As I give talks with Q&A  and read e-mails and blog comments that are trying to convince me that my choices around Size Acceptance and Health at Every Size are wrong, there are some arguments that just keep coming up, so I thought I would tackle them together today.

5.  The fat person who tells me “I don’t think it’s right that you say  Weight Watchers (or Jenny Craig, or Nutrisystem or whatever) doesn’t work.  I’ve done it 6 times and it worked every time.”

Um… yeah…Ok – let’s talk about the definition of “worked”.  One of the main reasons I think the diet industry continues to be so successful is that most people lose weight in the short term but gain it back in the long term. The diet companies they have found a way to take credit for the short term results of dieting, but blame the client for the  long term results. They know that almost everyone can lose some weight in the short term on almost any diet.  They also know that their 5 year success rate is less than 5% but somehow they managed to convince people that the other 95% just didn’t doing it right, and should buy their product again.  And we do!  If 50 years of studies showed that Viagra only worked 5% of the time and that it had the OPPOSITE effect more than two-thirds of the time, would be be telling guys to keep taking it but try harder?

What if your birth control worked for the first year but then you had an almost 100% chance of getting pregnant in years 2-5 even if you keep taking it correctly?

If I paid Weight Watchers six times and I’m still fat, then unless my goal was to lose weight for a year and then gain it back (possibly plus more) six times, Weight Watchers didn’t work at all. Of course that’s exactly what the evidence told me would happen so I probably shouldn’t be surprised.

4.  You’re only doing this to justify your fatness.

Ok, dude – my body needs no justification.  It is amazing and that’s not contingent upon anybody or anything else.  How over-exaggerated must these people’s sense of self-importance be to think that we need to justify ourselves to them? That is some ego run amok right there.  We aren’t seeking the approval of anyone  – we are giving them the opportunity to see that they are operating under prejudice, bigotry and stereotypes, and to stop doing that. They have so thoroughly missed the point that I’m worried about their reasoning abilities. If you are one of these people and you are reading this, let me break it down:  We are saying “I Stand for the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for myself and others” not “I kneel for your approval”.  Where you got the idea that anybody needs to justify anything to you I don’t know, but wow are you barking up the wrong fat girl.

3.  Your body is my business because you cost me tax and healthcare dollars.

I’m not trying to justify my fatness, but it seems like these people are trying to justify their fat bigotry. As far as taxes go, unless you can whip out your itemized list of everything your tax dollars pay for, broken down into what you do and do not want to pay for,  including a list of the interventions that you are involved in for every single item that you’re not happy about, then let’s just call this what it is:  weight bullying and stereotyping plain and simple.

Healthcare is even more ridiculous since everyone from economists to the Congressional Budget Office has made it clear that fat people are barely a blip on the healthcare expense radar. Here’s a handy graph to clear things up.  Every disease that is correlated with obesity is included in the blue section.  For more details head to this post.

2.  I know eat less/exercise more works because my sister’s cousin’s babysitter’s friend’s aunt’s co-worker’s daughter’s school bus driver lost 20 pounds and kept it off for 5 years.

When his parachute refused to open and his reserve parachute got tangled, Michael Holmes fell 12,000 feet and lived.  So does that mean that anyone who tries hard enough can fall 12,000 feet and live?  Are you going to go jump out of a plane?  “Anecdotal evidence” is mostly anecdote, very little evidence. There is a vast difference between 20 pounds and 200.  There is a vast difference between a statistical anomaly and proof of concept. That’s why we have studies.  Which lead us to…

1.  I get that weight loss fails almost all of the time, but that’s no reason not to try!

That’s only if we assume that there are no negative consequences to a failed attempt. To fully evaluate the decision intelligently we need to factor in downside risk. The worst case scenario for weight loss is that it I fail, I end up heavier than I started and subject to the dangers of weight cycling (aka yo-yo dieting) which include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, depression and cardiovascular disease.  I am a fan of evidence and math, so my decision not to diet is based both on an analysis of the likelihood of success (taking into account that there isn’t a single study in which “success” in terms of weight loss was causally linked to better health) and an analysis of the risk of failure of which there is an almost 100% chance.  Yoda tells us “Do or do not, there is no try.”  When it comes to dieting, I think it’s a Do Not situation.

