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I’m a culinary dullard. Seriously, I can’t even boil an egg properly. But my husband and I are total Top Chef addicts. Last night’s episode combined challenge with altruism: Serve up a healthy, gourmet boxed lunch to Chicago’s finest police recruits.

I come from a family steeped in emergency services culture: My mother worked as an EMT and later, a 911 dispatcher. When I was a teenager, I rode with my local police department as part of a police Explorer program and continued to ride throughout my college years (my first major was criminal justice). Because of the nature of the job — no lunch breaks, high stress, sporadic work hours — most cops I knew ate fast food while on the job.

So, the challenge to serve cops up a healthy meal is certainly admirable. But what talk on healthy eating wouldn’t be complete without also a healthy dose of fear-mongering? “As you know, the nation is facing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes…,” began host Padma. The camera then panned over a table choking under an array of clumsily-constructed burgers and ketchup-drenched French fries, which Padma explained to be the fare normally consumed by the recruits.

The insinuation was not lost on viewers: Fast food contributes to obesity and diabetes.

There are studies that purport fast food to be a contributing factor in obesity and diabetes, while other studies find no such evidence to support the claims - this is yet another example of that niggling thing they call the “obesity paradox.” But one thing is clear here and that is the inherent class assumptions and contradictions: A 500-calorie fast food burger contributes to obesity and diabetes, and yet a 500-calorie mushroom risotto stewing in a sauce of fatty cream and whole butter does not?

Barry Glassner brings up the issue of class in his The Gospel of Food. He quotes a “prominent researcher” at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who asked to remain anonymous:

“There’s a lot of subtle and not so subtle bias. From going to all these talks about the obesity epidemic, you would think that McDonald’s and other places where the ‘wrong’ sort of lower-class people eat are calorie-dripping hellholes, and expensive classy restaurants serve only fat-free vegetables and no desserts.”

“No one ever uses Starbucks as an example, but a Frappucino is as oversized and calorie-laden as anything McDonalds can dream up. But the person giving the talk probably goes to Starbucks him- or herself and wouldn’t be caught dead at McDonald’s.”

But here’s the real kicker: The dozens of police recruits who purportedly eat all that fast food? Are thin. And diabetic chef Sam Talbot, himself a former Top Chef contender (and show heartthrob), who served as guest judge of the challenge? Also thin.

Did anyone else catch the show? What are your thoughts?

I’ve got lots of school stuff to catch up on, so here’s a quick round-up of related topics in the blogosphere and news.

Congratulations to Harriet Brown, who announced this week that HarperCollins has purchased the rights to her next book, Brave Girl Eating. The memoir follows the Brown family’s struggle to cope with daughter Kitty’s anorexia. You can read Kitty’s story here. A brief summation of the book:

When Brown’s daughter developed anorexia at 14, Brown refused to accept the dismal track record of traditional approaches to eating disorders; this is the story of her family’s triumph over the disease, weaving together a parent’s perspective, a journalist’s point of view and issues of neurobiology and genetics. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Brown wrote about her family’s experience in the Times Magazine in 2006.

I’m still accepting blogs to be added to the Eating Disorders Digest feed. If your blog addresses eating disorders at least in part and you want to be added to the list, leave a comment here with your blog RSS feed address. Note: I have had to delete a blog off the list that ends every post with a running count of the blogger’s current weight, calories consumed, and exercise undertaken. While this feed is not intended to be anti-reality, I also want it to be as safe a place as possible for those struggling with eating disorders to go to. Detailing your own struggles with an eating disorder is fine, but I think posting a running count of your stats and weight loss goals aren’t appropriate for this feed, either. Another note: if you’d like to be added to the feed, please embed the feed on your site first. The feed is intended to be a cross-collaborative project, for both bloggers and readers of our blogs. You can view the feed here. Also, if you haven’t already, join the Eating Disorder Studies Yahoo group.

Size-zero models form a convenient coathook upon which the media like to blame many an eating disorder. But for me and others like Naomi Hooke, the development of our eating disorders has very little to do with ultra-thin models. Hooke explores the forces that led to her development of anorexia at age 11 in the British Independent - finding it had nothing to do with size-zero models.

