In Slate, weight-loss “success story” Shannon Chamberlain (who once weighed 350+ and is now a size 12 “chubby side of normal”) says she doesn’t know anything about weight loss:
The fact of the matter is: I don’t know anything about weight loss. Neither does anyone else. What is emerging from the best research is that the old nutritional mantra—burn fewer calories than you consume—is correct in the thermodynamic sense but useless on the individual level. …
Absent these precise measurements or solutions, how can you look at someone who is obese and hold them personally responsible for each pound? Or personally virtuous for each pound lost?
Let’s say you had to starve yourself daily for bare maintenance of your health and physical appearance. Could you do it? Forever? And would you be happy? I doubt very much that you would. But still, it’s what I have to do.
Read the whole thing; it’s a nice counterpoint to those folks who think their success translates to the entire obese population.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
Truth. Bomb. And very painful to read. To say this piece resonated with me would be an understatement. Of course no one will pay any attention. It’s not reflective of the rah-rah party line. Sigh.
She really captures that love-hate relationship I have with wanting to be open and upfront about having lost weight but being uneasy with becoming a weight celebrity. She’s also right about the intense focus required to keep weight off. Let’s hope a few doctors notice this article…
I’m an active enough person, but anyone who carries 200lb more than me wherever they go is already working out much harder than I ever have.
Thanks for sharing this article. I remember my hair falling out & the nails ripping off thing & I had nowhere near the extreme journey that she had. It’s crazy what we ask our bodies to try to do.
The comments section is fascinating. Not only are we in the middle of one big long dietary experiment here in the US, we’re in a rather fascinating sociological one. What happens when the majority of the population becomes “invisible” in some respect? I noticed this in DC. Significantly overweight or obese people would be gathered around a table to talk about the obesity crisis (usually about 50% of the crowd). No one EVER mentioned their own weight status or weight struggles. Not once. If I’d been more than an intern myself, I would have brought up my own story. It would have been fascinating to see how folks responded.
But then at that point, you get into sketchy “formerly fat” territory, where everyone assumes you have a diet plan that you want to reform the world with, or you experience becomes “anecdotal” rather than real, or –love this one–you weren’t “really” fat (because you aren’t any more), or you weren’t “fat enough” or for long enough (because you aren’t any more). Crazy.
“Let’s say you had to starve yourself daily for bare maintenance of your health and physical appearance. Could you do it? Forever? And would you be happy?”
The answer is clearly, no. “Starving yourself” may achieve a “physical appearance” perceived as desirable, but it can never achieve health. Calorie deprivation is not the answer to permanent weight loss.
For myself, abandoning the typical American diet for a whole foods diet resulted in losing 50 lbs, but the weight loss occurred over more than two years. I know for others it’s not as simple as that. The body’s systems of regulation must be put into balance for health and, consequently, ideal weight to be realized. Discovering and correcting those imbalances is not always a simple process.
Thanks, Beth, for sharing this stark look at one person’s courageous struggle to change her life. It scares me, too, because it could have been me if I’d had the resources for bariatric surgery. The burdens of hunger, eating, health issues and struggling to live with horribly oppressive weight stigma day in and day out are mind boggling. Desperation and daily despair drove me to throw out everything I once thought was “true” about hunger and eating and health. Four years ago I weighed approximately twice my current weight. It has only been in the last 6 months, however, that my body’s physiology has finally seemed to stabilize and find better equilibrium.
However, I am left with the ravages of 3 decades of damage from trying to follow the low fat/no fat approach to “healthy living”, and the brain damage alone—from glucose starved brain tissues and damaged endocrine functions and from enduring chronic, painful hunger (in spite of weighing 320 lbs)—still makes me want to cry with regret…and still makes me (in unexpected moments) feel like screaming with resentment for having believed (for so long—with all evidence from my own lived experience to the contrary) those official, “professionally” endorsed guidelines (yes, that insane pyramid).
Continuing to believe widely accepted “scientific truths”, which all of my own experiences proved to be false and harmful, decade after decade after decade, made me feel CRAZY. Alone. Ashamed. Afraid.
Now, THAT is social domination at work—an insidious kind of enslavement, of our minds and our bodies, and a perfect example of what Habermas calls “the colonization of our lifeworlds.”
