Fat Is a Feminine Issue: Why Women Are Getting Fatter. Why It Matters and What to Do About It..

By Helen Verlander

Why are women fatter than ever before and what can we do about it?

Today women are fatter than at any other time in history and there are 200 million more obese women than men. Yet some women are embracing obesity as a means of livelihood and validation while others are apologists for obesity, arguing that ‘big is beautiful.’

In this passionate polemic which draws on the latest science, Helen Verlander argues that feminism has lost its way in asserting that our main concern about obesity should revolve around self-esteem. Why is it important to get a good night’s sleep for the sake of your weight? Why is a glass of orange juice making you fat and ageing you seven times faster? How does the food industry make you addicted to food? How just ten minutes of exercise a day can make a big difference. Filled with practical advice and encouragement, Fat is a Feminine Issue, is a wake-up call for women everywhere who are overweight or obese.
www.Fatisafeminineissue.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Feb 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483455501

Book preview

FAT

Is A Feminine Issue

WHY WOMEN ARE GETTING FATTER.

WHY IT MATTERS AND

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

Helen Verlander

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Copyright © 2017 Helen Verlander.

Kactro Books 2016 www.kactrobooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for physical fitness and good health. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5549-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5550-1 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Book Categories:

Women

Health

Obesity

Overweight

Weight loss

Diet

Exercise

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 03/17/2017

CONTENTS

Prologue Fatlash

Part 1 Risky habits

Introduction Big is not beautiful

Chapter 1 Addicted to eating

Chapter 2 Sleepless somewhere

Chapter 3 Your chair is killing you

Chapter 4 Sugar and spice and all things vice

Chapter 5 Love and loss

Part 2 Fit and fabulous

Chapter 6 Think thinner

Chapter 7 Diet is not a dirty word

Chapter 8 Move it and lose it

Chapter 9 Eat drink sleep - the new rules

Chapter 10 Fat spats

Epilogue Slim chance

Acknowledgements

End Notes

DEDICATION

For my funny and brilliant father, Robert, and my gentle and beautiful mother, Wilma, who always liked to say ‘good things come in small packages.’ With love and thanks.

PROLOGUE

Fatlash

It is okay to be fat. It is okay to be skinny. Whatever you want is okay.

Sheryl Hoover to daughter,

Olive, in Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

2004 WAS A turning point for the women of the world though not in a good way. For the first time, there were more women in the world who were obese than underweight. It took men another seven years to achieve the same sorry result. As women, we worry about becoming fat. We worry about being fat. We disparage others for being fat. We hate ourselves for being fat. We think about how not to be fat. We even try quite hard sometimes not to be fat. Losing weight rates in the top three things women want most in the world. Really, for women this is the only club we will ever all belong to, the fat consciousness club.

There are a lot of ‘mean girl’ statements about being fat, except they are written by men and they apply to everyone. For example, Henri IV of France said, Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great. Then there was Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who said edgily, Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.

There is some schizophrenia on this subject, for there is also praise of fatness by association with jollity and distrust of thin people as potential plotters - due presumably to all that excess energy, undissipated in any Roman gym. So Julius Caesar said in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare (later portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow), let me have about me men who are fat.

Fat was also a sign of plenty, and a fat woman a good advertisement for her man bringing home the bacon for lots of good pig-outs. Women who looked like Tellytubbies represented fecundity whether pregnant or not. They made everyone forget about lean times when harvests were bad and the World Trade Organization was not even a pipe dream. Typical of these was the so-called Venus of Willendorf who was wider than she was tall, an early icon of female obesity in women from Paleolithic times.

In a sort of back to the future of fat, we are now apparently in an age where, at least on MTV, women’s butts have become ‘booty’ and could serve double duty as pantry shelves. Gone are the days when the pert, tiny rears of Kylie Minogue in satin hot pants and Felicity Kendall in similar in a Tom Stoppard play could excite general acclaim in ‘the most attractive bottom in Britain’ contests which, inexplicably never included those of any men.

We are now in the midst of a fatlash. Despite or because of epidemic obesity across the world, there is a new zeitgeist which is expressed in the diner scene from the Academy Award winning film of 2006, Little Miss Sunshine, written by Michael Arndt. Plain, chubby pre-teen, Olive Hoover, played by Abigail Breslin, wants to be a beauty pageant queen, notwithstanding she is no match for her hypersexualized, over made-up competitors. Her father, an aspiring self-help motivational expert, tells her that eating ice-cream will make her fat and suggests that Miss Americas don’t eat ice-cream. Mother, Sheryl, tells her that it is okay to be fat and okay to be skinny. Whatever you want is okay.

