History rewritten

There's an iconic picture circulating around the web of a group of female firefighters at Pearl Harbor, supposedly taken on December 7, 1941. [It wasn't and here's an article about that.] Nevertheless, the picture, shown below, strikes me as amazing for a couple of reasons.

First, it's of female firefighters at a time when women were still considered the fairer sex. Sure the war changed things, and women who had to step into traditionally male roles proved they could do more than bake cookies and make babies. Nevertheless, it's humbling to see these courageous women at work doing something so few women even do today.

Second, the ethnic diversity strikes me. There is a black woman, a Hawaiin woman and several Caucasian women, all working together during a time when diversity wasn't embraced or mandated as it is today. There's another new perspective for me of a time when I thought things were a certain way, and it turns out maybe they really weren't.

The third thing I notice about the picture also tells me that some of the historical facts we're bombarded with today, just may not be true. The 'fact' I question is that all those years ago people were slim and healthy because they ate fresh whole foods and exercised more. I look at these women, and I see courage and strength, but I don't see bony physiques and slim silhouettes. They're not supermodel shaped, thus evidencing the fact that back before the standard "American diet" took effect and began making everyone fat, women still weren't skinny.

In this related photo you can see it clearly. None of these women is slender. At a time when the fashion was the cinched waist and flouncy hips, these women didn't have an hourglass shape. I wonder how Dr. Oz or all the other weight loss and "health" gurus would deal with them. Eat less and exercise more? Who's got time for that when you're busy protecting the country? Seriously.

I have no doubt there are plenty of photos from this time of the ideal woman with perfect measurements, but I have the feeling she was no more 'average' than the size 0 supermodel is today. This picture shows women living life as it should be lived, not munching rice cakes and sweating on a treadmill or dancersizing. That's how to stay healthy and be real - do what needs to be done. Stop counting calories and fat grams and striving for the perfect BMI and go put out some fires. 

Eating Plan, plan to eat!

Part III of my Trouble losing weight? Lose weight series

I went to the dietician yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to speak to someone who was intelligent and knowledgeable. It’s funny how what a supposed doctor can tell you about weight loss while they’re looking at your blood work is very different from what a dietician can tell you about how to take better care of yourself.


Here’s some of the differences between doctor/PA and dietician:


PA: Cut bread out of your diet

Dietician: Eat two slices of whole grain bread with breakfast and lunch. You need carbs in your diet.


PA: Insulin resistance will turn into diabetes, you must lose weight.

Dietician: Insulin resistance doesn’t always turn into diabetes. You can improve insulin resistance.


PA: Keep a food diary.

Dietician: You don’t need to keep a food diary.


PA: Cut out snacks between meals.

Dietician: You must eat a morning, afternoon and evening snack.


PA: Avoid cheese.

Dietician: With your low cholesterol you can certainly have cheese.


PA: Switch to skim milk.

Dietician: Drink 1% milk, it has less sugar than skim milk.


PA: Change your life to accommodate your diet.

Dietician: Let’s create a food plan that fits into your life.


Now, armed with some sensible and doable ideas to tweak my eating habits, I hope to improve my health, not just drop pounds while I starve myself in order to fit into an ‘ideal’ weight category.

My ultimate advice: Trouble losing weight? Lose your doctor, and find a medical professional who understands health.

Evil Avocados

This is part II of my Trouble Losing Weight? Lose Weight – Series




Yesterday in the mail I got my follow-up paperwork from my farce of a doctor visit this week. Included with my test results was the ubiquitous DIETARY MANAGEMENT PAGE.

The notation at the bottom of the page tells me this list was printed up in 2001 – or maybe 1901. I can’t really tell.

Below the GOALS, which include the specific and intelligently worded: Reduce weight to ideal body weight [because everyone must be IDEAL at all times], is an exhaustive list of BAD FOODS to be avoided.

As expected, I’m to stay away from things like Whole Milk [how’s 40 years away from it, good enough?], Butter, Lard [cause I love a could scoop of lard now and then], Organ meats, [brains anyone?], Fish Roe [cause I can afford caviar], Honey, Candy, Chocolate [never giving that up!] and of course, the dreaded, evil Avocado!

Yes, to lower our fat intake we need to cut out that nasty avocados, which we find scandalously slipped inside dozens of different health food sandwiches. It’s heartening to realize the horrifying obesity epidemic could be solved if only we lowered our intake of avocados, those high fat fruits! I think I may go to the food store today and slap the avocados out of everyone’s hand and tell them how bad, bad, bad avocados are for us. We’re a nation of guacamole guzzlers, and it’s starting to show. We need to stop this frightening dependence on fatty fruits and get out there and start drinking more diet soda!

Stay tuned for Part II of Trouble Losing Weight? Lose Weight, where I plan to document my visit to dietician. Let’s see if she can tell me something I don’t already know about ‘healthy lifestyle changes’.

Trouble losing weight?

