The F*ck It Diet. Caroline Dooner

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ (like Weight Watchers and SlimFast), pharmaceutical and medical companies that make weight-loss drugs, supplements, or procedures, and any other company selling beauty and “health.” These companies thrive on people believing that they are addicted to food, and that weight loss is the answer to all their problems. And they benefit from all of us feeling insecure, hating our bodies, and believing that we are just five pounds away from becoming the woman we are meant to beeeeeeee, and at the same time five pounds away in the other direction, from destroying our health.

      No matter what they want you to believe, these are businesses, not philanthropic charities. They do not care about you. They make no promise to do no harm. And these businesses each make hundreds of millions because their products and solutions don’t work long-term. Because if they did, people would buy one book, or one membership, and become “cured.” Then the companies would lose that customer and revenue stream.

      It may seem like weight-loss companies sprung up in response to an “obesity epidemic,” but when you actually look at the timeline, the opposite is arguably more true. The “obesity epidemic” only came around in the mid-1980s—after people had already been spending decades using cigarettes as appetite suppressants, using amphetamines, ephedra, and Dexatrim, the grapefruit diet of the 1930s, and the cabbage soup diet of the 1950s. Weight Watchers started in the 1960s, and SlimFast came around in the 1970s. But the number of “obese” Americans didn’t soar until the 1980s and 1990s, when it doubled among adults in the United States.¹⁸ We all assume it’s because of our portion sizes and sedentary lifestyles, but the 1980s and ’90s were when exercise became mainstream, and low-fat and diet foods and fake sugar were all the rage. Then low-carb became popular, but “obesity” has continued to rise despite all of our dieting. Do you see how this doesn’t entirely add up? Our collective dieting became more and more widespread first, and collective weights have only risen after, likely because of, and in response to, our dieting and fucked-up eating.

      Beauty, health, and weight-loss companies have been telling women what is acceptable and attractive since marketing companies have existed. And we’ve always been suckers for it. We all want to be beautiful, and of course we do when we are taught how important it is for our future happiness, career, love life, personal Instagram lifestyle brand, whatever. But diets and body dissatisfaction are also more likely part of the cause of rising weight set points, not the cure. Dieting is directly related to people feeling more and more out of control with food.

      But companies who sell weight loss have always been seen as the good guys. They want to help us become thin and healthy and happy! Weight Watchers is trying to rebrand because they just want us to live our best lives! Fuck no. They don’t care about you. Don’t blindly accept that they exist to save us from ourselves. They have always had a vested interest in perpetuating our deep cultural bias against weight, and creating products and programs that only work temporarily so you keep coming back again and again.

      A scary truth is that companies that sell weight-loss programs and drugs also have a lot of power at the policy-making level and often fund the studies being used by the medical community. And many weight-loss drug companies sponsor doctors and public health initiatives. One example is our reliance on the bullshit BMI standard.

      BMI takes no actual health factors into account. It can’t tell you anything about your blood pressure, your glucose levels, your hormones, your metabolism, your strength, your stamina, your bone density, your cholesterol, your immunity, your cellular respiration . . . nothing. It’s literally just a math equation: weight in relation to height, and it was first published by a life insurance company in 1959 as a way of explaining their rates. This was criticized by scientists because the equation it was based on was never meant to be used for individual diagnosis.

      But doctors and insurance companies liked the simplicity of the equation, and so the BMI scale became widely used in 1985 by the National Institutes of Health. Then in 1998, the World Health Organization relied on the International Obesity Task Force to create updated BMI recommendations. And at the time, the two biggest funders of the International Obesity Task Force were the pharmaceutical companies that had the only weight-loss drugs on the market. The task force changed the BMI cutoffs on a whim, and overnight millions of Americans switched from being “normal weight” to “overweight.”¹⁹ Thanks a lot, lobbyists.

      The whole thing is arbitrary, because many studies have found that higher BMIs actually have lower mortality rates.²⁰ And many studies have shown that weight loss or too much exercise has been associated with poorer health, higher stress hormones, and increased mortality.²¹ And still, people are told they’re unhealthy based on their BMI, even if their health is otherwise perfectly fine. It’s just assumed. Oh, you’re in the overweight category? You must be unhealthy.

      We can easily compare the diet industrial complex (or “Big Diet”) to the military industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Oil, or Big Tobacco. These are all made up of powerful companies who tend to care way more about profit than anyone’s well-being, safety, or the future of the planet, and who have the resources to sway both public opinion and policies that benefit their own interests. In her book Dispensing with the Truth, Alicia Mundy calls it “Obesity, Inc.” and talks about the million-dollar funding that Weight Watchers and other groups contributed to Shape Up America!, an organization that was part of a strategy to turn obesity into a disease (!!!) so it could be “treated” by the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries. That’s one reason why I keep putting “obesity” in quotes. It was created by lobbyists.

      Our cultural weight bias is so deeply entrenched that even the scientific community isn’t immune to it. Bias has the ability to skew the way people interpret and share data; it’s called publication bias. Results can be marginalized by the scientific establishment, or even by the researchers themselves, because they don’t fit with what is considered to be the truth at the time.²² Scientists’ reputations are at stake when they publish data, and scientists who find results that don’t fit with current beliefs have been frozen out of positions, funding, or committees.

      Not only that, but most of the studies on weight and obesity that we hear about are ones that are funded by these pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies. Even ones touted by doctors and the government are funded by Big Diet. And when the results don’t tell the companies what they want to hear, the companies just ignore the studies altogether.

      Drug companies also use tens of millions of dollars to lobby for the approval of drugs that have previously not been approved (because they are dangerous or simply don’t work). Drug companies also gave lots of money to medical groups and doctors so they would encourage their patients to use diet drugs.²³ In the UK, the National Obesity Forum was partially sponsored by a number of pharmaceutical companies that just happened to manufacture the very drugs that the doctors were suggesting to combat the “obesity epidemic.”²⁴ This is a huge conflict of interest, but this is a consistent phenomenon with big businesses—Big Diet is no exception.

      Basically . . . Big Diet is not on your side. It never has been. And not only that, it’s all as corrupt as the oil companies back in the 1950s paying off scientists to claim that lead gas wasn’t bad for us (hellooooo lead poisoning!), and those cigarette ads kindly teaching us that most doctors smoked Camels.

      I’m not sharing this information to depress you—I want to empower you. In order to break free from our fucked-up relationship to food and our bodies, we need to start seeing through the bullshit fed to us. We need to start being our own advocates, in the doctor’s office and when people start making hyped-up claims about weight loss and health. Anyone who tries to heal their eating without dealing with the elephant in the room—our own weight stigma against ourselves—will not be able to find real freedom and intuition with food. It’s all too connected.

СКАЧАТЬ