~ponder~

[fox]

So I wonder: are there programs of the Jenny-Craig-et-al sort for people who feel like they need to gain weight? I don't mean for people who need help with anorexia or bulimia or other disorders, but for people who find that they eat and eat and just can't keep up with their metabolism and believe they would be healthier if they could gain fifteen or twenty pounds and keep it on.

It seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?, but really, there must be a market - albeit a very slight one - for the exact converse of the struggling-to-lose-weight segment of the population. Might help to focus the whole matter on health matters rather than body-image ones. (I will always adore Carrie Fisher, but I loathed every single time I heard her in her JC commercial say "Thank you for letting me be pretty one more time." There is nothing right about that sentence.) I mean to say: Health At Every Size and all that, but there are people at every size who are not healthy there, and sometimes the way to do that is to change the size, and sometimes the change needs to be one way and sometimes it needs to be the other way. And I presume, from logic and just a smidgen of anecdata, that among people who struggle with being underweight there must be those who need guidance to make choices that will help them control their weight better than they've been doing. (Anecdatum: I knew a girl in high school who had passed willowy and gone into rail-thin, who wanted badly to be able to gain some weight for a variety of reasons, and toted snacks with her everywhere she went - but raw celery wasn't going to do it for her, you know what I mean? She needed someone to take her by the hand and slap some peanut butter on there or she was never going to make any progress.)

I just, you know, I wonder what Weight Watchers would do if you told it your starting weight was 105 and your target weight was 130. They'd have to do a different set of calculations when working out the points, I think, where you'd get credit for the carbs and lose some for the fiber, maybe, instead of the other way around. It shouldn't be outside their remit, though.

Comments

[jae]

I mean to say: Health At Every Size and all that, but there are people at every size who are not healthy there, and sometimes the way to do that is to change the size

That actually goes against everything the HAES movement stands for, though (not to mention the respectable medical research about these issues that HAES is founded on). The way to "do that" is to change the health. Maybe the person's size will then change, maybe not, whatever--the size isn't the point. It's the health.

I don't see why that would be any different for someone who's thin than for someone who's fat.

-J

[fox]

Right, you've said it better than I did. Sometimes addressing the health issues will inevitably cause the size to change. The programs that advertise on the television, though, don't spin it that way, do they. I think that's what's got me thinking about it. I wonder what it would be like to see some sort of testimonial, with before-and-after photos, where someone said "My clothes never really fit and I was tired all the time, but now I've gained thirty pounds and I've got curves and I can wear v-necks and I am so much happier and I feel great."

[jae]

Health is incidental in those programmes, though. It's the opposite of HAES--those kinds of programmes are about changing size, and if you get healthy in the process, well, that's a bonus! And for the vast majority of people who would consider participating in those programmes, the size they want to be is smaller. I mean, I get your point--it's certainly a true observation that it's kind of hypocritical not to have programmes out there for people who want to make their size larger--but it's not really a new one.

As an adherent of HAES, myself, I would hope that the thin people who feel ugly because their clothes don't fit right would try a) eating healthy foods, b) exercising and maybe lifting some weights, and c) buying clothes that fit them better. But maybe that's just me.

-J

[fox]

c) buying clothes that fit them better

Assuming they could find them.

I think what I'm slowly working around to is, yes, of course people of any size who feel ugly (and possibly unhealthy) because (among other things) their clothes don't fit should begin by eating healthy foods, exercising and maybe lifting some weights, and buying clothes that fit them better - but what is to be done when a person has done all those things and doesn't feel any better? Health has a psychological component as well, after all. I have this sense that one solution is to learn to love the body you've got. Which is all fine and well, but there's certainly room also - isn't there? - for people who would prefer to learn to get the body they want. Health At Every Size, that is, and I'd like to be healthy at that size rather than this one.

... Maybe it depends which part of the self is being allowed to dominate. That sounds kind of woo-woo, but I'm not sure I can think of a better way to phrase it at the moment. There's a kind of faux-empowerment - and I am not suggesting this is what you're doing!, but I've thought myself around to it now - where it seems like people cross over from I'm-OK-you're-OK into you're-so-OK-it-would-be-wrong-to-change-even-if-that's-what-you-want.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I had a similar conversation once with a friend who was uncomfortable with how many women she observed changing their names when they got married, for feminist reasons - which was all fine and well, except for how uncomfortable she was with their having made the choice themselves, whether it was expected of them or not. ("I wish they wouldn't want to", she finally admitted, which was much truer than "I wish they wouldn't do it.")

