This is a collection of health news and related links for plus-size women. Please bear in mind that many, even most of such studies are the following
1)Funded by corporations that make a great deal of money from the diet industry. 2)Inconclusive. 3)Find correlation, yes, but not causation. A triangle may be prone to cancer, but a square also being a geometric shape does NOT mean it is also prone to cancer. 4)Exaggerated and panic-inducing. The “obesity epidemic” exists in part because people never previously considered “obese” have been re-classified under an arbitrary definition of “fat.”
For more insight and understanding into this, please read Junkfood Science from the beginning.
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Scales (Photo credit: Jarod Carruthers)
- Too much time in front of ANY screen leads to physical un-fitness.
“Spending too much time in front of computers and other electronic screens may cause American children’s heart and lung fitness levels, or “cardiorespiratory” fitness, to decline, a new study suggests.”
Yes, being inactive and choosing sedentary activities, on the computer or in front of a TV, does mean you get out of shape. This does NOT mean that spending time at the computer makes you fat. Spending TOO MUCH time at the computer does. It’s a matter of confronting and managing the neurological impulse that gets you to keep clicking, staring, and flicking long after you got your real useful material.
- In one I’m not really sure what to do with: preteen and teen African-American girls don’t benefit as much from exercise as their white counterparts.
“One possibility is that along with other lifestyle changes, black girls need to get a lot more exercise than white girls to start making a difference in their obesity risk.”
Research into the health of different racial groups requires just as much “correlations is not causation” chanting as does research into obesity for everyone. I’ve only in the past ten years come to the realization that I got a genetic code handed to me that demands way, WAY more exercise than what might be expected of the WASP-y white girl “norm.” Trying to honor that need around social factors – like butt-in-chair desk jobs – and physical factors, like a limiting and severe allergic condition – has made the last several years an inching progress towards what my body needs, versus what I was programmed to think it “only needed” based on a formula of everybody else’s body (which is not my body, which is not your body.) I can only assume that you would have to look at the entire life context for each and every girl in the study to get even a shard of the truth. Was the household stressful? Did she have places to go outside and play safely? What was the standard diet in her home? Did she have any control over her food choices? All of this stuff matters, too.
- A German preliminary study suggests that bloodletting – blood donation – can improve diabetes and high blood pressure.
“Blood donation may prevent not just diabetes but also cardiovascular disease for the obese,” study leader Professor Andreas Michalsen from the Charité-University Medical Centre, in Berlin, said in a journal news release.
But another expert isn’t convinced the findings support a bloodletting Renaissance. It’s true that excessive iron can worsen high blood pressure and diabetes, so it’s a good idea for anyone with those conditions to make sure they’re not unnecessarily boosting their levels by taking an iron supplement or multivitamin containing iron, said Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a preventive cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.”
If you have a BMI greater than 60, you are at risk for lymphedema, a painful leg condition. Obesity for doctors that still use BMI starts at 30 – so 60 is on the more extreme end. While I think a good chunk of health research into obesity is just scare journalism and scapegoating, there are aspects of having a larger body that really does negatively impact your health – this is one of them, and it’s worse (for the most part) than chafing and skin infections that can happen for those that do not know how to care for a fat body.
- Older adults with a BMI over 30 (going to use this instead of “obese” although BMI is mostly baloney) suffer from more poorly controlled asthma.
- A larger waist is correlated with increased risk of diabetes – but the study does not say how much, and it does not state how many people were studies. It also concludes with “this study did not show a cause-and-effect relationship.”
- Limiting people’s food choices does not help them lose weight. Nope. For those with disordered eating, it’s much more about why they eat, not WHAT they eat. Get to the why and the what becomes more flexible.
- For those on Atkins-style diets, your kidneys are more or less safe.
- Even women who become NOT obese face fat stigma.
“The participants also showed greater bias against obese people after they had read about women who had lost weight, compared to after reading about weight-stable women — regardless of whether the weight-stable women were thin or obese.”
“The researchers said they were particularly troubled by the finding that participants’ negative attitudes towards obese people increased when they were falsely told that body weight is easily controlled.”
I have had the experience. In high school I lost 60 pounds, but to my peers, I was the fat girl, and that was not going to change no matter how not-fat I was. Clearly the disease of the obese is not just – or maybe not even – in the fat people themselves.
