Sunday, January 9, 2005
No more dieting!?
Interesting piece on "Sunday Morning" (CBS-TV) about not dieting. NOT about being unhealthy or unfit, but about not dieting to become a size 4 when you're actually healthy as a size 12 or 14. They mentioned two books in particular. One is Wendy Shanker's The Fat Girl's Guide to Life, which seems both funny and chattily helpful. The other, by Dr. Glenn Gaesser, Big Fat Lies, is scientific and quite serious in saying that we the anti-fat obsession may be harming more than helping. He says, for example, that doctors and we always assume that being fat/large means having fat in our arteries. BUT it turns out that "most of the studies that have looked at the relationship between body weight (or body fat) and atherosclerosis--via coronary angiography or by direct examination of artery disease at autopsy--find that fat people are no more likely to have clogged arteries than thin people. In some instances results entirely opposite...are observed." Among his particularly interesting observations are that overweight men and women who exercise regularly have a lower risk for premature death than thin men and women who do not exercise and that body fat is beneficial, depending on its location, and can protect against heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Definitely a must-read for those of us who could be thin only by being sick (such as the month that I ate no more than 900 calories a day...and passed out almost every day). The morale is this: be healthy, be fit, however it works for you.
Labels: food
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