Anorexia has often been perceived as a quest for model-like beauty, as a teenage fad or as a diet gone wrong. It has even been described as a lifestyle choice. Seldom is anorexia acknowledged as the life-threatening medical condition that it is… Sufferers are often presumed to pour over the pages of glossy magazines and starve themselves in their aspiration to become glamorous, thinner-than-thin sex goddesses. From my own experiences and from those of numerous other eating disorder patients I have met, I can say unequivocally that nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty has very little to do with eating disorders, and the desire to be thin is merely one of many symptoms. Rarely can a single “cause” be identified.

Although the fashion industry may be rife with anorexia, the majority of eating disorder patients have not become ill through catwalk influences. And nor are they models.

And finally, go and read 18-year-old Katie Muller’s fantastic essay “F.A.T.” over at the other TheFWord site:

There is no good reason why women should be so appalled by their natural size and inherent store of fat (women naturally have a higher percentage of fat on their bodies than men) but there is a simple reason why they are. We live, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, in a man’s world. We are still, in a million small ways and plenty of big ones, submissive, convinced of our inferiority and full of contempt for our own sex. And to fit into the small space left for us in this man’s world, we have no choice but to shrink.

Shrink to fit, we are told, and reap the glorious benefits of success, money and even love. And when that never happens, reap the benefits of dying exhausted and being buried thin.

Muller’s conclusions on why aesthetic beauty standards are more stringent for women than for men fall in line with my own research interests: Women are encouraged to change their bodies so they don’t have the time nor the effort to change the world. As Miller explains:

Self-starvation is encouraged because as long as fat is seen as the enemy and ‘beauty’ the prize at the end of the rainbow, men are safe and women are trapped. Suddenly, from this perspective, eating disorders seem like an obvious solution, a practical reaction to society’s demands. They are so perfectly suited, in fact, to the job of undermining women that it would not be unreasonable to suppose they had been invented for that very purpose.

Muller, who also struggled with anorexia, understands what so many women in similar situations have come to understand: that “thin enough” is simply a journey, never a destination reached; that one can never be “thin enough” or “pretty enough” or “good enough” because the standards constantly shift, become higher and harsher. As she explains it:

We are all bashing our heads against the same brick wall. What are we trying to do? Break down the wall? It is not working is it? Perhaps that’s because we don’t need to break down the wall at all. We just need to stop bashing our heads against it.

Sage advice, indeed.

Comments? Critiques? Leave your thoughts on the stories above in the comments below.

I ran into a fellow grad student after class, who has recently switched from the stodgy annuals of European history to gender studies. Amy and I are both presenting papers at an upcoming history conference and I let her know that I found her topic on the sexualization of the Spice Girls interesting. She’s incorporated art history to present a multi-faceted look of the individual Spice Girls with their artistic counterparts. She said she will send me her paper so I could post snippets of it here.

We’re both really interested in the representation of women in mass culture, particularly in fashion and in women’s magazines. Discussion led into how the standards have continually shifted and become higher and harsher for women. And then Amy told me this little anecdote and gave me permission to share here.

In 2006, Amy took a year off school and had to apply for health insurance. I assume she didn’t have a job in which health insurance was available. Amy was denied for health insurance through Blue Cross/Blue Shield for two reasons: She had a preexisting condition of migraines which had required hospitalization twice in 25 years; and she was declared overweight.

Amy stands 5′0 inches and at the time, weighed 125 pounds. Her height and weight placed her BMI at 24.4, which falls within the range the government has deemed to be average.

Amy said she wrote a strongly worded appeal, emphasizing her healthy diet and lifestyle and castigated Blue Cross/Blue Shield for imposing unrealistic standards. She added that she is especially sensitive to the verbiage because as a dancer, she’s seen many of her classmates and friends go on to develop eating disorders. Unfortunately, Amy only received further form letters reinforcing her denial.

“Could you imagine if I wasn’t as confident?” asked Amy. “Being denied health care could have put me right over the edge.”

I have heard of people being denied health insurance for being overweight, but I often hear of these cases at the upper end of the weight stratum, usually with the obese or morbidly obese. The fact that one can be well within average weight standards and yet be declared overweight and denied health care is mind-boggling.

This originally arose as a comment to the discussion over at Shapely Prose on the recent study which claims you cannot be fat and fit. There’s another dedicated discussion on the subject at Feed Me!. I decided to repost my comments here, too.

