Facts Change Minds? Not So Fast

posted by meowser
Via Firedoglake, I stumbled on a veeeery iiiinteresting study conducted at the University of Michigan that tested the hypothesis that people change their beliefs when they discover facts that contradict said beliefs. Turns out that in most cases, they don’t, and in fact, finding out the facts may actually make people cling to their mistaken beliefs more strongly. The Boston Globe puts it thusly:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false.

Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the study, gave study participants of different political stripes mock news stories to read containing provably false statements about WMDs being found in Iraq, tax cuts increasing government revenues, and the Bush administration having a total ban on stem cell research. Then Nyhan et al issued errata (corrections) to each story, stating the truth was the opposite of what the original stories had stated. The Globe again:

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

I don’t know about you, but this story knocked me on my bouncy keister. I don’t know why it should have been so surprising that “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts” should be such a pervasive mindset, but it has, to say the least, strong implications for fat acceptance/body liberation. I know I’ve thought, over and over again, that if diet and pharmaceutical and big-food industry propaganda didn’t rule most of the widely disseminated media, and we had a chance to get our message out, people would just see that discrimination against us was wrong. Well, maybe not. Maybe they’re just selling people what they want to buy.

But people have changed their minds about things over time. Maybe not everyone, or anything close to everyone, and maybe not deeply enough to overcome ingrained prejudice…but enough so that the average person’s intellectual stance on the issue in question (and hence, their vote with ballot or pocketbook) is different and continues to evolve. They’ve changed their minds about same-sex marriage, about wars, about women’s rights, about abolishing Jim Crow laws, about bunches of things, haven’t they? So what makes them change their minds, if not an improved set of data?

Maybe it’s images. In Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller’s compulsively readable triple biography of singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Carole King, Weller describes King’s second-husband-to-be, Charlie Larkey, as having been pictured on the cover of Esquire in 1967 as the embodiment of the “anti-draft movement” when he was a stunningly beautiful young adult:

Charlie’s long hair spilled out under a soldier’s helmet and grazed the shoulders of his peacoat, and his blue eyes gleamed in his sensual face, under the cover line: “You think war is hell? You should see what’s happening on campus.” Young women were supposed to pass newsstands, look at Charlie, and think, I don’t want this cute guy killed in Vietnam! Many of them did just that.

You’d hate to think that opposition to Vietnam invasion would be based solely on that, as if war would be just fine if only ugly people got killed. But isn’t it perception of physical beauty and affection that makes Westerners (including me) averse to eating dogs, cats, deer, and rabbits, as opposed to cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys? It isn’t well-reasoned arguments about nutrition or ecology, that’s for sure. So yes, I can bloody well buy that Charlie Larkey’s Hollywood-pretty mug engendered about a zillion more anti-war protests than the Pentagon Papers. Who will be our movement’s Charlie Larkey?

Or maybe it’s just that there are two kinds of people in the world. No, not people who divide everyone into two separate groups and people who don’t (snerk). I mean, people who are capable of understanding that they have been operating with bad or incomplete data, and people who aren’t. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former, I’m afraid. So why even bother correcting the many factual errors that are floating around about fat people?

Well, maybe because people’s worldviews can change drastically with a drastic change in their personal situations, and when that window does open, a better set of data can tip the balance. In my case, it took a gain of some serious poundage on medication before I was receptive to the information that weight wasn’t All About Teh Calories and that becoming less lazy and more disciplined wasn’t really the answer to my problems.

On the other hand, if my beliefs were really set in stone about weight, I might have considered myself “the exception that proves the rule”; maybe *I* gained my weight on meds, but the rest of those fatties were just lazy gluttons who needed to put down the Ben & Jerry’s. I didn’t go there. So there must be something innate about me that doesn’t just automatically assume I’m right about everything. I used to wonder if this was a function of low self-esteem, and that if I thought more of myself, I’d feel right about everything too. But is having to be right all the time really about too much self-esteem, or is it more a matter of too little?

I ask. I do not know.

Blogaversary and News — Me at Basket of Kisses

posted by meowser
I’ve never done a “blogaversary” post here, but since I’m at the 3-year mark exactly today of posting here AND I have some news (not n00z, mind you!), I thought I’d toss some confetti in the air today. Whee!

FatFu, who founded the blog who bears her name, invited me to blog here 3 years ago, and it’s been an amazing growth experience. And like I said earlier, I’ll probably still post here from time to time and this blog will remain on the feed (and eventually, maybe Fu herself will post too).

But today I was offered, and accepted, the opportunity to blog at Roberta and Deborah Lipp’s fabulous Mad Men site, Basket of Kisses! (Yes, they’re back up; they had a server crash a few months ago and are in the process of restoring as much as they can.) We’re gearing up for the Season 4 premiere, which is June 25 (on AMC, Sundays at 10 PM Eastern and Pacific, 9 PM Central, 11 PM Mountain, in case you’ve never been a viewer before).

Deb and Roberta are truly righteous individuals who were Shapely Prose regulars before starting BoK (and still pop in from time to time), and they’ve created one of the few blogs around where MM is discussed from a feminist perspective. (They do partial feeds only, though, so keep that in mind if you’re adding it to a reader. I’m one of those dorks who reads everything by bookmarks, so I don’t care.)

They can get reeeaallly busy over there, especially when new episodes are airing. So it remains to be seen how this will eat into my fattyblogging time. But I do hope you’ll join me there, whether you’re a Maddict or just browsing.

When Politicians Talk About Fat Kids, Check Your Wallet

posted by meowser

Pattie Thomas, in a must-read post at the new People of Size blog (which is shaping up to be a great source for both FA and HAES info), really gets the nail driven in on a single whack when discussing Michelle Obama’s childhood-obesity initiative. Specifically, she wants to know why critics are softening their blows with “she means well, but…” rhetoric, when a little bit of digging proves this to be no more than a corporate money grab disguised as a save-the-children-for-public-health program, the likes of which people like the Obamas (and really, all nationally recognized U.S. politicians, who know which side their spelt toast is buttered on) are more than a little savvy about.

It’s a damn good question. Why do we let M. Obama off the hook here, and assume she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing and who really stands to benefit?

Don’t get me wrong. I adore the takes on Let’s Move by Harriet and Kate and Lesley on this, and good on them for bringing the real problems with this to national attention. And I’m well aware that taking the “Big Food Is Behind This” angle can be off-puttingly tinfoil-hatty to “mainstream” people who are suspicious of fat-acceptance folks already.

