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Note to self: stop laughing and write!

Just posting this cuz it made me LOL and I need the kick in the pants motivation:


see more Lol Celebs

Overweight is a disadvantage our kids don;t need.

Kudos to the writers of this article on the psychological effects of overweight and obesity in children!

"While some responded to (Michelle Obama during an interview) the First Lady's divulging of her kids' weight problems as insensitive, psychologists say pretending the issue isn't there doesn't help anyone involved."

I agree 100%!  I have said before that the first step in battling obesity is to stop acting as if it is some random act of happenstance. Overweight does not need to be embraced. Nor do the overweight need to be treated as victims.  Like smokers and drinkers, drug addicts and gamblers, they chose this condition and embraced it.  They need help shaking it, not pity.

Childhood obesity in particular.  Unlike overweight adults, our kids don't choose to be fat. Our small children aren't picking up cigs or getting into the liquor cabinet, they aren't into crack or casinos. But our wee children - even in infancy - are being indoctrinated into the Way OF The Fat.  And who is doing it? Us.  Mommy and dada. Would you give your toddler a snort of cocaine?  Then why do you let her drink soda?

To feed your child crap foods, and too much of them, deny that he's overweight, then turn around and tell him that his excess flab is "just who he is" or that it "runs in the family" and send him to school to be picked on and bullied is obscene.

""Overweight kids are more likely to have depression and low self-esteem, to be teased or bullied, and to bully other children," said Catherine Davis, associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia. "These can be serious problems for these children." "

Are we setting our own kids up for not only physical illness and infirmity but mental strife as well?  Are we authoring their future misery just because it's sooooo much easier to stop for fast food, let them get the school lunch, or cave in and buy the cold cereal and the soda?

I say, shamefully; yes.

Two diet myths bite the dust

If you've read this blog for any amount of time you are aware of my firm belief that most of the crap preached by 'fitness experts', registered dieticians, and doctors regarding diet and fitness is horseshit.

I think that the FDA food pyramid is the illustration of death, disease, and misery.  I think that the food served in school lunch cafeterias and given out on WIC the opposite of intended: not healthy but poisonous to our children.  I find people who engage in chronic cardio for weight loss really kind of sad.*

So I was pretty chuffed to find a few articles on two of the more pervasive myths: exercise and 'grazing'.

Here is a really nice essay by Frank over at Exuberant Animal on why we shouldn't exercise.

He says that exercise, defined as: "doing abstracted movements in a stereotyped, repetitive pattern." is unnatural and boring (among other things) and I agree entirely. Walking miles on a treadmill or riding an exercise bike all the while zoned out listening to your iPod, or worse, staring at the idiot Box on the wall is NOT how we evolved to move.

"Exercise is commonly promoted as a cure for everything that ails our bodies and our spirits: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression and all the rest. “Just do more exercise” is the common prescription offered by both professionals and lay persons alike.



But if exercise was actually the solution to our public health crisis, wouldn’t we be seeing better results? After all, experts and celebrities have been promoting exercise for decades and the state of the human body continues to deteriorate. In fact, if we looked at the trajectories of lifestyle disease and exercise promotion, we would find that they track pretty closely with one another. If we looked strictly at correlation, we might even come to the conclusion that exercise promotion causes atrophy, obesity and poor health.


{snip}

In short, exercise has been a spectacular public health failure and an immense waste of human potential. The biggest consequence of exercise promotion is that we have managed to make millions of people feel guilty about their failure to do something that is inherently unpleasant.

How true!  Every single person I know online who does cardio for weight loss / fitness has gotten on Facebook or Twitter and typed one of these lines:

"Man, I don't want to go to the gym, today"

"*sigh* I need to do my workout, but can't make myself"

"I guess I'll go do my cardio now. Ugh"

Or some version thereof. People who do cardio for weight loss / fitness frequently HATE doing it. So why are they?  I do no purposeful cardio: I don't 'exercise' at all. Furthermore, I've lost 155lbs NOT doing it.

-----

I also found this wee snippet by Dr. Steve Parker over on the Advanced Mediterranean Diet Blog on the concept of eating several times a day. How many of us have heard the tonnes of folks insist that eating 6 times a day is a MUST?  More horseshit.

"One of the currently popular dieting gimmicks is to eat every 3-4 hours while awake. The rationale is, “you need the energy.” "

"As long as you’re eating a fair amount of carbohydrates, you can store plenty of energy as glucose in glycogen - in your liver and muscles - to easily live without eating for at least 8-12 hours. So, there’s no “need” to eat every 3-4 hours. If there were, we would have gone extinct years ago. At rest, you’re getting about 60% of your energy supplied by metabolism of fats, not carbohydrates. Most people can live without all food, but not water, for about two months."

(emphasis mine just because it's a cool fact.)

So those dieters who say they just can't last for more than a few hours without eating ("I get so hungry" oh boo-hoo, honey, suck it up. If you'd eat the right foods you wouldn't get hungry every two hours!) are full of it.

Incidentally, I personally eat under 30g carbs per day - most from vegetables - and often eat less than 10g / day for days on end. I can easily go 6-8 hours without being hungry at all AND I'm hypoglycemic!



*Note: I am amused by the folks who do chronic cardio for 'pleasure' but I'm willing to keep my opinions on it to myself (*ahem* for the most part). My father, and several of the readers of this blog either run or bicycle and that's cool so long as they never try to sell me on how 'healthy' it is. Repeatedly overtaxing ones body physically, in a way it was not evolved to be abused, whilst racking up injury after injury ... well, seems a bit disingenius.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! TV commercials and obesity.

So according to a new study, commercials are the reason for the TV / childhood obesity link.

Horseshit!

Here it is again: the overweight as victims. As if they have absolutely no control over themselves.  As if what we need is more flaccid and useless government involvement to save us from ourselves.

ALSO, the whole thing just misses the bloody point:

"television commercials for sweetened cereals, junk food and fast food chains probably had an insidious influence over a child’s food preferences. The more television commercials a child is exposed to, the more likely he or she will be to try those foods and want to continue eating them, which then increases risk for weight gain."

Can you say Epic Parenting FAIL?

None of these children is breaking open his piggy bank and sneaking down to the Piggly Wiggly to buy a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs behind mum's back.  The children's PARENTS are buying this crap for them.

The bottom line is this: if you are so slack-twisted as to cave in to your kid's whingey demands for the latest sugary cereal or fast food meal to the detriment of his health, then you aught to be ashamed of yourself.  Period.

Dear US Government: stop throwing money at this problem everywhere but where it counts. The only way to combat childhood obesity is to cut the legs out from under the huge money-making scams of Industrial Agriculture and Big Pharma and target the root of the problem: MOTHERS.

From the moment she concieves, mom has the ultimate influence on her child. She pours HFCS into his veins inutero, she makes only a feeble attempt at breastfeeding and instead shoves a bottle of fake chemical crap into his wee mouth, she lets him stay up too late, watch too much telly, eat what he wants, rather than toeing the line and laying down the rules for his own good.

We need, all of us; bloggers, writers, pediatricians, hospital staff, DHEC, etc, to EDUCATE mothers on their influence and make them see how their decisions can be good ones.  Right now no one knows. Breastfeeding, for example, should be encouraged and flaunted, a joyous triumph of bonding and health rather than a "Oh, I guess I might try it ..." sort of thing.

We all need to aggressively talk about REAL good nutrition on blogs and Twitter, on bulletin boards and Facebook.  Mothers unite!  We could bring about real change.