[jae]

Well, you can put me firmly in the "I wish they wouldn't want to" camp, then. I really do wish that more people--and more women, especially--actually saw their size as incidental, and yes, for me at least that goes for thin women as well as fat ones (and everything in between). But individuals don't have to agree with me about that, and it's up to them what they do with their bodies and their time. I'm not going to try and stop them; that's not my place.

Where I really can't agree with you at all, though, is the part where you refer to the perspective you've come around to as HAES, and especially where you say things like "Health At Every Size, that is, and I'd like to be healthy at that size rather than this one." That perspective is antithetical to HAES. So yeah, if you tell me that you're going to try to change your size, I'm not going to argue with you, but if you refer to that as HAES, I'm damn well going to call you on it.

-J

[fox]

I don't mean to refer to that as HAES specifically, then - it has come from a totally incomplete (completely incomplete?) understanding of that philosophy, apparently, and I should be spelling it with lowercase letters instead, since I've always been (not just today! [g]) more about the individual-agency aspect of the thing than the self-acceptance. To put it totally bluntly.

[sebastienne]

It's not that they don't spin it that way, it's that the very idea of HAES is completely antithetical to them. Weight Watchers aren't saying, "we're here to promote healthy lifestyles for everyone, whatever their size"; they say "we're here to encourage you to be thinner, whatever the cost".

[fox]

That's ... not quite true. Other programs may say that, but Weight Watchers aren't interested in helping people lose more weight than [they determine] is healthy for them to lose. One might well disagree about how those goals are identified, but a person who loses too much weight gets a talking-to. Which is sort of why I'm a little surprised they don't have a companion program to help people gain, is what I'm saying.

[sebastienne]

Maybe they work differently in the US?

In the UK, you get a number of "points" per day, and I've had to carry people home from nightclubs because they saved up all their day's points for alcohol.

[fox]

You do get points per day, and saving up for booze is a regrettable choice - but I don't quite see how that lines up (or not exactly, or not entirely) with "be thinner, whatever the cost"; if you're on 30 points and you only reach 25, you are also not in compliance, I mean to say, because starving yourself to thinness isn't the point. Put another way: as is true of so many systems, off-label uses don't necessarily mean the design is fundamentally flawed.

[ellen_fremedon]

In magazine ads from the turn of the twentieth century, anything touted as a 'health food' is usually so called for its high caloric density-- things like Jello pudding were marketed as being especially good for invalids, who might not be able to get a lot of food down at any time. I think those meal-replacement drinks like Boost and Ensure are the modern equivalent.

There's also a whole genre of foods marketed to high-performance athletes-- endurance hikers or marathon runners and such. But that's more about immediate nutritional needs than long-term body modification.

[fox]

Yeah, those tend to be as you say about making sure you don't fall down in the middle of your run, and/or about building lean muscle mass - which is its own sort of thing, I guess, but the implication is never that the target audience has trouble gaining weight, just that they're taking this particular kind of control of how they're gaining it.

[sanj]

Well, Ensure and the like are often prescribed for recovering anorexics/bulimics, and for elderly people who are having problems keeping on weight. But I don't think there's any kind of program for it.

[laurajv]

One of my sisters-in-law needed to gain weight at one point; she was having reproductive troubles because of low body fat. Her doctor told her to eat high fat things that had nutrition in them, but especially ice cream (fat and calcium, yum yum). My brother would follow her around with pints of Ben & Jerry's. "Have some ice cream! You only had one bowl today!"

I was like, is this seriously the medically recommended plan?

(I mean, it worked, they've got 2 kids now, but it was weird.)

[fox]

Right? Friend of mine was diagnosed with celiac only after a whole summer of dangerously precipitous weight loss (such as you might expect if you're unable to digest most of what you eat, but it took a while to work out what the trouble was) - so once they sorted her out she was briefly on the ice-cream-and-marzipan diet. Startling, right? But as you say.

[insptr_penguin]

Some women with very low body fat, usually athletes, have trouble maintaining regular menstruation and go into secondary amenorrhea. This puts them at risk for bone loss. Gaining weight combats this and the sort of thing you mention might benefit them but in the case of athletes, I have found, they are usually aware enough of their eating and concerned enough with performance that it's easy enough to up the calories. Ensure or other high calories smoothie things are good for that. I think a group dedicated to helping thin people gain weight would be mercilessly mocked and attacked given our culture's utter inability to deal with weight and health rationally (fat-shaming, declaring some women "real" and some not, casting food as an enemy,etc...). On the other hand, I've heard of at least one person who joined Weight Watchers to ensure that they were eating enough by following the point system.