Cross-Post: Bingeing on Idiocy

All fat people overeat in the minds of people prejudiced against fat. They spend hours a day doing nothing but lounging about and gorging on junk food. No evidence to the contrary will ever be enough.

There are people with genuine difficulty with overeating, either with or without purging. Such people will binge on “comfort” foods for hours, consuming thousands of calories in one sitting. They will display other symptoms of eating disordered behavior, like secrecy, withdrawing from friends and family, measuring oneself, and so on.

However, in order to be diagnosed with a problem involving overeating, you need to establish that the patient, in fact, overeats.

So how is overeating defined? How many calories constitute a binge?

Here is overeating as described by the Mayo Clinic.

Here is another discussion of binge eating from Kids’ Health. (Warning: Fat hate ahead.)

Type “How many calories constitutes a binge?” into Google and you will find people asking this same question on message boards.

A valid point can be made about the act of bingeing being less about calories and more about process. Did you eat way more than normal in a short period of time? Were you secretive and guilty about it? Did you feel sick after? Was it a special occasion or is this something that happens regularly? All of this is very, very true.

However, there is a pit fall to not having a ball park calorie count and that is that it is all too easy misclassify someone as having a bingeing problem. Basically anyone that looks fat or who has gained weight is assumed to have overeaten.

Of course, naturally thin people and and do binge eat. Assuming that binge eating is a disease of fat people ignores the problem thin patients are in and marginalizes their experience. It makes it hard for them to get competent help or even get people to believe them.

This is still assuming that we can actually accurately diagnose binge eating disorder whether you are fat or thin, but especially if you are fat.

Our culture has turned eating into a sin and a chore, such that people who “admit” (like you admit to a crime) enjoying food are seen as having a weakness. People who overeat on holidays or who plow through a pint of ice cream just because they feel like it sometimes feel pressure to act ashamed of it. They preface their admission with statements like, “I know it’s bad, but…” or “It’s not like I do it all the time, but…” It is looked down on, especially for women, to fill their plates or ask for seconds. Forget about dessert unless it’s really a special occasion and you get the low-cal variety. There is the constant fear of looking like a pig.

Now that our society has significantly lowered the threshold at which ordinary eating behavior becomes piggish, how do we diagnosed someone as having a genuine binge eating disorder?

All my life, I was taller, heavier, and more muscular than most other kids my age. I also ate well. I ate a lot and I ate many different things. I felt no shame about my eating or my size. Somehow, I had failed to internalize gender norms about body and food, and my mother and sister sought desperately to change that. They glared at me when I asked for food, especially sweets, or when I asked for seconds or thirds. Over the years, I continued to eat, continued to grow, and continued to disobey commands to be properly embarassed at myself. This, naturally, led to my hiding my eating from them but eating 100% normally in front of others. In their minds, I had a “problem.” I “couldn’t stop” eating and I hid it because I was “secretly” ashamed. My size was proof positive that I had this problem. So their attempts to intervene only intensified.

Eventually, I became convinced of it myself. I had a problem with overeating because my family treated me as though I did, and when I tried to resist that treatment, that only reaffirmed it in their minds. Plus, I was getting larger all the time (during my teen years, which is of course normal). I started seeking help for my “problem” only to find out that I had no problem. My mother and sister had the problem, but since I admitted to mine, now I have that stain on my character.* See? Even she admits it! Yet she won’t do anything about it. She must *really* be sick!

When I hear someone confess to a problem with overeating, especially if it’s a fat person, I question it. I think our society sets fat people up for a self-fulfilling prophecy. We shame them from eating normally so that they must do it in secret. If they eat publicly, they must eat restrictively, which sets them up to binge later on. We encourage them to feel a deep sense of shame for eating at all. So I’m not convinced that a lot of people diagnosed with BED actually have it. I’m sure they believe they have it, but that is society’s fault, not theirs.

So what exactly in binge eating?

Who the hell knows?

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*No eating disorder should be a stain on anyone’s character, but in the minds of many people, that’s exactly what it is. I just chose language that reflects that attitude. I do not espouse itmyself.

Are you SURE you want to follow that advice?

Tags

food issues, humor, skepticism

I’m not feelin’ it today, so I won’t do an in-depth post about food processing and myths about chemistry (although I WANT to). I’ll keep it short and sweet and give you some advice.

Conventional wisdom: If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.

So…

You should never eat anything outside of your ethnicity because you probably can’t pronounce it.

