Lipid II

I seem to be surrounded suddenly by obesity discussion. I posted on it two nights ago, and suddenly a report comes out which shows an increase in obesity and unhealthy eating, particularly in young people. Hack did a show on it (which I missed, but plan to catch up on).

Spilt Milk very kindly dropped by from her blog to take me to task and pose some interesting questions about my own perceptions of obesity, body image, diet and weight. As usual I began in the comments box, hit Chapter 4 of my response and admitted that this was an issue which required its own blog.

You can read Spilt Milk’s entire response to my previous post in its comments section, but I was most interested in the questions she posed to me and I’ll answer them in sequence here.

Can the majority of people achieve long term weight loss?
This is a yes/no question in which both answers can be successfully argued as incorrect because its parameters are unclear enough to leave open debate. What is meant by “majority”, “long term” and “weight loss”? In fact, given that there is no perfect weight, why focus on loss?

Does attempting to lose weight (dieting) carry health risks?
Yes. Again, if the focus is on losing weight, instead of living healthily, then absolutely yes. But the word ‘dieting’ here needs qualification because it is an extremely loaded term. Technically, we are all ‘dieting’, we all have ‘diets’. However, the word ‘diet’ has come to mean ‘eating less’ or ‘eating plan focused on simply weight reduction as opposed to long term health’. The factor at variance is the quality and balanced of the food consumed.

Is dieting in one's lifetime associated with higher weight?
Again, this question is too broad to successfully give a yes/no answer without qualifying one's response, or clarifying the terms used.
I'm of the opinion that 'dieting' is an old-fashioned, unhelpful word for 'eating' - as old-fashioned and unhelpful as 'fat'. Taken literally, this question asks 'Is eating associated with higher weight?' to which of course the answer is 'yes', even if only because the converse is also true - 'Is not eating associated with lower weight?'
I'm going to assume that the underlying meaning of this question is more specifically:

'Is attempting to modify one's diet purely with the goal of losing weight (as opposed to overall health) associated with long-term, low health patterns; one of the indicators of which can be higher weight, particularly if an individual is already pre-disposed to higher weight?'

To which of course the answer is yes. But the implication of this question is a moral one, pointing towards a negative attitude towards impelling people to change their diets with the singular goal of losing weight. This is a straw man - no one seriously involved in this discussion would agree with telling an unhealthy person to reduce their eating or change their diet purely for a change in body shape.

Is correlation (obesity with diabetes) causation?
No. But correlation can be indication. An indicator (obesity) is more useful than a cause in this discussion because it is given equal relevance to a discussion on health to other indicators (of diabetes, for example) and can also be addressed as part of a health plan, rather the focus of it. The removal of cause also removes blame, which I believe is one of the primary reasons for FA or HAES activism.

Does social isolation cause health problems?
This is another straw man, the implication being that without a FA or HAES societal attitude, people are given the unwelcome choice between the documented health problems caused by unhealthy attempts at weight loss and the documented health problems caused by the social isolation currently visited upon fat people.

Is a 'personal responsibility' approach the best to take towards public health problems?
This is one I can't answer. Public health is a really broad area, and by definition, not personal. Hand washing is a public health issue, but requires personal responsibility for its function to succeed. Ditto immunisation.
I'm not sure obesity is a public health problem, but it can have public policy implications (increased need for treatment for ailments indicated by obesity, etc), but this is a democracy and that's what we pay our taxes for: to help each other.

What percentage of obese people are the obviously fat, 'morbidly obese' size?
(I'll answer that one - it's about 6%. The vast majority of people counted in obesity statistics are not considered very fat by societal standards.

Check out the BMI gallery at Shapely Prose to see what I mean).

I guess what I'm saying is that many assumptions underpinning 'mainstream' beliefs about fat and health can be proven wrong or at least a little wobbly. Always great to have people join in the conversation :)

I guess what I'm saying is this that in order for the whiff of denial to be eradicated from this discussion on bodies, these types of questions and implications need to be respectively answered and avoided.