So, choosing to eat ‘ice-cream à la mode’ (pronounced à la modee by the waitress) in a diner somewhere en route from Albuquerque to California is seen as a perfectly valid choice between equals – fatness and slimness. Father, Richard Hoover, is further undercut by Miss California telling Olive at the pageant that her favourite ice-cream, technically frozen yogurt, is chocolate cherry Garcia. In this new version of diversity and inclusiveness, we are all different shapes and that is fine. Indeed, not just fine but how it should be. Fatness is a new form of diversity which we criticize at our peril.

Being fat, I shall argue in Fat is a Feminine Issue is not like being tall or short, curvy or angular, blonde or brunette, black or white. That we are, on average, nearly two stone or 26 lb (11.7 kg) heavier than we were back in 1960 has everything to do with what we eat and drink, and how much exercise we do.

This book does not mention the word ‘patriarchy’ a single time (this one aside). It also takes as a given that women are more concerned about appearance than men and that this is a cultural bind of sorts. If you don’t think how women are required to present themselves is a feminist issue, try watching music videos without sound. It concentrates the mind. With some honorable exceptions, popular female singers look like hookers, moonlighting as pole dancers. The men hardly change from era to era. For the men, the focus is always the music. There were some exceptions but these are few and far between. Tom Jones in a shirt open to the waist or Freddie Mercury in female drag is as steamy as it gets. The moves of Mick Jagger, even in his prime, never made him look like a reject from American Gigolo.

The six inch stilettoes are stacked against us on this one. For women know that to get ahead, it takes the new age foot binding, known and loved as Manolo Blahniks, and many a lesser knock-off. In love and work, we know the importance of being slim. So how we look will always be a feminist issue too, just not in this book where our focus is female health. The 1978 feminist classic by Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue, argued that women get fat because of gender inequality and that being fat was a form of rebellion for women against powerlessness.

The fatlash of left-wing ‘progressives’ has transposed this into a demand for the right not just to be fat but to demand that the rest of us applaud their fatness as if it is an achievement. When Facebook refused permission for a women’s group to upload a photograph of a size 22 female model in a bikini to advertise a fat-positive event - on the grounds of fitness and health - the group was outraged and forced a retraction from the social media behemoth. The proponents of fat state the choice as one between heaving up one’s dinner in the toilet or living on mineral water. They see fat or adiposity as less a condition than a natural and positive expression of self.

For this lot, there is no middle way. Yet you can be a normal weight without being in danger of disappearing behind a street light. There is a bizarre disconnect when, in the midst of an obesity crisis which carries with it not just the personal health toll of increased risk of heart disease, stroke, ten types of cancer, Type 2 diabetes and various other unpleasant physical conditions but also a huge economic and environmental cost, obesity is presented as something to be celebrated. As the overweight and obese now outnumber normal weight people, especially in rich English speaking countries, can we really be surprised? In this case, the road to hell will be strewn with discarded fast food wrappers and Coke bottles. And to hell with good intentions for they have been replaced by self-regarding narcissism of the worst kind.

Being not just overweight but obese or even morbidly obese, is not an expression of self-love but self-neglect. And there are many reasons for becoming fat as we shall see. Some are overweight or obese as a result of prescribed drugs or a medical condition like an untreated thyroid problem. For most of us, it is a choice that we make even when we don’t know we are making it. In Fat is a Feminine Issue, I argue that we, as women, have unconsciously adopted risky habits that are quietly compromising our health and our happiness as we dig our way to an early grave with a knife and fork.

Being fat has become not so much a way of rebelling against powerlessness, as of actively seeking powerlessness, albeit dressed up as ‘self expression’ by the pro-fat activists. This is most evident in the ‘big beautiful women’ (BBW) websites that encourage women to eat themselves into paralysed immobility for the pleasure of paying male gawpers, enabled by normal sized male partners who end up having to be their carers. The thing about fat is that we can do something about it. We are powerless only if we accept it. Fat is not destiny.

From time to time in Fat is a Feminine Issue, I draw on the experiences of fictional female characters, mostly from television sitcoms, popular film and upmarket chick-lit. This is not because I am delusional and don’t know they are not real. In doing this, I want to make a point and lighten what could be a heavy subject, pun intended.

In Part 1, I cover the risky habits that make us overweight and frankly, fat – emotional eating, not exercising, consuming the wrong food and drink and its dire effects on our bodies, as well as not getting enough sleep. In Part 2, I look at how to change fat thinking, ditch bad diets for good ones, make better food and drink choices, prioritize exercise, sleep more and generally become fitter and more fabulous.

