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On a lighter note this week, MSNBC has a story out today on embarrassing gym mishaps, the bulk of which appear to occur in January by amateur gym-goers armed with freshly made new year’s resolutions.

Last year, there were more than 1,500 reports of exercisers landing in the emergency room after run-ins with workout equipment, according to data collected by the federal Consumer Products Safety Commission.

The agency estimates that when extrapolated to the rest of us, more than 50,000 people are treated in the ER each year after falling off exercise balls, getting snapped in the face by resistance bands, dropping heavy weights on their toes, tripping over jump ropes or flying off treadmills. Especially flying off treadmills.

When I moved from a graphic design position into a reporter role, one of the managing editors interviewing me asked why I think I’d make a good reporter.  I replied that I’ve publicly embarrassed myself so many times now that I have no qualms speaking to anyone about anything.  And yes, one of those embarrassing moments sadly involved me being propelled off the treadmill before an audience of early morning gym rats.  It was back in 2003, when I had finally achieved a fitness level in which I could run for more than a few minutes before collapsing in a huffing pile of red-faced exhaustion.  I had just upped the speed on the treadmill from a brisk power walk to moderate jog while reading a magazine to ward off the dreary monotony I’ve always found comes with running.  You know those annoying little subscription cards magazine publishers strategically place throughout that have the end result only of annoying readers?  As I flipped through the pages, a few of those cards spilled out onto the belt of the treadmill.  Fearing that I’d step on one and trip, I tried to strategically swoop down and flick it off all without losing my stride.  Yep.  You can imagine how this story ends.  I tripped, my headphone line got tangled in with the emergency stop button cord and I ended up ejected onto the floor with scrapes to my elbows and knees and a badly bruised pride.  All I could do was just sit there and laugh as a couple of concerned weight-lifters rushed to my aid.

How about you?  Do you have any embarrassing gym mishaps to share?

You remember the case of the otherwise happy and healthy Colorado four-month-old denied health insurance for the “pre-existing condition” of obesity, right?  The general reaction was one of rightful outrage, and the resulting backlash soon forced the insurance company to capitulate and change its policy on babies that are healthy but fat.

Rocky Mountain Health Plans’ denial of coverage to baby Alex is but symptomatic of a shift in the focus on childhood obesity to to direct anti-obesity fearmongering onto chubby babies — see here, here and here.  Perhaps its this growing hysteria on whether chubby babies turn into fat adults that contributed to a Washington couple deliberately starving their infant baby and toddler daughter and feeding the baby laxatives in an effort to force her to lose weight.  Brittainy and Samuel Labberton have been charged with third-degree criminal mistreatment, a felony, and are scheduled to be arraigned on Monday.  Neither is in custody.

According to local news reports (here and here), it would appear as if Brittainy certainly suffers from severe mental health issues, quite possibly including an eating disorder.  The baby was born in August, 2008 after Brittainy was induced at 38 weeks due to poor in utero weight gain, weighing 5 pounds, 4 ounces at birth.  Court filings note that Brittainy was then diagnosed with postpartum depression with psychotic tendencies and that she had stopped taking medication for this shortly after the birth.  A year later, when contacted by police, the 21-year-old mother “appeared emaciated,” said police detectives (I don’t want to give specifics here, but her reported height and weight indicates a BMI of 15, which is severely underweight).  Because of the baby’s low birth weight, doctors told the Labbertons that she needed to be fed every few hours.  The baby was hospitalized two months later after failing to gain sufficient weight.  When questioned by hospital staff, the couple insisted the baby was just “fussy and threw up her food,” yet she thrived while hospitalized and began putting on weight.  When told of her child’s progress, Brittainy was not pleased, said Senior Deputy Prosecutor Carol Spoor.

“Instead, Brittainy complained, ‘Oh my God she’s fat’ and ‘I have a fat baby,’” Spoor stated, recounting the December 2008 interview. “Brittainy insisted that (the girl) should be under the 50th percentile in weight, not over it.

