or other such whatevers. i am talking very specifically about uterine problems which have been shown to be DIRECTLY affected by weight gain of relatively modest amounts. i’ve seen the bmi guidelines for weight; they are quite generous for people who aren’t athletes. but for women specifically, they need to know that weight gain can affect their uteruses and fertility (though the uterus has major functions for women other than baby-carrying). i want you to go up to women carrying 10 pound myomas TRIGGERED by weight gains of more than 20 or sometimes even 10 pounds and tell them that it’s all ‘correlation not causation’. the link between a balanced weight and uterine health is real.
as for vegan infants, i was presuming the vegan mother would have a reduced store herself and not be able to supply much of anything to the baby, but you raise a fair point. i cannot offhand recall whether all instances of infant brain damage due to restrictive (usually vegan) diets involved breastfeeding mothers.
but hell, a diet that if practiced perfectly would damage your brain just doesn’t seem like something to be advocating. vegetarian diets are quite as healthy as anything vegan and you can always be sure you get every nutrient you need. although the raw meat diet is in some ways more friendly environmentally and w/r/t human labor costs, which is quite interesting in itself.
the uterine health thing is very near to me because i did not realise the state of women’s health in this country was so fucked. or how surprising some of the risk factors are for health problems. it’s just overwhelming and not talked about nearly enough, because nobody even knows what the problems are.
I’ve been lurking on this thread, and would like to put in my tuppence for anyone seeking nutritional books that aren’t about weight loss. Crys t mentioned IBS, and I’ve got IBD, and ‘diet’ books meant for either illness are all about how various foods interact with the body and how to better balance kinds of foods as well as be aware of how your body responds to certain nutrients (as an aside, someone mentioned b12 a couple comments up, which is a particular bitch to get enough of through disagreeable intestines). And because both illnesses often make it difficult to gain and keep weight, nobody’s pushing slimming down. I’d be glad to dig up some titles if anyone’s interested.
(and Dei, you might want to check out some books on raw foods. It obviously won’t help with, um, cooked recipes, but it is at least a less-ideological way to work natural foods into more of your diet)
defenestrated, above: Heh! You must have stumbled across the few least crazy raw foods books. I’ve done raw foods — I like it, it’s fun, it makes me feel good — and yet I am quick to disassociate myself from “those raw foods people”. As far as I can tell, that particular dietary style has got more than the usual number of one-true-wayists.
Please recommend the specific cookbooks. There are a few, I know — Anthony Bourdain recommends one, but the name slips my mind.
omnivorous: given what I know about PCOS, that’s BS. That particular uterine ailment causes weight gain, not the other way around. Want to play study-link-tag?
Oh, I’m not saying that raw foods people can’t be crazy – but if you can get around that – their diet is all about managing to live on unprocessed foods. Even if it’s not really workable in the long run, they have some experience with how to make the most of non-crap food. I was by no means advocating a raw foods diet, just the borrowing of their expertise.
I’m sorry that I’m going to be lazy and put off finding the titles til tomorrow, but I promise I’ll do it then. :)
a.j., look up fibroids. far, far, far more common and weight gain is a major contributor to triggering their growth, along with poor diet. which may be why they get so bad among african-american females specifically, but that is a class/race digression of sorts. they also can come paired or along with a number of other uterine ailments. hell, fibroids even sometimes come paired with PCOS. according to some estimates, 80 percent or more of all women have fibroids. and for af-am women, the LOW estimates start around 50 percent. i can guarantee the numbers aren’t that high for PCOS, not even close.
even the reviled BMI does have like a 20 or 30 pound ‘healthy weight’ range for most heights. there are wide ranges of healthy weights, and things do vary from person to person. but it isn’t always the best thing for them to be 100, 200, 300 pounds overweight. and i think it is possible to accept a range of weights as healthy and normal while still pointing out that yes, sometimes a person can be ‘too heavy’ and help them get to a more balanced weight for their body type and lifestyle.