More to the point: medical discourse surrounding weight is results-focused. It simply does not have the complexity or depth to take into account the lived experience of existing in a body which it has termed to be insufficient. Medicine is purely a science. Science is based on quantifiable results, not the external realities of how those results are interpreted and utilised. Science cannot predict, explain or treat some dickbrain screaming 'You ate all the pies!' from their car window at a diabetic.

But I’m still wondering: in a Fat Acceptance or Health At Every Size disourse, can obesity or even body size can be discussed at all? Is discussing ours and each other’s bodies out completely?


Elephant In The Room: This is the one I'm not qualified to discuss, but cannot move forward without addressing. Fat is a Feminist Issue. I'm a man. The experience is and will always be different. This doesn't mean I should bow out of the discussion but it needs to be acknowledged that most of the discourse surrounding health and weight is carried by women. Before we start making rules about how obesity and weight should be discussed, it needs to be acknowledged that men's bodies and women's bodies are treated differently in our culture and so the solutions and strategies for Fat Acceptance and Healthy At Every Size activism need to take that into account - something which I'm yet to see happen.

1. 2.

I don't often plug blogs for people I don't personally know, but this spark from The Age website's bloke blogger, Sam de Brito, is a real inspiration.

For those too lazy to click, the premise is "For every subject, there are really only two things you need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important."

My own suggestions are:

Writing:
1. Keep it interesting.
2. Rewrite.

Customer Service:
1. The customer is always wrong.
2. The customer who aren't wrong are morons.

Designing TheAge.com.au frontpage:
1. Keep it busy.
2. There must be at least one visible bikini at all times.

Doing a beer-can shotgun:
1. Eat the beer, don't drink it.
2. Crush can and throw.

Making coffee:
1. Make it fast.
2. Serve it hot.

Working in a university:
1. Complete what you start.
2. Know more about computers than your boss.

Cooking:
1. Use fresh ingredients.
2. Clean up as you go.

Buying a used car
1. The dealer is lying to you.
2. You don't have to buy it.

Reviewing a book
1. Read the entire book, no matter how bad.
2. Give reasons for your opinion.

Music Appreciation
1. No one else's taste is as good as yours.
2. Your taste sucks.

Had something to do with a bucket ...

I hope everybody enjoyed Single Sentence September and didn't become too frustrated with the topsy-turvy standards and themes. I tried to run with a weekly theme, but then that seemed too predictable so I went down a different path which (obviously) involved no theme at all.
I seem to have failed at that theme as well.
The biggest problem I had was similar to the one experienced by Josh Hartnett's character in the modern-day tale of religious purity, 40 Days and 40 Nights. My problem was only similar in that I really had no outlet for my nigh-unquenchable desire for pleasure. In his case it was sex. Which was why the movie did so poorly. "Man goes without sex for 40 days!" is hardly something that's going to entice movie-goers to part with their $15. I may have been single at around the time this movie came out and I can remember my initial reaction being something along the lines of "Boo Fucking Hoo. I just saw that in real life. Twice."
In my case, however, I was starved of my own natural outlet for stimulation and pleasure: writing.

If you don't have a blog and are reading this, you are probably furrowing your brow and wondering if I'm okay. You may even be considering making a casserole and popping over to do my laundry and make sure I'm brushing my teeth properly. If you do have a blog, you are probably still stuck at the end of the last paragraph,having laughed your breakfast all over the cat at the mere suggestion that I had actually stopped writing anything more than a sentence long all month.
You know what I'm talking about: every blog I've visited over the last month has been subject to at least one Big Mac-sized slab of text wedged squarely in the comments section, doubling the length of the post itself and skipping off on tangents like a gay geometry teacher. Single Sentence September should have been more accurately titled: 'Blog On Other Bloggers' Blogs September', but alliteration is always awesome and that would have let everybody know that I was coming.
I like to be sneaky.