“She indicated that her husband has a weight problem and she does not want her girls to be fat.”

Child welfare workers pulled the girl from the home.  Despite the admitted and remorseless neglect of their baby daughter, court social services didn’t move to take immediate custody of their toddler daughter until a day later and only because Brittainy said she felt she would kill herself and the child. According to court reports, when the older girl arrived at the foster home, she was “ravenously hungry” and eating so fast that she nearly choked on her food.  The couple were nonetheless allowed to see the baby three times a week in presumably unsupervised visits.  Shockingly, police were not notified of the baby’s neglect until seven months later when the baby’s foster parents noticed a “fishy smell” from her bottle following a visit with her parents.  Testing revealed the contents to most likely be laxatives.  In an interview with police:

“Brittainy expressed no remorse for not feeding the baby and admitted to hardly feeding (the infant) for many days,” Spoor said. “She also indicated she wanted to have 12 children.”

…Brittainy Labberton described her daughter as “very fat and overfed,” [Bellevue police Detective Ellen] Inman said. The detective added that the woman believed her daughter was much healthier before she was pulled from the home.

Samuel Labberton, 24, complained to detectives that his 9-month-old daughter had “gained so much weight that now she is fat,” according to court documents. He remained convinced he and his wife had behaved appropriately.  “Samuel told me that he would not change anything if he could go back,” Inman said. “He does not believe that he and Brittainy did anything wrong.”

The public outrage and anger is palpable and you can imagine the kinds of hate-laced comments and arguments for forced sterilization lobbed the couples’ way (and disproportionately at the mother, I might add).  To some degree, it’s understandable. It’s a natural knee-jerk reaction to get angry at hearing of society’s most vulnerable being hurt and abused.  What seems to be lacking however, is the consideration of (and compassion for) possible mental health issues at play here on behalf of the mother and quite possibly even the father.  Do the Labbertons deserve jail time?  Perhaps, although justice may better be served all around if that sentence also carries with it mental health counseling and treatment.  But just as it takes a village to raise a child, it’s that same village that will lead those children to burn it down.  We need to collectively ask ourselves the kind of culture we’re fostering when parents would rather kill their child than see it be fat.

I love me some Whole Foods’ vegan General Tso’s chicken, but I seem to have lost my appetite after reading that Whole Foods is discriminating against its fat employees by offering their thinner coworkers as much as a 10 percent additional employee discount.  Jezebel has the scoop.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey explains the program in a letter, reproduced below. Apparently it’s part of an initiative to reduce health care costs, which is interesting since Mackey is against the health care reforms that would actually reduce costs for all people.

Note that Mackey knows BMI isn’t a perfect measure of health, but at least it’s cheap! Even more fun, though, is the poster for the new Healthy Discount program, breaking down exactly what BMI range his minions need in order to get various discounts on his Tofu Pups.

If your BMI is above 30, you’ll get to keep the original 20% employee discount, but you’ll paying more than your thinner co-workers, who can knock as much as 30% off. Because if public health research has taught us anything, it’s that reducing people’s buying power totally makes them healthier. Stay classy, Whole Foods.

(copies of the announcements are available after the jump)

To put this into perspective: to receive the maximum 30 percent employee platinum discount, a 5-foot-4-inch Whole Foods employee would have to weigh less than 140-pounds and a 6-foot employee less than 177-pounds.  That is, of course, assuming they also meet the attendant platinum levels cholesterol, smoking and blood pressure requirements.  And because this is all in the name of health, say that same 5-foot-4-inch employee meets all the cholesterol, smoking and blood pressure requirements of the platinum level but they weigh 175-pounds, which means that they have a BMI of 30.  Their added discount?  Nada.