But Big Food IS behind this. And they’re not exactly keeping it a secret, either. Pattie’s post provides a link to the corporations who have joined up with M. Obama’s initiative, and it’s a pretty jaw-dropping who’s-who of who makes pretty much every damn product you can buy in a supermarket and a few other places, too. Shit like this is why I gigglesnort to the point of tonsilitis whenever FA critics say we’re tools of Big Food; yeah, that’s why they’re clamoring to buy ad space on our blogs and we just won’t let them because we’re all so dripping with integrity, so they have to go over to the Enemy instead, poor things. Ow, my aching tonsils.

Why would Coca-Cola, for example, give a crap about FA? Their best selling product is a diet drink. And pretty much all of Big Food benefits generously from fatty-panic in some way, which is exactly what Pattie’s post zooms in on. To wit:

If this is a fight that Big Food doesn’t want, then why is it buying into the program so fully?

Why does any industry engage financially with a project? Because this is good for business.

The key to understanding why such companies as Pepsico and Hersheys want to be on board with a program that on the surface seems to be attacking their major product lines is to understand the fundamental underlying principle of making a profit in modern capitalism: scarcity.

She then goes on to elaborate that not only does Big Food get to make diet products (and market existing products as “weight loss friendly”) and charge out the yang for them, but people who are hungry from self-imposed food scarcity and can’t stand it any longer are likely to grab at the first thing they can get that will ease their hunger — which is likely to be a Big Food product, because they’ve got the distribution sewn up. Then, not only have people “blown their diets,” but they blame themselves rather than the diet, and start buying the premium-priced diet products again. They win the yo-yo contest at both ends of the yo-yo, see?

Not only that, but they’ve got Big Pharma in on this too, and Pattie helpfully provides a link to the list of sponsors to the Partnership for a Healthy America who are involved (although Pattie’s link is hosed, and you’ll have to use mine until she fixes it). Speed and WLS (gotta keep selling that surgical equipment!) for kids? Brand-new diet pills marketed just to the children and their freaked-out parents? Insulin sensitizers being sold to kids who aren’t actually diabetic in the hope of getting a few pounds off them? Oh boy, good times ahead. Where’s the fast-forward button on life when you need it?

And that’s not even counting the health costs of stigma. Pattie again:

Stigma of fat kids is going to increase. This not only means that fat kids are going to suffer more bullying and violence, but it may be bad for their health. There is growing evidence that many of the so-called “co-morbidity” conditions related to “obesity” may be cause by the stress of stigmatization and not the state of the larger body. So instead of creating a healthier generation, we may be creating a food-obsessed, eating disordered, stigmatized generation that will be our unhealthiest generation.

Like Pattie, I have my doubts that any of this is accidental. The reason for focusing on fat kids rather than adults is that the kids are both more credulous (not having experienced as many failed diets as their adult counterparts yet) and more desperate to fit in, and also that many will simply outgrow their “fat periods” irrespective of actual effort and thus resemble “success stories.” (See the story M. Obama tells about her own daughters’ weight for a good example of the latter. You can’t tell me those girls have to battle “fat genes” in any way, shape, or form.)

Adults have considerably more freedom of movement when it comes to escaping a mentally abusive environment; if you’re fat, there’s pretty much no forgetting that the world hates you and wishes you were dead (which is why they care so much about your health, of course), but there are certainly places one can go where people will shaddup about it for a few minutes.

Kids, on the other hand, have no exit, not with “Let’s Move” posters all over their schools to look forward to in the fall, the perfect fuel for bullies who are already pissed at them for “costing” them their soda and snack machines with their alleged wanton gluttony. It would be nice to think M. Obama really gives a crap what happens to these kids, but it would not surprise me in the slightest if she does not, and regards them as simply a fund-raising tool for B. Obama’s re-election.

You know, I really hate being such a wet-blankie, negative asshole about this. Believe it or not, I don’t live to rant, and would vastly prefer a world that gave me little reason to do so. But this kind of BS just makes me turn into a poo-flinging monkey.

Ending food deserts is a great idea.

So is giving everyone enough time and energy and support to cook decent meals a few times a week, which would involve shortening both work times and commute times considerably.

So is cracking down on work environments that slice people to ribbons, to the point where if you told them they had to stand at the counter and chop vegetables for 20 minutes when they got home, they’d throw the knife at you instead.

So is making sure everyone has a decent, vermin-free kitchen with plenty of ventilation and counterspace to cook in and good working appliances.

And that’s just what springs to mind immediately. Veggies, unlike fruit (which I think is a great idea to distribute more widely, as long as it’s edible quality), require preparation. So do whole grains, legumes, and all those other things kids are “supposed” to be having for each and every meal.

And even if everyone did eat “wholesome” food for almost every meal, we all know the actual percentage of fatties in any age bracket would not change one bit. For most people, eating “better” might make a difference of 1 BMI notch, if that (about 5 pounds for adults, less for kids), 2 at most; not 5 or 10 or more, unless you have a serious ED to begin with (in which case, being badgered to eat differently will do approximately squat anyway). But yay, we got millions of kids at the 95th percentile down to the 94th, and millions of kids at the 85th percentile down to the 84th! Child obesity crisis solved! So worth it! Everybody dance in the streets, including you lazy lumpenfatz!

Seriously, though — I wouldn’t mind seeing everyone have equal access to high-quality food, but considering who is providing the financial oomph behind Let’s Move, there’ll be a snowball fight in Yuma before this initiative even comes close to that. A Diet Coke in every baby bottle is more like it. As Pattie says, “The campaign needs to be scrapped and a true campaign of promoting exercise and healthy eating for all sizes and ages needs to be developed, and believe me it would NOT gain the kind of support that Let’s Move has.” No freakin’ poopie.

Quickie Blognote

posted by meowser

No, I did not put those Google ads on my site. I don’t know how they got there, and I’m not getting paid for them. If anyone knows how to get rid of them, please let me know; otherwise, I’ll be tinkering with the site later trying to figure it out.

HAES-Related Aside

posted by meowser

Regarding the ever-raging To HAES Or Not to HAES debate…all I’m gonna say right now is that, as broke as I am, I would pay good money to watch Amanda Marcotte walk up to Linda Bacon, look her straight in the eye, and tell her that she (Linda) doesn’t understand science. Now that would be a showdown for the ages, yes?

For the record, Linda Bacon’s book (which I doubt Amanda has even seen, let alone read) contains over 400 footnotes for its 265 pages, and almost all of them are to peer-reviewed papers in medical or scientific journals. If that’s not enough citations for Amanda, I think I know who the “denialist” is here, and it ain’t Linda. Or Paul Campos, or Glenn Gaesser, or Kate Harding, etc., etc., etc. Do people really think the HAES crowd just pulls their conclusions out of their asses fully formed, without having read any of the relevant medical or scientific literature?

