Last week while browsing the Fanatic Cook blog I ran across this excerpt from a book called The Fat Pig Diet, by the ironically named Michael Winner. (Don’t forget to read section 2 of the excerpt, too. If you can stand it.)
Winner has written a 304-page book to tell people that the secret to weight loss is to “eat less.” I wonder what he needs the other 303.99 pages for.
When I started reading this excerpt, I rolled my eyes. Just what we need, another simplistic solution for weight loss, I thought. After all, if losing weight were a simple matter of eating less, Winner’s book wouldn’t have the company of 44,126 other diet books, which is how many I found by searching Amazon.com in “Books” for “weight loss.” (Search performed at 7:25 PM EDT on 10/25/07 – your number may vary.) But as I read further, my eye-rolling switched to eye-popping.
Everything Winner says indicates that he thinks managing obesity is just a matter of willpower, and that the reason that he is no longer a fat pig is that he finally summoned up the willpower to stop eating too much. My main purpose here is not to question the details of Winner’s story, but at one glaring moment he overlooks (deliberately or not, I cannot say) something so important that I feel an obligation to point it out. He describes how, with a great increase in exercise and a modest reduction in food (“just a little caution,” he calls it) he lost 10 lbs in 2 years. Big whoop, ten pounds in two years, when you start out weighing 220 lbs and exercise for an hour and a half a day. (If exercise is so great, by the way, aren’t you supposed to have more to show for more than 1,000 hours of it?) He then mentions, briefly, that he was prescribed metformin to treat diabetes, and even admits that metformin is known for aiding weight loss. But he does not mention that the way metformin works is by improving the body’s ability to use insulin, thereby breaking the “eat-carbs-release-too-much-insulin-feel-blood-sugar-drop-crave-more-carbs-cycle.” And it was on metformin that he finally begins to shed weight in earnest.
Could it be that Michael Winner’s dramatic weight loss had little to do with his newfound willpower, and much to do with getting his glucose metabolism under control? Could it be that Winner’s inability to eat just a little ice cream, instead finishing off the whole pint (or two, a situation I sadly remember myself from my pre-low-carb days), was not a sign of weak will but rather the manifestation of unstable blood sugar? And could it be that the one and a half hours of daily exercise Winner took helped him, not because they burned calories but because they increased the sensitivity of his insulin receptors, again resulting in less insulin production, better blood sugar control, and better appetite control?
And that brings me to my real beef with Winner’s reasoning – his take on weight loss is rife with moral judgments and insults. The fact that they are (mostly) aimed at himself doesn’t make them any less insulting or facile. In just this short excerpt, he says he “could never resist temptation.” He refers to his previous habits as “piggish” and ”undisciplined.” His friend calls him a “fat bastard.” Winner calls himself “the pig of the western world,” and implies that dieting is a matter of being able to “stand it,” as if it’s all willpower. He says that “greed prevents” fat men from becoming thin men. He refers to an overweight actress as a “fat cow,” because she rejects his diet advice (which is, after all, simplistic, questionable, and hard to follow). He says that hunger pangs go away after a while if you exercise “control.” And in the second excerpt, he says, “Why, you may ask, did I have to wait until I was nearly 70 before I finally managed to lose weight, and keep it off? The answer is simple. Because I was a total pig.”
(As a formerly rather fat person who is now a slightly less fat person, I have to tell you, gee, I can hardly wait to read the other 302 pages. Because I just love the implication that fat people like me are lazy gluttonous slobs. I can’t get enough of it! And if you are a current or former fat person, I bet you’ll find it delightful, too.)
If you’ve ever been obese, fat, chubby, pudgy, or a little on the large side, Winner’s theme will sound familiar. You’ve heard it before – you’re fat because you eat too much, exercise too little, are a greedy glutton, and have no willpower or self-control. And if you’ve ever been obese, fat, chubby, etc, I would be very surprised to hear that you have never tried a weight-loss diet or an exercise regimen, or both. And if you are still obese, fat, chubby, etc., (or worse, if you are obese, fat, chubby, etc., again, after having once lost weight), one can only conclude that it is because that diet or regimen failed in some way. And if the diet or regimen failed, you probably felt that you failed, too.
I’ve been there. I’d spend two or three days eating a teensy bit of smoked turkey breast (ick) with fat-free veggie “cheese” on dry whole wheat bread (six to eleven slices a day, just like the USDA said), with a side of raw veggies and an apple with fat-free caramel dip, washed down with diet Coke or skim milk. After a few days, I’d be so hungry I’d give up. And when I say “hungry,” I’m not talking about minor physical symptoms here, a few rumblies in my tummy. I’m talking about shaking and breaking out into a cold sweat and fearing I’d pass out, or hunger pangs so intense all I could do was lie down while slowly consuming some food until they subsided. So eventually I’d give up on the low-fat diet and scarf down a pint of super-premium ice cream, the kind where one serving provides 75% of the maximum saturated fat the USDA (screw them, by the way) says you should eat in a day. And there are four servings in a pint. And I would actually feel all right for a while.
