To begin with, let’s look at photos, videos, and blogs of people dancing!

That’s Ragen Chastain dancing, by the way. You can read her dance blog here.

Listen to Big Moves’ NPR Interview

Visit Big Moves dance studio for classes, shows, etc.

Trailer for the movie Everyday Dancers

The UK’s Ballet Black:

PSA for the scholarship program of the City Ballet of Los Angeles:

Trailer for a show by the UK’s StopGap Dance

The Prometheus Dance Company’s Elders Ensemble

That’s Kim Tanri, artistic director of the Japanese-Malaysian performing arts group Taihen, which I think is pictured here:

Cuba’s Danza Voluminosa:

(Hat tip to Body Impolitic for the pointer both to Danza Voluminosa and Taihen)

The Black Swan Diaries

Wheelchair Dancer:

Los Hermanos Macana do tango:

Tango with three dancers

A lone dancer practicing in hir studio:

But what about your health? No less an authority than the Centers for Disease Control is standing ready to persuade you that obesity is a terrible public health epidemic. One would think that getting or staying thin must be a prerequisite to a long, healthy life.

Let’s look at that idea a bit more closely. To do that, we start with your BMI, your Body Mass Index. The BMI is a measure of body size that is less crude than a simple weight measurement in that it corrects for expected variation in weight due to height. (I said it was less crude. I did not say it was elegant.) Research done on obesity often uses BMI as its outcome measure.

Here, let’s calculate your BMI.

Mine comes out at about 27, which puts me in the “overweight” category. If you run the widget, you’ll see it places you into one of four categories.

• underweight (BMI < 18.5)
• normal weight (BMI 18.5-24.9)
• overweight (BMI 25-29.9)
• obese (BMI >= 30)

Researchers usually also distinguish between

• mildly obese (BMI 30-34.9) and
• moderately/extremely obese (BMI >= 35)

Click here to see if you can put these categories in order by risk of mortality. Which category has the highest mortality risk? Which has the lowest?

Are you surprised by the correct answers? All of the large, epidemiological studies of which I am aware on this topic have ALL come up with this same rank ordering of mortality risk.

So if “longevity “is a decent proxy for “better health,” then the fabulous “mildly obese” Kate Harding

is “healthier” and can expect to live longer than the apparently “normal-weight” Beyonce:

And the “moderately/extremely obese” fashion icon Lesley Kinzel

is in better health and can expect to outlive apparently”underweight” Angelina Jolie:

A quick note: In looking at these photos, I encourage you to check your body policing urges at the door. I am not claiming that any of these prominent women is or is not healthy, or does or does not lead a “healthy lifestyle” (whatever that means), as I don’t have any data to address those questions and am not inclined to police the private, personal behavior of individuals even if I did. I set these pictures side-by-side as vivid illustrations to encourage you to challenge your stereotypes about body shape and health and marvel about the inaccuracy of the messages you might have received about that. They’re not here so you can trade one set of unrealistic expectation about what is “healthy” for another.

Not so fast. The Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Study was the largest, most extensive, experimental study of “healthy eating” ever conducted. More than 48,000 older women (ages 50-79) were randomly assigned to either eat their usual diet, or eat a low-fat, high fiber, diet with lots of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains — the essence of what most people think of as “healthy eating.”(They chose older women because they wanted to be sure there would be enough incidence of disease among the participants to detect differences between the groups after several years of follow up.)

The women in the intervention group had intensive, state-of-the-art support to maintain their diets  — an intensive initial group treatment led by nutritionists, followed by a long-term maintenance intervention group that met regularly over the course of the study, individual counseling, and personalized feedback on their dietary targets and progress.  They ate this diet and continued in the intervention program (and were compared to their control-group counterparts) for an average of 8 years of follow up.

They weren’t perfect at maintaining their target diets, of course, but they were pretty good: As Sandy Szwarc notes, “The women in the healthy eating intervention group cut their total fat intakes down to 24% of their calories and 8% saturated fat the first year — well below the control group eating about 38% total fat and nearly 40% more saturated fats. By the end of the study, the “healthy eaters” were still averaging 29% fat, compared to 37% in the control group. The “healthy” dieters also ate about 25% more fruits and vegetables, grains and fiber than the typical American diet of the control group.”

