Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (26 page)

After training some of these elite athletes at the London Olympics in 2012, Josh Holland became convinced that discipline was the foundation of their success. “What I took away from that experience was how disciplined these people are. To me, that is what it boils down to. They were blessed with certain talents and physical attributes, but I think they have a talent in discipline as well.”

Beyond making a commitment to exercise, your approach is limited only by your imagination.

When Josh posted videos on Facebook featuring a unique exercise every day for a year, he proved that neither a gym nor any kind of special equipment is required to work out. One of his favorite pieces of exercise gear is a jump rope; it’s inexpensive and simple to use, and it fits right into your purse or suitcase. Most of his videos were not shot in a gym. “They were either in my apartment, or maybe out in a park,” he said. “We all have a chair in our home, we all have a bed, we all have a sofa. That’s really all you need. I’ve done exercises on chairs, including pushups. You can pick up the chair, you can curl
with it, and you can do squats. Or how about just standing up on your own two feet and doing jumping jacks, pushups, or sit-ups?”

More exercise pros are getting away from workouts that require elaborate machines and focusing on what they call
functional movements
. Diane’s trainer Andy DeVito used that approach to help her recover from hip replacement surgery and improve her fitness. “The philosophy is based on getting your body to move and work in ways that it was meant to, like climbing, crawling, pushing heavy objects; things that humans were designed to do,” Andy explains. “A lot of the workouts we do simulate those movements and functions of the human body. We’ve stopped doing these activities because we’re sitting at a desk all day.”

Sitting turns out to be dangerous not only to our weight-loss efforts, but to our health, so that’s another powerful argument for moving. An Australian study, based on twelve hundred participants, found that after age twenty-five, every hour of television you watch reduces your life expectancy by nearly twenty-two minutes.
⁶
So if you watch six hours of TV a day, you’ll take about five years off your life. That’s actually worse than the impact of smoking cigarettes, according to the report. And it’s not the TV that hurts you, it’s the sitting.

Other studies have confirmed the correlation between sitting and premature death.
⁷
The science is new here, and we’re still not sure exactly why sitting for long periods is so harmful. One theory is that surplus “fuel” builds up in the body when we don’t use the large muscles in our legs, because processes needed to break down fats and sugars slow down or shut off, and blood sugar levels rise as a result. We know that the average
person burns 60 more calories an hour when standing than sitting. We need to do more research to really understand what’s going on, but I’m alarmed by the findings.

Personally, I can’t stand still, so this actually isn’t much of an issue for me, but if you spend most of your work day at your desk, think about a few ideas for mixing it up. Stand up while you’re making phone calls, keep the trash can on the opposite side of the office, walk around during your coffee breaks. Small changes add up and can make a big difference, both to your weight and to your lifespan.

Getting Americans moving again begins with the decisions each of us makes as an individual. But it doesn’t stop there. And that’s the topic we’ll discuss next.

M
Y STORY
,
WITH
D
R
. N
ANCY
S
NYDERMAN
, K
ATE
W
HITE
,

D
R
. D
AVID
K
ATZ
, R
EBECCA
P
UHL
, D
R
. E
ZEKIEL
E
MANUEL
,

R
EAR
A
DMIRAL
J
AMIE
B
ARNETT
(
RETIRED
), M
AYOR
M
ICK

C
ORNETT
, D
R
. R
OBERT
L
USTIG
, D
ONNY
D
EUTSCH
,

S
ENATOR
C
LAIRE
M
C
C
ASKILL
, S
ENATOR
K
IRSTEN
G
ILLIBRAND
,

J
OHN
B
ANZHAF
, C
HEF
L
ORENA
G
ARCIA

T
he conversation that Diane and I have been having, and the ideas that experts have shared here about how you think, eat, and move, mirror the conversations I think we need to have as a nation.

Overweight people are in the majority in this country. We need to fix that, but we can’t do it unless we are prepared to have an open, honest, and caring discussion—not one that stereotypes, blames, or disdains overweight people. The problem belongs to all of us, and so does the responsibility to find solutions. We need to face this head-on.

Morning Joe
is all about conversation. By talking with people on all sides of an issue, we often find a meeting place somewhere in the middle, someplace we can settle, agree, and move forward. I don’t think we are there yet on obesity, but there is a lot of constructive and public talk going on around the country.
Many concerned people are trying to find ways to get us on the right track. I hope that hearing about their attitudes and policies can help us change.

If you’ll pardon the pun, what follows is some food for thought. As I said at the beginning of this book, you won’t agree with me on everything, and you may not agree with some of these folks either, but let’s consider what they have to say. Some of their prescriptions just might work.