And thanks to Tasha Fierce for reminding us once again that HAES and fat acceptance are not one and the same and that fatties have a perfect right to reject it, or any form of making yuppie healthism any kind of priority. However, I also wanted to mention that as far as I’m concerned, any definition of HAES that means doodley squat has to include mental health, or it’s incomplete. In other words, if the way you eat now would horrify the yuppie healthists but keeps your noggin from becoming completely unglued, that’s HAES too.

Carry on.

BADD 2010: The Total Erasure of Partial Disability

posted by meowser

ETA: For anyone who’s visiting my site for the first time, I send first-time commenters to moderation. I am in the U.S. Pacific Time Zone (UTC-8) and I work nights and sleep days; therefore, if you don’t see your comment right away, you can probably assume I’m asleep and will approve it when I get up. Trolls, however, will be immediately perma-spammed. Thanks.

One of the things you’ll see come up in fat acceptance circles a lot, if you hang around long enough, is the concept that fat does not ipso facto equal disabled, and how loudly many of us feel the need to announce that. I’m fat, and I do decathlons! I’m fat, and I get through a 70-hour week and three hours of sleep a night, without even so much as a yawn! I’m fat and I do all my shopping on foot! (That last one would be, um, me, so please understand, I’m not pointing fingers here.) Fat people aren’t all bedridden, you know! In fact, most of us aren’t bedridden at all! We can do anything skinny people do! Yes, anything! You name it!

And I understand why that happens, I really do. Like I said, I’m not going to claim I’m 100% liberated from it, either. Let’s face it, you have a better chance of getting decent housing, decent food to eat, decent transportation, and maybe a little money in the bank left over if you can work in some capacity, than you do if you can’t. Government payments for permanent disability in the U.S. (either federal or state) are very, very hard to get and getting progressively harder, and even after you do get approved, they’re generally a pittance; as housing costs have soared in the last 15 to 20 years, disability payments have not kept up. And most of us don’t have families (of origin or of our own making) who can offer us total lifelong financial support, housing, medical care, etc.

So yeah, most of us have to try to work, somehow, in some capacity. And most of us probably want to, albeit not necessarily at what’s available to us at the moment. And in order to get people to hire you, you have to be able to give the impression of being reliable and capable of doing what they’ve hired you to do (even if you get some sort of accommodations), day in and day out. So it’s easy for us to let sentences like, “I’ve never missed a day of work in my life,” “I never get sick,” and, “I’m strong as an ox, I carried my own piano home from Sam Ash the other day on my back for ten miles and then up two flights of stairs” drop from our lips as a shield. Especially in a super-competitive job market like the one currently experienced by Americans, where employers are reluctant to hire even currently fully functional fatties because our health care allegedly costs a fortune compared to our supposedly low-maintenance thinner brethren. Throw in a disability of any kind, and you feel like it’s gonna take a miracle to be chosen.

So yes, naturally you’ll see a lot of fatasses denying that fat = disability. Unfortunately, that denial comes back to bite us in our generous-sized tuckuses when it comes to issues of access. We’re supposed to make ourselves fit the seats, no matter what it takes; the seats aren’t supposed to fit us. The societal assumption that all fat people have the same shot at permanent, healthy thinness is a profoundly ablist one, and when you frame it in terms of social model of disability, which states that our concept of what constitutes impairment is relative to what society has named the gold standard of behavior and functionality*, then you’d better believe I consider not being able to attain and maintain an acceptably thin body with no more than a token effort to be a disability. What people always seem to forget is that disability need not be total — that is, easily visible and preventing a person from working regularly and/or being capable of unassisted daily-living tasks — to be significant.

I know a lot of fat people are going to disagree with me about this, and that’s fine. But you go where I’m going if you believe, as I do, that access matters in assessing “ability” just as much as functionality. In many cases, “you can’t do X if you have Y type of body” becomes QED if it’s too much trouble for them to give you a frigging chair that fits your tush, or they decide you have the “wrong” body to sell X type of product or service. But if it’s hard for you to think in terms of partial disability, it’s perfectly understandable. It’s something that really does not get a lot of airtime in this world. In almost every conversation that exists out there, it’s assumed that the participants are all (currently) fully abled, and if we’re lucky, PWD will be considered at all, if they have a visible and permanent disability.

Now, I understand that many, many conversations out there are not for me, don’t concern me, can’t concern me. I’m not one of those people who feels the need to butt into every discussion with, “Oh yeah? What about the autistic women who were diagnosed in their 40s who are also lefthanded, Jewish, live in Portland, and are Mets fans? Huh? Huh? What about us?” (Actually, if there is more than one person on earth — that is, in Portland — who does fit that description, I will not only eat my Mets hat, I will do so on camera.) But it would be nice not to be forgotten entirely, as a person with partial disability.

Allow me to flash back to the big-hair ’80s, if you will, when the “briefcase or baby, or both?” discussions for women first started to get mass-media exposure. Even not knowing what my disability was then, I knew they weren’t talking about me; I knew I could maybe either parent or work, but no way on earth could I possibly do both simultaneously, and no way on earth could I ever manage more than 40 hours a week at either one. Even a straight 8-5 job with relatively little stress was pushing it for me; I always had headaches, always had digestive problems, was always tired, could never get enough sleep, was constantly anxious and overwhelmed. And the only “answer” anyone ever had for me was, “You come from a dysfunctional family.” (Yeah, like society isn’t one big dysfunctional family, right?)

I worked for a technical publishing company as an administrative assistant; I got paid more than the copy editors, who also had to work nights and weekends without overtime, whereas I could go home at 5. But copy editors could also parlay their experience later into better publishing jobs, and that was the name of the game. In order to “make it” at anything I thought was worth doing, you had to be willing to do some serious OT, put in the extra time, go the extra mile, get that extra degree while still working full-time, put your nose to the grindstone. In other words, prove you weren’t just some lazy slacker who didn’t want to work. And I knew I…just couldn’t. And I felt terrible about that, especially when I got into my 30s and realized that all those overworked, underpaid copy editors (and other people who had done the nose-to-the-grindstone thing) now had real careers making real money, and I was still stuck at the McJob level.

That’s where many of us with partial disabilities wind up, especially if we haven’t been given the tools to understand and obtain accommodation for our disabilities (which is, to paraphrase Ian Dury, “common as muck”). We can work, after a fashion, but no 70 or 80 hour work weeks for us, no pulling all-nighters to write our papers (or partying all night long) and then going to work the next morning for us, no being on our feet all day every day for us, no having jobs where people scream and yell at us all day for us, no simultaneously saving the world and raising our kids on 3 hours of sleep a night for us. Not even when we’re young and supposed to be bursting with energy. And nobody can ever understand why, other than chalking it up to bad attitude. As far as most fully abled people are concerned, either you can bust your ass round the clock, or you are quadriplegic (or the equivalent thereof) and get a government check. Those of us in neither category are barely assumed to exist at all, or to even be worth thinking about if we do.