Whole Foods is careful to point out that they’re not penalizing employees who do not participate or who do not meet their admittedly “imperfect” bio-markers for health — all employees will keep their basic 20 percent discount — but, in effect, they are penalizing these workers by selectively rewarding those who hand over their private medical files and meet incentive requirements.  Whole Foods CEO John Mackey cites an attempt to curb rising health care costs as the impetus for the program, but do the ends justify the means?  Ironically, the company’s plan to slenderize employees by dangling before them an organic carrot may actually work to increase health premiums in the long run.  Remember that many an eating disorder begins as a simple diet and desire to “eat healthy.”  Now consider that eating disorders alone cost U.S. companies about $3.8 billion a year in lost productivity.

By rewarding a BMI of 24 — a full point below what is considered the benchmark of “overweight” — Whole Foods is not-so-subtly indicating its preference that a lower BMI is better and ideal, thus contributing to an atmosphere in which employees who do not meet this standards are made to feel ostracized and targeted.  These blanket standards also ignore genetic, gender, age and ethnic differences across groups, thereby directing this sense of corporate hostility, however passive, toward those employees who may already be among the most vulnerable in the workplace: minorities, women and senior citizens.  Would we tolerate this kind of “incentive” if it were directed at other groups of workers?  Consider this: in at least half the states, marital status isn’t a condition protected by state or federal anti-discrimination laws.  Many other states, like Ohio, are “at-will” employment states, meaning that workers can be fired without just cause (so long as its not based on unlawful discrimination, which even then must be proven).  Whole Foods could also save a lot of money both in terms of productivity and health care costs if they offered similar incentives to employees who make the “lifestyle choice” to remain single, childless or who limit their family sizes to a number that’s more cost-effective for the company’s bottom line.

Absurd!, you gasp.  Unfair!  A person’s marital or parental status has nothing to do with their work performance!

Exactly.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Examined Life will continue this week, but I wanted to bring to your attention a very important matter with political implications for all Americans.  Last week the Supreme Court effectively deregulated the American electoral process by striking down a century-old ban against corporate spending directly on political campaigns in federal elections.  With that 5-4 decision, the court, in essence, has transformed the highest offices of the land into an auction to be controlled by the likes of Exxon, Big Pharma and Wal-Mart.  The ramifications of the decision cannot be overstated.  As the New York Times sums up in its excellent editorial:

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

…The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

This decision touches upon nearly every facet of Americans’ lives, but in particular for readers here, it has the potential to affect causes near and dear to our hearts.  A quick rundown of what may loom in the near future:

• Corporations like Johnson & Johnson, who have huge and multiple stakes in the weight-loss industry, have long fought to fight to have obesity classified as a disease, for if obesity is a disease or a mental illness, government and private insurance will be forced to cover products and treatments for its treatment.  Groups like the American Obesity Association–which is supported by the pharmaceutical industry and commercial diet-mongers like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig and also advocates obesity to be classified as a disease–have gone so far as to argue for “fat taxes” to be leveraged against fat Americans.  In 2008, Johnson & Johnson alone posted annual sales of $63.7 billion.  If the company directed less than 3 percent of those earnings to political lobbying, they will have spent more than the combined 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain — which in itself was more than double the amount spent by both candidates in the 2004 election.* With the court’s overturn on corporate electoral spending, how long before corporate interests masquerading in doctor’s smocks are allowed to dictate treatments and taxes that support only their bottom line ?

• Proposals have already been made to develop and adopt national standards for company-run “wellness plans” with tax incentives and credits given to companies based on whether or not their employees meet “wellness objectives” such as weight, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and other arbitrary levels of health as defined by people with no otherwise right to peek into your medical file.  Corporations, of course, like this proposal because it offers them a relatively inexpensive return on investment — simply adopt a government approved wellness plan and then either not hire or fire those employees who don’t meet the new government health standards.  With the court’s overturn on corporate electoral spending, how long before corporations lobby their candidates of choice to make this proposal the law of the land?
• Last year, Congress finally passed H.R. 1424, which among other things provides equity in the coverage of mental health and substance use disorders by ensuring that group health care plans do not charge higher co-payments, coinsurance, deductibles, and impose maximum out-of-pocket limits and lower day and visit limits (provided that they offer mental health coverage).  The bill is set to take effect this October.  With the court’s overturn on corporate electoral spending, how long before Big Health Insurance Corporations lobby Congress to enact laws and amendments that erode at this coverage