So, what do you suppose were the benefits of the healthy diet these women maintained faithfully for 8 years?

• There was no advantage in terms of cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke, for the healthy eating women.
• There was no advantage in terms of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or any of 30 other cancers, except possibly ovarian cancer, and the researchers note that this one, modest, effect, may be due only to chance.
• And despite maintaining a restricted diet for 8 years — at follow up, they were eating an average of 361.4 kcal/day less than they had been eating at baseline — these women lost a total of about one pound, on average, compared to the women who ate as they pleased.

These women successfully changed their eating lifestyles for 8 years: more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less fat, less calories. Classes, nutrition groups, hearing feedback about how they were doing. (“Couldn’t you cut out the chocolate, Ann-Marie?”) Yet they didn’t do better in terms of cardiovascular health, or cancer. They lost only a pound, for 8 years of effort. Would that be worth it to you?

(Sandy Szwarc has an excellent series on this study if you’d like to read more about it.)

Efforts at weight loss and body change, especially through dieting, are common: nearly 50% of men and 75% of women report dieting at some point. Americans spend about $35 billion — more than $100 for every man, woman, child, and infant — every year on weight loss products, according to this article from CBS news. Researchers have also gotten in on the act: The National Institutes of Health spent $147 million on obesity research in 2010, more than it spent on breast cancer, lung cancer, and stroke combined.

But all that scientific, entrepreneurial, and ordinary human effort expended hasn’t achieved much more than your own efforts have. If you’ve tried, and failed, to lose weight, it isn’t your fault.

There is little evidence that any weight loss diet — even the state-of-the-art scientifically supported diets that are generally studied in randomized controlled trials — is effective over the long term. In fact, as many as two thirds of dieters in clinical trials regain more weight than they lost on their diets. Also, weight loss research is biased toward showing successful results, so clinical research on weight loss probably underestimates the extent to which dieting is counterproductive.

The news may be worse in non-laboratory, real-world situations. Among adolescent girls, self-reported dieting, exercise for weight control, and dietary restraint actually predicted weight gain and the onset of obesity over long-term follow up, a finding that’s been replicated in several studies.

As Kate Harding said, diets don’t work. (And no, “lifestyle change” doesn’t work as a weight loss tactic, either. That’s part 2. Coming attractions.)

So: How’s that working for you? How far have your efforts brought you to these positive feelings? Maybe you already know that they have not in fact brought you closer either to solving the problem or achieving happiness — that in fact your problem has become larger and your self-hatred and unhappiness more intense.

But that’s only because these strategies haven’t worked, right?

If only you could have the body you dream of…

If only you were thin…

Then, then you would be happy.

You may not know how to get there, but you know that if somehow you could, your life would begin.

But consider the situation of people with anorexia. People with anorexia, by definition, have been successful at achieving thinness. One stringent definition of Anorexia Nervosa requires sufferers to have a BMI of 17.5 or less.

A BMI of 17.5 or less is not necessarily what you may think of as “emaciated.”

Toronto model Caroline Savage has a BMI of 17.5:

Puerto Rican model Ana Delia D has a BMI of 17.5

Toronto model Sara Balint has a BMI of 17.5

U.S. model Kelli Kickham has a BMI of 17.5:

People with anorexia often look like supermodels. They’ve achieved what you may be imagining. And yet, despite having achieved a supermodel-like ideal of thinness, they are not happy. In fact, people with anorexia are more likely to die by suicide than people with any other DSM-IV mental disorder, including depression and schizophrenia. If being thin and having a model’s figure worked to bring self-confidence, happiness, and self-esteem, eating disorders treatment centers should be filled with happy anorexics.

This is a new, and lovely, eating disorders treatment hospital. Does it look like a place of happiness to you?

Achieving thinness doesn’t bring happiness. Indeed, the evidence suggests it may bring misery.

More than 60% of American women ages 25-45 say that they are currently trying to lose weight.  75% have disordered eating patterns. (Note that the second link is to a popular press article that describes the study in the first link.)

Is dieting a strategy you have tried? Have you engaged in other strategies to change your body to make it more appealing or acceptable?

