| This book came to me highly recommended, and I must confess that I had a personal motive for reading it. I grew up in a fat-phobic household, which is probably not uncommon at all in this culture. But it was a fat-phobic household with two fat family members. One of those family members, my dad, CHOSE to be in the family and ultimately he chose to work his butt off and lost weight. It's a constant effort for him because his body's equilibrium seems to be a bit larger than the CDC tells him it should be. The other family member was my brother, Adam, who died nearly 5 months ago at age 23. He was my best friend. He didn't choose to be born into our family, and he didn't choose to be judged for his weight every day - but he certainly DID believe it. He died believing that his own self worth was diminished because he was obese.
After I lost Adam, I went looking for answers. What happened? What was going on in his head? I think he had a compulsive binge eating problem perhaps. One thing's for sure. He intellectually knew which foods are healthy and which foods are not, and he very much wanted to be thin - yet after he died we found bank statements showing that he was a regular at every fast food drive-thru in town. And at that time he was telling all of his friends and family that he was on a diet.
I wish Adam could have read and believed Health at Every Size before he died. Perhaps he could have read it, but I doubt he would have believed it. How do you suddenly believe a book that tells you it's OK to be YOU when you've spent your entire life wishing you could be anything BUT you? And yet - the book is right. Why should anyone be told by society that they aren't OK and won't be until they can lose weight? Adam was my favorite person in the world and losing 200 pounds wouldn't have made me love him any more or less. All I wanted for him was happiness and health, and that's what Health at Every Size guides its readers to strive for.
Maybe you wonder "How can a book tell people it's OK to be fat and yet also tell them to be healthy?" Well... the book doesn't tell you to gorge on cookies and nachos and then watch TV 10 hours a day. Sure, that's a recipe for getting fat but not one for health (mental or physical).
The premise of the book is that our bodies are pretty darn good at regulating weight. When we need food, our bodies signal hunger. When we've eaten, our bodies signal fullness. And sure, we crave sweets and fat but before the last century, those were crucial to survival! As we evolved, sweets came from ripe fruits, packed with antioxidants and vitamins. It made sense to crave sweets because those ripe fruits were so good for us! It's only recently that we've learned how to strip the sweets away from the vitamins to make refined sugar and processed foods.
Similarly, as we evolved, those who could not store calories effectively starved to death. A body that was good at losing weight was FAR less crucial to survival because starvation was much more common than today's modern environment where we have an overabundance of junk available to us. The result? Bodies that are very good at gaining weight but not so great at losing it.
The take-away message here is that your body has a pretty good idea of how much you should weigh. When you try to diet, your body thinks there's a famine and it might think it's time to pack on a bit of extra weight just in case. That's why some people diet but end up weighing MORE in the end. Rather than fight our bodies, we should TRUST our bodies. And we need to learn how to use our bodies regulatory system so we can allow it to work. When you ignore cues like hunger and fullness, that's where you get into trouble. Health at Every Size gives instructions on HOW to listen to your body's signals.
Another valid point? If diets worked, there wouldn't be so darn many of them. There would be one diet if it worked and anyone who wanted to lose weight could go on that diet and then lose weight. It would be so simple. We wouldn't need an entire industry built up around dieting. Clearly, diets don't work. But when they fail, we tend to blame ourselves instead of blaming the diet. It's time to STOP blaming yourself. If the diet didn't work, it was the diet's fault! And because they don't work, quit dieting!
Beyond that, Health at Every Size tells readers HOW to be healthy. Once you learn to listen to your body's hunger and fullness signals, the book does not recommend a diet of Twinkies and Ho-hos. While it also doesn't make any foods off-limits, the book explains how to choose foods that make you FEEL good.
Bacon has her own version of Michael Pollan's "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" but her version involves the word "Enjoy." Food should be pleasurable! But pay attention not only to how you feel while eating but also to how you feel AFTER eating. If that double bacon cheeseburger tastes GREAT as you gobble it down, fine - but does it make you uncomfortably full and tired afterward? If yes, maybe it wasn't the best choice for lunch. And if you've got a pile of magazines in the bathroom because you're spending a lot of time in there, something in your diet needs to change!
Last, Bacon addresses other lifestyle habits like getting enough sleep, managing stress, and moving for fun (exercise doesn't have to mean going to the gym if you hate the gym). A happy, healthy lifestyle involves more than just food.
All in all, I give this book two thumbs up. It just makes sense. People didn't need diets or weight loss programs or special shakes, pills, or frozen dinners before now. We evolved to regulate our weight without any special science or diet program. But we also evolved alongside whole foods, not the processed stuff available today.
Health at Every Size totally reframes our idea of an "obesity epidemic." If some people's bodies are meant to be larger than what the CDC determines they should be, why do we need a government program to change that? Yet, we DO have a problem. I'd say we have an "unhealthy lifestyle epidemic" - and that includes people of all sizes (thin and fat) who eat crap food, spend their days in front of the TV, etc. So if the government wants to address something - why not work on improving school lunches and PE programs instead of sending kids home with BMI reports to shame the fat ones into losing weight? |
