starving
last night i read a 4-year-old (2005) Time magazine that had a 30-something page special on the American obesity epidemic (that’s where that last post came from), and one of the articles was Can You Be Fat and Healthy? there was a lot of easy to absorb and interesting comparative information in there about being physiologically fit vs. perceived as healthy just by weight and pant size. and then the question:
If you eat well, work out regularly and walk away from your doctor’s office with straight A’s on your physical, what does it matter if you can’t wriggle into slim-cut jeans?
yes, what does it matter, really? why can’t we just be happy in our bodies as long as we’re healthy? how has body image become so twisted?
and then today, thx to Tiny Cat Pants, i read this article about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (see wikipedia also), which should absolutely be read beginning to end, especially by any women who restrict their calories for diet purposes, but i’ll post a few eye-opening findings here about the effects of a 1,600 restricted-calorie diet on grown men, noting that 1,600 calories is a lot more than a lot of people on diets, especially people on CLEANSES, allow themselves to eat:
The men’s resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging.
…
But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were the most profound and unexpected. So much so that Dr. Keys called it “semistarvation neurosis.” The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day).
…
These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating…
so think about that for a minute, ladies, next time you’re irritable and depressed and your body aches and you don’t feel well. are you also not eating as much as your body wants you to, for fear of being “fat”?
not to mention the complex debate(s) around female body image and the patriarchy:
The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.” This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically.
Tiny Cat Pants also stated it well:
Many, many people have made this point, but I will make it again. Encouraging women to obsess over our weight and to restrict our caloric intake is one of the easiest and surest ways to keep us from being as effective as we might otherwise could be. No one has to actively hold us back if we accept it as our duty to do it to ourselves.
the Minnesota Starvation article then goes onto talk about obesity and discrimination and how genetically pre-determined our body shapes and sizes are:
The commonly held belief that obese people can simply decide to eat less and exercise more to control their weight is “at odds with substantial scientific evidence illuminating a precise and powerful biological system that maintains body weight within a relatively narrow range (10-20 pounds),” he said. Fat people are victimized by a social stigma predicated on these myths, he wrote in a 2004 issue of Nature Medicine. Our body shapes and sizes are, to a most significant extent, genetically determined. “The heritability of obesity is equivalent to that of height and greater than that of almost every other condition that has been studied…”
so in a culture that stigmatizes heavier people, how many are restricting their calories to the point of physical and mental harm in order to acheive a body image that is neither possible nor healthy?
“Why has the scientific evidence from long-standing obesity research not found its way into the minds of the public and even a significant proportion of the scientific community?,” asks Dr. Friedman. “Perhaps,” he says, “it is because these views are shaped by a constant barrage of advertisements from the diet industry which has a multibillion dollar interest in promoting the view that weight can be controlled through volition alone… Perhaps it is because humans prefer to believe that the conscious wish to be trim is an element of our “free will” and should therefore dominate” our genes. But the average person eats one million or more calories each year, while weight changes very little, because energy balance is biologically regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously controlled, he explained.
…wow. that’s a lot to absorb.
i found the whole idea behind the experiment interesting: starve people intentionally to study what happens and how best to help those suffering…and that people volunteered for this. how differently would you see the world if you understood what it felt like to starve for days on end? anyone who’s ever gone hungry will attest at how much of your life begins to revolve around food, and how to get food. if you don’t have food, are you willing to join a terrorist organization to get some? support a war if you think it means you’ll be fed again? compromised judgement, compromised values – nations of starving people are being abused by the powerful, and what can we do? and then to extend that set of physical and mental results to the people are doing this to themselves, now, intentionally, in the name of vanity…it’s fairly mindblowing, and definitely makes me rethink how i feel about my body and my health.