In response to the ruling, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fl) has filed five campaign six campaign finance bills to secure the people’s “right to clean government.”   The bills have names like the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act and the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act. The first slaps a 500 percent excise tax on corporate spending on elections, and the second mandates businesses to disclose their attempts to influence elections. More details are available on the congressman’s Web site.  Grayson’s also created an online petition to support these bills moving forward and becoming law.  I urge you to lend your support in rescuing democracy.

* The candidates spent a combined $1.7 billion in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, according to Bloomberg.

Continuing our series, “An Examined Life,” comes Katie’s story about her reluctant foray into recovery from anorexia and learning to reshape herself as someone other than the “sick, anorexic kid in the baggy clothes.”

Katie writes:

My eating disorder was not a conscious decision on my part. They hardly ever are, but I wanted to make that clear from the onset. Instead, it was like sitting in a bath while the temperature is slowly raised. Hardly noticeable at first, until you are being boiled alive.

It started in high school, when I was 14. I was a runner, mainly cross country, but also track. I wanted to be fast. I decided to eat right. I wasn’t trying to lose weight at first. Honest. We didn’t even have a scale in my house. But I started cutting down on what I ate and started running more and more.

My parents first saw the problem that spring, at the first track meet of the year. I had hid all winter in my uniform, my baggy running pants, my clothes from the 7th grade that still fit. But when I took off my sweats to run the first race of the season, my parents saw a problem.

That started a series of counseling sessions with many different therapists, appointments with the family doctor (whose advice was to eat more cheese), appointments with a nutritionist and finally, a stay at an eating disorder treatment center where they tube-feed me and I was told that God wanted me to eat.

I was not consulted on any of the above treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing our series, “An Examined Life,” comes Kate Le Page’s account of her recovery from anorexia.  Kate recently published her memoir, Goodbye Ana, and has set up an anorexia and depression recovery site at anorexiarecovery.webs.com.

Kate writes:

I am Kate, 31 and in recovery from anorexia. My experience of seeking treatment has taught me that often you have to fight the system and keep persisting until your voice is heard.

I first sought treatment for anorexia when I was in the early staged of the illness, aged 17, back in 1995. My family doctor weighed me and put me on a course of antidepressants. He told me that even Princess Diana had an eating disorder and implied that it was simply a phase. I felt like a fraud as I’d gone there hoping for help with my eating disorder and received nothing but medication.  Over a period of a year I saw my doctor monthly to be weighed and each time my medication was either increased or switched. Unsurprisingly, the medication had little or no impact on my illness. Eventually I was misdiagnosed again, this time with Chronic Fatigue and referred to a specialist who gave me yet more medication and put me on a graduated exercise programme to rebuild my strength. Looking back it is rather ironic that the very treatment of exercise was prescribed to an anorexic and years later my exercise addiction landed me in the EDU!

In 1997, whilst at university, I stopped eating and saw a doctor who decided the best thing for me to do was go back on medication. It wasn’t until 1998 that my doctor back home finally diagnosed me with anorexia. Even with this diagnosis I was unbelievably prescribed another medication which actually made me so wired that I completely lost what little appetite I had left and made me lose more weight.  I received counselling at university but this did not help much as she had very limited experience of the illness. My university doctor referred me to a nurse at the clinic for support (who i was supposed to see weekly) and the rather intimidating receptionist said that the earliest appointment was 6 weeks. I felt totally fed up and told her to leave it. Several month later I was referred to the local hospital’s Eating Disorder Service. Again, this was only a monthly 15 minute chat with a dietician so had virtually no impact on my illness.