• Eating disordered behaviors?
• Fasting?
• Exercise?
• Surgery?

Even if you realized a long time ago that none of these strategies worked in a long-term way, you may have continued to engage in them. Even if these strategies don’t change your body, they may offer other benefits.

It’s interesting that the reasons people give for dieting are similar whether they are:

• normal weight adolescent girls on their first diets,
• underweight women with Anorexia Nervosa,
• or fat men or women seeking medical treatment for weight loss.

Losing weight “for health reasons” is sometimes given as a reason for dieting, especially among fat people seeking weight loss treatment. But health isn’t the only reason people give. For many people, the most important reasons to diet have to do with pleasing others, looking better (in order to feel better about themselves), and improving unhappy moods. Teenage girls beginning their first diets say they did it “because I was depressed” or “unhappy with myself.” Women with Anorexia say that the eating disorder “makes me feel good about myself” or “makes me feel accomplished.” 15% of overweight or obese people seeking weight loss treatment in one study reported that the major reason they sought to lose weight was not health or appearance, but to improve their mood.

Is your mood state linked to your body shape? Why?

What motivated your first efforts to change your body?

• Was it being teased by peers?
• Negative body comments by the people you loved about themselves?
• Negative body comments by the people you loved about you?
• Being told to lose weight, by a parent, a peer, a lover, a doctor?
• Noticing that your body looked different from someone else?
• Or is the link between “feeling bad” and “feeling fat” less obvious to you?

What are your reasons for engaging in strategies to change your body and eating?

• How old were you when your problem with weight, shape, food, or body image came into your life?
• How old are you now?
• How many years have passed since this problem entered your life?
• And since the problem entered into your life, has the problem gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed about the same?

So what does that mean?

I don’t even know you, but I have a guess about the pattern you have just described here. Does this sound familiar?

• You have worked hard, for many years, trying to solve your problem with weight, shape, body image, and food by every logical means.
• You have put in a good-faith effort. You have tried unbelievably hard.
• Nevertheless, despite all your efforts, here you sit, years later, with a bigger problem than you had when you started, or at least a problem that is no smaller or easier to solve.

Is that the case for you? How does that feel?

Does it feel hopeless?

Or are you reading this blog with one last hope? Maybe this stranger on the Internet really has it, the solution, that once-and-for-all magic that will fix this problem in a way none of your previous efforts ever have. One more try. Maybe this time will be the charm.

Well. I have some terrible news for you. I don’t have the solution. You’ve done everything I can think of, and probably many things I could never think of, to solve your problem with weight, shape, food, and body image, and yet the problem is still here, big as life and twice as distressing. I don’t have any magic wand to control something that you, with all your best efforts, have been unable to control.

All I can offer you are some images:

When you go into a casino, go up to a slot machine, and insert a coin, what do you hope will happen?

If you take a roll of coins to this slot machine and play, it is likely that you will win: a little bit, here and there, just enough that you may feel tempted to keep playing. Not only that, if you look around, you will see evidence – flashing lights and clinking coins — that some people win big.

But what happens if you keep playing, roll after roll of quarters, for days, weeks, months on end?

You lose money. And the longer and harder and more faithfully you play, the more you lose, even though — as gambling addicts can tell you — from time to time you may be ahead, you may be winning. Why is this? Why is it that gambling addicts always lose money — entire fortunes! — despite dedicated effort, over many years, in a place expressly designed to address their hopes to win big?

The reason is very simple: Because the game is rigged.

Could it be that the same is true for your game? Your dieting, weight loss, self-hatred game?

Look back over your list and see if this is true: Did your problem ultimately get worse every time you tried to make it better? (Don’t be like the gambler, who brags about the small wins without admitting to the much bigger losses – look at the net change for you over time.)

If the problem got worse every time you tried to make it better,  is it possible that the solutions may be part of the problem?

which is a salon-style photograph of women with a variety of short haircuts. What fascinated me about it was the comments like these:

“I was so happy to have found this poster recently. When I went to the salon last week, I pulled this poster up on my phone and pointed to the haircut I wanted. For the first time EVER, I got the haircut I actually wanted.”

To look the way this woman wanted to look — to envision it in her own head, and then convince others to help her to attain it — she had to have a picture of it. And she was not the one who created that picture.