i have been thinking a lot about body image lately, more than i’d like to admit, partially due to aging and things that happen to your body once you’re over 30, partially due to our culture and my subculture and how important it seems to be to everyone, partially due to my own preferences for image and fashion, partially do to the types of things i participate in (fashion, performance, which sometimes makes it all very acute), and partially just because the more i focus on health and fitness for myself and have increased body awareness, well, that makes you more aware of things about bodies.
lately i’ve struggling to find a balance between what i know and believe is healthy, and how i feel, physically and mentally, about my own body. and it’s one of those things that’s hard to blog about because everyone has an opinion, and i don’t really want to hear everyone’s opinion about my body and how i feel about it, and therefore i don’t blog about it often even though it’s something that i think about every day.
the older i get (and the more physical problems i endure, like last month’s shoulder issue), i am more concerned with being healthy than how i look, but it’s hard to let go of body image issues in this culture. harder than i like. more than just “i’m not as thin/pretty as i want to be”, for many of us it’s also a constant internal battle of psychologies, as ariel bravely discussed in her piece on “fat is a feminist issue” a couple of years ago, with many, MANY people chiming in from all sides in the comments (resulting in a comment shitstorm, as one might say, and because of that piece i’m sort of afraid of what people might say here). so not only are we unhappy with how we look, we feel GUILTY about even caring about it. because we’re not supposed to care about our bodies. or wait – are we? between celebrities and magazines and fitness gurus and cleansing and whole foods and yogaphiles and feminism and counter-culture, it’s a mind-fuck, to be sure. care about your body and how it looks, but don’t care *too* much. yes, there is a definite difference between caring about being healthy and caring about how you look, but especially once you get into fitness and spend a lot of time thinking about your body, that often becomes a very blurry line.
given all of what was reported above and all we know anyway, the obvious advice is to “stop caring what other people think” and “just focus on how you feel, not how you look”, so to pre-empt anyone who might want to say that in the comments: I’M AWARE. i AM working toward concentrating on being HEALTHY these days, and trying to care less about what my ass looks like in a bathing suit and focusing more on how good i feel. and while logically that makes sense, for these and many more reasons, it’s tougher than it should be.
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This is probably one of your most thought provoking posts I’ve ever read. Well done.
Another aspect of this complex issue is the research showing that a calorie-restricted diet leads to longevity at least in mice and other animals. Some progress is being made on understanding that mechanism, but right now it’s still a bit of a mystery. People working on aging are also concerned with issues of health, so this is another interesting lens on the topic.
oh, thx ben. while i was writing this i knew there was some other recent thing i read that i couldn’t remember on calorie restriction.
eat enough, but not too much…finding that balance is harder than it sounds in a world where we have 24/7 access to processed food. the “80% full” rule seems like a good guideline.
bravo and thank you for putting this out there.
To expand on Ben’s point, it is called CRON: Calorie Restriction Optimum Nutrition. All of the nutrients, but with about 10 – 15% fewer calories to maintain a weight below the mid point of a person’s BMI.
Starving is simply not getting enough “food”. CRON is about getting enough nutrients, but with less energy ( calories ).
According to people who follow CRON there are a large amount of studies starting from the 1930s continuing to the present that show the most reliable way to increase the life span of an animal ( even primates ) is to feed it optimum nutrition but with reduced calories.
Suppositions about evolution from lay people ( me ) is pretty much the fools gold of knowledge, but their idea makes sense. It seems as if animals and people evolved to survive under conditions of scarcity. That is what our bodies know how to handle, even if we don’t like it ( another adaptation for survival -> a desire to eat whenever we can ).
The interesting thing about CRON people, IMHO, is that they freely admit that their ideas may not work for human beings. They are far from the dogmatic followers of other fad diets.
FWIW, these people think the healthiest weight for people is below the mid point in their BMI range.
(this is ridiculously long for a comment, sorry, it started as a couple sentences but just grew the more I thought about all this… thanks for being so thought-provoking!)
I just want to say that I think about these things every day and struggle with these issues too. It is truly a most ultimate mindfuck.
