I’ve been thinking more about how paleo (or at least the 2012 PaleoTM version) is not a panacea for some of us.
For a long while I’ve just been thinking about it from a purely compulsive eating perspective, but since AHS12 (and the fallout), I’m starting think a bit more about weight loss, obesity stigma, and connection (or lack of it).
In particular, I keep coming back to a comment hopefulandfree made recently on her blog. She writes re the paleo fixation with offal:
It’s not the venison, or the ox tail that MATTERS—what matters, and what creates HEALTH, are the social bonds of trust, respect, and certainty—the security of knowing you are not a separate person who must find her/his own food or construct shelter without the help of all your extended “family”. We are sick and suffering and succumbing to so much illness in this culture precisely because we are essentially on our own (as individuals or as individual families) and we know: NOBODY HAS MY BACK over the long haul.
Eating liver rather than McDonald’s is certainly a good idea, but it’s not the holy grail. Nor is getting in your WOD at the local Crossfit box.
Psychology of Eating’s Marc David states it point-blank:
Science has failed us in the weight loss department.
It literally gets an “F.” The culture has failed us as well. Far too many people have intense moral judgments towards anyone with excess pounds, which contributes to the hidden epidemic of social disconnection, apathy, and plain old sadness. Let’s face it: when it comes to the subject of weight gain and weight loss, we’re clueless. And from that place of cluelessness we tend to flail around, we try our hand at the most inane weight loss strategies, we diet for decades, we consume diet foods and ingredients like synthetic fats and artificial sweeteners that are, if you care to closely study the scientific literature – toxic.
I’d suggest that if you’re not outraged at how all of us have been handling the issue of weight, than it’s time to pay more attention.
Maybe, just maybe, what’s important before anything else is to have a sense of security AND a sense of connection or community. That’s true for all of us. So what does it mean for your average overweight or obese person who may well be starting from a place of stigma and shame?
Time to put the social back into social? It’s very interesting to me the number of times social support and health appeared in my feed this week (here from the folks at SPEED, here from Dave Asprey, and here from Michael Prager).
And it go me thinking … just as a Western diet is a poor substitute for a nutrient-dense diet, and just as sedentary lifestyle is a poor substitute for one focused on movement, so too is our movement away from real social support towards one that, for many of us, is largely online.
Just eating the right foods and doing the right exercise is trying to balance a stool on two legs. So if working hard on diet and exercise isn’t doing it for you, maybe it’s time to give those a rest and work on connection … to nature and to others.
I’m putting my money where my mouth is. More about that in future posts!
Photo credit: Penn State
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health & food policy. And cats! 
“We are sick and suffering and succumbing to so much illness in this culture…” I recently visited Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg, Ontario, which is a village that has been made to reflect what life was like in that part of Canada (or pre-Canada) in 1860. We spoke with some of the staff as they went about their work (picking vegetables, spinning wool into yarn, etc) and I was really struck when one woman pointed out that the average lifespan in 1860 was 40 years old. People did not expect all their children to live, and often half or more would die of disease in the first few years. I just don’t think that our lot here in the West is so bad. And maybe it is a myth, this notion that we were ever really free of illness and suffering. Just a thought! Not a cheerful one, I guess.
Yes, it’s not a good idea to paint too rosy a picture of pre-industrial life. That said, I think it’s not an unfair assessment to consider that, in the first world at least, what we may have done is addressed the first or second of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and now our “illness and suffering” exist in the latter levels.
HOLY COW. No pun intended. I had not read the astounding piece (blog post) by Adele Hite, RD, to which you link above under “fallout” (even though she left me a beautifully concise summary of her related thoughts as a response to my “paleo dreams” essay). I mention this because it still surprises me whenever a professional in the “health care” field writes with so much clarity and scope of vision about the frighteningly unjust social conditions and the perverse power imbalances which drive health outcomes in ways most of us simply cannot begin to comprehend. I am so VERY grateful that you brought her post to the attention of your readers. Hite appears to have more optimism than I can muster, as far as being able to envision potentially hopeful directions to explore at systemic levels (such as communities). I will certainly be following her future pieces and feel eager to read her previous articles.
Moreover, I am excited to see this turn of direction in your own viewpoint regarding social connections and your re-conceptualization(s) of “health”. I have always enjoyed your insights (and the interesting mix of resources you provide and/or synthesize in a reader-friendly format). And I’m looking forward to following you to new territories (both personal and scholarly), which your shift(s) in perspective will undoubtedly open up for future exploration.
Perhaps, as more people become better educated about social determinants of health, many more of us will come to realize that “our lot here in the West” (in terms of health and health outcomes) cannot be understood in any meaningful way without facing the extremes (in social and material conditions) separating those who experience privileges linked to preferred health outcomes and those without access to those privileges.
It is painfully ironic when SOME individuals (not all) who are gifted with privileges that they didn’t even need to request (and often don’t recognize)-specifically, privileges conducive to better health outcomes-proudly take personal credit for their “healthy choices and behaviors” while attributing their healthier outcomes to “wiser” or “more careful” (more virtuous) personal conduct-while many who lack those privileges blame themselves and feel deep shame for supposedly making “poor” health choices resulting in “self-inflicted” illnesses (a state of affairs you point toward with your reference to the social stigma which harms people who are “overweight” or “obese”.)
