Welcome to my chapter-by-chapter review of Rethinking Thin, the 2007 book by science writer Gina Kolata. Rethinking Thin was written after the conclusion of a large study comparing a low-carb diet to a reduced-calorie diet. This evening, I'll be reviewing the interlude titled "One Month," and follow that with an in-depth review of Chapter 3.
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Rethinking Thin, by Gina Kolata
The story so far:
In chapter one, Kolata introduced Mr. Carmen Pirollo, one of the participants in the large diet comparison study. She then discussed the two diets - the low-carb Atkins regimen, and the low-calorie LEARN lifestyle program. She followed that with an exploration of the phen-fen (a combination of phentermine and fenfluramine) fad of the 1990s, and finished the chapter by detailing Mr. Pirollo's experiences with phen-fen and his other diet successes and failures.
In chapter two, she showed how everything old is new again when it comes to diets. She started with the 19th-century origins of low-carb diets with Brillat-Savarin and Banting, and low-protein regimens from Sylvester Graham and Horace Fletcher. She also discussed the history of calorie counts on restaurant menus (which has been revived as a policy goal by Dr. David Kessler and others), and an early 20th-century weight-loss contest (very much like today's The Biggest Loser phenomenon, complete with post-contest weight regain).
In the rest of the book, the ongoing story of the Penn weight loss study will be told mainly in interludes between full-size chapters. The first such interlude takes place at One Month into the study.
Interlude: One Month
One month after the start of the study, participants in both groups - low-carb and reduced-calorie - are losing weight successfully. Kolata focuses on the low-carb group in this first interlude. Most of the dieters seem happy to be in this group - and why not? At the beginning of the study in 2004, the low-carb diet was at the height of its popularity.
In fact, while discussing his strategies for coping with meals with friend and families, one study participant said, "Everyone I've told [about participating in the low-carb diet study] has been totally impressed, like, 'Wow, that's so cool.'"
The dieters discuss other strategies. The man with the easily-impressed friends went to a ball game at the Phillies stadium and found a pork sandwich that was legal for the low-carb diet, because he ate the pork and cheese and threw away the bun. Mr. Pirollo, who was introduced in the first chapter, is also finding ways to resist temptation in public places - for example, by bringing his own snacks to the movie theater. He's also walking four hours every week.
Chapter 3: Oh, to Be as Thin as Jennifer Aniston (or Brad Pitt)
In chapter 3, Kolata looks at societal attitudes toward obesity. She starts by asking, "How thin should we be, exactly?" She talks to Katherine Flegal (who we met in Kessler's book as well), then interviews Samantha Miller, who advises Miss America wannabees based on her experiences as Miss Virginia 1997.
The Miss America contest has stopped publicizing contestants' weight and height, but the pressures are still there. Benjamin Caballero, a Johns Hopkins researcher, studied the data for contestants from 1922 through 1999, and found that while the pageant winners have gotten a little bit taller, they've gotten quite a bit thinner. The Body Mass Indexes (BMIs) ranged from 20 to 25 back in the 1920s, but recent winners have been in the "underweight" range of BMI, including one whose BMI was just 16.9.
Half of American women have BMIs above 25. However, more than 70% of American women want to lose weight. Why do women with BMIs in the "normal" range want to lose weight? One anthropologist, George Armelagos points to the example set by the rich and famous, labeling it the "King Henry the Eighth and Oprah Winfrey Effect." When Henry was king, being fat was a sign of affluence. Now, it's getting and staying thin that is associated with wealth and power, while people who are overweight or obese are stigmatized.
Life as a fat person can be hard, and society's judgment harsh. Studies have found that fat people are less likely to be admitted to elite colleges, are less likely to be hired for a job, make less money when they are hired, and are less likely to be promoted. One study found that businessmen sacrifice $1,000 in salary for every pound they are overweight.
One thousand dollars for every pound they're overweight? Not obese, but overweight? That's incredible - "incredible," as in "I don't believe it." If I'd been penalized a thousand bucks for every pound of overweight, I'd have had to pay my employers for the privilege of working for most of my adult life. Kolata does not identify the study that made this absurd claim. Her footnotes reference her own NY Times article from 1992 (which makes the identical assertion, again without identifying the original study) and the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. At the latter site, I found a PDF titled "Weight Bias: A Social Justice Issue," which makes the far more believable claim that overweight and obese people sacrifice as much as 6% in salary compared to "normal"-weight workers.