Way before I was ever diagnosed, back in the big-hair era, I read a book on how not to sabotage yourself about money matters (I was big on the belief that I was sabotaging myself then, as if being broke was just a bad habit like biting my cuticles). The author scoffed at the notion that some people were convinced they had “some kind of debility that keeps you working from working more than part time, or at all.” Of course I couldn’t be like that! I couldn’t be some shiftless spoiled brat who thought work was beneath her! How silly of me to think I had a legitimate reason for all the headaches and stomachaches and twelve-alarm cramps and insomnia! I should just get over it!

This author was carrying around the same 200-pound eraser that everyone else was, the one that rubbed out all of us who actually did have “some kind of debility” that made us process information differently, or have chronic pain, or have bouts of refractory serious depression, or whatever it was that kept us from the kind of middle-class job and lifestyle we were “supposed” to be striving for. Not enough so that we couldn’t work at all, but enough so that we couldn’t be worked to death. How did we explain this to people? How could we make them understand? Especially if we barely understood it ourselves.

So I really do think step one has to be getting people with partial disabilities to recognize themselves. This can be tough, because getting a “legitimate” diagnosis that we can present to employers in order to make a job accessible to us (or to qualify for government benefits) can be challenging in and of itself. (And of course, employers or clients can just decide not to hire us because of our disabilities; they don’t legally have to tell us exactly why.) How many doctors “don’t believe in” fibromyalgia or Asperger’s or whatever it is that keeps us off both the “fast track” and the “parent track” at work? But I say, we can’t ask for something if we don’t know what it is we’re asking for. We cannot buy the “lazy slacker” label; we must reject it. Furthermore, as more of us do recognize ourselves, there will be more safety in numbers.

Will that be enough? If the experience of people with visible and total disabilities is any indication, probably not. Access issues for PWD are a huge and ongoing problem across the board. But if we recognize ourselves, at least we’ll be on the board, and that’s something.

* Contrary to popular belief, though, the social model doesn’t say there’s no such thing as true impairment, only that we don’t know what actually does constitute impairment if only a very narrow range of being is considered “okay.”

May 1 is Blogging Against Disablism Day! (This Saturday)

posted by meowser

Hello! This is just a brief reminder that the Annual Blogging Against Disablism Day at Diary of a Goldfish will be this Saturday, May 1. I decided to participate last year at the very last minute; this time, I will actually make an advance commitment to do it and have it up after midnight that Saturday morning. (Ulp.)

If you have any kind of inkling to participate, please do! All are welcome. More details are here. Yes, brain stuff counts too! There’s no specific theme, so the only real rules are 1) it has to be about some kind of disability, and 2) it must be anti-ablist (or anti-disablist, same thing; different word usage in different countries), and 3) it has to be a fresh post, not a rerun. A list of last year’s posts can be found here.

See you Saturday!

Better Happy Than…Uh, Happy?

posted by meowser

By the time I got this hat tip from Shakesville on an article for Self magazine on antidepressant weight gain (that was reproduced on both MSNBC and AOL; you can get to it through the Shakes link), Liss had already closed down the comment thread because of commenter issues. (That’s what I get for keeping vampire’s hours.) And although I pretty much covered this issue last time out, and won’t rehash it all here, I did find I had a few things to add after seeing the Shakes post and reading the article.

Okay, for starters, I’m not providing a direct link because of fat hate and ablism in the story, although it’s mitigated somewhat by the fact that the author (Lauren Slater), has actually experienced this. She knows that those of us who say we’re not living in a bathtub full of M&M’s and it really is the meds are not CBS-ing anyone, it’s really true that a lot of these meds can send you straight to Category 4 if you stay on them. And it’s in a Major Women’s Magazine and the frickin’ Today Show. Finally.

But eesh, just that title — “Rather Be Fat and Happy or Thin and Sad?” If you guessed that Slater comes down on the side of the latter — her friends don’t want to be seen with her! her husband is squicked out by her! her pets won’t let her pet them! (okay, I made up that last part, but still) — then you’ve obviously read one Major Women’s Magazine too many over the course of your lifetime (yeah, me too) and know that they’d never ever ever print a story that says it’s okay to be fat if it means you won’t ever have to be 5150-ed again. Gods forbid.

The hell of it is, I envy the shit out of Lauren Slater. She’s used to thinking of herself as a “petite person,” and has reaped the privileges that go along with that — great career, great circle of friends, great kids, great partner, and I’m guessing a fabulous home, too, and never any worries about money beyond the shouldn’t-have-charged-those-Jimmy-Choos-maybe-heehee kind. Yes, I know, there are fabulous fatties on the ‘Sphere and elsewhere who have nabbed all that for themselves without being thin (and since my Asperger diagnosis, I’ve become well aware that more of my social/professional difficulties have been about what’s going on above my neck than below it).

But though I do realize there’s a big dose of unhealthy entie-envy here, I’ve felt my whole life like my face has been pressed up against the glass watching women like Slater love their lives, those NPR-listening, oh-so-aware-and-sensitive ruling classers, whose words are actually listened to and respected, who don’t have to worry about anyone they want to know better rejecting them because of externals. How I’ve ached to be them, felt like I’ve been missing my whole life because I’m not.

If I had ever gotten to live her life, maybe I’d have been freaked out about getting Officially Fat too, even if the alternative was potentially being re-institutionalized. (Slater says she spent much of her childhood and young adulthood in mental institutions, so I know her depression had to be somewhere in the neighborhood of mine in severity.) But I had nothing much to lose by gaining weight, even a vast shitload of it. The partner(s) I eventually hooked up with weren’t going to have a problem with it, and the kind of friends I’ve tended to make don’t either, and I’ve never had a career (career? what career?) where my body habitus was going to mean diddleydoo. That doesn’t mean I’m 100% sanguine about it, mind you; I’d be lying if, as an ovary-carrying person with PCOS, I said I wasn’t concerned about what Remeron and everything else I’ve been on for the last almost-20 years could eventually do to me metabolically. But would I rather have diabetes than be perpetually terrified I’m going to swallow every pill in the house? On balance, I’d have to say yes, albeit gulping harder than I’d like to admit. (I hate needles something fierce.)

But I’m not her. Slater, in the end, sounds a lot less like someone who hates fatties than she does like someone who knows that the whole world hates fatties, and whose entire life setup depends upon maintaining her “petiteness,” regardless of how she feels about it personally. This makes me a lot more sad than angry, especially knowing that I’ve felt like a failure for much of my life for not being just like her. Losing what you and everyone else around you has come to depend upon is a lot different (not necessarily “worse,” mind you, just different) from never having had it in the first place. Slater isn’t really the problem; the anti-fat propaganda that has become our international wallpaper is.

