The Chasm Between Weight and Health

After reading my post yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a message about how she frequently felt judged for her small size (OMG, she must purge all her food, GAH, go eat a cheeseburger!) and found it comparable to how we judge people for being a larger size. She also kindly shared with me that she lost her dad to heart disease; even though he was very slender, he was certainly not healthy. I really appreciate her reaching out, and it made me realize that I needed to discuss this in further detail before moving forward with other posts.

My friend's story about her dad also reminded me of an article I read ages ago in Runner's World about an ultramarathoner who suffered a heart attack in his early 30s. Genetics? Perhaps. A diet extremely high in simple carbohydrates that he explained in great deal? In my humble opinion, this is the more likely culprit. I plan to do a post on the mounting evidence of sugar causing heart disease, but for now, I will simply state that is my opinion. Don't believe it until you read the evidence for yourself.

Too often we attribute weight to health when it's really just one of many factors and certainly, in my opinion, void of the most important factor: what do you actually eat. So I feel the need to set the record straight: size does not determine how healthy you are. I chose to start this discussion of health and nutrition based off of weight gain because I think it is something most people can relate to. My grander purpose is to get us thinking about health instead of weight. There are lots of overweight people who are not binge eaters, just like there are lots of skinny people who are not binge eaters. The morbidly obese and the emaciated actually have a lot more in common than meets the eye: their bodies are starved of the nutrients they actually need. You can be a medically defined "ideal weight" and be much less healthy than an overweight person. For example, you could have lung cancer, or any other number of diseases that have nothing to do with being overweight. This is how some parts of our medical lexicon play into nutritional misinformation. In fact, recent evidence shows a correlation between being overweight and having a longer lifespan. I would purport that, it's not the excess weight that's helping the overweight live longer, but one macronutrient in particular that is essential to the body (particularly the brain) that also helps absorb micronutrients. The overweight may be eating this macronutrient in addition to the food that causes them to be overweight. A slender person could also be eating this macronutrient without gaining any excess weight. (I will discuss this lovely macronutrient, my favorite of them all, in great detail, in another post.)

So please, pretty please with a cherry on top, stop judging other people based on their outward appearance/weight, and, more importantly, stop judging yourself based on your outward appearance and/or weight. The reason I wrote the "ultimate fat trap" post relatively early on in this discussion is because I want us to really see how little evidence our judgments are based on. And, furthermore, how little evidence our nutritional guidance is based on. It's enough to make anyone throw up their hands and say "screw it, I'll eat what I want."

Learn what foods are good for you and indulge in your favorites; may you find pleasure in food and find pleasure in health. Feed your body, feed your mind, and feed your soul with positive things. I hope my blog can help guide you a little bit in finding what things are actually good for you, as well as delicious and satisfying, and to stop the judging, depriving, binging, purging, or any other disadvantageous activity. I hope that we can do it together actually. I am learning and growing right beside you, and I think I can help us both ask the right questions. The hardest part of this equation is figuring out what foods are actually good for you, and I think we may actually be able to figure this out. Please, join me!