I refuse to live with hunger. I refuse to buy into the socially constructed demands and practices and beliefs which insist we must all maintain control over our natural human body systems. I refuse to attempt or pretend that I have the power to predict and control physiological responses over which I have no control. I refuse to be crazy anymore.
Do not ignore your cravings. Foods like ice cream and chips are delicious. Cravings for unhealthy foods like these can kick into overdrive when you are on a diet. Try not to cave, but don’t completely ignore these cravings either. Instead, get rid of the craving entirely with a low-calorie alternative.
I was touched and deeply saddened by Shannon Chamberlain’s article, which shows in excruciating detail how fiendishly difficult it can be to lose weight and maintain that loss.
But what really struck me about the article was the rabid hatred of fat people that permeated most of the comments. I would estimate that at very least 80% of the responses intimated that Shannon was either a) a liar (because everyone knows that if you simply “eat less and move more the pounds will melt off”–meaning that she was hugely deflating the number of calories she ate or hugely inflating the amount of exercise she did) or b) stupid (she obviously did something terribly wrong or just didn’t cut out the “real” culprits: sugar, wheat, yada, yada).
Most people (ranging from medical professionals, to nutrition “experts” of all stripes to fitness gurus to average people in the street) just refuse to admit that the science of what keeps us fat, thin or in-between is complex beyond belief and that no one has the ultimate solution.
A few lucky souls stumble upon something that works for them. Maybe it’s paleo, maybe it’s unbending calorie counting, maybe it’s 3 hours of strenuous exercise a day, but most people just yo-yo diet themselves up the scale. In the meantime, the “personal responsibility” police, which has many members amongst the ranks of the fat, continues to “helpfully” heap scorn on fat people.
And “health”? By conveniently linking so-called “good health” to a number on the scale, people are getting sicker and sicker. After all, why exercise if you don’t lose weight?
Wow. @ wendyrg, for your brilliant and insightful observations and analysis of socially-constructed oppression (above) in response to a heart breaking view of Shannon’s REAL and PAINFUL and ongoing struggle to be “healthy” and to be socially-accepted as a REAL person, the latter oppressive social condition of our times which apparently happens (being accepted as worthy of human value) only if you achieve a particular (smaller) sized body, or if you have enough money or social status or authority to sway others into overlooking your otherwise socially disapproved size.
Personally, my own decision to refuse living in a perpetually horrified state (feeling crazy) disallows me to read comments such as those described by the courageous “wendyrg.” Seriously. I guess folks call those “sanity points” in mockery of “Weight Watcher points” but I can’t quite take such a lighthearted (and admirable) stance.
It reminds me too much of reading the kind of remarks people typically made—openly and with pride—during the ’50s, for example, in Alabama USA while referring to the supposedly self-evident “laziness and sloth and dumb come-uppity sass” of minority ethnic groups. It just makes me feel sick and dead inside to read comments that continue to encourage and advance horrible forms of stigma and domination and injustice.
I have nothing but empathy for Shannon. It’s easy to understand why she made the choice that she made, to have surgery, and why she feels compelled to continue with such grueling practices to maintain a life which—even with all the sacrifices she makes—perhaps feels less oppressive and cruel. It’s the terrible price many are able and/or willing to pay, nowadays, to avoid some of the consequences of bigotry and social torment. It’s a sad and tragic price to feel forced to exchange for a little bit of peace in a world gone made with fear—with a socially approved and socially legitimated force that pits “us vs. them.” Or, rather, us OVER them.
It all makes me sad for humanity.
If one continues to eat the Standard American diet and one has been obese (and therefore probably had metabolic syndrome) then yeah, you are going to be eating a maintenance level of calories that you have to monitor carefully, be hungry a lot and generally suffer. Before I was obese I could lose weight this way, suffer and eventually gain back 10-15 lbs. Because being hungry all the time sucks. Day after day, month after month. Year after year if you can make it that far. Almost none do.
The way I lost 80 lbs a few years back was to ‘go paleo’ but I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. Now I realize what I fool I was to buy into low-fat and whole grains and it was pure luck that I decided to cut back on grains and keep protein and some fat. I haven’t gained the weight back and I eat FOOD. A lot of it (so it seems). Really tasty and even more fat recently even — butter, bacon, etc. I do not miss pastries, though I can fit one in every once in a while just fine because I think my metabolism has recovered.
I have the same ‘this is forever’ feeling she mentions, but it’s a forever of eating good food. I do not feel deprived and I am not hungry all the time.