Years went on and although by this point my eating disorder had become more severely entrenched I was very wary of seeking further treatment.

Read the rest of this entry »

I received an enthusiastic response to my call for eating disorder recovery stories.  These will all eventually be archived and made available once I complete the site redesign, but for now I’d like to spotlight them as part of a special series this week I’m calling “An Examined Life” (the title is inspired by the well known Socrates quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” which was first introduced to me by a wonderful friend influential in my own eating disorder recovery).  While many people resolve to transform their bodies each new year, I want to instead to focus on our minds and self-image.  Not only do I hope to show recovery is entirely within grasp for most people with an eating disorder (or disordered eating, poor body image, etc..), but also the different ways in which people from all shades of the disordered spectrum have gone about achieving it.   Our first story comes from an anonymous reader, who blogs at Spits at Mirrors, and struggled with bulimia.

Anonymous writes:

When I was a kid, Mary Lou Retton won a buncha gold medals in the 1984 Olympics and all my girlfriends and I becaume obsessed with gymnastics. When I was 7, my friend Katie and I took gymnastics together after schools. (This was by no means serious training, it was just once a week after school, the way other girls take ballet lessons when they are young.) I also read every book and magazine I could get my hands on about gymnastics, and saw the Nadia Commenici biopic when it came out.  This interest in gymnastics was when I first became consious of my weight, because the bios I read about the teenage girl Olympic gymnasts all mentioned their weights. These 14 year olds weighed the same amount that I did at age 7. I was not overweight, just your average-weight well-nourished American child. But I remember feeling bad about how much I weighed, because teenagers weighed as much as I did.

At one point Katie and I were playing on my swingset in the backyard, and we started talking about weight. Katie was shorter and had a smaller frame, so she weighed less than me by about 10 pounds, and I was very jealous. I think our fight turned ugly. Eventually my interest in gymnastics faded and was replaced by other things, like Sweet Valley High books (“Jessica and Elizabeth, the perfect size 6!”), music (I loved Madonna and Cyndi Lauper), and drawing comics. The next instance of weight awareness/self-hatred came when I was ten years old. I happened to be sitting in the living room with my family, and they were watching some PBS program about modern dance. I remember noticing how lithe the dancers were, and looking down at my own body and just seeing fat fat fat. That summer I went to camp, and while sitting down waiting my turn to play dodgeball, I looked at my thighs in shorts and thought to myself that they were spread out like slabs of fat on the chair.

Ever since then, I was convinced I was overweight and the conviction that I needed to “reduce” was with me.   Read the rest of this entry »

From the station that helped destroy the Gosselin’s marriage comes a new series called “One Big Happy Family.” The series, which premiered last month on TLC, documents the efforts of a black North Carolina brood, in which all four members weigh in at more than 300 pounds, to slim down. The show’s producer, Mike Duffy, likened it to the TLC show “Little People, Big World,” saying that “One Big Happy Family” is instead “about big people living in a little world — fat people living in a skinny world.”  Show clips are available here.

The Boston Herald calls it “TLC’s latest attempt to exploit a family for ratings.” Monsters and Critics says, “Trainwreck reality TV doesn’t get much bigger than the TLC effort, One Big Happy Family.” Variety says, “One Big Happy Family joins a TLC lineup that often seems devoted more to pithy titles than anything else.” And a CNN report last week drew attention to “big” concerns whether or not the show is “potentially exploitive of the family, whose ‘fat and happy’ attitude has drawn comparisons to the comedic Klump family from the Eddie Murphy film ‘The Nutty Professor.’”

Granted, the Cole family’s attempts, at times, can seem like buffoonery. For instance, in the clip above, the family is shown eating a voracious amount of pancakes, which mother Tameka says the family can work off later with a walk around a local water park (an excursion undoubtedly suggested by show producers). Once there, they indulge in a big, sugary piece of funnel cake. Chairs break beneath their weight and the family is turned away from a water park ride for their size. But weight-loss reality shows are, by their very nature, exploitive, which begs the question of why the sudden concern and criticism over this weight-loss reality show.

