3FatChicks - Weight & Height Stats

Originally, I thought I would post about the forum asking "1200 Calories, way too much?". The woman who started the post was simply not losing weight with her 1200 calorie diet and was asking fellow posters whether she should go down to 900 calories. To my relief, nobody responded back that a 900 calorie diet sounded like a good idea. Instead, they began to attack pasta. The first poster outlined her typical day of food which consisted of two or three bowls of pasta. The fellow dieting posters all rallied and decided that the reason she wasn't losing weight was because she was eating too many carbs. So, now the woman is supposed to track her food and try to add in more protein and fat to trick her body back into losing weight.

It's all so complicated.

Another blog forum asks, "So many diets, which to choose?". Once inside the forum, everybody has a different opinion but they all have a general theme of, you won't know until you try one.

What I've been noticing in these chat forums are that many of the posters are putting little weight loss trackers supplied by the 3FatChicks website. The posters have a little tracker at the bottom of each post and then they have a star next to the part of the scale they are at currently. One woman has a smiley face as she gets closer and closer to her goal, unhappy faces at the beginning and then grimacing faces in the middle:



I then realized that many of the women posting have listed their height and weight next to their profile information. I am really disturbed by the obsession with the numbers on the scale. I feel like the 3FatChicks website makes it okay for people to obsess about their weight and focuses too heavily on reaching the desired number, rather than focusing on having a healthy relationship with food. I feel like the chat forums constantly associate dieting with health (i.e. Will diet coke make me lose weight?) when in actuality, a balanced diet with as little artificial products as possible is the healthiest way to lose weight.

I find the arguments made by fellow dieters troubling because these are not doctors or nutritionists giving advice and yet, the posters seem to be wholeheartedly accepting "facts." The bias that is clear in these posts, either the dieters who have lost or those that have not, does not mean that they have any idea of health.

Binging...is this normal

So, I am sticking to the 3FatChicks website for the initial post this week. In particular, an entire topic that caught my attention is called, Binge Free Challenge, and it is actually still live today - running for one week.

The goal was to have a binge-free week and what I find so interesting is the creation of normalcy around binging. This is a support forum, so the women do not want to binge and are working to not binge, but the women who slip and do binge are told to hang in there and start again tomorrow. What I guess I have a concern with is the support that is given is to try again tomorrow, but I am finding very little that suggests getting a doctor's help. Binge-eating is an eating disorder and I guess I am concerned with the creation reality through normalizing the behavior. I believe that the argument is that binge eating is just like any other part of a diet and you have to resist the urges in order to lose weight. But, again, the focus is on weight-loss rather than the unhealthy aspect of binging.

This reminds me of one of Jean Kilbourne's lecture/discussions for her book, Can't Buy My Love where she discusses the control of advertising to shape the way women think and feel. She argued that advertising normalizes binge eating, but in reality, a healthy eating pattern would not include binge eating at all.

I think that this forum discussion on binge eating encourages the argument that it is normal to want to binge and to slip up and binge, but if you want to lose weight, you have to control your binge-eating. Rather than questioning the urge to binge and encouraging a healthy mental attitude toward food, the chat forum continues to encourage the white-knuckling of avoidance and rewards a multi-day stint free from binging.

Weighing Less = Feeling Good

I have enjoyed everybody's comments, and I'm sensing a theme of not just how we feel healthier when we fit in our clothes, but we feel better about ourselves. And, though most of my examples have centered on women, I know quite a few men in my life that are just as concerned with wanting to lose weight, and I welcome any comments from men as well.

I have an issue with the word, "fat." I do not know why and I know that there are quite a few overweight people who have taken this word as their own and I suppose have tried to create a sense of power behind the word.

I stumbled across a chat forum called 3 fat chicks on a diet. I immediately cringed at the use of the word fat - almost as if it's okay to say that because soon they will not be "fat." According to the main website, About Us section, 3FatChicks.com was started as a support resource for three sisters who were starting a diet.

I'm thoroughly interested in some of the posts and threads within the forum, but one in particular caught my eye. It is called, "Nine year old daughter eating chocolate secretly" and it is about a mother who restricts sweets to once a week, but her daughter is sneaking food. When her mother "gently" questions her about why she had empty chocolate wrappers in her bag and a receipt for a Snicker's bar, dated the day before, the little girl breaks down in tears and won't answer. The mom is concerned that this is a sign of a future eating disorder and relates the situation to her own childhood and how she would sneak food. She is also implying that she has shared her own struggles with weight loss with her daughter. She is very careful to state that her daughter is of normal weight and she is not trying to force her daughter to diet, but rather to teach her the concept of moderation.

I am not concerned with saying whether this situation is bad or good. I think there are a lot of factors that go along with this that we cannot know. However, it does make me question where our eating habits and ideas about food and body image come from? It's easy to blame the media, but I think my earliest memories stem from watching and listening to my family. So, knowing that little eyes are always watching, what is the right message to give children about food?