queerbychoice | Links Post

This will be a quick links post, because so many people posted such good links yesterday.

blahflowers pointed out that a bill is in danger of passing the U.S. Congress which would ban all federal courts from ever again hearing any cases against "an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

dieppe pointed out that "the newest and most comprehensive study of the impact of obesity" found that - surprise, surprise! - the health risks of obesity are being ridiculously overhyped. Specifically, "according to the current study, obesity is causing about 111,000 extra deaths, but overweight is preventing about 86,000 deaths, leaving a total toll of about 25,000 deaths [a year]. And underweight is causing about 34,000 deaths a year." I think they should probably conduct some additional research about how many more deaths a year are caused by the stress of ostracism and prejudice against fat people, too.

gamesiplay pointed out that despite the depressingness of watching voters in so many U.S. states pass laws banning same-sex marriage, such laws actually sometimes can be defeated, maybe not by majority (heterosexual-controlled) vote among the entire voting-eligible state population, but yes by majority (heterosexual-controlled) vote among state legislatures: the state legislatures of Idaho and Maryland have both rejected state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. And this week, of course, the state legislature of Connecticut passed a bill allowing same-sex "civil unions" (hmm, I think we should put that phrase in quotation marks every time we use it, the same way right-wing websites put marriage in quotation marks), and the Republican governor of Connecticut signed the bill into law.

Lastly,

legolastn pointed out a parody website called AbstinenceOnly.com. I bet you never knew abstinence could be so much fun!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Sigh. The biggest problem with the whole underweight/overweight healthiness argument is that weight is only one aspect of overall physical health. If, for example, you are, like me, thin but in a very high stress work environment, you will probably be in worse shape than my friend who is moderately overweight but completely satisfied with her work.

It would be helpful if this debate focused on total fitness, which includes your mental state, your workplace, your time spent with friends, the foods you eat, the amount of time you spend laughing, the amount of time you spend playing, and oh, yes, the weight thing.

The other problem is that these obesity studies fail to take into account the level of obesity -- some people are very very seriously overweight, but not all overweight people are in this category.

And then there's the minor problem that many people, and I include myself in this category, feel overweight when we aren't because we keep looking at all the stick figures on TV shows and movies. Not a helpful body image, really.

"It would be helpful if this debate focused on total fitness, which includes your mental state, your workplace, your time spent with friends, the foods you eat, the amount of time you spend laughing, the amount of time you spend playing, and oh, yes, the weight thing."

But that would impede the real purpose of the studies, which is to encourage further fatphobia against both oneself and others.

Which then leads to more eating disorders and more purchases of weight loss foods and a lot of money for the weight loss industry -- but, rarely any actual permanent loss of weight for those involved. About the only successful diets I've seen, and I use the word successful very loosely, have been the Atkins and the South Beach diet -- and Atkins carries its own health risks, and I've seen a number of women give up South Beach because the results aren't fast enough. But Atkins certainly makes a lot of money.

I do think that exercise can provide a number of health benefits, and I'd be happy to see that encouraged, but the problem is, a number of people exercise solely to lose weight -- not to reduce stress or to have fun. And when they don't lose weight, they give up exercise -- and then lose that benefit.

From what I understand, Atkins only works temporarily - after a certain amount of time, the benefit goes away and one has to switch to a more conventional long-term diet if one is going to maintain the weight loss.

As for exercise, I think telling people "Go exercise more! It's good for you!" would still be missing the point. The point about exercise, to me, is that there's a reason people don't do it, which is that almost every place they want to go to is unreasonably far away to walk or bike ride to, because cities are built with an expectation tht everyone will drive cars everywhere. Telling people to go walk around without getting anywhere will never be half as effective as putting stuff close enough to them that they could actually get somewhere by walking.

Also, in the suburbs, or at least the suburbs around here, building sidewalks for people to walk on would certainly help. The only place to walk on a lot of streets in the Sacramento area is on a two-foot-wide strip of asphalt while cars are whizzing by at 50 miles per hour mere inches away from you, and taking that kind of risk of being hit by one of them is definitely not good for one's health. Dying from lack of exercise is likely to take 50 years; dying from being hit by a car while exercising on un-pedestrian-safe streets takes only seconds.

