Obesity myths exploded
When behavioural scientist Nadja Hermann’s weight ballooned to 150kg she realised it was time for radical action – and turned to science. Along the way she found out a lot of information about weight-loss is a big fat lie
AS FAR back as I can remember I was over - weight. In my teenage years I tried every diet going and would sometimes lose weight, only to put it all on again. Eventually I concluded that so-called “normal” weight just wasn’t realistic for me. It would mean a life of permanent hunger. I also decided such a life wasn’t necessary: excess weight was demonised without reason. I might be fat but I didn’t smoke, drink, consume fast food or red meat. And I was physically fit. I decided to set other priorities in my life – such as training as a psychotherapist and getting married. At the age of 30 I tipped the scales at 150kg. If asked, I told people I was comfortable with my weight. Meanwhile I was secretly visiting
an obesity clinic as an outpatient and thinking about a stomach-stapling operation. I eventually decided not to have the operation, and buried myself even deeper in studies showing that being overweight wasn’t really harmful.
This went on until one day I slipped while doing housework and injured my knee. Then I had another accident while renovating our house. I walked with a limp for months, until it happened again.
After more than a year of pain and restricted mobility I had a breakdown. I knew that if I kept going this way, within a few years I’d be unable to walk. Something had to change.
For the first time I consciously started thinking about my eating behaviour and began reading up on genetics, metabolism, diets and obesity. Although I’d read around the topic for a while, I’d done so selectively. Now, I began to explore the 95% of the research to which I’d turned a blind eye. I came across the term “fat logic” and it immediately resonated with me. The term refers to the complex grab bag of supposedly medical facts, well-meaning advice, homegrown ideas and fantasies that make losing weight not only difficult, but impossible.
I’ve always been the kind of person who questions things – I have a doctorate and an interest in science. But still I believed in so much fat logic, probably because I was always surrounded by it. My parents were morbidly obese and I was told from an early age that our family had “fat genes” and that my metabolism was “broken”.
Tearing down the fallacies I’d believed my whole life was a long and sometimes painful process. But in the following year I began to put it to practical use. I restricted my kilojoule intake. I moved more. Within a year I was in the normal weight range for my 175cm height and a few months later I weighed 63kg – the least I’d weighed since the age of 12 or 13.
Chatting to others, I realised fat logic isn’t just a problem for fat people. I’ve never met a person who was completely free of it. Here are some of the most persistent myths.
MYTH 1 I can’t lose weight because I have a sluggish metabolism
A widespread fallacy is that there’s a huge range of difference in people’s metabolic rates. The amount of energy we need is influenced by various factors, but the main ones are body mass, and what that mass is made up of.
A person’s energy consumption can actually be calculated relatively precisely using certain formulae. The only information you need is height, weight, sex and approximate daily activity levels. You can find plenty of online calculators – just search “basal metabolic rate (BMR) calculator”. This will show you the number of kilojoules you’d require if you were resting all day. There’s a high probability that your BMR will indicate somewhere between 5 857 and 8 368 kilojoules a day.
The bottom line is that if you’re on a diet and limiting yourself to 4 184 kilojoules a day, it’s practically impossible not to lose weight. So, the question is, are you eating as little as you think you are? Overweight people have a strong tendency to underestimate the kilojoule content of their food.
Despite the common cliché of the fast food-guzzling fat person, my favourite meal used to be a large mixed salad with salmon. I ate it regularly and if I’d had to estimate the energy content, I’d have guessed about 2 000 kilojoules. When, after many years, I finally weighed out all the ingredients and calculated the actual number, I discovered that the dressing alone, with three tablespoons of olive oil, contained about 1 250 kilojoules.
The number of kilojoules in the salad itself – tomato, cucumber, red pepper and lettuce – was within reason. Mozzarella, though, added considerably more to the total, and the fact that the salmon was fried meant the final tally for this meal was more than 6 200 kilojoules. That’s three times the amount I’d estimated, and equivalent to the entire daily energy requirements for a small slim woman.
People can hugely misjudge their intake. A study carried out in 1992 investigated people described as “diet-resistant”. These people claimed not to be able to lose weight, despite restricting their food intake. They were asked to keep nutrition journals and it turned out they’d underestimated their average kilojoule intake by 47% and overestimated their physical activity by 51%.
The hard truth is that anyone who believes they “don’t actually eat that much” and then still inexplicably puts on weight, doesn’t have a problem with their metabolism, but with their perception of their own eating habits.
MYTH 2 Being overweight isn’t that bad for you
This is the fat logic argument I encounter most often and which I believed myself for many years. It’s also the one I kick myself about the most, in retrospect. I always claimed to have made a rational decision about my weight but I was labouring under two misapprehensions: that it’s extremely difficult to achieve and maintain normal weight; and that it doesn’t have all that many advantages anyway. Now, I argue the opposite whenever I can.
This isn’t about whether your bum looks better as a size 36 or a size 42. Rather, it’s about what goes on inside our bodies, and about how being overweight directly affects our quality of life.