When I was 15 or 16, I was a fan of Sinead O’Connor. Around the same time, I thought it would be neat to have a haircut that looked like this:

Then, the next year, my friend Francis got extensions for his hair that looked like this:

And ever since then, I’ve wanted to get extensions just like that for my hair.

Neither Sinead’s hair cut, nor Francis’s, would have been conventional haircuts for me, a white woman, but as a teenager, I was interested in being actively unconventional, looking creative and perhaps even provocative. But what I find fascinating is that even given my own explicit interest in appearing creative or unusual, I had to have a model before I knew what I wanted to do with my own hair, my own body. I was — and am — creative, artistic, and comfortable with my hair and my body looking different. But how many of my ideas about how I wanted to look, or could look, or should look, came from my own creativity?

How many of your own ideas about how you can look or should look or would like to look are actually your own?

Maybe none of them.

How does that feel? What does that mean?

When you created your body timeline, were you reminded of your efforts to solve your problems with weight, shape, food, or body image?

Evaluating those efforts honestly is a useful strategy: It may point to solutions that worked well but have been abandoned prematurely, as well as steering you away from solutions that will not work no matter how hard you try to implement them.

So give it a try: In your journal, make a list of every single thing you have tried to solve your problem. Be exhaustive. If you’ve tried them, include medications, therapies, surgeries, exercise programs, fashion changes, diets, self-talk, being more positive or looking on the bright side, gym memberships, personal trainers, food delivery services, fasting, spa trips, eating or binging on “forbidden foods” in an effort to feel better, eating disordered behaviors, or anything at all else you can think of. List each strategy separately – each medication or diet pill by name, for example, each diet by name, and so on. The important thing is that you list every single thing you have tried to solve your problem, whether it was “healthy” or unhealthy, effective or not, helpful or not.

Once your list is complete, look at each strategy, one at a time. Ask yourself, for each strategy: How Far Has This Strategy Taken You Toward Solving Your Problem?

Be brutally honest. Did it help for a little while, but then stopped working? Did it make you feel better, without solving the problem? Did it make the problem worse? Did it work well, but you had to give it up? And if so, why? Was the strategy too costly in terms of money or time or effort? Was it dangerous or unhelpful in some other way? Don’t say, “I was just lazy,” or “It was my fault.” If it was really a good strategy, you would have stuck with it, so for any seemingly helpful strategy that you gave up, honestly admit to the costs that made it hard to implement, rather than blaming yourself.

How long is your list? Did you miss any? Go back, add in any you forgot, and evaluate each of them, too.

Now, look at that.

Did you realize that you had worked this hard to solve this problem? Do you deserve a gold medal for your efforts to solve this problem? I think you do. You have worked hard and tried hard and made an incredible, valiant effort to solve your body image issues. If you hate how you look, or you’ve received messages from other people that you should hate how you look, you may believe – or have been told – that your size and shape are your fault.

But look at your list! Whatever size or shape you are: It’s not your fault. You’ve worked hard, and tried hard, and given it your all – tried everything you can think of, and probably everything I can think of, too – and the problem remains.

How about your evaluations of these strategies? Here are some common categories; see if your strategies fit into these:

1. The solution didn’t work at all.
2. The solution made the problem worse.
3. The solution made me feel better, temporarily, but didn’t actually do anything to solve the problem.
4. The solution worked temporarily, but the problem returned. (And sometimes, the problem returned and was even worse when it came back!)
5. The solution worked for some aspects of the problem, but didn’t help with others (or made others worse).
6. The solution worked well, but I had to give it up because it was too costly or difficult to implement.
7. I am not sure whether this solution would work because I haven’t given it a fair shot; I still think it may hold promise for solving the problem.

Do you have any number 7s on your list? If there are, the thing to do is to put down this your journal, get up from them computer, and take a deep breath, and pause. This blog offers a truly different approach, and I believe it is not worth your time to consider a new path if another well-worn strategy still holds promise for you. So if there are any strategies on your list that are 7s, go back to them and try them until either a) your problem is solved or b) they move into a different category on your list.

If you haven’t got any 7s, don’t despair. We’ll talk about that more tomorrow.