Ask the Food Fairy!

As a free introduction to my “love your body” course, “The Best Weigh,” I created a “wellness quiz” you can take to get personalized suggestions for feeling even better in your body.

The way I see it is that first of all, healthcare in my country – where many of you readers live – sucks. It’s expensive, it’s hard for many people to get, and even if you do have it, Western medicine tends to suck. Some folks have awesome, excellent, supportive doctors who are aware of powerful alternative treatments that most patients don’t get offered as an option. Yay for some folks!

But if you’re like me, your doctor takes an “It’s probably not a problem” approach to any health questions you might have, reluctant to order expensive tests, to encourage self-diagnosis, to look at problems that there are no easy answers for or that they personally don’t know anything about, or to do anything about anything if you seem to be more or less okay in general.

Then there are the fatphobic doctors. I’ve had one myself; she gave me medication that we both knew would cause my weight to redistribute around the middle – because she said so! – and then, ages and ages into it, poked my belly, professed to be concerned that it was convex instead of concave, and tried to back herself up by pointing at my weight on the BMI chart – at a spot for people much much shorter than I – and pointing out that it was labeled there as something like “borderline obese”. Isn’t doctoring supposed to involve critical thinking?

More troubling, to me, is the fact that many of us are so used to our everyday aches and pains, tiredness, digestive problems, headaches, or brain fog, that we don’t even think there is anything to be done about them. They become our standard for normal health – and sap our energy for making any changes.

I have my own story about that, but I’ll share that as we go along. The nutshell here is that the quiz has a ton of statements, you click the box next to each one that is true for you, and then you put in your email address and hit submit. And then I review it and (within about 48 hours) let you know if it suggests you have any problems – which are mostly nutritional – like brain chemistry imbalances, hypoglycemia, yeast overgrowth, adrenal exhaustion, thyroid problems – and, most importantly, what simple steps you can take to regain balance, joy, and energy.

I had a blast with it. Some of the things it turned up were obvious to me, like that my stressful day job – at the unemployment department! – is messing up my adrenals again. It also revealed what I had hoped, which was that my brain chemistry (amino acids) were out of balance – which I very much wanted to hear, because I felt like I was going a little crazy at work and I wanted there to be something simple I could do to smooth that out. I already do tons of personal work in 12-step programs, and yet suddenly things seemed to be going downhill. To me, that means that there’s something biological in the works.

What surprised me a little was both how out of balance I was, and that I had low thyroid function. That was something I had looked at a little bit in the past, and sort of toyed with doing something about – and then dropped it when the first thing I half-heartedly tried didn’t work. And yet it seemed so obvious this time. The first follow-up test for it is to take your temperature three days in a row and see if it is low – but my body temperature is ALWAYS lower than normal. Oho!

I’ve been taking l-tyrosine for it, plus now an over-the-counter thyroid support pill, and it is helping me have much more energy at work. That’s just in the past couple of days; I can’t wait to see what the long-term benefits are like. I’m adding in GABA (another amino acid) as a stress preventative or stress support. I think it prevents me from going into that adrenalized place where I start judging and getting huffy and buying into negative thoughts and enter a downward spiral of tension. But I will tell you all more as it develops! In the meantime… check out that quiz!

That’s the big meme, right? If you just eat fewer calories and/or burn more calories, you will lose weight!

By which, of course, is always meant FAT. Nobody cares about muscle except prizefighters. “It’s all muscle” is up there with “I’m just big-boned” as a common escape from fatphobia.

Well, turns out the link between fat and calories isn’t quite as straightforward as people think. My favorite story in The Diet Cure is a little throwaway anecdote about the author’s neighbor, who is constantly dieting and consumes some 1700 calories a day (mostly diet food) to the author’s over 3,000 (mostly protein and veggies). And yet he weighs far more than she does. AND he cares about that, which I’m not sure she does.

Of course, there are plenty of diets that take what you eat into account… no bread, no dessert, no fat, nothing but lemon juice and cayenne, whatever… with wildly varying levels of “success”.

But even if that works for you, it means you can essentially never go back to those foods – which is part of the reason behind the often-quoted statistic that 90% of diets fail.

Plus, dieting focuses on the wrong place. Any goal weight or size is going to be pretty arbitrary – there’s no one right number for any of us that means we’re healthy, attractive, or whatever our real goal is.

I am convinced that what we should really be doing is exploring what it means for each of us to be healthy. Healthy in terms of what we eat, what we do for fun, how we feel about ourselves and our bodies, the whole shebang– and how to get there.

A healthy size or weight is the size or weight we are when we are living a healthy, balanced, joyful life. And it might change as we learn more about what that means, and that’s okay too.

This is going to be a core part of the holistic food workshops I am creating. Check out that link for more information as it develops! And any feedback is very welcome here.

A follow-up on last post’s G. K. Chesterton quote about the beauty of the pig:

After marveling at it, I read on to find that he goes even further. Chesterton writes,

“You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart. You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship, and as long as he is visible, he will be beautiful… In short he has that fuller, subtler and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking… mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality.”

Doesn’t that just terrify you? Doesn’t it bring up all the mumbling, grumbling, ad-supported ideas about what a terrible world we would live in if more people were fat, and what a horrible state of affairs it is if more people are fat? How it is all going to lead to early death, disease, and dysfunction? How could he have said such a thing?!

Well, I don’t know the context. I came across the quote in a lovely book, “The Good Good Pig“, about an actual pig and “the valuable, life-changing lessons [author Sy Montgomery] and others learned from Christopher Hogwood, a generous soul who just so happened to be a pig.” It notes that Chesterton was musing on his childhood dream of owning a pet pig, but that is all I know.

Of course, what the fatphobic wailing in the media fails to note is that there is nothing wrong with being fat.

Fat is something of a mirage in the first place. There is no dividing line between thin and fat, no point at which we can say we have crossed over. Like money, it is associated with worth – except that with fat, the less of it we have, the more worthy we think we are.

And as with money, there is no satisfactory endpoint – there is either the spacious territory of having a healthy relationship to money or our bodies, and living abundant lives, or there is the driving worry, whether quiet or loud, that we will never have (or lose) enough.

Fat is sometimes a symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle – compulsive overeating, or eating enough but very unhealthy things, or eating unhealthily and never, ever getting any physical exercise – but it is the unhealthy lifestyle that is the problem in these examples. There are people who are considered fat who eat healthily, exercise joyfully, and were born with a larger build. There are, of course, some folks with glandular imbalances too. But there are many people without a psychological or physical care in the world who are considered, by dressmakers or photographers or their anorexic-thinking neighbors, to be fat. The fat is not the problem.

This pig strikes me as laughing at us, and all our ridiculous obsessions with losing weight. What do you think? Is fatness ever a valuable quality? How can and should we associate worth with fat?