The study in question, of course, is this one referenced in this AP story or read the official study here. The study followed some 39,000 women with an average age of 54 over a period of 11 years, tracking their weight, physical activity, and incidence of heart disease. The study concluded that overweight active women had a 54 percent higher risk and obese women an 87 percent higher risk for developing heart disease. By contrast, overweight inactive women had a 88 percent higher risk and obese inactive women a 21/2 times greater risk for developing heart disease.

In other words, according to these researchers, weight trumps physical activity in the development of heart disease.

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The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

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When I began making a concerted effort to deal with my gym phobia two months ago and become more active, my litmus was not weight loss or even inches lost. No, my goal was far less common: To run up the three and a half flights of stairs to my graduate class without huffing like a diesel truck.

Two months and hundreds of stairclimbing, cycling and walking miles later, I haven’t lost a single solitary pound, but I’m able to glide up the stairs effortlessly without getting winded. I kind of felt like Rocky after climbing the steps to the Philadelphia Art Museum.

An MSNBC story today addresses America’s “couch potato crisis,” but like most stories on fitness, it mindlessly conflates a lack thereof with obesity. Although the article notes that the average 2005 life expectancy is 78, up from 47 in 1900 and 68 in 1950, it continues to echo the as yet unsubstantiated claim that this generation may be the first to live shorter lives than their parents.

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Time picked up on the recent Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study in which it was revealed that weight discrimination is more prevalent than discrimination based on sexual orientation, nationality or ethnicity, physical disability and religious beliefs - article here.

“If a person perceives he is being discriminated against,” said study co-author Tatiana Andreyeva, “it might have significant consequences for his or her health and mental health. Even the perception of discrimination can be important because it is self-perpetuating.” And if rates of weight discrimination are indeed on the rise, say the authors, then it’s up to society to mandate legal protections for those who are overweight, just as laws protect people from discrimination by race, gender, disability and age.

As obesity continues to be demonized, all the while becoming more and more of a scapegoat for diseases, infirmities and disorders the medical community doesn’t want to admit it can’t quite fully comprehend or explain, Andreyeva’s suggestion is an astute one. Certainly if weight-based discrimination weren’t so prevalent, eating disorders wouldn’t be on the rise or as popular as they are today. And a study released earlier this year found that found that the desire to weigh less was a more accurate predictor of poor physical and mental health, than body mass index.

That fact that there still exists Americans today that need to have certain criteria legislated as a protected, legal class baffles me. And the fact that we even need to hold debates on the issue of granting and protecting civil rights astounds and saddens me.

Hoorah to Miss Plus Size Elite Jenna Vaught! The blonde bombshell dropped a bombshell of her own on reining anti-obesity zealot MeMe Roth on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet (h/t to Joy Nash).

Vaught appeared with the same guests I appeared with back in January, Roth and Dr. Jennifer Ashton. I thought it was very telling when Juliet asked the good doctor: “Can obese people be healthy?” Ashton responded with “For someone who is morbidly obese, I don’t care if they’re exercising and eating carrots and not smoking, by definition they have set themselves up for risk factors down the road…”

Once again, it’s an artful dodging of the question and a gross exaggeration of fatness. I would agree that someone who is morbidly obese - read a BMI of 40 or more - may be at risk for weight-related health problems, but that was not the question posed. Juliet pointedly asked if obese people can be healthy - obese is usually signified by a BMI of 30 to 39.9 - not if morbidly obese people can be healthy.

Roth, with her usual blind fanaticism, insisted that “plus size is no reason to celebrate” and compared obesity to yellow teeth stains from smoking cigarettes. But the real highlight of the show comes at the segment’s end. Vaught, a training physician-to-be, took Roth to task by pointing out Roth’s complete lack of medical expertise:

I don’t see why I shouldn’t celebrate my life. I am a single mother. I have come from nothing. I am a future physician.

Guess what? This morning, I’ve already run four miles. And I eat 1,800 calories a day. So dont judge me because I still carry a little extra baggage. As far as I know, I’m the only - along with this doctor here - future physician. So stick with your social judgments.

Watch the video here

As for Vaught, she’s a Weight Watcherer, but it also sounds like she subscribes to the Health at Every Size Approach. She also plans to launch a plus-size fitness series sometime during spring. Taken from her website:

As Miss Plus America Elite and a future physician, I know the crisis our country is having today concerning the obesity epidemic. Many people have asked me about my stance on obesity and weight. Although I believe that every person should find joy and happiness within themselves, at any stage in life. I also believe in fitness and healthy eating at any stage in life. For me, it is not so much your weight or jean size.