Read the rest of this entry »

The images and reports coming in from Haiti are absolutely harrowing.  The earthquake, which left the capital city of Port-au-Prince in ruins, is catastrophic; more than two million people have been affected, tens of thousands have died, and uncountable people injured.  Times are tough for a lot of folks right now, but if you can help, it seems that financial donations are the best and preferred avenue to take.  Here’s a few groups with strong track records collecting donations:

CARE: CARE has already deployed emergency team members to Port-au-Prince to assist in recovery efforts. They’re focusing their efforts on rescuing children who may still be trapped in schools that collapsed.

• Matthew 25 Ministries: This is a Cincinnati-based organization that works internationally to help people in need and in times of disaster.  To give you an example of the enormity of their assistance, they use the U.S. Air Force to transport some of their materials and say they’ve now outgrown the Air Force.

• AmeriCares: The organization has already committed $5 million in medical and humanitarian aid, is sending emergency response experts to Haiti, and is currently preparing an emergency airlift to their partners in Haiti.

• Doctors Without Borders: Operates one of the only free trauma centers in Port-au-Prince as well as an emergency hospital in the capital for pregnant women, new mothers, and newborn children. All three of its primary medical centers have collapsed, but DWB has already set up temporary shelters and is offering emergency care on the ground.

• American Red Cross: The organization has already pledged an initial $1 million in relief to Haiti, has opened its Panama warehouse to provide tarps, mosquito nets and cooking sets for about 5,000 families and deployed six disaster management specialists to coordinate relief efforts.

You can also sign the petition to grant temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians living in the U.S. President Obama has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to halt all forcible deportations to the disaster zone, but human rights groups are asking him to go one step further and grant them temporary protected status.  Refugees from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan are afforded this status.  “This will give [undocumented Haitians] protection from forcible deportation to Haiti, allow them to work legally, and start the long and difficult process of healing their families and communities. To refuse to do so would be irresponsible and immoral,” according to Credo Action.  Click here to take action.

Every beginning brings with it hope and the promise of great possibilities and the start of the new year is no different.  But for people with an eating disorder, the seemingly never ending barrage of weight loss and fitness advertisements can make it seem very trying, indeed.  While many people pledge to transform their bodies each year, I thought it might be different instead to focus on our minds and self-image.  In that spirit, I’m collecting stories from people who’ve recovered from an eating disorder or who have overcome various degrees of disordered eating (including dieting) and/or poor body image.  Not only do I hope to show recovery is entirely within grasp for most people with an eating disorder, but also the different ways in which people from all shades of the disordered spectrum and backgrounds have gone about achieving it.  A few folks have already sent me entries, and I plan to run them as part of a special series beginning next week.  When I get the new site design finished, they’ll also be archived in a special section there, too.

Interested?  Here’s a few points to consider when writing your own story:

• Briefly explain the nature of your disorder or food-related behaviors (please omit specific weights and numbers). How did it start?  How old were you?

• When did you realize that you had a problem?  What led you to seek outside help?

• What kind of help did you receive?  Out-patient therapy?  In-patient hospitalization?  Self-help books?  Did you have any obstacles or challenges to receiving outside assistance?

• Did you have support from friends and family?  If so, in what ways did they support you?

• What kinds of goals did you set while in recovery?  Did you do any self-exercises or other activities to help you work towards those goals?

• How long would you say you’ve been recovered or mostly recovered?  How do you successfully manage triggers today?  Do you have any advice for others?

E-mail me your entries at Rachel (at) the-f-word (dot) org.  If you have a blog, website or email address you want to share, be sure to also include that.  These entries can also be completely anonymous, too, so please let me know if you’d like a pseudonym used.