Thanks again, Beth, for all the great *food for thought* you present on your blog. :)
It is very cool to have two bloggers I admire tremendously say nice things about my work. It seems that, though there may be some dividing forces at play-as there are in any social change movement-a lot of people are coming to the same conclusion we are. I can’t really think of a better way to say it except that we’ve begun to recognize that we can’t expect to “use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” It’s a concept that taken me a good while to figure out.
Let’s keep the conversation going.
“Let’s keep the conversation going.”
Yes, yes a thousand times yes ;)
“than it’s time to pay more attention.”
I’m a tad reluctant to trust the graded critique of someone who can’t distinguish between than and then— a fourth grade grammar principle even by liberal standards.
It’s not the grammar per se, but what it represents….. Take the concepts related by this post http://eatingacademy.com/personal/what-does-lower-back-pain-have-in-common-with-low-carb-eating
It shows the natural progression of change
1)Unconsciously incorrect
2)consciously incorrect
3)consciously correct
4)unconsciously correct
When someone types up a blog comment I would venture to say the grammar involved is unconscious; Based upon your numerous experiences writing for school, work, pleasure…etc. So when someone displays incorrect grammar on this venue, to me it signals ‘undereducated’.
Just saying it’s a bit scary to seriously consider these “radical” secular views when presented by such a persona….
It’s a bit scary for me to think there are folks out there so unwilling to cut someone some slack in a 1300-word blog post. I think your comments signal more about you than Marc David. But I once wrote about my “next store neighbor” in a letter to my parents when I was in college. Don’t tell Georgetown or they’ll take their MA back.
lot of ways you can interpret my actions, i guess; could be that i’m a bigot. More likely i’m trying to critically examine these statements and what they signify in the larger framework. For instance, you could deduce a pattern of dissatisfaction and ideological anarchy based on that (Marc David’s) comment and then tie the grammar incorrectness to the ‘undereducated’ demographic. If you continue using critical thinking you could try to ideologically bridge the gap between the naive anarchist and the totalitarian that imposes mainstream mantras without considering evidence on the contrary. Or I guess you could assume i’m just a cyber bully and try to make me feel inadequate for holding people to a higher standard. Your call =)
I think that’s a lot of “baffle ‘em with bullshit” for the dreadful sin of using “than” rather than “then.”
“…so too is our movement away from real social support towards one that, for many of us, is largely online.” That’s the line that got me. I have been struggling for over five years to find support in my life for eating in a healthier way and it is slim pickens in the real world! Thanks so much for this post.
You’re welcome! And in addition to support for eating in a healthier way, I think it’s also the idea that we need what Robert Putnam calls “social capital” … the lack of which can affect our health. So we have to be careful that we’re not trying to use diet and exercise to “fix” other things in our life. I.e., you cannot diet and exercise your way out of a bad relationship!
@ Beth, re: not that you need anyone’s defense, but the grammar cop reminds me of certain students I taught (college, English) to differentiate between #1) spotting proofreading mistakes (and typos)—and #2) doing the far more challenging and significant work of lit criticism and/or rhetorical analysis. The latter requires the critic to provide: first, an implicit theoretical stance or philosophical foundation; second, an indication of its critical relevance to the specific rhetorical CONTEXT; and, third, a cogent critical analysis.
Moreover, the aforementioned approach to critical discourse (A) allows the critic to anchor his or her argument(s) firmly in “reality” (rather than shoulder deep in extraneous excrement); (B) allows the critic’s reader(s) to approach the critical perspective with a POSSIBILITY to locate common ground (and, thus, both parties may enter into the potential dialogue with implied expectations of truth, sincerity, and appropriateness ); and (C) provides the critic’s reader(s) with reasonable and logical grounds to give a sh*t. Without “C,” any emancipatory potential for achieving mutual understanding remains stillborn.
If mutual understanding was never at the heart of the critical process, then communication was never on the agenda. Instead, the critic’s language games underscore his or her strategic aims: 1) to create the illusion of being in control (offers clairvoyant-like predictions of another’s supposedly secret, dark biases…”bigot”…”bully”); 2) to dominate and/or posture (employs out-of-context terms from dominant political discourse-”naive anarchist”, “totalitarian”, “mainstream mantras”—for the purpose of distorting any actual meaning other than *sounding powerful*…as if showing off a magical, rhetorical light saber); and 3) to oppress (mainly, to silence views that the critic perceives as threatening).
Examples of strategy #3 abound. (And STILL I never tire of this routine’s transparently ironic absurdity!) The critic, showing no awareness of irony at all, seeks to oppress and silence another (by attempting to instill shame and by falsely ascribing base motives)—AND YET THE CRITIC JUSTIFIES his own oppressive tactics by claiming virtuous motives (altruistically helping others-to achieve “a higher standard”) while simultaneously suggesting that HE is the unfortunate individual, here, most at risk of being victimized….Yep, using his astonishing powers of preemptive foresight, he predicts he’ll be wrongly accused and made to feel ashamed. (Poor little fellow…)
All kidding and prodding aside, I can’t help wondering what might happen (to interpersonal relationships and to social structures) if more people started being direct and honest with each other.
I know that this article is titled “When it’s time to give diet and exercise a rest,” so please bear with me. I found a link attached to a link that led me to check out the following book from the library: Sitting Kills/Moving Heals by Joan Vernikos, Ph.D. Among other activities, she advocates standing up slowly and then sitting down during the day-just once each time. She also encourages stretching at one’s desk. Even if you’re not going to engage in formal exercise classes or go to the gym, IMO, these activities won’t hurt and may actually help.