#and it’s not like i interact with paleo stuff to terribly often? my friend does so im at most a mild spectator

[spider-gets-inspired]

thinking about this like, mixture of excitement and grief i’ve been better able to articulate after watching prehistoric planet.

Excitement to see some truly believable, wonderful depictions of these animals and what they were really like. Smiling at easter eggs of the planet’s future in their colors and patterns.

But also this distinct feeling of grief, knowing that unlike most animal documentaries, these ones are long gone. Their fate is inevitable, and we know their story eventually ends with a new era. But it still matters that they lived! It still matters that we might see them struggle yet persist, if only for a little bit. And it matters to see they really were just like any other animal. Especially looking at the pterosaurs, i feel this distinct feeling of loss, knowing they’re one of only a handful of families of animals to use self propelled flight, and that they were just so good at being able to take off quickly and efficiently, and that they were around for so long before us! It feels like we barely missed them. I can almost feel this feeling that maybe in past life, maybe i did know them. Maybe i saw something like this, as i watch these faithful recreations and feel this sense of nostalgia for something i reasonably haven’t seen as a human being before.

It’s a weird, smiling grief. One that makes me say, “Hey, it’s weird you guys aren’t around anymore.”

[delphinidin4]

 Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time—an 11-point rise since 1990. Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat. 

...

 I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families.

Chances of a woman classified as obese achieving a “normal” weight:.008%

SOURCE: AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, 2015

Diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism

“As a kid, I thought that fat people were just lonely and sad—almost like these pathetic lost causes. So I want to show that we get to experience love, too. I’m not some 'fat friend' or some dude's chubby chasing dream. I'm genuinely happy. I just wish I'd known how possible that was when I was a kiddo.”— CORISSA ENNEKING

“If you looked at anything other than my weight,” Enneking says now, “I had an eating disorder. And my doctor was congratulating me.”

...

This phenomenon is not merely anecdotal. Doctors have shorter appointments with fat patients and show less emotional rapport in the minutes they do have. Negative words—“noncompliant,” “overindulgent,” “weak willed”—pop up in their medical histories with higher frequency. ... In 2011, the Sun-Sentinel polled OB-GYNs in South Florida and discovered that 14 percent had barred all new patients weighing more than 200 pounds.

...

When Joy Cox, an academic in New Jersey, was 16, she went to the hospital with stomach pains. The doctor didn’t diagnose her dangerously inflamed bile duct, but he did, out of nowhere, suggest that she’d get better if she stopped eating so much fried chicken. “He managed to denigrate my fatness and my blackness in the same sentence,” she says.

“There is so much agency taken from marginalized groups to mute their voices and mask their existence. Being depicted as a female CEO—one who is also black and fat—means so much to me. It is a representation of the reclamation of power in the boardroom, classroom and living room of my body. I own all of this.”— JOY COX

Physicians are often required, in writing, to prove to hospital administrators and insurance providers that they have brought up their patient’s weight and formulated a plan to bring it down—regardless of whether that patient came in with arthritis or a broken arm or a bad sunburn. Failing to do that could result in poor performance reviews, low ratings from insurance companies or being denied reimbursement if they refer patients to specialized care. 

...

Three separate studies have found that fat women are more likely to die from breast and cervical cancers than non-fat women, a result partially attributed to their reluctance to see doctors and get screenings. Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.

...

If Sonya ever forgets that she is fat, the world will remind her. She has stopped taking the bus, she tells me, because she can sense the aggravation of the passengers squeezing past her. Sarah, the tech CEO, tenses up when anyone brings bagels to a work meeting. If she reaches for one, are her employees thinking, “There goes the fat boss”? If she doesn’t, are they silently congratulating her for showing some restraint?

Emily says it’s the do-gooders who get to her, the women who stop her on the street and tell her how brave she is for wearing a sleeveless dress on a 95-degree day.

Ratio of soda and candy ads seen by black children compared to white children: 2:1

SOURCE: UCONN RUDD CENTER FOR FOOD POLICY AND OBESITY, 2015

This is how fat-shaming works: It is visible and invisible, public and private, hidden and everywhere at the same time. Research consistently finds that larger Americans (especially larger women) earn lower salaries and are less likely to be hired and promoted.... What’s worse, only a few cities and one state (nice work, Michigan) officially prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of weight.

...Paradoxically, as the number of larger Americans has risen, the biases against them have become more severe. More than 40 percent of Americans classified as obese now say they experience stigma on a daily basis, a rate far higher than any other minority group. And this does terrible things to their bodies. According to a 2015 study, fat people who feel discriminated against have shorter life expectancies than fat people who don't. “These findings suggest the possibility that the stigma associated with being overweight,” the study concluded, “is more harmful than actually being overweight.”

...

Kids as young as 3 describe their larger classmates with words like “mean,” “stupid” and “lazy.”

And yet, despite weight being the number one reason children are bullied at school, America’s institutions of public health continue to pursue policies perfectly designed to inflame the cruelty. TV and billboard campaigns still use slogans like “Too much screen time, too much kid” and “Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid.” Cat Pausé, a researcher at Massey University in New Zealand, spent months looking for a single public health campaign, worldwide, that attempted to reduce stigma against fat people and came up empty. In an incendiary case of good intentions gone bad, about a dozen states now send children home with “BMI report cards,” an intervention unlikely to have any effect on their weight but almost certain to increase bullying from the people closest to them. [I have a friend who had to take a paper home in high school telling her family she was obese. Now, in her late twenties, she’s still dealing with the emotional scars.]