A good place to launch a broader conversation about the national obesity crisis is to talk about the ideas we have about a healthy body. That begins with an honest look in the mirror. Although Hollywood stars may seem to be wasting away, most of us are not. “As the population becomes fatter, study after study shows that instead of feeling bad about ourselves, we have entered a collective state of denial about how big we’re actually getting,” writes health writer and blogger Tara Parker-Pope. “While researchers admit that some denial may have to do with personal embarrassment, the consistency of the findings suggests that neural processing and psychology probably both play a role.”
¹

NBC’s Nancy Snyderman thinks we need to get the word
fat
back into our vocabulary, and I agree with her. I know that Diane was very hurt when I first told her she was fat, but she now uses the term herself, and it is helping her face her own situation. We should talk about being fat, not to be pejorative, but because we have to tell the truth. By trying to be politically correct and socially sensitive, we end up skirting the whole issue instead.

Clothing manufacturers also help us do that, by allowing women to brag about wearing a size 0 or a size 2, according to Kate White, former
Cosmo
editor and author of
I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know
. “There’s been all this downsizing in clothes. I ordered a pair of pants from a catalogue. I put them on and I was swimming in them. And I realized, what used to be my size has now been increased; it’s still the same size but they’ve really blown out the waistline.”

David Katz says that the tendency to tell ourselves little white lies is normal human behavior. “We tend to think we’re an inch taller than we are, and we tend to think we weigh a bit less than we do,” he observed. “We tend to think we eat fewer calories and we all tend to think we exercise a bit more than we do.” When each of us admits the truth about our own body weight, we begin to understand that we have a shared problem.

At the same time, a lot of us struggle to respond in a healthy way to all of the media images suggesting that women who are beautiful must be thin. The average woman in America weighs almost 163 pounds and wears a size 14. So when Ralph Lauren hires a gorgeous six-foot-two model who is a size 12 as the face of his “plus size” line of women’s clothing, he sends a message to every woman about what the fashion industry thinks.

“We have billion-dollar diet industries, billion-dollar fashion industries that communicate the message that women must try to conform to very unrealistic ideals of physical attractiveness,” complains Yale’s Rebecca Puhl. “Thinness has come to symbolize core values in our culture.”

We have billion-dollar diet industries, billion-dollar fashion industries that communicate the message that women must try to conform to very unrealistic ideals of physical attractiveness.

—
Rebecca Puhl

What’s happening is that as American women are getting heavier, models and actresses are getting skinnier. Kate White recounts looking at older photographs of Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford and realizing that those models “were not skinny, skinny girls. They were very healthy looking, very feminine, and lush almost. When actresses became more of a fashion influence in Hollywood, they got skinnier, too. You look at Jennifer Aniston compared to how she was when she first started in
Friends;
there’s a big difference.”

Kate says that when she was at
Cosmo
, “I encouraged our team to use models that aren’t super skinny. I reject super-skinny models. I think it’s important for us in the media to show women who are natural looking, who are curvy, who are more like the Christie Brinkleys who have luscious, healthy bodies.”

I reject super-skinny models. I think it’s important for us in the media to show women who are natural looking, who are curvy . . . who have luscious, healthy bodies.—
Kate White

For Kate, it was a matter of showcasing good health—she didn’t want to highlight a super-skinny body, but she was not
keen on showing more plus-size models in
Cosmo
either. “I feel that we’ve run amok in this country with nutrition and food. And the way you deal with it isn’t to say, ‘Okay, well, we’ll start showing people who are putting themselves in health danger,’ just as I wouldn’t show people smoking.”

So how do we start championing bodies that are a healthy thin? For one thing, let’s act on the latest science and start early. Dr. Zeke Emanuel tells me we should get kids on the right path even before they are born.

“We might think of in utero effects,” he explains. “We know that a woman can have a big impact on the size of her baby and the amount of fat on the baby. We may need to think about pregnant women and the diversity and the nutritional content of what they’re eating. We do have some good evidence that once you create fat cells, you can’t really get rid of them, and therefore later in life it gets very hard—not impossible—but very hard to lose weight.”

We might think of in utero effects. We know that a woman can have a big impact on the size of her baby and the amount of fat on the baby.

—
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

If the tendency to be overweight starts in the womb, so might the craving for certain foods. But people can change their desires, according to Yale Prevention Research Center’s David Katz.

“Taste buds are very malleable little fellers,” he says. “When they can’t be with a food they love, they very quickly learn to love a food they’re with. They like what they’re used to.”

Taste buds are very malleable little fellers. When they can’t be with a food they love, they very quickly learn to love a food they’re with.

—
David Katz

So here’s the really good news:
research shows that taste buds can be retrained to like better foods in as little as one or two weeks!

“Imagine if all that stands between us and one of the more massive opportunities in the modern history of public health is a hill only two weeks high?” asks Katz hopefully. “How do we help the public understand that they need a week or two to get used to it, and then they’ll spend the rest of their lives being perfectly satisfied with a food that’s much better for them?”