List of Studies Related to HAES

Here is a compilation of all (or almost all) the links used by the moderators and other supporters of HAES in various discussions on the sub-Reddit askHAES. This isn't meant to be comprehensive and will not have every study available. This is meant to be a backup in case it is needed but is buried.

All studies listed have been screened to make sure there are no duplicates. If you have a study that is not listed here, please post it in the comments!

LINKS DIRECTLY TO STUDIES

1) Naturalistic weight reduction efforts predicted weight gain and onset of obesity in adolescent girls
2) Intentional Weight Loss predicted accelerated weight gain and risk of overweight.
3) Dieters Gain More Weight During Pregnancy
4) Eating in response to hunger and satiety signals is related to BMI in a nationwide sample of 1601 mid-age New Zealand women.
5) List of intuitive eating related studies
6) This paper evaluates the evidence and rationale that justifies shifting the health care paradigm from a conventional weight focus to HAES.
7) Among people who have ever been overweight or obese, just 4.4% have lost 20% or more of their starting weight and kept it off for one year.
8) Face to face format finds people still gain weight anyway
9) Reviews the science of the failure of LTWLM (long term weight loss management) and how most weigh management programs essentially ignore the overwhelming body of research
10) This comment that lists various quotes from studies that shows the futility of LTWLM is well-accepted in the research community
11) Obese and Overweight individuals who eat 5+ fruits and veggies a day, exercise 3+ hours week, does not smoke nor drink has a lower mortality rate than people in the "normal" BMI range who do not do these habits.
12) Human plasma ghrelin levels increase during a one-year exercise program.
13) Weight loss increases circulating levels of ghrelin in human obesity
14) Leptin reverses weight loss–induced changes in regional neural activity responses to visual food stimuli
15) Energy expenditure and postprandial thermogenesis in obese women before and after weight loss.
16) Combined Impact of Health Behaviours and Mortality in Men and Women: The EPIC-Norfolk Prospective Population Study
17) Medicare's Search for Effective Obesity Treatment: Diets Are Not the Answer
18) The Relationship between Intuitive Eating and Health Indicators among College Women
19) Dieting Does Not Work, UCLA Researchers Report
20) Physical Activity, All-Cause Mortality, and Longevity of College Alumni
21) Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift (ie fitness over weight loss)
22) All-Cause Mortality Risk of Metabolically Healthy Obese Individuals in NHANES III
23) Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and obesity using standard body mass index categories: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
24) Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men
25) High levels of energy expenditure in obese women.
26) Is Obesity Caused by Calorie Underestimation? A Psychophysical Model of Meal Size Estimation
27) Body mass index as a predictor of fracture risk: A meta-analysis
28) (Low) Weight and body mass index predict bone mineral density and fractures in women aged 40 to 59 years
29) Risk factors for low bone mass in healthy 40–60 year old women: A systematic review of the literature
30) Putting body weight and osteoporosis into perspective
31) Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study
32) Poverty and Obesity
33) Childhood IQ in relation to obesity and weight gain in adult life
34) The role of ego-control, ego-resiliency, and IQ in delay of gratification in adolescence.
35) Physical activity attenuates the genetic predisposition to obesity in 20,000 men and women from EPIC-Norfolk prospective population study.
34) Physical activity attenuates the influence of FTO variants on obesity risk: a meta-analysis of 218,166 adults and 19,268 children.
35) Dietary factors impact on the association between CTSS variants and obesity related traits.
36) Obesity: lessons from evolution and the environment.
37) Epigenetic flexibility in metabolic regulation: disease cause and prevention?
38) Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index CategoriesA Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
39) Does Body Mass Index Adequately Convey a Patient's Mortality Risk?
40) Impact of smoking and preexisting illness on estimates of the fractions of deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity in the US population.
41) Healthy lifestyle habits and mortality in overweight and obese individuals.
42) 10-year follow-up of diabetes incidence and weight loss in the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study.
43) Chart Showing Exact Rate of Weight Regain
44) Weight loss does not lower heart disease risk from type 2 diabetes
45) In U.S., Obesity Rate Stable in 2012
46) Age-adjusted Percentage distsributions of BMI among Persons 18 Years of Age and Over.
47) Association of All-Cause Mortality With Overweight and Obesity using Standard BMI
48) A Whole-Genome Scan for Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Obesity
49) The effect of exercise training on obstructive sleep apnea and sleep quality: a randomized controlled trial
50) The Efficacy of Home Based Progressive Strength Training in Older Adults with Knee Osteoarthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial
 