So, by way of saying 'thank you' to all the bloggers who hosted my guest-spots (or "put up with my mutton-headed takeovers"), I will be searching back and finding a couple of the silliest examples of my blog invasions and posting them here with links to their original, more inspirational post. Yes, Writing has been reborn as an environmentalist: I am recycling my own shit.

The first one is rather special.
The formidably fantastic Poetsquib is currently hosting a competition. By a combination of luck, fate and chaos, she has acquired a free t-shirt. It's a ripper.
See?
But she is not keeping it, she is not selling it, she is not dumping it in a charity bin (lest it be burnt at a Goodwill stake) she is giving it away. Free postage. The t-shirt will go to the commenter with best reason for being given the shirt as explained in her comments section.
I went first with a mystical tale of curse and destiny and have since been both trounced, served and delivered a litany of literary smackdowns at the hands of snappy poetry and a longer, crazier sentence than I ever came up with.
I tried my hand at poetry, but it didn't really make the splash I might have been hoping for. But, since you are allowed to enter as many times as you like, I gave it another, longer go.
Bear in mind that I posted this right into Squib's comments section and what you read below is not the entire entry. You'll have to mosey on over to poetsquib's great big blue t-shirt competition to find out what happens ...

It would have been a dark and stormy night, but Franzy had locked himself indoors with all of the lights on and the stereo tuned to out-rattle the watered-down sludge which fell from the sky as what passed for God's Great Rain these days. He was band-aid ripper kind of person, unable to put up with the tediousness of prolonged suffering before the inevitable snuff. Taking his final queues from Thomas and Cobain, he preferred to leave, not with a whimper, but a bang.

The generator gauge fell like a twirling leaf in a slow motion info-sermon explaining God’s Greatest Design Triumphs. Less-than-6000-year-old fossil fuel heated, burned, died and fled to The One True Heaven from the exhaust spire. Franzy pulled on his homemade Llama t-shirt, just to be ready when the Divination And Prayer Brigade would undoubtedly arrive to claim back his mortal soul and save him from the wickedness of scientific lightbulbs not illuminating any proper moral teachings and also from the hellish sound of decades-banned secular music lest it poison the air and ears of the Good Soldiers Of God throughout the neighbourhood.

He turned up the music and peered out into the street. A few curtains swayed as hunched shapes cowered behind them, praying to their Holy Candles that this last threat to True Spiritual Peace and Righteousness would be taken from their Pure And Perfect Lives Unsullied By Controversial Thought Or Deed. Divination And Prayer would arrive soon and, with the might of God, set everything right once again.

Franzy smiled and slumped into a Counsel-issued Prayer Chair which he had carefully broken and rebuilt into a normal seat that didn’t force you to lean forward and kneel and pray to almighty God every time you wanted to sit or stand. He checked the generator gauge and plugged in his most forbidden treasure, hidden all these years in a hollowed-out illustrated Holy Book which he had sealed with canvas, claiming it was untouched by Sinner’s Hands. The Web Weaver Of Satan had held up very well for something that would have been laughably out of date had The Gentle Holy Counsel allowed personal computers to continue being developed and distributed. As such, they had been declared sinful and morally diseased: the soul-raping plague rats of the mid-21^st Century, spreading anti-Godist propaganda and cutting the hearts from The Pure Children Of God as they went.

Franzy plugged the old smiley-face plug into his home-made converter and plugged the converter into the now-icon-shaped electrical socket. Little green lights flickered warmed up as he turned on the laptop.

There was no point in having it on really. Just for memories. Satan’s Web had long been dismantled and banished as the Evil Cancer Which Rotted The Souls And Minds Of God’s Pure Children. There was no Blogger, no Google, no Boingboing. No electrical pulses carrying information of any sort.

