health at any size

Subtitle: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body

Recommended to me by: Kate Harding’s blog post The Fantasy of Being Thin

The introduction begins:

“Did you ever notice that the very same magazines that tell you each and every month how to lose weight, burn more calories, fight the flab! […] will turn right around and tell you to love your body? And then, adding insult to injury, tell you that confidence is the sexiest thing in the world?

And did you ever just want to light every one of those magazines on fire?

We’re right there with you.”

The whole book is like sitting down to tea with chatty, warm, kind friends who eagerly share their smarts and personal stories because they care about you. It’s a delight to read.

First they work through the evidence that diets simply don’t work. Even if you call them “lifestyle changes” or a spiritual practice, food restriction does not result in sustained weight loss over 5 years for 95% of people.

They introduce Health At Every Size (HAES) – making the best choices you can for food and movement at whatever size your body likes to be.

They briefly address depression and its compounding effect on negative body image and advocate for seeking treatment for ongoing depression symptoms.

They encourage finding body-positive doctors because you deserve good healthcare at every size, and “you should lose weight” is not healthcare. Also body-positive friends, because why hang out with people who subtly or overtly put you (or themselves) down all the time.

To find new friends, and replace all the time spent dieting and obsessing about food, try out new hobbies.

And more! Highly recommended for anyone who struggles with body image.

Kate Harding’s blog (archived)

Marianne Kirby’s blog

Available at Powell’s Books.

Subtitle: How To Eat, How To Raise Good Eaters, How To Cook

Recommended to me by: Michelle, The Fat Nutritionist

This book is full of wise, kind advice for adults trying to improve their eating competence. It contains advice for feeding children, like Child of Mine, as well as advice for solo adults, “families of one.” There are recipes, shopping lists, and nutritional facts, some of which contradict what “everyone knows.” For example, eggs, red meat, and full-fat yogurt are all valid, nutritious foods.

The core of the book defines eating competence:

• Trust yourself and your body around eating
• Honor your appetite
• Eat as much as you want
• Feed yourself faithfully

Ellyn Satter emphasizes a gradual, mindful approach to changing our eating. The book contains reassuring stories about small steps toward eating competence, each one meant to establish self-trust rather than authoritarian rules.

I skimmed in and out of this book, lacking the time and focus to take it all in at once. I plan to digest it a little at a time, in small steps.

Available at Powell’s Books.

Subtitle: Feeding with Love and Good Sense

Recommended to me by: Michelle, The Fat Nutritionist

I want to learn more about healthy eating, so I looked up books at the library by Ellyn Satter, and this one came in first, which is why I read a book about feeding babies when I don’t have one.

I like Satter’s firm imperative to respect and trust a child’s physical autonomy. She says over and over that children will choose the foods they need and balance their food intake over a week even if a single day’s food does not look nutritionally balanced. Parents control what food is offered when, and children control what and how much they choose to eat. She also emphasizes that children come in different sizes and trying to control their eating to make them larger or smaller simply doesn’t work.

I hadn’t realized that eating is a set of physical skills that each baby has to learn. It requires coordinating all those jaw muscles and the swallow reflex, as well as learning to tolerate a variety of flavors and textures. Satter recommends a patient, gradual approach to teaching children these skills, with a firm (there’s that word again) expectation that the child will share mealtimes with the parents and learn to eat the offered foods eventually. She recommends fixed meal and snack times, with no “panhandling” for food in between.

All Satter’s advice is couched in firm terms. Don’t feed a baby honey for the first year because it might contain botulism spores. Don’t feed a baby wheat cereal for the first year because it might trigger gluten intolerance which is inconvenient. Do feed a baby barley cereal because it’s a more rarely used grain so it’s okay if the baby becomes intolerant of that. (She seems blithely unaware that barley contains gluten.)

I’m not a child and I’m not feeding a child, so I’m not sure how much of this book applies to me. I plan to read one of her books about eating for adults. At the same time, I find myself resistant to her firmness. We had family meals growing up, and that wasn’t a guarantee of healthy eating for me. My mother was eternally on a weight-loss diet, so there were other issues going on. I kept thinking there are more right ways to eat than Satter acknowledges, even while I appreciated her emphasis on autonomy and respect.

Available at Powell’s Books.

This dry, technical book provides a much-needed survey of scientific results about weight-loss dieting, most of which don’t make it to mainstream media nor public consciousness. Vignettes about the participants in a 2 year dieting study add a veneer of characterization and plot.

Scientifically shown in controlled and reviewed studies:

• Every body has a preferred weight, within about a 20 pound range.
• Bodies already at their preferred weight react radically differently to extra calories than bodies below their preferred weight. This is a strong reason for the rebound effect after a weight-loss diet. It is also a refutation of “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” which is often used to judge people’s food choices and body sizes.
• Most people find it physically impossible to lose more than 10% of their body weight and keep it off. This is not the result of a character flaw, nor “not trying hard enough.”
• On average, people who are moderately “overweight” by current standards are healthier and live longer than people who are at or under currently recommended weights. These studies were intensely challenged by many people invested in the obesity “epidemic.”
• Both increasing height and increasing weight are correlated with more prosperous societies. Perhaps plentiful food allows people to reach the high end of their genetic range for height and weight.

Any book where I start skimming rather than reading doesn’t get posted to this blog. This book narrowly escaped that fate. I did skim a couple of chapters about the history of weight-loss dieting, but the careful scientific reporting drew me back in.

I highly recommend reading this book if you need support to accept your body as it is rather than battling yourself with weight-loss diets.

Available at Powell’s Books.