But if Slater’s essay is dismaying, the AOL survey accompanying the story, which Liss put up at the Shakes link, is downright gabberflasting. The question is, “Would you be OK with weight gain if it meant you were happy?”, and out of almost 15,000 respondents, 76% said “no.” Wuh-what? As Scott Madin pointed out in the comment thread, tautology anyone? “Would you be happy to be happy if you were happy”? (Sounds like that old 70s song “Express Yourself,” doesn’t it? “It’s not what you look like when you’re doing what you’re doing/It’s what you’re doing when you’re doing what you look like you’re doing.” Cracks my shit up every time. The YouTube link, BTW, is audio-with-title-screen only.)

Besides, the wording is a bit nebulous, no? My next question would be, “As opposed to what?” Losing weight and feeling worse every day? Having a grand piano fall on my head? Being eaten alive by a pack of hungry opossums? I’ve experienced only one of those three things, but that’s enough to tell me that most of the people being surveyed have not. Do you have to have experienced life the way I have to know that there are far worse things in life than becoming a big whaleypants?

And Now I Am Deathfat…

posted by meowser

It’s official. A couple of weeks ago, I went in for my yearly ladybits exam that I have to have for the insurance company to keep paying for my generic Mircette, and I got weighed and measured. I don’t weigh myself at home, so at this point I kind of regard it as an interesting novelty more than anything else. (It does help immensely that I don’t have fat-shaming doctors. You have no idea how grateful I am for that.)

I’ve had a Remeron-fueled 15-pound gain in the last year (although I suspect most of that was in the first six months, going by clothing fit and body measurements), after the Remeron-fueled gain of 25 from the seven months prior to that, and now I am officially DEATHFATZ, BMI > 40. Better get that voodoo coffin ready, folks, because I’m a-fixin’ to die any second. Well, except not. A-fixin’ to die any second is what would have happened to me had I not taken the Remeron.

Gives me a built-in argument for the MY INSURANCE BLAAARGH crowd, it does. It’s very likely I would never have become “obese,” let alone DEATHFATZ (though probably, thanks to PCOS, would not have been “ideally” thin) if I’d never seen a doctor in my life. Prolly wouldn’t be typing this, or moving my fingers at all, or, for that matter, taking air into my lungs, either, but since even the MY INSURANCE BLAAARGH folks (mostly) aren’t impolitic enough (yet) to insist I should have had the good grace to die and leave a size-12 corpse while the cacking was good, what else can they say? Zoloft catapulted me into “obese,” Effexor kept me there, and now Remeron has pushed me into MONSTERBEAST range, I am coming to eat your children, hahaaaa!

And here’s what the MY INSURANCE BLAAARGH people are really, really going to hate: I’ve never felt better in my life. I haven’t had a recurrence of the killer hip-flexor problem that bedeviled me after I lost weight (while I was off meds), my internal bits are in no worse shape than they ever were, and my mental health? Off the charts better. I honestly thought that when Pendo died, I would take to my bed for a month and cease to be able to function at all, I’d lose my job and wind up in the hospital and everything. But no. Obviously it was upsetting, and I cried a lot, but I only needed one full day off to deal with it. It was a miracle.

See this fat ass? These jiggly thighs? These squishy forearms? What you are looking at is REMISSION, baby. The thing I’ve been waiting for for 35 frigging years, ever since I perched on the side of my bed with my Girl Scout knife when I was 11 and felt universally loathed, and wondered how one went about slashing her wrists. Maybe I’ll go off the Remeron one day (my psychiatrist thinks one day I won’t need it anymore), but I’m sure as hell not doing it because people think I’ve been whomped with the ugly stick. I’ll do it when it’s time to do it, thanks.

And last week something happened to remind me that I should never, ever take this remission for granted. A former friend of mine, who blew me off years ago and wouldn’t tell me why (I assumed it was because I embarrassed her — this was all pre-aspie diagnosis) jumped off a bridge. She was one year younger than me, and was in such a fragile state of mental health that all it took was one questionable mammogram, and boom. (I got this information from my ex-husband, who got it from her ex-husband, who was one of X’s best friends.) For years, I envied her because her (then) husband made enough money that she didn’t “have to” work, she just seemed really contented and together, and knew exactly how to live, and was doing exactly what she wanted to do with her life. It might have seemed like “nothing” to a lot of people, but knowing what I knew — that most jobs sucked, and that if you could weasel out of doing one of the many, many sucky jobs in this world, more power to you — she seemed far above me, in so many ways.

Except not.

Apparently, after she and her husband split, she went downhill in a hurry. She’d told me once that if there ever was a divorce for her, she’d make a living organizing and cleaning houses, and I believed her. I knew — I just knew — that the reason she wouldn’t talk to me, even after I reached out to her after hearing about her separation, was that I wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t important enough. Wasn’t socially adept enough. It was all about my deficiencies. Of course it was. That was how I had always thought: Everyone else is fine, even if they’re jerks, because they’re jerks in a way that’s perfectly sanctioned. I’m the one who’s wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. I once half-joked to X, “I’ll hear from her as soon as I get a book published. Then she’ll want to talk to me.” But I really wasn’t kidding. I really thought that was why.

I forgot. Other people are better at hiding their mental health issues than I am. By orders of magnitude. And you know what? The fact that I suck at hiding how I feel is actually what saved my ass, until I could attain the sweet relief of remission. I knew I was going to die if I didn’t contract with multiple people not to jump off the bridge, or do anything equally deadly, until I could stop feeling that way. And I came close anyway, but I honestly think that’s why I didn’t do it.

I have to wonder: How many people who could be helped by medication don’t take it (or stop taking it even if it works for them) because they are terrified of getting (or staying) fat? (And yes, I know there are people for whom meds don’t work or actually exacerbate their problems, or who have made an informed choice to deal with their mental health issues without chemicals, and I respect that, too. I’m talking about those of us for whom the drugs actually do work.) I know my ex-friend was distressed by her own Zoloft-related weight gain. I don’t know if she stopped the drug because of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me, knowing what I know about her. I couldn’t quite get it through to her that, having experienced everything that I had, I knew there were much worse things in this world than being fat. Even DEATHFATZ. And thinking you should be dead is definitely one of them.

It’s kind of incredible that this still needs to be said, but it does, and that’s why anyone who dares tell me that my weight makes me ipso facto self-destructive, is going to get an earful xe will never forget. I know what self-destructive really is; that very well could have been me jumping off that bridge, and I owe fat acceptance big time for the fact that it wasn’t.