But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still look at the old cache files he had madly saved during the internet’s final days before it was bricked up in a cold tomb, along with free media, non-religious texts and anyone else who tried to stop the entire place turning into a mega-sized puritanical village run by power-mad elders and assisted by God-fearing zombies praying for righteousness and good at whatever cost.

Over the polluted rain pounding on the roof and the throbbing metal wailing from the speakers Franzy could just make out the furious pounding of horses’ hooves and rusty farming tools banging together. Out in the street somebody was singing a shaky-voiced prayer as they assembled a large wooden frame.

He scanned his old blog posts, noticing a missed plural there, a spelling error here and a bunch of absent apostrophes that had gone to join the twenty generations of floating fathers who crowded into the room with him, hands stuffed in ill-fitting pockets, plucking at poorly-cut shirts, shuffing amateur-grade chain mail and rewrapping badly tied loin-cloths. They shook their ghostly heads and peered out of the window at the chanting mob, jabbering in unison as a man stood in front of them on a make-shift stage, yelling and waving a book and a torch.

Franzy finally found what he was looking for and a couple of the ghosts gathered over his shoulder.

I command you. Go to poetsquib! Live the heightening drama!

***

Guess The Header - Oh yeah. You thought I'd forgotten. I haven't.

Inaugural winner is The Mighty Other, other Sam, who may now refer to himself by his Nom du Bling (or 'Rap Name'), T-MOoS. Two points. Two comments. Two points. Plus two chest thumps and a fist pound.

Is that how it will work from now on? Maybe. You'll just have to suck it up and see to it.

You know it makes sense

And now, the lady you've all been waiting for, it's the Howard Stern of Franzy's Writing, Mele. Today she returns with her own brand of smack-down placed squarely upon the culinary quagmire that is Bribie Island and, we suspect, greater Queensland in general. So, without further ado ...

Culture Shocked II

Okay, I’m still whinging about the Bribie Island food…but two out of three butchers don’t stock veal chops on a regular basis (if indeed, at all.)

‘Why don’t you have them?’ I exclaimed to butcher number two, after having driven across the entire island in my quest for them.

‘Er, there’s just not enough demand for them, love.’

I can understand foie de grais being off the menu, but veal chops? What is everybody doing here? Are they dry-frying lamb chops and serving them up like rubber, like my grandma does? I guess the older demographic are still boiling their vegies to beautiful shades of grey and cringing at the very idea of seasonings other than salt and pepper (What else is there, other than that? Oh, parsley—served on the side of your plate in the grand tradition of 1982.)

I was amazed to find the veal chops in the Big Supermarket Chain of all places. Not the greatest quality admittedly, but they tasted pretty good after cooking for two hours in a French-inspired sauce of streaky bacon, red wine, mushrooms and thyme.

My biggest whinge, however, is reserved for seafood. We live on an island and see fishing boats cruising up the passage all day long. We see huge container ships floating against the horizon. We see all kinds of activities aquatic, yet the only seafood that is fresh, cheap and readily available are the sand whiting we manage to catch ourselves. The only regular supplier of fish is—you guessed it—the Big Supermarket Chain, and I have bought seafood from there three times. Twice the fish was so off and inedible that Franzy and I were forced to throw it straight out. The third time I bought salmon I had to buy the wrong cut of fish because the type that I wanted was a red gelatinous quivering mass reduced to $29.00 a kilo When salmon is no longer orange it isn’t worth 29 cents, let alone $29.00.

In all seriousness, I have made a huge effort to explore other options. I drove to a fish market that was actually a restaurant that sold overpriced prawns and crabs on the side. There’s a seafood takeout around the corner that does the same thing, but its salmon was as flamingly red as the one at the Big Supermarket Chain. The only other fish shop on the strip has been designated a no go area, with good reason:

‘Excuse me, can I have my calamari grilled instead of fried?’ I asked upon my one and only visit. I was ready and eager to taste my first serving of Bribie Island seafood, and I’d figured what better place than the takeout shop less than 50 metres by the sea?

