You have my permission to forgive yourself.

When I was 12 you said "wow you'd make two of her"
When I was 30 I overheard you say "its too bad she let herself go."
I've worked hard to forgive 'you'. But I've had to work harder to forgive myself.
I'm not blaming myself anymore. It stops now.

I have been writing about size acceptance and Health at Every size but I think I need to slow down and explain some more of "my truth"
I call it my truth because that is what it is. I will point to some studies and cite some resources but the theme is that this is my truth. I've lived in this body for almost 34 years and for many of those years its a been a body easily judged.
When I blog about health at every size - I don't blog to necessarily convince anyone of anything - though that would be nice. I blog for the me 15 years ago who needed this. I can't go back in time and talk to that me but maybe someone else can read this and benefit.

Fat is not wrong.
Fat is not a sin or weakness.
Fat is not a necessarily a sign that you are unhealthy.
Fat will not kill you.
Fat will not cost society bazillions in healthcare costs.
Its NOT a simple equation of Calories in/Calories out
Almost any statement about fat following 'well everybody knows..." is most of the time opinion and rarely an actual fact
Healthy choices are paramount but what you look like is determined by many factors: genetics, hormones, environment, thyroid issues, PCOS, etc...
Diets don't work. The measure of a successful diet is five years of maintained weight loss. The success rate for that is less than 5% - a statistical failure. What diets do succeed at is money making - a 60 BILLION dollar soul crushing industry.

from here:

If we wanted long term weight loss using this theory (calories in/calories out) then we’d have to eventually turn to starvation

If we wanted to use calories in/calories out effectively, knowing what we now know about entropy and how decrease in caloric intake causes decreased basal metabolic rate, we would just have to keep decreasing our calories and increasing our exercise until eventually we would be following disordered eating patterns.  It would be the only way to stay under our ever plummeting BMR and eat less than we burn. Perhaps this is why 95% of intentional weight loss efforts fail.  The body releases weight at first but then the damn science catches up to us and no matter how hard the people who’ve attended a physics amateur hour try to yell to the contrary, they will never be able to out-science the actual laws of thermodynamics and the complicated human body...

I'll give you a moment to take that all in.
You may disagree.  That is ok.

I've had plenty of thin roommates - in fact all the non-related females I have lived with were size 0-8 - mostly in the size 2 area. One was a size 00 - I didn't even know that size existed till her.  I wasn't overly impressed with their willpower or exercise habits - we had similar eating and exercise habits. Yet I felt like a failure because my dress size exceeded what GAP would carry.

following info from here:


Starting in 1959 Jules Hirsch was curious about weight loss - he basically starved 8 fat people with a 600 calorie diet until they had lost significant amounts of weight. Thinking their bodies were so drastically altered and now in a thin state they could maintain it. Not so -they regained and he was horrified.. And his testing went on and on to the point that participants in his studies experienced starvation induced neurosis.While in this state of reduced caloric intake participants metabolism dropped up to 24%.  The requirement to maintain weight loss long term was to be metabolically in a constant state of starvation.


Then another researcher Ethan Sims wondered if naturally thin people deliberately got fat what would happen. He had prisoners volunteer for the experiment - trying to gain as much weight as possible. It took tremendous effort. Four to six months of consuming up to 10,000 calories a day (yes you read that right). During this phase their metabolism increased up to 50%. And when the study ended they effortlessly returned to normal weight and stayed there.

The message is clear. Your body has a set point weight it wants you to be at. Disease may alter that level but doctors should treat disease not size. "Lose weight" is not a prescription.

There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body's metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.


The message of these studies never really got out to the nation's dieters. What industry would benefit from: "its good for your body to be healthy, but really in the end you'll look like your parents."

Some days I get so sick of diet and weight loss surgery ads. I think I should write a HAES post for every single one I hear. But I'd probably not have fingers left.

More interesting studies have been done on twins:

Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young - 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.


The scientists summarized it in their paper: "The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect."


In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.


A few years later, in 1990, Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.


The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.


The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples' weights might be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.


The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss - the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more - that Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.


He published it in the journal Science in 2000 and still cites it:


"Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one's breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe," Friedman wrote. "The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty.


This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight."

What it comes down to is this.
Healthy choices will always be good for you.
Intuitive eating may make you weigh less, it may not.
But its better than hating yourself any day.


Please follow the rest of the series by clicking on a label below - it all started here