...

The effects of weight bias get worse when they’re layered on top of other types of discrimination. A 2012 study found that African-American women are more likely to become depressed after internalizing weight stigma than white women. Hispanic and black teenagers also have significantly higher rates of bulimia. And, in a remarkable finding, rich people of color have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than poor people of color—the opposite of what happens with white people. One explanation is that navigating increasingly white spaces, and increasingly higher stakes, exerts stress on racial minorities that, over time, makes them more susceptible to heart problems.

...

But perhaps the most unique aspect of weight stigma is how it isolates its victims from one another. For most minority groups, discrimination contributes to a sense of belongingness, a community in opposition to a majority. Gay people like other gay people; Mormons root for other Mormons. Surveys of higher-weight people, however, reveal that they hold many of the same biases as the people discriminating against them. In a 2005 study, the words obese participants used to classify other obese people included gluttonous, unclean and sluggish.

...

Fat people, though, never get a moment of declaring their identity, of marking themselves as part of a distinct group. They still live in a society that believes weight is temporary, that losing it is urgent and achievable, that being comfortable in their bodies is merely “glorifying obesity.” This limbo, this lie, is why it’s so hard for fat people to discover one another or even themselves. “No one believes our It Gets Better story,” says Tigress Osborn, the director of community outreach for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “You can’t claim an identity if everyone around you is saying it doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.”

“I think some folks are genuinely surprised that a man who looks like him is with a woman like me. As a fat person, I'm very aware of when I'm being stared at—and I have never been looked at this much before. So I thought that taking the photo in public would be a good idea. It feels subversive to show my fat body doing regular stuff the world believes I don't or can't do.”— EMILY

Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled in 73 countries and increased in 113 others. And in all that time, no nation has reduced its obesity rate. Not one.

...

The problem is that in America, like everywhere else, our institutions of public health have become so obsessed with body weight that they have overlooked what is really killing us: our food supply. Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.

For more than a decade now, researchers have found that the quality of our food affects disease risk independently of its effect on weight. Fructose, for example, appears to damage insulin sensitivity and liver function more than other sweeteners with the same number of calories. People who eat nuts four times a week have 12 percent lower diabetes incidence and a 13 percent lower mortality rate regardless of their weight. All of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety get thrown off by eating foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber and injected with additives. And which now, shockingly, make up 60 percent of the calories we eat.

4% of all agricultural subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.

SOURCE: ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP, 2014-16

But that’s still no reason to despair. There’s a lot we can do right now to improve fat people’s lives—to shift our focus for the first time from weight to health and from shame to support.

...

In 2017, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the expert panel that decides which treatments should be offered for free under Obamacare, found that the decisive factor in obesity care was not the diet patients went on, but how much attention and support they received while they were on it. Participants who got more than 12 sessions with a dietician saw significant reductions in their rates of prediabetes and cardiovascular risk. Those who got less personalized care showed almost no improvement at all.

“My son and I both like to play the hero. There wasn't necessarily any intentional symbolism in the costumes we chose, but I am definitely a member of the rebellion, and I see my role as an eating disorders researcher as trying to fight for justice and a better world. Also, I like that I'm sweaty, dirty and messy, not done up with makeup or with my hair down in this picture. I like that I'm not hiding my stomach, thighs or arms. Not because I'm comfortable being photographed like that, but because I want to be—and I want others to feel free to be like that, too.”— ERIN HARROP

A review of 44 international studies found that school-based activity programs didn’t affect kids’ weight, but improved their athletic ability, tripled the amount of time they spent exercising and reduced their daily TV consumption by up to an hour. Another survey showed that two years of getting kids to exercise and eat better didn’t noticeably affect their size but did improve their math scores—an effect that was greater for black kids than white kids.

You see this in so much of the research: The most effective health interventions aren't actually health interventions—they are policies that ease the hardship of poverty and free up time for movement and play and parenting. Developing countries with higher wages for women have lower obesity rates, and lives are transformed when healthy food is made cheaper. A pilot program in Massachusetts that gave food stamp recipients an extra 30 cents for every $1 they spent on healthy food increased fruit and vegetable consumption by 26 percent. Policies like this are unlikely to affect our weight. They are almost certain, however, to significantly improve our health.

...

What does work, Corrigan says, is for fat people to make it clear to everyone they interact with that their size is nothing to apologize for. “When you pity someone, you think they’re less effective, less competent, more hurt,” he says. “You don’t see them as capable. The only way to get rid of stigma is from power.”

...

This has always been the great hope of the fat-acceptance movement. (“We’re here, we’re spheres, get used to it” was one of the slogans in the 1990s.) But this radical message has long since been co-opted by clothing brands, diet companies and soap corporations. Weight Watchers has rebranded as a “lifestyle program,” but still promises that its members can shrink their way to happiness. Mainstream apparel companies market themselves as “body positive” but refuse to make clothes that fit the plus-size models on their own billboards.

...

“Fat activism isn’t about making people feel better about themselves,” Pausé says. “It’s about not being denied your civil rights and not dying because a doctor misdiagnoses you.”

...

There is no magical cure. There is no time machine. There is only the revolutionary act of being fat and happy in a world that tells you that’s impossible.

“We all have to do our best with the body that we have,” [Ginette Lenham] says. “And leave everyone else’s alone.”