Unless of course you are fluent in every language on Earth, which no one is, in which case  you can eat anything you want even if it is chemically altered, prepared in an unsavory way, or is just plain icky. I just hope there is no indigenous 7-syllable word for human brains, which was once a popular food item in Papua New Guinea. Nope, no health risks (or moral qualms) with eating human brains.

If you are illiterate, you must starve to death.

Anyone without a basic science education must starve to death also.

If you are a scientist and CAN understand all those long scary labels, you too can eat anything you want…even something caustic, flammable, radioactive, or otherwise toxic and it totally won’t hurt you.

Most importantly of all, don’t drink dihydrogen monoxide. It contains no nutritional value, causes burns, and is deadly.

The problem is that you can’t live three days without it. It’s water.:) Check out my sidebar for more information about the deadly compound that is water.

Does my advice sound silly? That’s because it is.

I have  a major issue with the common wisdom that if you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it. Rather than encourage people to learn about what’s in their food, chemistry and all, including foods that are made at home or that are allegedly natural, it encourages technophobia, chemophobia, and ignorance. This mentality spurs people to adopt policies that endanger public health, such as the campaign against irradiation, a technique that can virtually eliminate food-bourne illness.

I bet if someone reviewed the ingredients in your home-cooked food and had to explain it to other scientists, you would hear way more scary scientific names than you ever wanted to.

Know your food. Know your chemistry. Resist.

Are students *supposed* to fail physical fitness tests?

Tags

deception in science, healthism, obesity panic

The first answer is yes, a certain subset of students will always fail physical fitness tests because they are simply not athletic enough to pass. Few people would deny that some people are just naturally gifted at music and others are not. Someone who is as musically untalented as can be can learn the notes on the staff and maybe learn to play nursery rhymes like Hot Cross Buns or Mary Had a Little Lamb with one hand. Beyond that, we accept that music just “isn’t their thing.” We certainly won’t enroll him upon penalty of death (or unemployment) if he doesn’t pass university level music courses, prove membership in a music group, and obtain virtuoso status by the end of 30 days.

For some reason, though, this basic concept is lost when it comes to athletics. Instead, we choose to believe that everyone can be in top physical shape and a near-natural athlete if  only they weren’t so lazy. But that’s not true. I will once again credit Sandy at JFS for the idea that components of physical fitness is primarily hereditary. (See MIA-All Sides  of “Healthy” Physical Activity and Paradoxes Compel Us to Think Part I). I knew, of course, that athletics came naturally to some people and not others, but I wasn’t aware of just how crucial heredity is to fitness. No matter how much we demean and run physically unfit kids into the ground, they will never be physically fit enough for those standards. They weren’t *meant* to be athletes.

Aside from holding these children to a standard that’s impossible for them to achieve, physical fitness testing serves to stigmatize them in the eyes of their peers. Have you ever been the last person to finish a mile run? Consistently? Long after everyone else has finished, even though everyone with half a brain knows that a lot of them cheated? Point made.

That’s not the point of this post, though. I am now thoroughly convinced that, nowadays,  physical fitness tests are designed so that *most* children, including obviously athletic children, will fail them.

I’ll never forget physical fitness testing during my senior year of high school when the government changed the rules for the 1-minute curl-up challenge. Before, someone would hold your feet down and when the teacher yelled “Go!” You did as many sit-ups as you could in one minute. If you did an improper sit-up, like when you lean to the side to prop yourself up or don’t sit up all the way to your knees, the person holding your feet would skip it. At the end, the number of proper curl-ups you did in that minute would be recorded. I am not athletic by any stretch of the imagination, but I usually scored in the 20s and 30s on that test.

During the 2007-2008 school year, something changed. Everything else was the same, but one thing changed that was both crucial and so shameless that I don’t know why more people aren’t coming to the conclusion that I did.

You were no longer *allowed* to do as many sit-ups as you could in one minute.

Excuse me?

That’s right. There was now a three-strikes rule. If you did up to three improper curl-ups at any time during the test, you were forced to drop out.

In other words, a varsity athlete that can do 40 curl-ups in one minute, but who does three bad curl-ups at the beginning because he was just getting started, is now only capable of five curl-ups a minute.

That’s exactly what they do, too. They won’t say, “This person is normally capable of 40 sit-ups but he struck out of our stupid game.” They will say that this person, literally, can only do five curl-ups in a minute.

Millions of schoolchildren have taken that test, and most have probably struck out.

How do you think obesity scaremongers will react to that? And how many people know, or will think to ask about, what really happened in that gymnasium?