Doctor solution: Lose weight

I'm disgusted right now, having just come from a follow-up visit with my psuedo-doctor, [a physician's assistant, since, as a woman, I don't rate seeing an actual doctor].

I visited three weeks ago with a couple of concerns: a feeling of generalized anxiety, a fluttering in my chest at times that made me anxious, a tiredness, a feeling of being overwhelmed, an inability to lose weight despite numerous 'healthy lifestyle changes', and just a general not well feeling.

Psuedo-doctor's first step was to prescribe vitamins, calcium supplements and Claritan [for a mild sinus irritation.] She then ordered blood and urine work, which I went for and today I went back for the results.

Well, my bad cholesterol is amazingly low!
My good cholesterol is also low. [How do you fix that? More exercise!]
My blood sugar is a little high [egads, I'm pre-diabetic - so now no other symptoms or concerns are of any importance. I could have had a broken leg and it wouldn't matter - I'm overweight and I have high sugar [9 points above normal] so therefore nothing else is of any value other than I LOSE WEIGHT!

Hold on, wasn't an inability to lose weight despite years of dieting and lifetsyle changes ONE OF MY COMPLAINTS?

Why, yes, it was.

What does the psuedo-doctor say? Here's a brief, disheartening transcript between me and the skinny little medical robot:

Her: You should cut out starches, pastas, sweets, white bread, white rice etc,.

Me: I explained to you already that I've done that. It made no difference.

Her: I'm sending you to Weight Watchers, people have lost 70 or 80 pounds on that. You should go with someone for moral support.

Me: I've been on diets since I was 17. They DO NOT work. I've counted points, calories, fat grams, etc. I've cut soda, white bread, salt etc. out of my diet and seen no weight loss.

Her: It's not just for weight loss, it's for a healthy lifestyle.

Me: I'm doing healthy lifestyle changes. They're not making a difference.

Her: How often do you exercise?

Me: I was doing it every day, it made no difference.

Her: But how about now?

Me: I'm TOO TIRED to excercise. That's my problem!

Her: Well, you can't just give up.

Me: Why not? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting diffrerent results is the definition of insanity.

Her: I can send you to a dietician. Maybe they can tell you something you're not doing.

Me: Fine. Whatever.

Her: I'd like to see you in three months and let's see if we can get that weight down, because we don't want you to become diabetic.

Me: I thought it wasn't about weight, it was about a healthy lifestyle.

Her: I'll see you in three months.

Me: No. You won't.

Shed your kids – for weight loss?

Here’s a clunker of an article by Emily Leamon at Be Well Philly, which provides us with the snippet of wisdom that having kids makes us fat. Ye Gods! So the only way to stop the dreaded obesity epidemic may be to simply stop the human race. If we can avoid having kids, maybe we can avoid packing on the pounds later in life.


The tragedy of this article isn’t that it quotes useless BMI statistics, [which is does], or this ridiculous quote:

Fathers gain more weight than mothers, on average, likely because their lifestyle choices—smoking, drinking—are impacted most. As fathers give up those habits, they turn to food, researchers suggest, which leads to more pounds over time.

slyly suggesting if those dads just kept on drinking and smoking they would stay thin, but that Ms. Leamon’s only solution to the ‘problem’ is to “try, oh try to stay in shape before you dive into parenthood.” Such sage advice! Especially when the article itself touts the magical age for childbearing to be 26 – pick a different age in either direction and you’re doomed to pork up apparently.

I could have saved the researchers a lot of time and effort and told them why parents gain more weight than childless people. The answers are simple and clear to anyone with kids. Stress! When you can spend all your time smoking, drinking and doing recreational drugs as the source article mentions prominently as being the reason why fathers especially gain more weight, and you don’t have to be responsible for the life of another human being, it’s a lot easier to stay thin. Having less time to cook and shop and less money to spend on those suspiciously more expensive “healthy foods” is also a contributing factor.

Let’s face it, kids are expensive and time consuming and they impact a person’s ability to stay focused on the all important weight of their bodies. The takeaway from both of these articles is – if you want to stay thin, forget kids, stick to the smoking and drinking and substance abuse ‘cause lord knows it won’t help you after you have them.

Complaints are lies...

…and bad manners besides.



During last week’s episode of Dr. Who on BBC America, I was treated to a commercial for a miraculous new weight loss product called Lipozene.

According to the commercial, Lipozene is the answer for people who have had problems losing weight and finally want something that works. Oh goody!

I decided to look up Lipozene and find out what the hype was all about – the very hype that the Lipozene people don’t want us to believe.

I won’t post a link to the Lipozene site, but I will tell you that Lipozene claims to be an ‘all natural remedy’ used for generations in Japan that ‘acts as a sponge in your intestines.’ That’s so much better than all those nasty lifestyle changes that can be damaging to your system.