The food and hunger thing is kind of fascinating to me. I play around with various eating patterns (no real diets, but eating different types of foods at different times of day) and am often surprised by the results on my energy level and “hunger” level, which are sometime illogical. I think for me “hunger” is so much a mental thing that is not even tied to actual level of fullness. Weird!? A little disturbing!? So incredibly personal that no one else could really understand how or why I eat the way I do!?
Also, the recent occurrence of my dad getting cancer and losing a shitload of weight is giving me a new outlook on weight. Seeing someone who tries but cannot keep a healthy weight because a tumor larger than a baseball is sucking the nutrients, energy, flesh into oblivion, is something creepy that I never gave a lot of personal thought to before. Seeing someone I love look like a skeleton and have to drink four Ensure drinks per day, is making me not so concerned about those five pounds I can’t seem to lose, at least it’s just forcing me to think about it a bit differently.
On another note. One time my mom gave me a subscription to “Shape” magazine because I kind of liked reading it, and after reading it each month for a year it was so apparent to me the contradictions contained in each issue are enough to drive any sane woman absolutely CRAZY without consciously knowing why.
On probably every page is:
1. Some sort of message about how women should love themselves, accept their bodies, set realistic weight goals, not deprive themselves of food, be all-around healthy and wholesome and happy, avoid unhealthy chemicals, etc
AND ALSO
2. About ten messages (photos and text) that state loud and clear that women should be stick thin, always be exercising and dieting, trying new drugs and beauty enhancing chemicals, obsessing about some other part of their physical/mental/emotional state of nonperfection (and of course all the products you must buy to achieve all this!)
Both 1 and 2 are presented in a such an appealing, digestible, easy-to-absorb format that they are both at the same time believable, convincing, alluring. The result is completely schizophrenic and contradictory and that just REALLY PISSES ME OFF.
I am getting closer each year to resolving these issues within myself and loving the way I look, but it’s very dependent on what I do each day, how I present myself to the world. Maybe it’s weird that I really need lipstick, mascara, electric hair curlers, and clothes that I feel good in or else I can feel really really ugly. At one point in my hippie era I would probably have scoffed at that. But, it’s not that I really care so much how others perceive me but rather, how I perceive myself, and these things help me to feel confident and beautiful so I can live with that. I also *feel* much better about the way I look when I am working out a lot, even if I don’t look any different. Sometimes I will go to the gym feeling ugly and leave feeling sexy, which is kind of a trip.
Thank you for allowing me to rant and ramble on…
long comments appreciated!
thanks for your thoughts, A. i feel you on all those things.
the mixed messages we get, especially, it seems in the last 5 yrs or so as things like yoga and meditation have gone super maintstream, are so abundant it’s impossible to not be confused unless you totally unplug from media, which i just can’t bring myself to do.
the CRON thing is also interesting – thx for that info. last fall when i was having a month-long anxiety attack, i thought FOR SURE i had a vitamin deficiency of some kind because of all the things i read similar to the symptoms of the Minnesota Experiment subjects above “cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping” – that was pretty much my life for September 2008. i thought that perhaps my limited diet (mostly vegan, simple foods, not a lot of protein) had caused some sort of deficiency.
but then when i went do the Dr and had all of my bloodwork done, i wasn’t deficient in anything, despite the fact that some days i only eat about 1200 calories. no B vits, not iron, not calcium, not potassium, nothing. which is part of the reason i was surprised, and admittedly a little suspicous, of the experiment results. really? all that can happen on 1600 calories a day? i guess if you’re a farm boy that’s only half what you’d normally eat. but still.
I used to read Shape. I agree there is a contradiction between their down to Earth fitness advice and the average weights of the models in the advertisements.
I’ve also noticed all of the yoga magazines and videos using svelte attractive female models in clingy clothing almost exclusively. I started with yoga back in the stone ages of the earl 1980s while it was still an exotic thing. For many people it is just an excuse to look fashionable while bending and twisting in sexy ways. Ego aggrandizement. Don’t get wrong, even if people never go into the deeper levels I think it benefits them and the people around them when they do “yoga”.