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LINKS TO ARTICLES, POSTS, ETC

1) Abstract Thinking: A Review of FCJ studies
2) Requiescat in Pace
3) What Is the Connection Between Ghrelin and Leptin?
4) Explaining the difference between the BRFSS Obesity tracking versus the NHANES Obesity Tracking
5) Obesity, Health, and Metabolic Fitness
6) Charging Fat People More for Health Care
7) Understanding Universal Healthcare
8) What is Health? What Does Good Health Mean?
9) What Is Healthy Eating? What Is A Good Diet?
10) Gut Bacteria Linked to Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome Identified
11) Gut Flora May Be Tied to Obesity
12) The Fat Trap: New York Times Report
13) Relationship Between Poverty and Obesity or Overweight
14) Overweight and Obesity in the US
15) Physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and adiposity: contributions to disease risk.
16) Commentary: Current perspectives on obesity and health: black and white, or shades of grey?
17) The Biologic Basis of Obesity: A Lecture by Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD
18) “The most dangerous issue (for overweight people) is not being heavy per se but being sedentary,” Bente Pedersen

Obesity! Crisis! Hits Pagan Community

One week ago, a young, well known, well liked member of the pagan community suddenly passed away. David Grega suffered cardiac arrest at the age of 27. Upon hearing this very tragic news, I thought to myself, "Surely the pagan community won't comment on his 'overweight' appearance, because they are better than that, right? Surely we won't be getting a flood of obesity crisis posts from big name pagans because they know better, right???"

This week, some big name pagans have posted about the Obesity! Crisis! (hereon called OC), and my fears were realized. (Un)Fortunately, what you hear/read is mostly the sympathetic, "help the fatties" sentiment. Questions were raised about conventions, events, activities, and speeches about health in our community, and while I think it would be a great idea to have people like Linda Bacon, Ph.D or Ragen Chastain speak at these places, I highly doubt these are the people that they were thinking about asking.

One common thread in every post can be summed up by Peter Dybing:

"One of the most valued principles within the Wicca community is that all bodies are sacred and beautiful."

I whole-heartedly agree! If he, and the others, had stopped at that, I probably wouldn't be writing this post. Dybing goes on to say, "This is so engrained in our culture that that we have developed a collective amnesia concerning the health affects of obesity." I really don't think that is true. I think that a good portion realize, consciously or subconsciously, that the mainstream belief on obesity is false, or at least that diets suck, and have ditched the body hate.

Dybing also gave a few OC data points. Let's look at them.

1) "Obesity is the #2 cause of preventable death in the United States" - It could be considered "preventable", if those who dieted/lost weight had a better chance then the current 5% success rate. No one knows how to make a naturally fat person thin, or vice versa for that matter. Diets do not work, and study after buried study is proving that. For instance, this 2007 UCLA study (pdf) looked at 31 earlier studies and determined that:

"[D]ieters were not able to maintain their weight losses in the long term, and there was not consistent evidence that the diets resulted in significant improvements in their health. In the few cases in which health benefits were shown, it could not be demonstrated that they resulted from dieting, rather than exercise, medication use, or other lifestyle changes. It appears that dieters who manage to sustain a weight loss are the rare exception, rather than the rule. Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority." (Emphasis mine.)

Also, this study, who were the original scientists who published the first paper on deaths by obesity, had this to say:

 "According to the [second] study, obesity and extreme obesity cause about 112,000 deaths per year, but being overweight was found to prevent about 86,000 deaths annually. Based on those figures, the net U.S. death toll from excess weight is 26,000 per year. By contrast, researchers found that being underweight results in 34,000 deaths per year." (Emphasis added.)

So, in with those actual numbers, Obesity would fall to #8, below firearms deaths and above STIs.

2) "60 million Americans, 20 years and older are obese" - Also, 40% of Americans have brown eyes, equaling to about 124 million.

3) "9 million children and teens ages 6-19 are overweight" - 16 million children live in poverty in the United States alone. If I had more time, I would draw the correlation between poverty, food deserts, and how that affects children. Also, this.