I hope that clears some things up.  For the record, I truly don’t mind when people legitimately ask questions about these or anything else, I do mind when people use them as if they are legitimate arguments.

In my blog last week I talked about the fact that my first marathon took way longer than I expected.  There are a bunch of reasons, I’ll talk about them more below but one of the major ones was that the Seattle hills just whooped my ass.  I simply hadn’t trained properly for the hills. Though the LA Marathon is very different, I’m determine to own the hills this time around.  Enter hill workouts, there are three different types that I’m doing:

Plain Old Hill Repeats:  Go up the hill, come down.  Repeat.  Sometimes it’s a number of times, sometimes it’s a length of time.

Mile and Back Hill Repeats: start at the base of a hill, run/walk a one mile out and back, go up the hill and come down, then turn around and go up and down the hill,  then run/walk a mile out and back. Repeat full cycle 4 times (increasing the number of times as training increases)

Screw These Hill Repeats:  (I’m sure this isn’t the official name but it’s what I call them)  Set number of hill repeats (I started with 6) Try to do each one faster than you did the last one, try really hard not to die.

“Luckily” I live by Signal Hill (pictured above) so I have easy access to a hill to go up and down. Yay!

Hill work can seriously suck but, I’m betting, not as much as not being ready for the hills sucked.

A lot of people have asked what happened to make my last marathon go on for four hours longer than I planned (I trained for 8.5 hours and it took almost 13.)  I’ve written a bit about it but gone back and forth on writing extensively – on one side there is plenty of helpful information about what not to do in the telling of it,  on the other I don’t want to appear to be “making excuses” for something which needs no excuse (despite the insistence of the haters who like to e-mail me their opinions as if I actually care what they think.) In the interest of telling the whole story, here’s what happened:

I started out over hydrated and nervously excited and so at mile 2 I seriously had to pee.  Unfortunately I was far from the only person in this condition and thus the lines at the port-a-potties were super long.  I took me over 20 minutes in line. (Of course my haters couldn’t figure out that my 25 minute bathroom break was almost all standing in line – likely because none of them has ever done a marathon –  so there are threads online with literally hundreds of posts speculating about my gastrointestinal health and bloviating about fat people’s gastrointestinal health in general.  One of the most hilarious things that has ever happened to me was discovering that there are people spending a ton of their free time discussing my poo.)  So that was 25 extra minutes.

When they re-opened the roads (two hours earlier than the signs said they were going to) they put us on a dirt trail that winds along the water, and also forced us to run up and down a steep, often muddy embankment as the trail had stops and starts. It was way slower than just walking in the middle of the road.  We also had to stop for traffic lights, and traffic where there were no lights, and go into restaurants to use the restroom after the port-o-potties were pulled off course.  Toward the end we were walking in a heavily wooded area in the dark, again – it was much slower than walking in the middle of the road in the day time.  With all of the winding and off-roading, we also walked over a mile extra.

I wasn’t ready for the conditions – I trained in Southern California usually in 70-80 degree weather.  At the marathon it was 40 degrees and I was freezing my ass off. I had never trained in wind like that (up to 20mph), and as previously mentioned, there were the hills.  I was happy with the preparation I had done, except that I should have done a better job of preparing for the conditions.

I trained entirely on my own, but walked the marathon with my Best Friend.  So instead of listening to music with nothing to break the complete boredom but obsessively checking my pace and keeping up my hydration and nutrition strategy, we talked as we walked and I didn’t keep track as I normally would. (To be perfectly clear, this is entirely on me – it was not in any way Kel’s fault).   I just didn’t stick to my plan. Also the closing down of the aid stations after mile 11 didn’t help and we were out there four hours longer than we had water or nutrition for.

So that’s it – I made tons of mistakes, they cost me and Kelrick a lot of time. I set out to complete 26.2 miles in one go, it was absolutely horrible but I did not quit and I finished 26.2 miles in one go. Success, however sucky. I’m eternally grateful to Kelrick for doing it with me and, dare I say, I’m actually kind of excited about doing it again.

Days until Marathon:  287
Current Level of Confidence:  9
Fun I’m having on a 1-10 scale:  9

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