Let me say from personal experience, it’s very difficult keeping your cool in such a situation and especially with someone who is quite vocal in her opposition to your very existence. Vaught acted and reacted quite regally in the face of such hatred - just as a queen ought to.

Being fat isn’t a piece of cake regardless if you’re a man or a woman. But it seems as if fat women have a heavier load to bear. This is not to say that fat men do not suffer size discrimination – they do, but at much higher weights than women do.

I don’t believe the fight against fat bias ought to be split along gender lines. It’s a collective fight. But it seems as if women have more of an uphill climb than do men – as documented in a new report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, published this month in the International Journal of Obesity.

Researchers there documented the prevalence of self-reported weight discrimination and compared it to the experiences of discrimination based on race and gender among a nationally representative sample of adults ages 25 – 74. The data was obtained from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States.

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A roundup of related topics in the news…

Fat activist Jeanne Toombs has passed away due to complications of pneumonia. Am active board member of NAAFA, Toombs also spearheaded efforts to assist in the passing of the bill that would add height and weight to the protected classes in Massachusetts. Expressions of sympathy may be sent to her sister Nancy at ntb180 (at) comcast.net.

Via Shapely Prose: The magazine that’s working on reproducing Kate Harding’s BMI project is still actively looking for more women of color and women in their 40s and 50s to submit photos. If you fall into one or both of those categories, and either the overweight or obese BMI category, and are in good health (by your own definition), they would love to hear from you. Submission info is here.

Daniel Engbar, an associate editor at Slate magazine, wants people to shut up about the cost of obesity. Check out his editorial on the subject in the Dallas News. Calling current obesity scapegoating efforts “misleading” and “misguided,” Engbar argues it is the stigma of being fat - and not being fat in itself - that actually contributes to illnesses attributed to obesity and poor health. He rightfully calls for presidential candidates to pledge support for a federal ban on weight-based discrimination.

Speaking of weight-based discrimination… Anna Kirklund’s new book Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood has been released. Kirklund, an assistant professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, places the focus of fat rights squarely where it ought to be: civil rights. I’m definitely adding this one to my already growing summer reading list.

I’m featured in the newly released issue 6 of Pulse Zine, along with articles on coping with sizeism and sexism, the gender of group fitness, sexual abuse, a DIY on creating a zine and many more feminist-inspired topics. I received a copy of the previous edition before I agreed to the interview and I found it chockfull of feminist artwork, articles, affirmations and body-positive articles. For ordering information, see here.

Author Leslie Goldman of the blog The Weighting Game appeared on The Today Show last week for a segment on spring break and eating disorders. The story centers on Ashley Fillips, who fought and beat an eating disorder and is now an eating disorders activist. The segment focuses on spring break and eating disorders, but it’s important to note, by Ashely’s own admission, she struggled with disordered thinking and eating at a very young age. I don’t think the segment entirely simplifies eating disorders to spring break syndrome, but it does skate over other factors inherent to eating disorder development. Leslie shared some admissions from women she received during research for her book, Locker Room Diaries, including a woman who admitted that she and her friends were all doing cocaine so that they could fit into their bikinis for spring break. Click here for a video clip of the segment.

Diabulimia makes the news again, this time with an excellent feature in the Boston Globe. The term refers to people with Type 1 diabetes who skip or skimp on insulin doses in a dangerous attempt to lose weight. It’s been estimated that up to one-third of women with the disease engage in these behaviors. The article shares results from a recent Joslin Diabetes Center study of 234 women with type 1 diabetes. They found 10 deaths among women who had restricted insulin, compared to 16 among the larger group who had not. Those who restricted their insulin died on average 13 years younger - at 45, compared to 58.

Many patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy also experience a number of symptoms of eating disorders, according to findings from a Dutch study reported in the journal Sleep. Aside from the main features of excessive daytime sleepiness and cataplexy, one of the more prominent symptoms of narcolepsy is an increase in body weight, along with some reports of symptoms of eating disorders in these patients. For more information on the study and its results, read here.

Comments? Critiques? Post your comments below.