My approach has been that of the investigative journalist, drawing on the latest scientific research to arrive at a picture of the shape of women in our time. In this, I have been influenced by new and neglected research brought together in some wonderful recent analytical studies on diet, obesity, nutrition and the food industry. These have shown the deficiencies in much dated nutrition advice still being doled out, demonizing saturated fats.

Just as the lead male character, played by Cary Grant in the film, North by Northwest, asked his secretary to write him a note to ‘think thin,’ this book is a longish memo to myself and informed by my own experience. It’s a new slant on preaching to the converted, myself.

Having spent most of my adult life being a few pounds overweight – okay, maybe multiplied by three - and unable to wear most of the really quite nice clothes in my wardrobe, including some from Paris, it took the research that went into this book to finally lose weight, if not effortlessly, certainly without hardship or hunger pangs. As a journey should involve a boarding pass or a full tank of gas, I won’t invite you on a journey. In any case, I think it is better to arrive than to be always travelling hopefully.

It could be argued that obesity represents a greater risk to men rather than to women because of where men’s fat gets deposited – their middle – and their lack of estrogen which is a protective factor for women before menopause. However, the rate of obesity is higher for women, sometimes obscenely so, across the world as we shall see in the introduction ‘Big is not beautiful’. Men can tell their own story about overweight and obesity.

My aim in writing Fat is a Feminine Issue is to debunk the myths or part truths around being obese. Here are some;

• you can be fit and fat

• eating fat makes you fat

• putting on weight is part of ageing

• ‘diet’ is a dirty word

• educating about obesity is fat shaming

• genes make us fat

• you can’t get fat if you only eat healthy food.

How these statements mislead is a thread that runs through this book, drawing on the experience of women throughout the world.

Espousing fat as a form of liberation is truly hypocritical and phoney. Be fat if you must but don’t expect plaudits because society will have to pick up the bill in everything from your lost work days to the supersized equipment you will need and the level of medical services you will require. Being obese is not just another strand of diversity. It is a rocky road to chronic illness and a premature check-out.

I hope this book will shock you out of your complacency by arguing that being fat is a serious health issue which has implications for generations to come. It is my devout wish that after all this effort on my part, you will emerge from Fat is a Feminine Issue like Bridget Jones from a chemical wasteland of fatty snacks and too many units of alcohol, refreshed and confident that you too can rise, phoenix-like from the ashes to look like Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Aniston, Julianne Moore or better still, a new improved version of yourself. For as Dorothy Parker said, Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

Helen Verlander

27 August 2016

Part 1

Risky habits

INTRODUCTION

Big is not beautiful

9 st. 4 (terrifying slide into obesity – why? why?) alcohol units 6 (excellent) cigarettes 23 (vg) calories 2472

Helen Fielding Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996)

IT’S ANOTHER DAY in the ‘happiest kingdom of them all’, Anaheim’s Disneyland, and the rides at Small World are banked up as oversized passengers are decanted at emergency platforms to get the show back on the road or rather water again.

In 2007, it was reported that the Small World ride was being closed for modifications. The fiber glass boats were hitting the bottom of the flume and getting stuck because the ride had been designed in 1964 when men were on average 175 lb (79 kg) and women were around 135 lb (61 kg). Now they have to accommodate men and women over 200 lb (90 kg). Other Disney rides such as Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of the Caribbean are also regularly stalled or slowed by ‘passengers of size’ as some airlines term them. It turns out to be a fat world after all.

F is for fat

There is a new ‘f’ word, and it stands for fat, very fat. More of us are fatter than at any other time in human history. We are also fatter younger. The World Health Organization (WHO) has asserted with splendid understatement that overweight and obesity are abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health.

In 1975, 105 million people in the world were obese; by 2014 the ranks of the obese had swelled to 641 million. If we include those who are overweight, more than 1.9 billion adults worldwide were overweight or obese by 2014. In 2013, 42 million children under five years were overweight or obese and the rate of increase was highest in developing countries. Since the West began introducing the most easily transportable commodities such as flour, sugar, molasses and biscuits wherever their great masted ships could reach, obesity has followed Western lifestyles.

These figures reflect the speed at which our waistlines have expanded in the last 40 years, and particularly in the last 25 years. It is like an incoming tsunami of fat that threatens to engulf our health systems, strain food supplies and tax economic resources. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2000, no US state had an obesity prevalence of 30 per cent or more of the population. Ten years later, 12 states had obesity rates of 30 per cent or more, with the lowest Colorado (21 per cent) and the highest Mississippi (34 per cent). In 2012, Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a study that estimated that more than half of Americans would be obese by 2030 on present trends.