Late contribution to this thread, but I wanted to defend Zoe Williams’ reputation as a writer. I personally agree that the article reduced the issue of dieting to an unfair distinction between the “good” women who are already liberated enough not to obsess about their weight, and the “bad” ones who still labour under the delusion that losing a few pounds will increase their happiness. As India Knight puts it, it might increase their confidence and their social and sexual power, but it will be a hollow victory because any gains are superficial and could just as easily be taken away.
However, Zoe Williams is generally an excellent writer and having heard her speak at a seminar I know that she is a good thinker and is far from being anti-feminist. In the article she is expressing her personal dismay at what women choose to focus on when they could be genuinely enriching themselves and I think it’s cool that she has a platform at the Guardian to debate feminist arguments.
Quite a lot of the “trivial” articles and opinion pieces coming out of the Guardian website are probably from Comment is Free which is a less formal group blog.
omnivorous,
cites?
Also, even if you can provide cites, you are conflating weight gain with weight. Being overweight is not the same as gaining weight, and unless you have cites showing that weight loss of steady weight cures fibroids, arguing that weight gain causes fibroids (again, cite?) means that weight loss cures them or prevents them is a non-sequitor. Both rapid weight gain and rapid weight loss can cause health problems, although the extent to which that is true is hard to disentangle from the fact that lots of health problems cause weight gain or weight loss.
Barbara:
It isn’t true now, and I doubt it ever was, that a McFlurry contains no dairy products. The primary ingredients are milk, sugar, and cream.
OK, here goes – and bear in mind that I’m recommending these in much the same spirit as the raw foods books, in that I’m not suggesting that anyone should adhere to the diets they describe (unless you yourself have IBD or IBS, in which case I can direct you to a whole bunch more stuff, particularly if it’s the former). But they do present a different way of looking at food than we’re used to, and have some quite detailed nutritional info. All of that said:
More geared towards nutrition info:
Breaking the Vicious Cycle, by Elaine Gottschall
Eating Right for a Bad Gut by James Scala
Eating for IBS by Heather Van Vorous
What to Eat with IBD by Tracie M Dalessandro
More specifically cookbooks:
How to Cook for Crohn’s and Colitis by Brenda Roscher
The Creative Colitis Cookbook by Denise and Ross Weale – is all non-dairy (and low-fiber) recipes
OK, the IBS one just came up while I was looking for the links, but I didn’t want to be entirely IBD-centric.
Omnivorous,
“Too heavy” – what is this? What chart or measure can tell me this? If I’m active and eating well, what do you want me to do? Cut off a leg? That would certainly make me weigh less, perhaps even in the “range of weights” you’ve claimed you can identify for me that would be healthy. Lipo would too, but it’s been shown to do squat for health. Given just how little weight can predict in relation to lifestyle, I think it is ridiculous – and a sign of extreme ignorance and prejudice – that we continue to return to discussing it as a health issue. Even with PCOS. Weight loss has been shown to have many consequences for fertility as well (not to mention heart health and mental health – yikes!), so just showing that there is a relationship between weight – high or gained – and fertility problems doesn’t show that weight loss or “management” should be recommended. As mentioned before, these studies often don’t account for the fact that weight gain is the first symptom of problems for many women (often a symptom that shows up before diagnosis and then is, in retrospect, labeled a “cause” or “risk factor.”) Talk of risk factors is always problematic. Hell, being a woman is a risk factor for uterine problems. Maybe we should address that! ;)
For the record, I have PCOS, and instead of listening to the idiotic fat-hating doctor, I went and did my own review of the literature and consistently found that the well-controlled studies suggested moderately increased activity along with carbohydrate and insulin monitoring WITHOUT weight loss produced the best health outcomes.
defenestrated: I’m not actually saying that there’s anything wrong with eating raw (on the contrary, it works great!) I’m actually just saying that, for dietary reference material that is not full of fruit-loopy statements like “Cooked food is POISON”, you have to look around carefully.
I’m pretty sure that the reason so many people are so emphatically, sciencelessly loud about eating raw foods is because it works well as a healing modality.
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It is not anti-feminist to go on a diet at all, feminism is part the modern day obsession with dieting, because of its tacit encouragement of female androgyny. It is anti-feminist to be fat it seems.