Obesity is a bit like smoking: the tumours don’t start growing right after the first cigarette. For someone who’s naturally prone to lung problems it might take five years. Another person’s lungs might be able to take 50 years of constant damage. But just because the damage isn’t visible, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Analysis from 2013 investigated the long-term consequences of obesity with the specific aim of examining so-called “healthily obese” people. A comparison between healthy people of normal weight and healthy but obese subjects showed the latter group had a significantly higher risk of dying or developing cardiovascular disease. The scientists who carried out the study therefore concluded that the belief you can be “fat but fit” is just a myth.
MYTH 3 Being overweight doesn’t impede me
For a long time, I convinced myself that being overweight didn’t have a particularly negative impact on my life. I’d suppress the panting as I climbed the stairs so I could tell myself I had no problem walking up three floors.
Our society makes it easy for us to delude ourselves. People who exercise regularly are seen as “fitness freaks” while “normal” people are the ones who lead physically inactive lives.
Now that I can compare the abilities of my well-trained body (and I’m absolutely not athletic or super-fit) with my abilities before, I’ve come to realise how far below optimum my fitness level really was. I used to consider even relatively normal things to be great sporting achievements.
The same applies to the achievement a US leader of the fat-acceptance movement, Ragen Chastain, claims makes her an “elite athlete” – with a morbidly obese BMI. In 2013, she ran a marathon and published an article about it with the title “My Big Fat Finished Marathon”. She wrote about how, after five months of training, she covered just over 40km in 12 hours and 20 minutes.
It’s an achievement for a severely obese person to walk the entire length of a marathon in one go. But Chastain’s average speed of less than 3,5km/h is much slower than normal walking speed. The last
participant to complete the race, several hours before her, was a woman in her 70s. The marathon had officially ended hours before Chastain crossed the finishing line, the stands had been removed.
Of course, everyone has to start from their own fitness level. When I weighed 150kg average sporting achievements were as likely for me as breaking Olympic records. In the first few months I was proud of reaching various milestones such as walking for half an hour without stopping or spending 20 minutes on a bike.
It’s good to be proud of your progress. But declaring your own below-average performance to be an objective record and therefore to claim that any improvement is unnecessary will only stop you – and others – from tackling the problem of excess weight.
MYTH 4 My family and friends don’t think I need to lose weight
This statement is fat-logical only when referring to people who aren’t underweight or for whom losing weight would mean they’d become underweight. Let me start with my own experience. When I weighed 150kg there was no one who seriously claimed that losing weight wouldn’t be a good idea for me.
Apart from my mother, as far as I can remember, in all those years nobody ever asked me about my weight. My weight was the elephant in the room, which no one mentioned – until I brought it up myself.
I lost my first 40kg in secret, without anyone noticing. When I reached about 105kg everyone around me suddenly noticed I’d lost weight.
At over 100kg I was still very much within the obese range but others saw it quite differently. From all sides I was asked, surely I didn’t want to lose any more weight? A neighbour who saw me gardening worriedly asked my husband how much I now weighed and asked him please to make sure I ate more. When I ran into a colleague on the street, she half-jokingly asked when I was going to be diagnosed with anorexia. Another admitted he deliberately hadn’t reacted too enthusiastically to my new size for fear I might go to “the other extreme”.
It was ironic: when I was sick and almost bedridden at 150kg, no one ever expressed concern or commented on my weight in any way. And then when I lost 40kg, was able to walk again and feeling better than I had for years, people started to get worried about my health.
Why is it so socially acceptable to criticise someone for losing weight? Because most people don’t know what overweight looks like. In one British study, obese people were asked to assess themselves and only 11% of women and 7% of men with a BMI of over 30 were aware they were obese.
MYTH 5 Obesity is down to your genes
Genes create a basic situation but they don’t oblige anyone to be fat. Things that can genuinely be explained by genetics are appetite, preferences for certain flavours (such as sweet or fatty) and the natural urge to be physically active.
Several studies have shown that carriers of so-called obesity genes consume on average 500 to 1 100 kilojoules a day more and have no differences in their metabolic rates.
The deciding factor in whether children have a tendency towards being fat is the set of conditions created by their parents and the rest of their environment (such as school meals). Living in a household where high-kilojoule food is constantly available won’t necessarily make kids fat if their genetics mean they have a naturally small appetite. Children with naturally large appetites, by contrast, will pounce on the proffered fare.
However, studies have shown that food preferences aren’t set in stone. In one experiment, the brains of obese and normal-weight subjects were scanned to record their reactions to food. The reward centres in the obese subjects’ brains showed a strong reaction to high-fat foods ( fast food, sweets). The test was repeated after the subjects had followed a dietary plan containing healthy foods for several months. The reward centres in the obese subjects’ brains reacted more strongly to these foods in the second test.
In the end, our genes just set out the path we’ll follow if we don’t actively strive to change its direction – which can take great effort. However, those efforts are only temporary. Once we’ve become habituated to new behaviours, it’s easier to maintain them.
SO HOW is my life now that I’m maintaining my target weight? The actual weight loss hasn’t changed much but the impact on my life has been great. The fact I now take pleasure in exercise has opened up an entire spectrum of new interests to me that would once have been out of the question.
My husband and I went on a cycling holiday. I’ve discovered climbing as a new hobby – and Pilates, too. My gym buddy and I now meet once a week for coffee and weight training. I’ve gained so much – and have come to see that being thin doesn’t have to mean a life of constant deprivation.