Some European countries are not far behind. An OECD study in 2012 found that after Hungary, Britain is the fattest nation in Europe with over a quarter of the population classed as obese. Over half of all Europeans are either obese or overweight. In Australia, forget the well-toned, bronzed Bondi beach lifesaver whose six pack abs have graced the outside of London’s Tube trains in search of the tourist dollar. About two thirds of Australian adults are overweight or obese and the obese have grown from ten per cent of the population in 1980 to 25 per cent now. Only 35 per cent of adult Australians are now a healthy weight.

The fatometer

The main fatometer is the BMI or body mass index which is the most widely used guide for calculating overweight and obesity, and is gauged by a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of his or her height in meters. It can also be calculated in pounds divided by height in inches squared and multiplied by 703. Normal BMI is 18.5 to less than 25; overweight is 25 to less than 30. Mild obesity starts at 30 plus and morbid or severe obesity kicks in at 40 plus. The formula takes into account the greater body fat percentage in women compared with men, a difference of around ten per cent.

In 1960, the average American woman weighed 140.2 lb (63 kg) and stood 63.1 inches (160.2 cm) in stockinged feet, making for a BMI of 24.9 (normal weight). Now the average American woman is 166.2 lb (75 kg) and stands only slightly taller at 63.8 inches (162 cm), making for a BMI of 28.7, just shy of obese.

If you know your weight and height, you can calculate your own BMI online. Bridget Jones was at 9 stone 4 lb (134 lb or 59 kg) and, relative to her height, not even overweight. Her creator, Helen Fielding, doesn’t mention Bridget’s height but if we extrapolate actress Renée Zellweger’s height of five feet four inches (1.63 m), her BMI in the character of Bridget Jones for which she had to fatten herself up in preparation, would have been 22.3, well within the normal range for her height.

BMI is not a perfect measure because it doesn’t take into account muscle, so can overestimate adipose tissue or fat in some groups like Bondi life-savers and underestimate it in others like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan who have been described as ‘skinny fat.’ The latter is a condition that describes having a disproportionate amount of fat to muscle despite being underweight. Despite these limitations, WHO claims BMI is the most useful population-level measure of overweight and obesity as it is the same for both sexes and all ages of adults. The caveat is that it may not correspond to the same degree of fatness in different individuals. This is why BMI has been adjusted downwards for smaller Asian frames.

Those southern belles like Scarlett O’Hara were onto something in emphasizing their slender waists. Waist circumference is also used to determine cardiovascular risk. A raised waist circumference is over 40 inches (102 cm) for men and over 34.5 inches (88 cm) for women. In 2011, British women were much more likely to have a raised waist circumference than British men - 47 per cent compared with 34 per cent. Using both BMI and waist circumference, 26 per cent of British women were at high cardiovascular risk compared with 21 per cent of men in 2011. The number of obese women in Britain rose from 16.4 per cent in 1993 to 25.9 per cent while the number of obese men rose from 13.2 per cent to 23.6 per cent in the same period. Having a normal BMI is no longer normal in Britain, Australia or the US and many other countries.

Sex and the geography of fat

Losing weight is rated as one of the top three goals of women in life, along with men and career. Being too heavy is the major source of women’s self-esteem issues. Yet, losing weight remains a forlorn hope, more honored in the breach, because women are even fatter than men. According to WHO, to be identified as ‘obese’ a woman must have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or more or body fat greater than 33 per cent and a waist measurement of greater than 31.5 inches (80 cm). Of the 641 million obese adults worldwide, the majority are women. In 2014, 375 million women were obese compared with 266 million men. Back in 1975, there were 71 million obese women compared with 34 million obese men.

These figures come out of a review of global trends in adult body weight, released in April 2016, published in The Lancet and covering 19.2 million people from 186 countries. Only using studies where weight and height were measured rather than self-reported, the study for the first time also included the proportion of people who were underweight and not just obese but morbidly or severely obese.

There is a sort of geography of fat or adiposity to use the clinical term. A fifth of the world’s obese live in just six English-speaking countries - Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. But the dubious honor of world obesity champion remains with Polynesia where over 50 per cent of women are now obese and 38 per cent of men. (The most underweight women are to be found in Timor-Leste). And in the fattest place on earth, American Samoa, 74 per cent of the population is obese.

The stand-out revelation from this meta-analysis of global studies of obesity was that the rates of obesity for women surpassed those for underweight women globally in 2004 and ditto for men in 2011. This was truly startling news - for the first time in history there are more obese people than underweight people in the world. Between 1975 and 2014, the proportion of obese men tripled from 3.2 per cent to 10.8 per cent globally, however still behind the proportion of obese women which more than doubled in the same period from 6.4 per cent to 14.9 per cent.