People’s calorie needs can vary greatly. Even between people of the same sex, build and activity level. I need very few calories compared to other men of my size. If I ate the amount of calories recommended by the various formulas you can find I would be morbidly obese, assuming I could push that much food into my mouth.
The general rule of thumb among experts has been, for decades, that losing between 1 – 2 pounds a week is the maximum optimal rate for weight loss. After that point is passed you are flirting with deprivation.
In my uneducated opinion, if you like your weight,can maintain it without being hungry (aside from getting close meal times ) and have good energy levels then you shouldn’t care what experts recommend.
This isn’t related to weight, but it is to body image… Am I the only one who is disturbed by the new trend towards Axe shower gels and body washes and “body sprays” whatever the F those are? It seems that rather than recover from creating and exploiting insecurity in women, we are now doing the same thing to men. I am being told that women don’t like my hair if it is too crunchy but of course still needs to be styled or I will never have sex again. Guys used to have a free pass and were mostly spectators (and conspirators) to the objectification of women. Now we are also being objectified and I see very little resistance to the idea.
Indeed, this is an excellent and thoughtful post. As with any big problem, it’s multifaceted. But I would like to point out a few things that generally go against the concepts discussed here. First is an economic one. We in the US have placed (an unhealthy) value on … well … value. By that I mean, if I can order a 2lb cheeseburger for $5 or a 0.75lb cheeseburger for $2.50, most Americans go for the “better deal”, this is a common result in the psychology of economics, and it has a proper name which I forget now. This kind of mentality is probably partly evolutionarily based, and partly socially ingrained by hardships like the Great Depression. If you question this, just look around us… we’ve got “Super Value” meals, and Denny’s “Hearty Breakfasts”, and an entire fast food industry geared at selling you the most calories for the least money. I believe this, combined with the gluttonous quip “Finish what’s on your place” and worse “Finish what’s on your plate if you want dessert” has led us to an overeating disorder (as a nation) … it’s disgusting how much we eat in the name of a good deal. Clearly, the entire continent of Europe is not unhealthy and irritable (in fact arguably the opposite in comparison to the US), but look at their portions! Much smaller. That then brings me to my next point. America is the most obese country in the world … if we took what this article said at face value, one would think that the genetic makeup of the US is somehow predisposed to being heavy which is ridiculous considering that in large part we’re of European descent, so something is going on here, in the US, that distinguishes us from other genetically similar populations that are healthier and leaner. Could it be that we’re simply eating way too much? On a moral note, I’m Malthusian, but for now I’ll put that off and say that if we’re serious about feeding the poor, and I agree a well fed population is a (more) rational population, it seems learning to control our own desire for food is paramount. Living in a country that simultaneously follows the aforementioned food economics and cries for aid, food and clean water for Africa is hypocrisy at its worst. Finally, on the science front, there is quite a bit of molecular biology evidence that suggests calorie restriction is good (to a point of course). Maybe a more generous interpretation is that we need to find an optimum caloric intake and we’re not there yet. All this said, we’re definitely on the same page regarding the twisted concept of body image produced by the media and our own insecurities.
good thoughts, tristan. thx.
and jon – re: the body sprays for men, i believe that is all a ramp up to the days when we no longer have enough water for showering, and like in Elizabethan times, everyone will just douse themselves with perfumes. they’re just getting their brand out there early.
I could have written this exact same sentence:
“the older i get (and the more physical problems i endure, like last month’s shoulder issue), i am more concerned with being healthy than how i look, but it’s hard to let go of body image issues in this culture. harder than i like.”
Especially as I’m dealing w.a herniated disk. I need to be healthy if I can keep on dancing for the next decade but find myself being alarmingly self-critical as I’m healing even though I’m probably in better shape now than I was 5 yrs ago at 24. It’s actually kind of scary.
I’m glad that you were brave enough to write this!