‘Oh, you want it grilled?’ replied the incredibly young girl out the counter. ‘I’ll just go see if the cook can do it.’

I stood there flabbergasted.

What seafood cook refuses to grill calamari, and insists of deep frying it every time? Why is everything the shop other than fish fillets deep fried?

A moment later the cook emerged from the back. ‘You want it grilled?’ she asks, looking confused.

A horrible realisation sets in. She’s not refusing to do it—she doesn’t know how.

I don’t tell her what I really want, which is calamari lightly dusted in flour, Greek style, which is still unhealthy and fried but less gluggy and oil soaked than the thickly coated Queensland alternative.

‘I’ve seen that on TV… I’ve never actually done it, but I’ll give it a go.’

She gives it a go. The calamari I get back is rubbery and tastes vaguely chemical. It has the power make any Greek person convulse and die on the spot.

One of the problems with Bribie Island is definitely the fact that all takeout food is homogenised and whitened. Perhaps I am conscious of the fact that I am part of an Ethnic minority, as well as being part of the Australian stereotype (European family/English and Scot family) and I’m oversensitive to this issue. But what I can’t help but notice that none of the takeout places here acknowledge their cultural identity. In fact, they downplay it for their customer base.

In South Australia, there are Greek seafood shops that sell Greek style seafood, and they have Greek names. The Chinese restaurants have names like Ying Chow and Ky Chow—they’re not called anything in English. Italian cafes selling Mediterranean type fare have Italian names too (although Italian cafes are generally awful, and don’t sell much traditional fare, only mainstream crap that actual Italians don’t eat and barely recognise...even in SA there’s only one Italian café worth its salt, and it exists in a completely Italian neighbourhood that’s segregated from the city itself).

But here on the island, a lot of places have weeded out the ethnic words and stigma. Franzy’s workplace is the worst offender of the lot. It is based on a European style of eating, is largely alfresco and has a lot of watered-down Italian foods on offer that don’t have Italian names. It has gotten rid of all the things that make Italian cafes good—chinotto, home made gelati, antipasto with meats like cappocolo, cannoli, stand-up-a-spoon-in-its-own-thickness-coffee, etc. Fair enough, there’s not the base or demand for such stuff, but why pretend what they offer it isn’t actually Italian food?

I shall return to my other, less explicable Bribie Island food dilemma: the seafood. Why isn’t seafood cheaper here than in SA? Gordon ‘F@#* Me’ Ramsay is always belting on about restaurants using cheap and fresh local produce, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Everything is expensive—at least as expensive as SA, if not more, and only prawns are slightly cheaper. Why sand whiting is expensive even though the passage is full of it I don’t know. Franzy has this theory that big supermarket chain gets all its stuff from a big supplier and none of it is local anyway. I think there’s a grain of truth there myself.

Food issues aside, I am glad to be living on Bribie at the moment. There have been a few cold days and nippy nights, but there’s been plenty of sunshiny warm days that my skin has rejoiced in. I love Queensland winter—if we had the money, I’d live here in winter and in SA in summer. I love the sunsets and the mountains and the lagoon. I love the trees and forests that grow right down to the sandy beach. I love picking up wild passionfruit and feeling smug because the Big Supermarket Chain sells them for a dollar each, even though they grow wild all over the place.

I’ve decided that Bribie, for all its food transgressions and dare I say it—heresies—has got a lot of little old ladies who I’m sure make absolutely fabulous cakes and scones and other Country Women’s Association type delights, so I’ve been inspired. The other day I went out and bought the Women’s Weekly Cake cookbook, a rolling pin, a set of scales and about 19 different types of flour/baking agents in the effort to make my first sticky date pudding ever. It took me ages but it turned out perfect thanks to the Weekly’s triple-tested-for-your-success formula. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess. I’m also going to try and convince Franzy that we really should go to the Fishing Association’s Guide to Fishing on Bribie seminar. It looks like we’re going to need it.