4) "Being obese increases the risk of health conditions and diseases including: Breast cancer, Coronary heart disease, Type II diabetes, Sleep apnea, Gallbladder disease, Osteoarthritis, Colon cancer, Hypertension and Stroke" - Actually, no. Obesity has: 

"been shown shown to protect against a variety of problems, including “infections, cancer, lung disease, heart disease, osteoporosis, anemia, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes.” Fat people also have lower rates of emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hip fracture, tuberculosis, anemia, peptic ulcer and chronic bronchitis." 

 And being overweight and obese can actually boost your survival rate after a stroke. (If you need something a bit less science-y, check out this link.) Like Margot Adler said, "The truth is that fit overweight people usually don’t have many medical problems."

Now, specifically moving to the Firefly Chronicles post, let's talk about a few things. If you remove the mention of obesity from Iris Firemoon's post in the beginning, you have an article about the Natural Food diet (diet here meaning what you eat as opposed to diets like Weight Watchers). It's about eating healthier and being in good shape to improve your life and it touches on some of the problems people face in the U.S, like insurance coverage and questionable restaurant foods. In ways, she echos threads from Health At Every Size.

But then it starts getting dicey at the end, and I get a particular rub with "Making healthier choices is not an easy start.  It hurts at first.  It doesn't taste good at first.  It doesn't bring us pleasure at first." and "How does the community, with the resources available, address obesity?" Obesity isn't the problem, people who think that obese people aren't doing X, Y, or Z and are fat because of it are the problem. People who think they can judge a person's health by the way that they look are the problem. People who think they can simply judge people are the problem. Fat shaming is the only discrimination where the victims actually believe they deserve it. They don't, no more than anyone else deserves it. No one deserves hatred of any kind. [EDIT: Isis Firemoon has since changed her article. For context, and to preserve the article, I'm leaving these two paragraphs up.]

How then should the Pagan community deal with it? Like they always do, with science as their partner and human rights Second in Command. With a posse of facts and the normal banter.

Here then, are my facts for a better alternative, the HAES alternative.

First and foremost:

 "Poor nutrition and a sedentary lifestyle do cause health problems, in people of all sizes. This is why it’s so fucking crucial to separate the concept of “obesity” from “eating crap and not exercising.” The two are simply not synonymous — not even close — and it’s not only incredibly offensive but dangerous for thin people to keep pretending that they are. There are thin people who eat crap and don’t exercise — and are thus putting their health at risk — and there are fat people who treat their bodies very well but remain fat. Really truly."

Second,

"Health at Every Size is based on the simple premise that the best way to improve health is to honor your body. It supports people in adopting good health habits for the sake of health and well-being (rather than weight control). Health at Every Size encourages:
• Accepting and respecting the natural diversity of body sizes and shapes.
• Eating in a flexible manner that values pleasure and honors internal cues of hunger, satiety and appetite.
• Finding the joy in moving one’s body and becoming more physically vital."

Third, HAES is more effective to long term health than dieting:

"Cognitive restraint decreased in the health at every size group and increased in the diet group, indicating that both groups implemented their programs. Attrition (6 months) was high in the diet group (41%), compared with 8% in the health at every size group. Fifty percent of both groups returned for 2-year evaluation. Health at every size group members maintained weight, improved in all outcome variables, and sustained improvements. Diet group participants lost weight and showed initial improvement in many variables at 1 year; weight was regained and little improvement was sustained."

This, and this and this and this and this and this. This with tears and shaking anger. This with happiness. This with gusto and fervor. This for the bookworm in me, and this with sadness.

The question then becomes, why didn't we have this lifestyle in the first place? The next question is why don't we adopt it now that we know about it?

By accident, I stumbled across an article about stereotypes (regarding immigration and work, but whateve') and it errily fits this situation somehow.

 "As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once pointed out, the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they’re untrue; it’s that they are incomplete. If you go to Mexico, you can find a guy in a sombrero playing mariachi music. He does exist. But he can’t represent all of Mexico."

Yeah, you will have the stereotypical fat person who is sooooo fat that they cannot move by themselves or even get out of bed. But no matter how you cut it, that person can't represent all of the fat people. Hey, isn't that just like the saying about how no one pagan can represent the whole? Hmmm.