In chapter 2, Kolata noted that William Banting, the 19th-century proponent of low-carb dieting, had to deal with the "sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious." In chapter 3, she details some of the hurtful attitudes faced by overweight and obese people today. Kolata's 1992 NY Times article (linked above) focused on these insults, and was titled "The Burdens of Being Overweight: Mistreatment and Misconceptions." The PDF from the Rudd Center makes the same point, and notes that children have been found to see their overweight classmates as "...undesirable playmates who are lazy, stupid, ugly, mean, and unhappy."
Personally, I (Edward) never have experienced the insults of "the cruel and injudicious" the way that some have - even though my BMI at my heaviest (37.0) was greater than William Banting's (33.6). Maybe I carried my fat better than Banting did - a friend from high school saw my before-and-after pictures on Facebook and said that she didn't remember me as having been as obese as I remember being when I graduated high school. Or maybe I've just been oblivious to strangers' remarks. Whatever the reason, I've never felt targeted as much as the unhappy people in Rethinking Thin - but I find their stories of prejudice believable nonetheless.
So fat people are stigmatized - but what are American men and especially American women supposed to look like? Kolata identifies the Gibson Girl as the beginning of the modern ideal:
She was mesmerizing--tall, lithe, and athletic yet still possessing curves, and with an attitude, a bearing, that compelled notice...Every woman who saw her envied her. Every woman who saw her wanted to look like her, wanted to be her.
When I read Kolata's description above, something didn't quite match what I imagined the Gibson Girl look to be. A quick Google image search for Gibson Girl helped me figure out the problem - the original illustrations drawn by Charles Dana Gibson around the turn of the 20th century had waists that were much too small to be characterized as "athletic." That aside, however, Kolata makes a very good case that the Gibson Girl did become the ideal for American women. In fact, although Kolata doesn't say so, the Miss America contestants she mentioned at the beginning of the chapter are real-life Gibson Girls, complete to the elaborate hair-dos. Or change the Gibson Girl's brunette pompadour to long blond hair, dress her up in more modern fashions, and move her to California, and you have the iconic look of the late 20th century - the Barbie Doll.
As the Gibson Girl gave way to the "flapper" look in the 1920s, young women felt even more pressured to lose weight to conform to the popular look. And three relatively new technologies enabled them to Geek Their Fitness - the inexpensive bathroom scale, the inexpensive full-length mirror, and inexpensive photographic reproduction in magazines. Now, for the first time, young women could get an accurate picture of the "ideal" look in magazine photographs. They could look in a full-length mirror and compare themselves to the photographic ideals, and then get on the bathroom scale to get an idea of the numbers they needed to obsess over.
As the 20th century wore on, the ideal changed - but the more it changed, the more it stayed unattainable. Kolata notes that although Marilyn Monroe is remembered as voluptuous, her actual height and weight put her BMI on the low side of the "normal" range. A decade later, the voluptuous looks of Marilyn and Barbie gave way to the look of fashion model Twiggy, whose BMI was 14.3. Kolata asserts that Kate Moss and other "heroin chic" fashion models are later incarnations of this unattainable ideal.
At the end of chapter 3, Kolata looks at how these ideals affect the self-image of real people, including the participants in the weight study:
Fat people say they long for a day when they are thin enough to enjoy looking at themselves in photographs. At one of the diet meetings, a woman in the Atkins group confesses, to nods of acknowledgment, that she hates being photographed. "I don't want to see what I look like, and I don't want it duplicated for all eternity."
...
But, notes Eva Epstein, the young and slender psychology student who is directing the discussion, "in some cultures, being overweight is a sign of health."
"We don't live there," a man shoots back.
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Feb 25
Thurs AM - 2liberal
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Feb 26
Fri AM - WHEE Open
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Sat AM - bloomin
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Mon AM - NC Dem
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Weds AM - WHEE Open
Weds PM - Edward Spurlock (Kolata, Ch. 4)