Fategories

posted by meowser

When I was a baby second-wave feminist, way back in the days when Gloria Steinem was a household name (yep, that long ago), I used to muse aloud about why, if women were over half the U.S. population, that women had such a hard time earning basic legal and social rights for themselves. (You know, piddly things like making the doctor tell you you have cancer instead of telling your husband or father and letting him decide whether you’re strong enough to handle it, which in 1970 terms he’d probably decide you aren’t. Yes, it really was like that, kids.) The answer, as you probably know if you’ve studied feminism for more than five minutes, was that too many women not only thought they didn’t deserve such rights, but were convinced it would be bad for them to have them. After all, they were just women — how could they possibly be trusted to know what was best for them, let alone actually act on their own behalf?

So it is these days with fatties. Supposedly, we represent a majority of people in developed nations, and even a fair percentage of people in developing nations. So why, then, don’t we rule, or at least get a seat at the rulership table?

Obviously, it’s because there are some situations where the majority doesn’t rule, or even have much of a say in how things are set up, because they’ve been sold on the illusion that their presence in the non-ruling-class is temporary, or would be if only they did all the “right” things — and that once they’re in the ruling class, they get to stay there forever. Even these days, with the U.S. economy in the crapper and upward mobility more infrequent here than ever, at least a third of Americans believe they will be “wealthy” one day, while only 2 percent believe themselves to be “wealthy” right now. Anyone else besides me think that if a similar study was done about weight, that almost all the fat people would say they believe they will be thin-’n'-healthy one day, although a shockingly tiny percentage of people actually do manage to lose 50 or 75 or 100 pounds or more from diet and exercise alone and go permanently from fat to thin in the process? And when I say “shockingly tiny,” I mean shockingly tiny enough that almost anyone who actually manages to do this can get themselves a book deal, even if they can’t write.

But just try telling most fatties that they have about as much of a chance of that happening as they do of someday belonging to a yacht club. Just try telling one, at random, right now. I’ll wait. Didn’t like it much, did they? After all, they know that someone, somewhere, has done it. And once they gave up cheesecake for a month and lost five pounds, so nyaah on you and your negativity. They’re going to be thin, dammit, and you can’t stop them!

Well, here’s what I always tell people in that situation: If you are meant to be a substantially smaller size than you are (or were), there’s not a damn thing I could possibly do to stop you. Nor do I even want to try. I mean, that sounds like work, and you know what a lazybutt I am. Yeah, like here in the ‘Sphere, we regularly take calorie, fat-gram, and carb count surveys of our members and readers, and if you’re not eating as much as we think you should, off you go! No. Not happening ever.

I just want everyone to understand that not everyone has the same shot at permanent thinness, at least not the kind that is associated with the kind of vim and vigor that people typically pursue thinness for. (Yeah, if you made me eat cardboard pudding and do hard labor all day for a year, you might be able to get some weight off me. And if I strapped you to a bed and gave you hyperalimentation for a year, maybe we could do a clothes swap — maybe. What’s your point?) That’s how I came up with my “fategories” theory — specifically, that there are four basic categories of people in the world when it comes to weight. To wit:

Category 1 is people who can get and/or stay thin through no effort whatsoever; in fact, they would have a very hard time not being thin, if ever called upon to do so.

Category 2 is people who can get and/or stay thin with a token effort — that is, doing so doesn’t take over their entire life. (Although they might not be able to get quite as thin as they think they should be, if their body ideal hovers somewhere below a BMI of 20.)

Category 3 is people who can get and/or stay thin (or even anywhere close to it) only by devoting their entire lives forever to the cause.

And Category 4 is people who won’t be able to get and/or stay thin (or anywhere close) no matter what they do.

I am pretty well convinced that (despite Category 3′s and 4′s being anything but freak occurrences) it’s Category 2′s who run things in most of the world, because they believe they represent nearly every human body, to the point where an awful lot of Category 3′s and 4′s, and even a fair number of 1′s, mistakenly believe they are 2′s. An easy mistake to make, given all the 300-decibel hype. (Although many people do move up in category with age, very few people move down unless they become very ill.) The Category 2′s who make the most noise (along with those who loudly claim to be 3′s but are probably 2′s, like She Whose Name Must Not Be Typed In Its Entirety) pooh-pooh any possible existence of Category 4′s, and state that 3′s, if they exist at all, must simply accept that their lives will be ruled forever by their cockamamie diet plans. Hungry? Tired? Sore? Constipated? In four-alarm physical pain from your workouts? Have to give up decadent sedentary activities like sitting in classrooms or writing a novel? Can’t concentrate on reading books on a treadmill? Tough shit. You shouldn’t have asked to be born, then.

As for me, knowing everything I know about my body, I’m quite certain that I am a category 4. But really, even if I was category 3 (I know damn well I’m not a 1 or a 2), what right does anyone have to demand that I devote every ounce of time, energy, and money I have to obtaining and maintaining a more socially acceptable body? Seriously. What right does anyone have to expect that I will do absolutely nothing else with my life than try with all my might to force my weight down? It’s really not reasonable to demand that from people, any more than it’s reasonable to demand that they climb a mountain to get to work every day. If you want to climb a mountain to get to work, and you can, knock yourself out. But really, it’s a lot to ask of people.

And yeah, even in a society that was less “obesogenic” (gag me) those categories would probably hold, for the most part, provided there was nothing truly catastrophic like world famine. Maybe a few 3′s would instead be 2′s, maybe a few 4′s would become 3′s. (If anyone comes up with a less fattening antidepressant that actually does squat for serotonin, give them my number.) Maybe some 2′s who could be convinced (along with their parents and doctors) that dieting when you’re 8 years old is an Officially Bad Idea wouldn’t become 3′s and 4′s.

But it’s just as true that in a less “obesogenic” society, it would take less in the way of “extra” weight to make one an outcast (or “unhealthy,” same diff). Don’t think for half an atomic second that if they somehow managed to get everyone’s BMI under 30, that 25 wouldn’t become the new 30, and 20 the new 25. I mean, if we lived on Planet Walter Willett, my partner, who’d be hard-pressed to get his BMI much over 21, would be getting stern warnings from his doctor that he was putting too many naughty things in his mouth and he’d be a big old pillowbutt before he knew it. It sounds hilarious, but 30 years ago, if you’d told me that the high-rent health-yups would today be equating eating a bowl of spaghetti with shooting heroin, I’d have been laughing then too. I laugh not now.