Don’t worry, Lipozene has no side effects! It’s been clinically proven to work and best of all, if you come across any complaints or negative reviews on the Internet don’t believe them because [and here’s a quote]:



• Many people who submit complaints to these supposedly unbiased review sites say they were ripped off or that the product didn’t work. The fact is that most of them never received the product because their credit cards were declined, or they never ordered it in the first place. Our customer service department has done the research to prove the facts behind these Lipozene complaints.

Yep, anyone who has a bad report about the product, probably never really bought it in the first place! They’re just lying. Isn’t that rude?

Obviously you can trust someone who tells you all complaints about them must be lies. So there you go. A new and effective way to lose weight, safely and naturally. Stock up while the lies supplies last!

Got milk? Oh no!

I’m of two opinions on this article by Paul John Scott at DETAILS – one, kudos for an article that highlights the controversial truth that diets don’t work and calorie and fat restriction are not the answer to long-term weight loss. A raspberry for the tired cliché that you can blame your weight on one thing – [ur doin’ it wrong] by drinking skim milk.


As someone who was taught from an early age to revile whole milk, I’ve often wondered if my relationship with dairy products has been a good one or a bad one. Years of lactose intolerance led me to avoid milk for a long time and feel guilty about it. ‘Milk does a body good’ you know. Learning about milk’s dark, dirty secrets – the hormone and antibiotic abuse – assuaged a lot of that guilt and allowed me to reduce milk to nothing more than an occasional cooking ingredient. [Ice cream doesn’t count in my book – I don’t care what it’s made of].

Regardless of the findings of any study, I don’t plan to add milk [whole or skim] back to my diet in a big way because the dairy industry is, for the most part, vile. I don’t see legions of skimmers making the switch either because our society is too terrified of fat to embrace whole milk again after decades of believing it was the root of all evil.

I wonder how long it will be before whole milk makes a comeback as a weight loss secret.

Back with a vengeance

I’ve seriously neglected this blog for a lot of reasons, chief among them the feeling that it was becoming just a place to rant and I wasn’t sure how much negativity I wanted to spout into cyberspace.

On the other hand, I do need a place to vent about things that irk me, especially the things in cyberspace that irk me. So I’m back.

What got me started on the need to vent was this puff piece I stumbled across by Susan Cheever of SELF magazine, who opines that being nice can make people fat, because apparently her lack of assertiveness resulted in weight gain and therefore everyone should learn to be mean in order to lose weight.

Like most of the media-drugged masses, Cheever thinks she’s found that simple trick everyone craves in the race to weight loss. She’s noticed that the nice people she knows are overweight, the jerks are skinny – hence, ipso facto, being nice must make one fat.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Isn’t it?

She goes on to explain how learning to say ‘no’, and subsequently being a bit rude and self-centered shaved 25 pounds off her, and also got her invited to fewer parties. I suppose it’s better to be thin than to be liked.

What’s interesting is that Cheever let’s her readers in on the real reason for her weight problem in the beginning of her article. It has nothing to do with her kindness or sensitivity, but her dysfunctional family attitudes about food and weight.

Everyone is so busy blaming obesity on the wrong things – we’re too nice, we have fat friends, we watch too much television, we eat too much fruit, blah, blah, blah. Let’s face it, we all know the real reason the population is gaining so much weight – it’s because the diet industry wants us to. How would they make billions of dollars if we were all as thin as they promise us we can be?

Diet books, diet shakes, diet gurus, diet reality shows – all encourage dysfunctional eating. Lose weight, gain it back, starve yourself, gorge yourself, strip out nutrients from your diet, overeat to compensate, fill yourself up with pills and shakes and bulking agents, rice cakes and Slim Shots, and when you gain it all back, someone else is there to tell you the only reason you failed was because you did it wrong and you just have to follow THEIR diet plan for lasting success.

I’m tired of it all, so the gloves are off. I’m done being nice – not because I expect it will help me lose weight [it won’t] but because there needs to be a counterpoint to all the blathering about how easy it is to lose weight if you just know the right thing to do or the right way to be.

Dieting flip flops

No, this post isn't about shoes that help you lose weight - though I'm told they do exist.

This about another dieting myth busted - or a new dieting myth created, I'm not sure which.

According to this article posted at MSNBC.com the long-held belief that slow and steady weight loss is best, is just a bunch of hooey. Then again, aren't most weight loss tricks and tips just hooey?

Turns out researchers at the University of Florida have conducted a study which shows [or perhaps has been made to show?] that women who lose weight faster will have a greater chance of keeping the weight off than those who lose weight more slowly.

I guess this is great news for all the quick start diet programs, you know, the ones that doctors have been telling us for years are no good because quick loss cannot be sustained?

Of course the lead researcher of the study declines to say for sure whether the study is actually conclusive. I wonder if perhaps women who lose weight faster are more likely to keep the weight off because they've had greater success and are therefore more committed to weight loss than those who have lost weight more slowly. Is this a true scientific cause for more sustainable weight loss, or just a flimsy cause and effect experiment disguised as a research study?

I guess we'll never know, but I can bet we'll see an increase in 'quick start' weight loss programs based on this study.