Your second paragraph nails the problem right on its head: we've developed a culture where walking is often not merely unnecessary, but a nuisance. And even if you go someplace to walk, you may not be able to walk far. And many suburbs are intentionally built sidewalk free.

For example, here in South Florida, we do have parks with "trails," but most of these nature trails are only a half-mile or a mile in length -- which means that to get any benefit from walking, you must first drive to the park, and then walk around and around the trail. It's not a real walk. Yes, admittedly part of the problem is that our largest park (the Everglades) is a wetland with very few areas that could be walked, but the parks near the coastline could and should have been developed with more walking and rollerblading possibilities.

Actually, I'll be attending a conference this afternoon and tomorrow where one of the subjects will be how to reduce traffic in Broward County. I feel like screaming: obvious solution, people: Start by increasing the buses, and then, make sure that people have sidewalks so that they can walk to the bus in the first place.

But the assumption here is that you will drive.

Oh, and I think you're right about Atkins. In any case, it's not the healthiest of diets, and I've heard several different doctors ranting about it.

While we are addressing health risks and fat, can we talk about the potential heart attacks that can occur when one realizes that while one was sidelined with fibroids, one has (temporarily, one hopes) eaten oneself right out of J. Crew's clothing? I am trying to keep K's words of wisdom in mind--"Clothing should be cut to fit bodies, not vice versa."

It's amazing, though--I'm finding that the "Eat Like I Have Some Damn Sense and Move Around" plan is working pretty well. But that wouldn't sell diet books and products and create a diversion that makes our politicians merely *look like* they care about our health, would it?

Another great site like this is http://www.technicalvirgin.com. They even have video clip PSAs.

According to the weight-loss counselor I saw at Duke, only the first 20% of weight you lose makes a big health difference. So, I am 220 lbs--getting down to 200 will cause the most health benefits. He said anything that I lose after that is mainly "vanity weight" and won't have much of a health impact, thought I think, according to most charts, I'd still be considered "overweight". He said that insane dieting, to get down to what the charts say is my "normal" weight, would actually be very unhealthy. What he recommended, instead, was eating a sensible diet and exercising moderately. Apparently, on that plan, I will just "level out" at some weight (probably 170, since that's what I've usually been since puberty) and that weight will be my "ideal healthy weight", even if it is not considered "normal" on the charts. And this guy has some kind of Ph.D. in nutrition, so I'm guessing he's not completely on crack. It's a shame though--at 170 I still look "plump" (and people sometimes treat me like I'm "fat")--so I guess I'll just never get treated as nicely as someone who naturally has a more model-like weight.

That site is greatness.

I thought we'd already agreed on one city - San Francisco!

If only California weren't so huge, the queers in San Francisco would have a much more noticeable effect on state government.

San Francisco is definitely very expensive, but not in the least dirty. It's a beautiful, clean city with huge wide brick sidewalks with lots of room to walk on and everywhere you go you can see the gigantic expense that was poured into every building and every street.

I don't live in San Francisco; I've only ever lived in Sacramento, which is a three-hour drive away. I would like to live in San Francisco, except for the sky-high price of real estate. Because of the prices, I probably never will live in San Francisco.

I love all of Northern California though, and the real estate prices aren't nearly as high in other parts of it as they are in San Francisco. (Probably still higher in almost all of California than in small towns in Texas, though.) Southern California, on the other hand, doesn't appeal to me . . . I think it's an ugly, smoggy, desert with too little green foliage and too little rain to be able to grow any green foliage. But then, you live in Texas, so maybe you're used to that. My roots are deep in Northern California - not only have I lived here all my life, but both my parents have lived here all their lives, and three out of four of my grandparents were born and raised here.

Links Post

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Abstience Only Parody

weight foo

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Re: Food good, now want boy.

Re: Food good, now want boy.