The categories get trickier still when you realize that a lot of us fatties could lose a substantial amount of weight, even 50 or 75 or 100 pounds or more, and not even approach a socially acceptable (“healthy”) weight. Can you imagine losing 75 pounds, actually keeping all of them off, and being told that that’s not good enough? Meet my ex-husband, then. Thanks to certain longstanding health issues having been addressed for him, he’s quite a bit thinner than his peak weight, but nowhere near thin. Tell him he should be doing more to get his weight down, and he’ll give you the Boob Pistol of Disdain (yes, his boobs are still big enough). Category 3? Category 4? Say I, there’s no material difference between the two, if you understand that volunteering to give up your life for thinness is not an option. That doesn’t mean nobody will ever want to do it, mind you — just that people shouldn’t even be reaching for that as any kind of prescription to give to you. You get to decide whether it would be best for you to sit down and write a novel, go jogging, or blob out and watch TV, or whatever kazillion other activities (or inactivities) there are to do in the world. You do. You can be trusted. No matter what they say.

Attention Seattle Peeps!

posted by meowser

I already posted about this this on the Shapely Prose Ning site, but for those of you who aren’t hooked up with that, I thought I’d cross-post it here.

On March 8 and 9 (Monday and Tuesday), I’m going up to Seattle to do some research for my book. (Sorry it didn’t work for me to do this on a weekend, but this was the time I could get off to cover what I needed to cover.) Over on Ning, we’ve talked about having a Monday night dinner at Via Tribunali in Belltown (haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve been wanting to), around 5:30-ish to whenever. That means those who want to come early can take advantage of their 4-6 pm happy hour deals ($5 pizzas!), and others can come later if they want to.

I’ve also got some time for a Tuesday lunch, if anyone is interested in that. I have to be at Safeco Field by 2:30 for the stadium tour (part of my research), and then I’ll be headed back down to PDX.

So if any of this interests you, please leave a message here, or over on Ning, or shoot me an email letting me know, and what time you’ll be around.

Thanks bunches!

Is It Just Me…

posted by meowser

…or has anyone else noted that (with the exception of fat acceptance blogs and heavily moderated feminist blogs like Shakesville and FWD) the comments section of virtually any article or blog post having to do with fat people in any way quickly devolves into a series of unsolicited diet tips? EET LES AND MUV MORE LA LA LA OF THERMODYNAMICS I TEWTALLY LOOSED 15 POUNDS ONCE AND KEPT 10 OF THEM OFF 4EVER SO U CAN LOOZE 100 IF U TRY IT’S SCIENCE.

Just wonderin’.

The Kitty Who Taught This Fatass How to Love

posted by meowser

Seems like there have been plenty of sad kitty stories going around the Fatosphere in the last year. Scroll on by if you don’t wish to read another.

A week ago Saturday I lost the most wonderful kitty friend I have ever had. That’s him, above. His name was Pendo — his name had already had been bestowed upon him by my pet sitter in San Francisco, who rescued him. She told us it was a Swahili word for “love and friendship,” and after meeting him for five seconds and feeling his silky head burrow into our hands, my now-ex and I couldn’t think of a better name for him. He just radiated love, and we knew he’d be a wonderful friend.

As a kitten, he’d been left for dead in a Dumpster with the rest of his littermates, with a corneal ulceration which we had to give him medicine for (the vet said it was from feline herpesvirus). How can people do shit like that to animals and live with themselves? He never did recover full sight in his right eye. And a couple of years ago, a routine vet exam had turned up a heart murmur that led to a diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (thickened heart valve). So all things considered, the fact that he made it to age 9-1/2 is pretty miraculous.

And he loved me so much.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I always love my cats and goosh incessantly over them, and I’ve got two others I adore and would hate to lose. But with Pendo, I knew somehow it would hurt that much more to see him go. More than any other cat I ever knew, he needed me — not just for survival, but for closeness — and wasn’t afraid to let me know it, night and day, every day.

I had gotten custody of him in the divorce (along with Binkley, my icon-kitty), and I can truly say that when I had nobody else around to love me nonstop like I needed then, he did. I told myself it was projection, it didn’t count like winning over a human did, all I had to do was feed him, all this…crap. Of course it “counts” to be loved by an animal. Does it ever! Sure, Pendo loved everyone, it seemed — even other cats! — but it was my attention he wanted most, always. Always wanted to engage with me. Always wanted to make sure I was awake and paying attention. Zoning out with a computer screen or a book? He’d fix that. He was a chatty guy — he meowed more than all my other cats combined — and he had quite the vocabulary of chirps, beeps, epic-yowls-of-boredom, polysyllabic squeaks, and don’t-put-me-in-that-carrier-again screams.

He could be exhausting. It seemed like he wanted everything, all at once. “Feed me! No, play with me! No, pet me! Do it all! I want I want I want!” I actually had to leave the house if I wanted to write, most of the time. A lot of the time, his meowfests would culminate in me following him around telling him to show me what he wanted, only to have him walk two rooms over and flop on the floor with his belly in the air. Like he couldn’t have done that in the room we were already in. (And yep, he ate into blogtime, too, no question.) But I truly believe I wouldn’t have been able to love Chris the way I have if not for Pendo, all out, not hiding anything. And he feels likewise, that Pendo was someone who unlocked his heart, who got him to feel for an animal the way he never thought he could have.

I was probably in a bit of denial about just how serious his heart condition really was. I knew cats with HCM typically didn’t live a full life span (and trying to get him to take his meds was a nightmare beyond belief) but I was hoping against hope that he’d be the exception. After all, he had no clinical symptoms; if not for the vet hearing the murmur, I’d never even have known about it. And the ultrasound said the valve was only “mildly” thickened. And yes, he was the one cat I had who was “normal” weight, the one I could point to and say, “See, I have one thin cat! The fat mom really doesn’t have them all hooked up to chocolate pudding IVs, honest!” But he was the one with the biggest health issues, and as it turned out, the most expensive ones thus far. (I haven’t had to take Binkley, who might be the biggest cat you’ve ever seen in your life, in for anything but routine vet care since he was a kitten, and that’s almost 8 years now. And Zevon actually weighs quite a bit less than him now and has been mostly fine since the food switch, about which more later.) I pretty much had to clean out my life savings to try to save Pendo after he collapsed in the living room two days before he died, screaming in agony, and they couldn’t save him. When they treated his heart, his kidneys started failing, and that was that.

Now he’s gone, nothing left but his hair clipping and paw print card and ashes, and I can’t believe how quiet it is in here. He just filled the place up with all his commotion and noise — and oh yes, love and love and love and love. He packed a lot of living into those 9-1/2 years, just like his mom — I counted no fewer than ten different residences I had with him during his life (although only two in the last five years), in four different states. I wish things had been a little less hectic for both of us during all that time. But when I close my eyes and picture him, he tells me I gave him everything a cat could want. And now he wants me to go get everything I want, everything I put on hold or slowed to a crawl to take care of him, and says that anyone who can’t see what I have to offer doesn’t know what they’re missing. Fat feels great when you’re curled up on the pillow next to mommy and she’s got her nice soft arms around you, holding your back feet just like you want her to. Who cares what other people think?