***

GTH - Points go to Adam Y for his excellent theory on how Telstra makes its money (seeing as it can't be for customer service). Honourable mentions to Kath and River, but no points, ladies. I was looking for someone connecting helpful Franzy with the Samaritan who left change on the parking meter for me on a recent trip to Brisbane.

Tonight's guest is a lovely lady from Bongaree ...

I rarely allow guests on this blog. Usually I'm either stealing someone's quotes who I like, or linking someone's comic who I'm a fan of. Today, however, comes a brief missive from Mele so you can all get a bit of perspective on what it's like to live on Bribie, other than my almost full-stop-free, smart-arsed, semi-true complaining.
Take it away, baby.

Culture Shocked
with Mele

1. Sam is acquiring a Queensland accent. He is not saying 'pewl' for pool or 'kewl' for cool yet, but his 'yeah' is getting longer and he has started talking through his nose.

2. The RSLs of this place are loaded. They have more money in them than the normal pubs. State of the art furnishings and mod cons for the old fashioned at heart. Weird.

3. South Australia is barren and savage in terms of wildlife. Dead kangaroos, galahs, pigeons, feral rabbits, stumpy lizards and magpies are the usual go back home, but here there are sand frogs-yes, frogs in sand!-pods of dolphins, fish that actually JUMP out of the water, sting rays, geckos (Sam found one in my bra the other day), butterflies that are yellow, brown and white (rather than the standard white cabbage butterfly back home), pelicans (without thousands of seagulls in tow) eagles, ibises that strut across our lawn, soldier crabs and slugs that take up residence on bedroom doors. Most amazingly, we live 200 m from the channel between the mainland and the island, and every night at dusk thousands of bats (yes, kids, thousands) stream across the channel turning the sky black. Oh, and when you throw a line in the water, things actually bite.

4. Queenslanders are about ten years behind in food culture. I once ordered a pub meal from a fancy island pub that was deep fried with old oil and served with a salad of iceberg lettuce, tomato and shredded cheddar cheese with no dressing. I actually cried from culture shock. This kitchen was so bad it made Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares look good. Adelaide's cheap, genuine ethnic food is sorely missed, and I'd give my right arm for a meal at Ying Chow or some of my nonna's melanzane.

5. Everyone here is whitey whitey WHITE. No wogs. Literally. There is half a wog on the island, but not a whole one. That half comes from me.

6. Nothing ever dries. I am never dry. My bathrobes stay wet for days, and I'm partially damp due to skin lotions, wet bandaging and oil baths. I go to bed at night with my t-shirt clinging to my skin and wake up the same way.

7. The tap water here is marginally better than Adelaide tap water. The bottled water here comes in plastic containers that make the water taste plasticky. Gross. Have given up and am currently drinking from the tap.

8. QLD media is quite insular in an American scary way. There is little world news on any commercial channel (aside from brief mentions of Obama and Mugabe). The news is all about infrastructure and the Gold Coast. Whoop-de-fuckin-doo.

9. People on the island are friendlier and more laid back than in Adelaide, and the driving culture is amazing. You can idle at roundabouts, forget to signal, do 20 ks under the speed limit and never get beeped by other drivers. All you have to do is give way to pedestrians, whether they are walking with frames or stopping at stop signs in front of you with their gophers. No kidding. A station wagon (me) and a four wheel drive (behind me) was stuck waiting for an old man and his gopher to stop at the sign, drive on at 5 k to the next give way and then move out to the main road. Nobody beeped. The island's average age is 55, so old people rule here.

10. The library is the hub of the locals. It might not be cool but I'm pretty nerdy so it's strangely comforting.

11. It's hard to make friends when you spend all day writing and treating your skin, can't get a job and be part of the normal world. I'm just like a lot of old folk here, and it's nice to be the youngest pensioner on the island as well as the only half-wog.