Archive for 2014
8/23/14, Signe Weighs, Blog Talk Radio: Body Respect: by Linda Bacon, interviewed by Signe Darpinian
“You support your clients in self-care when you dump your ideas of what they’re supposed to do, and support them in making choices that feel right to them. Sure people would benefit from a high fiber diet, but they’ll better make more sustainable dietary changes when they can make connections that it helps them feel better, e.g., helps with comfortable bowel movements and more stable energy levels throughout the day, rather than as a prescriptive commandment. They make the changes because it feels right not because they think they should.”
Listen hereAugust, 2014, Marie Claire Magazine, Can you be Heavy and Healthy, by Virginia Sole-Smith
“…research shows that using body shame as motivation for improving health just doesn’t work. To remedy the situation, many advocates are pushing the Health at Every Size approach, propelled by San Francisco–based nutrition professor and researcher Linda Bacon, Ph.D. It takes the focus off BMI and scales, and promotes realistic lifestyle changes relating to diet and exercise instead.”
Link to article7/23/14, Yahoo! Health: Are Wedding Diets Healthy?, by Beth Greenfield
“The practice of crash dieting before you tie the knot — or at any time — is not even healthy, Linda Bacon, diet expert and author of “Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Weight Loss,” tells Yahoo Health. “All calorie restriction is dangerous — after all, you’re depriving your body of nutrients — and the more extreme, the more danger they pose,” she explaiins, listing compromised immune system, lost muscle and bone strength, and a miserable mood as some of the pitfalls of the practice. ”
Link to article7/13/14, Seattle Times: Lighten up, dieters! Focus on health, not weight, by Carrie Dennett
“Lighten up, dieters! Focus on health, not weight A new approach to health called Health at Every Size urges people not to get preoccupied with the number on the scale. Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, authors of the upcoming book “Body Respect,” explain.”
Link to article5/27/14, SBS The Feed (Australian tv): Fat pride: The growing movement of people looking for fat acceptance, by Mike Clay and Nick McDougall
[snip]… Dr Linda Bacon is the author of ‘Health at every size’ and says that being thin seems to be a cultural obsession. She says people should embrace the bodies they have and not try to fit into a social ideal of being skinny. “We hear in the news all the time about an obesity epidemic and how people are dying of obesity,” says Dr Bacon. “It’s just not true. What is true is that people are heavier than they used to be but what’s also true is that we’re living longer than ever before.” “There are many reasons for why someone might be living in a fat body… for some people that’s just genetics… to try to judge somebody by their weight will give you a lot of misinformation.”
Link to article5/17/14: New York Magazine, A Non-Diet Diet: The Case for Eating Whatever You Want, by Melissa Dahl.
[snip]… Proponents of intuitive eating argue that their method may be a healthier and more realistic way of managing food intake. “Usually when people have a history of chronic dieting, what that means is they’ve learned to shut off their body’s signals,” says Linda Bacon, a nutrition professor and researcher at City College of San Francisco and the University of California, Davis. “So they can’t even recognize hunger, because for so long they’ve thought that hunger is something you’re supposed to suppress — or ignore.” Bacon sometimes takes her students through an experiment with a food they love, usually chocolate. “I tell them to take a little bite of it, and notice all the sensations in your mouth and how it tastes,” she said. “And then take another small bite. When you keep doing that, inevitably what people see is that the third or fourth bites don’t taste nearly as good as the first bite. You’re getting clues from your body, which is saying, ‘Slow down, don’t eat so much, I’ve got what I need.’”
Read more4/8/14: KTRH Radio, Is Being Fat Healthier Than You Think?, by Cliff Saunders.
[snip]… Weight has been very much exaggerated in terms of health,” Linda Bacon stated. And Bacon says she has the research to back it up. “There are more important things that define health. There are many overweight people that live long, disease-free lives,” she explained.
Read more4/3/14: Vitae, ‘I’m the Biggest Man on Campus’, by Stacey Patton.
[snip]… There’s no data to prove size discrimination in academia, according to representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, an advocacy organization, but there’s no reason to believe that academe is immune, either. In the meantime, fat-studies scholars trade anecdotes. Linda Bacon, a nutrition professor at the City College of San Francisco and author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, shares one, from a search committee she served on. One overweight candidate applied for the position. She was at least as qualified as the other applicants, Bacon says, but she didn’t get the job. “When it came time to discuss the lone fat candidate, one of my colleagues dismissed her by saying, ‘Well, she really isn’t the role model for someone who eats nutritiously, is she?’” Bacon recalls. “I was horrified. What it reinforced for me was that had this candidate had been up against a thinner woman similar in other aspects, or even with lesser qualifications, the thinner person would have gotten the job just by virtue of what she weighed.” When Bacon attends NAAFA’s conference, an annual gathering place for fat people, she says she’s usually the only thin person in attendance. She says a good number of the attendees are academics. “I’m struck by how many people in the room have Ph.D.’s, how many of them are incredibly brilliant, but they are underemployed and can’t get tenure-track positions,” Bacon says. “It’s got to be because they are fat. But how do you prove any of this stuff?”
Read more3/24/14: Priory, Searching for ‘Thinspiration’ Online.
[snip]… Dr Bacon states the issues with encouraging this kind of dieting “On a short term basis, people who follow restrictive diet plans like this will have nutrient deficiencies (which may not be immediately noticeable) and will weaken their immune system. The damage to the immune system may show up as increased vulnerability to viruses like colds. They may also experience concerns related to low energy, like irritability, impaired concentration, lethargy, and preoccupation with food. And when it doesn’t result in sustained weight loss, it may lower their self-esteem; make them feel like a failure. It also reinforces their bad feelings about their body.” Similarly talk of appetite suppressants and those encouraging each other to fast or restrict are potentially causing themselves a lot of harm. “Hunger is a good thing.” Dr Bacon went on “It lets us know that our body needs nourishment. If you don’t trust and respond to hunger, after a while the self-regulatory set point mechanism that controls your fat stores breaks down. You weaken your innate ability to hear your hunger and fullness signals. When this happens, most people actually gain weight over the long-term.”
Read more1/29/14: NPR, Adult Obesity May Have Origins Way Back In Kindergarten, by Rob Stein.
Children are already suffering from a kind of societal hysteria about childhood weight, according to Linda Bacon, a physiologist who studies weight regulation and nutrition at the University of California, Davis. “What this is going to do to kids is … cause more bullying and teasing of the larger kids,” she says. “It’s going to cause them to feel bad about their bodies. It’s going to make the thinner kids really scared of getting fatter. There is so much public and media hysteria about the epidemic of childhood obesity already.”
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