We have kind of a running gag now, Chris and I, that when one of us wants something like a chocolate hazelnut milkshake (in January!) or a long luxurious nap, that “Pendo would want us to.” Of course, Pendo would just want me to quit my job, too, and the hell with having health insurance — I used to tell him that if he paid my salary, I’d be happy to just follow him around the house and watch him do his stop and plop for eight hours a day. It would be a lot more fun than listening to doctor-drone. But you know, having two people who worked out of the house, he probably got more fuzzy-face time than a lot of cats who live full life spans do. I really did give him everything a cat could want. And he really did know more about how to love — and accept — better than most humans. He’d want you to have that chocolate hazelnut shake, too, even if you never got to meet him.

Sleep tight, furbaby.

Again With the Diabeeeetus…

posted by meowser

Yeah, Michelle Obama. The diabeeetus thing. I suppose y’all have heard/read it by now. (Hat tip: Bri of Fat Lot of Good.)

Know how many American kids actually DO have T2d?

The short answer is, nobody knows for sure, because it’s so rare nobody can get exact numbers.

But…extrapolating from data on the ADA Web site (not a fat-friendly organization, mind you, so they have no motivation to fudge the numbers in our favor), the number would seem to be…drum roll please…about 30,000 or 40,000 people younger than 20 diagnosed with T2d in the U.S. Yes, that’s in the entire country. Yes, that’s out of about 83 million people under 20 years old in America. I am not kidding. We really ARE talking about a number THAT tiny, and the only time they had a percentage-population increase in the 22 years they’ve been tracking it (and no, they didn’t track it at all before that) was when they lowered the diagnostic criteria from fasting blood sugar > 140 to FBS > 126. (Newsflash: Broadening the diagnostic criteria and actually testing people for it means more people diagnosed. I’m autistic, I know this quite well.)

How’d I get my numbers? Simple. The ADA says:

186,300, or 0.22% of all people in this age group have diabetes

About one in every 400 to 600 children and adolescents has type 1 diabetes

Therefore, we can surmise that about 70% of all diabetes cases in people < 20 years old in America are type 1. The rest are a combination of type 2, MODY (maturity-onset diabetes of youth, which some consider a subset of type 2 and some consider a separate condition), gestational, and secondary (due to pancreatic injury or some other systemic illness attacking the pancreas). Therefore, the type 2 figure is no more than 50,000 at the very most, and probably considerably less than that.

And of those 30,000 or 40,000 kids, give or take, what percentage have first or second-degree relatives with the disease? About 85 percent. That’s according to the paper that initially identified the T2d youth trend back in 1996; the entire paper isn’t available online, unfortunately. (Even so, the abstract says the link with first-degree relatives alone is around 65%.) And if you like medical nerdery, this paper from Endocrine Review talks about the polygenetic nature of T2d, confirming that this is about way, way more than the fourth-grade-level assumption of “eat like a pig, get fat, give yourself diabetes.” (Hat tip to Sandy/JFS for both papers.)

Oh, and even Dr. Francine Ratner Kaufman, whose infamous “New Epidemic” paper (which said T2d is “responsible for 8-45% of new cases of diabetes, depending on geographic location,” which some people — including our first lady? — have interpreted as “8-45% of kids have T2d”!), admitted the overwhelming genetic link in her paper. So there.

And that’s not even taking into consideration that kids have fluctuating insulin levels as they are growing and could possibly be misdiagnosed with T2d because of that, especially if they’re fat. (Not to mention that this is a disease that disproportionately affects poor nonwhite children and teens. But of course, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with increased genetic propensity, or with their stress levels being off the frigging charts and their health-care and food availability and neighborhood safety being total garbage compared to their whiter and/or more affluent counterparts, now could it? Nah, we just have to get them all to quit eating fries because fries are the root of all evil, and fat kids who eat them — or hell, even the ones who don’t — deserve to be reminded nonstop that they’re the reason America can’t have nice things.)

So Mrs. Obama’s panic-button projections (which seem to have been gleaned from a decade-long game of Telephone rather than actual facts) lead her to believe that “in a generation” (20 years from now?), we’re going to go from 30,000 kids, almost all of whom have a strong genetic link to T2d, to almost 30 million kids with T2d, almost none of whom do? How??? How is that even remotely possible?

Oh, I forgot. They’ll lower the diagnostic criteria again to FBS > 110, then 100, then 90, then 80…

Aaaand We’re Back! (sort of)

posted by meowser

Okay, so first: Congratulations to everyone on Team Fat for NaNoWriMo, all 5 of whom (including yours truly) finished their 50,000 words!

If you NaNoed, feel free to use this thread to tell me what you’re doing next with your magnum opi. (Heck, if you didn’t NaNo and you have a magnum opus, you can join in too, if you want.)

Me, I’m zoning out for a few days, then (dirty little secret time) doing the sweaty work of putting my scenes in sequence, because I…wrote them all (except for the first two) OUT OF ORDER. Yes, that is how Not So Little Miss Right Brain rolls. I put my scenes on index cards (writing new cards whenever a scene idea occurs to me and I don’t have time to write it just then), then I write wherever my energy is going that day. That means a lot of jumping around.

Yes, you are allowed to write that way if you want to! Nobody’s going to stop you! (My favorite NaNo FAQ: “Can I write one word 50,000 times?” Oh, just guess what the answer is to that one. Can you imagine trying to explain that to the people you live with?) I have given myself the gift of not showing anyone my work until I feel like I’ve gone as far with it on my own, or even telling very many people the subject matter. I had to learn that particular “shooting my wad” lesson the hard way, I’m afraid.

So…I don’t know how much blogging I’m going to be doing from here on out. Some, probably, but I can’t quit or take leave from my job, and Remeron makes me dead to the world for 9 or 10 hours a day, and this book has been in my head in one form or another for at least the last 8 years, and I’m not gonna live forever…I’m sure you understand. But I’m still on the fat feeds, so if I do blog, it will show up there.

Oh, here’s an interesting bit of news: My psychiatrist has been so blown away by what I have to say about my experiences with Asperger’s that he has, with my advance permission, been bringing interns in to our sessions, and they have been knocked on their keisters too. So much so that he has asked me to do a presentation with him about it at a local hospital later this month! This will be my first public speaking gig, and I’m sure I will be sweating piss pellets once I start getting close to the date, which is right before Xmas. So, anyone who has done public speaking and wants to leave their bons mots about their experiences in comments, or write to me about it…blaze away.

GO TEAM FAT! GO GO GO GO GO!