Or I would get up on a Sunday morning, eat a bagel with fat-free “cream” cheese and have my coffee with fat free “half and half.” (Half what and half what, I now wonder. I think it’s half corn-syrup solids and half hydrogenated oil. And how can they call it cream cheese if it has no butterfat? If you’re my age or older, you might remember that, in the 70s, if a company made a product that was a substitute for the real thing, it had to be labelled as “substitute” or “imitation.” We had more than a few jars of imitation mayonnaise around the house when I was a kid, not for any diet reasons but because they were cheaper than the real stuff – no longer the case, by the way; fat-free is big money now. How come fat-free half and half and fat-free cream cheese and fat-free mayonnaise aren’t labelled “imitation” any more? That’s probably the USDA’s fault, too. But I digress.) It would be a beautiful sunny day, and I would think, “I ought to go out for a walk after I’ve read the newspaper.” I’d sit down and read the paper and a half hour after my low-fat, high-carb breakfast I’d be so sleepy that I’d be unable to keep my eyes open. I’d wake up several hours later, the day completely shot, and feel like a lazy slug.
And because the issue of fat and weight loss is so fraught with moral terms, I’d feel guilty. I’d feel like a failure at dieting; I’d feel like a failure at exercising. And I kept getting fatter and fatter and lazier and lazier.
I will have much, much more to say about this when I review Good Calories, Bad Calories, but first let me ask the question which should’ve been obvious to my then ever-fattening self: if I was experiencing severe physical symptoms – cold sweats, shakiness, hunger pains, and drowsiness – that were alleviated by eating or inactivity, does that not suggest that mere willpower had nothing to do with it? Shouldn’t that have suggested that something physical was going on?
So why wasn’t it obvious?
The reason it wasn’t obvious is the clamor of voices shouting, “Fat people are lazy. Fat people are gluttonous. Fat people are fat because they spend all their time sitting in front of the TV scarfing down Cheetos. If you are fat, it’s because you have no willpower.”
The moral stigma is nothing new. Gluttony and Sloth have been numbered among the Seven Deadly sins at least since the time of Pope Gregory. But, peeps, that was the 6th century. Since 590 AD, we’ve learned that the sun is not the center of the universe, that microorganisms cause smallpox, that our blood circulates rather than just sloshing around inside us, and that instead of four elements, there are hundreds of them. Why has our understanding of Why People Are Fat not been upgraded in the last 1,417 years?
What if it is not the quantity, but the quality of what we eat, that matters? What if, as Taubes suggests, we’ve got cause and effect mixed up? What if it’s not that we are fat because we eat too much and don’t exercise enough? What if the opposite is true, that we eat too much and don’t exercise enough because we are fat? What if a fat person’s body directs most of the energy consumed straight to the fat cells, leaving little energy for normal activities? What if that makes fat people tired and hungry all the time? What if the cause of this condition is not eating too much food, but the wrong kind? And what if the kind of food that makes you hungry and tired is exactly the kind of food that’s everywhere, the kind that’s cheap (pasta), ubiquitous (check out any snack machine - heck, they even sell snacks at the Home Depot), easy to prepare (just add boiling water), found in virtually every restaurant from McDonald’s to Le Cirque, widely considered to be suitable food for children (macaroni and cheese, cookies, juice, crackers), served at every meal (your daily bread), requires no refrigeration (white flour, Fritos) and promoted by the government as healthy (the bottom of the Food Pyramid)? What if finding genuine alternatives to the food that makes you hungry and tired were really difficult? (Try this some day - count the different brands of unsweetened full-fat yogurt at your local grocery store. I predict that the number will be 0 or 1. Then count the varieties of sweetened, fat-free yogurt.) What if people looked at you funny if you tried to skip these foods that make you hungry and tired and instead ate the food the government claimed was going to kill you?
I’m not asking you to be convinced that all of those what-ifs are true. But for the sake of argument, just suppose for a moment that they are true. Does it call into question the You’re Fat Because You’re a Lazy Glutton Theory of Obesity? Does it suggest an alternate explanation of why fat people eat a lot and don’t exercise? What if, instead of a weak will, all of us lardasses are all genuinely hungry and tired?
I’m not trying to say that we have no personal responsibility. Lord knows, some days it’s just plain hard to skip the carbs. They’re everywhere, and every day, every meal, I have to make a conscious decision that I am not going to eat high-carb foods. After I bought brownies for my husband’s family, I made him take the leftovers to his office so I wouldn’t be tempted. But let me tell you, it was thousands of times easier not to eat those brownies after I’d been well nourished by lamb and spinach with whole-milk paneer, than if I’d already been eating nothing but a non-stop stream of the low-fat, high-carb food the USDA wants me to eat. It is a lot easier to skip junk food if you are not shaking and faint from low-blood sugar, if you are not so hungry that your stomach hurts. And if you’ve been eating exactly the wrong foods because that’s what the officials tell you, and all it has done is make you fat and tired and hungry and unhealthy, how is that you are a lazy glutton? And aren’t you mad, just plain angry at the people who promote these foods and the people who call you ugly names because you actually consumed them?
At least Winner used to be fat. The worst is when some lifelong skinny person says, “Well, I’ve been skinny all my life, but …” and goes on to tell you, Fatty, how your problem is that you eat too much and don’t get enough exercise. Don’t you just want to smack them?
Migraine aura picture from 