The geographical distribution of female obesity is considerably wider too. In 2014, more men were obese than underweight in 136 out of 200 countries; for women, obesity surpassed underweight in no less than 165 countries. The same point holds good for severe obesity. In 2014, more men were severely obese than underweight in 113 countries, but more women were severely obese than underweight in 135 countries.

The senior author of the study, Professor Majid Ezzati from the School of Public Health at Imperial College, London, singled out women for concern, saying, "If present trends continue, not only will the world not meet the obesity target of halting obesity at its 2010 level by 2025, but more women will be severely obese than underweight by 2025." [my emphasis] The study revealed that 58 million men and 126 million women were already severely obese in 2014. Over a quarter of the severely obese, around 50 million, live in the same six English-speaking countries, followed by the Middle East and North Africa which have around 26 million severely obese people or 14 per cent of severely obese people worldwide. For those who are severely obese, the order of magnitude has increased too. In just over 20 years between 1976 and 2000, the weight of the average severely obese American woman increased 43 lb (19.5 kg) from 258 lb (117 kg) to 305 lb (138.3 kg), a rise of 18.2 per cent.

The rate of change in obesity has been remarkable over the last forty years. Where there were only 10.5 million American women and 7.7 million American men who were obese in 1975, now the numbers of the American obese are nearly four times as great as the entire populations of middle level countries like Australia. There are now 46.1 million obese women and 41.7 million obese men in the US. The obese in the UK numbered a mere 2.1 million women and 1.7 million men in 1975; now there are 7.7 million obese women and 6.8 million obese men in the UK.

Back in 1975, the contest for obesity champions mirrored the Cold War as the nuclear super powers, the Soviet Union and the US, topped the obesity charts - although the US finished a long way ahead. Excess leaves clues. In a sign of China’s pre-eminence as a global industrial player, there are now, in sheer numbers, more obese Chinese than obese Americans. All those factories churning out cheap clothes or electronic widgets have put more food on the table for more people. It also means cars, television sets and labor-saving devices. Where once you might have labored all day in the field and done back-breaking work washing clothes in the river, now you need a treadmill at home to get some exercise and Spanx to smoothe out your bulges.

Change across the world has been so dramatic that even in the developing world, underweight coexists with the expanding girths of the newly prosperous. Even in countries where undernutrition is still a problem such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Nepal and Vietnam, the number of overweight and obese women has risen to 38.5 per cent. While obesity rates in West Africa are still relatively low at around ten per cent, there are three times more obese women than men and obesity rates have doubled in the last 15 years. Obesity loves urbanization.

In the West, the difference between male and female obesity is not so stark. The equality of the sexes, which has been perhaps the greatest achievement of the Western democracies in the last hundred years, is reflected in the distribution of fatness. It is a different story in other parts of the world. In the developing world, women are overwhelmingly more obese than men. Particularly in the newly rich Gulf countries of the Middle East, the male-female divide is pronounced. In Saudi Arabia, 28 per cent of men and 44 per cent of women are obese. In Kuwait, 36 per cent of men and 48 per cent of women are obese. In Iran, nearly 40 per cent of women are obese compared with only 14 per cent of men. In Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where many families can afford cooks and maids, and traditional foods like dates, vegetables and wheat have been supplanted by high fat sugary processed foods, being obese is increasingly considered normal.

In these countries, it isn’t just that fast food follows fast money. The issue is also a cultural one about accepting hospitality. It is not the ‘done thing’ to refuse food offered by your host. Then there is the tricky issue of the place of women which is still in the home. Fat babies and fat women are seen as a sign of prosperity. Fat is therefore intrinsic to the idea of female beauty in the region which is reflected in the cultural practice of ‘leblouh’ or fattening. In Sahrawj ethnic groups in the Western Sahara, for example, girls overeat for forty days before marriage in order to make themselves more attractive for their future husbands. They do the same thing if they want to beef up further after marriage to fill out the traditional clothing. Being stuck in the home in a traditional role, having servants but no freedom of movement due to male ideas about what is proper for females, the importation of Western processed and fast foods, this is the backstory of female obesity in the Middle East and North Africa.

A feminine issue

In Western democracies, as we’ve seen, women dominate the outer limits of the fatosphere. While all of us have been getting fatter, some are getting fatter faster. Some of these triggers for overweight or obesity which are so obvious in traditional, sex segregated societies, also play out in our advanced industrial societies. Not only is inequality between the sexes a factor in obesity as it is in places like the Middle East, social disadvantage also predisposes people - and none more so than women - to become overweight or obese. If you’re a rich A-lister, there is pressure on you to be thin enough to