The Double-Chinned Devil and Me

Actually, I'd planned to talk about Yankees, and how nice they've been to us, but before I do that, let me wander off into the weeds a bit, the weeds of last week. It was both horribly busy and a time for reflection.

First, the busy part. Last week started with me in an enormous fabric warehouse where I excitedly bought bolt after bolt for the drapes I intend to make. What's truly horrible is that I've had no time to make even one cut into all this fabric. All that yardage is still waiting, hungry to be cut and sewn and hung well (no jokes, please). For a whole month, we've had only drop cloths strewn from the windows. I don't know how much longer I can stand it.

And what fabric I have bought is only enough for a couple of rooms. It seems we're in this New House Death Spiral, where we can't settle on fabric and paint colors until we have a clearer idea of the furniture we have to buy (Seven Layers of Design and all that) and we can't be sure how much furniture is required until we can determine how much stuff can be squared away into the attic and basement. And we can't put stuff away until the handyman nails down more sub-flooring in the attic and the dehumidifier guy makes the basement safe for stuff. Supposedly, those guys start tomorrow but they've thus far displayed a very casual attitude towards returning my phone calls.

So that was the busy part of the week. The reflective part began when I went to the oncologist's for my quarterly check-up and saw that I'd lost another pound. I wanted to pat myself on the back but really it's just the tamoxifen sparking all those hot-flashes. All that burning heat has to cost the body something. If the truth were known, I'm now eating like a horse, because my estrogen levels are dropping far faster than my testosterone levels. More male hormone. More hunger. More lunch!

But my weight keeps dropping and that latest pound to fall off is just one more in the downward trajectory from the 177 pounds I weighed seven years ago and the 140 pounds I weigh now. The picture at left is one of me at my fattest (memo to Universal Heart-Mind: I want that cute little four-year-old back).

I used to attribute this downward slide in weight to the fact that I was getting on my bike and riding more. Some weeks, I rode a lot. And there can be no doubt that all that exercise earned me a few pounds, here and there. But while I was applauding my hard work and self control, I was forgetting that the same weight drop had happened to my dad. Over twenty years, but beginning with a big push in his early 40s, he went from being a big, schlubby guy to a spry, slender fellow, resembling his own father in late middle age. Looked at another way, my weight drop simply happened right on schedule.

Not long after I joined a breast cancer survivor's group, I found myself helplessly drawn to Gina Kolata's book, Rethinking Thin. The women in my group were all wonderful but when they talked about eating blueberries and broccoli and drinking herbal teas, I had images of a kid at the batter's plate, nervously rubbing his lucky rabbit's foot. Sure, you want to make healthy substitutions in your diet. Sure, you want to live by Michael Pollan's brilliant eight words: "Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants." But a tumor, like your body, has genes, and will largely do what it was programmed to do.

But we all want that magic bullet, that tablespoon of bran that will make the cancer or the fat or the bad skin go away. Kolata shows that the strongest determinant of your weight is your biological parent's weight. Take the infant of obese parents and raise him/her in a family of normal-weight people and the chances are he'll still be a well-upholstered man. Even adoption by the Schwarzeneggers won't re-write his basic genetic script.

So if it's all in the genes, why are Americans getting fatter? Kolata argues that what few good studies we have on the subject of the nation's weight gain show that Americans are getting larger by an average of 5-7 pounds. That's not much. And it's anyone's guess as to what the causes may be. You could just as easily claim, she would argue, that the gain is attributable to the same forces that has caused us to gain height and IQ points in the last 70 years. Some researchers think that our biology is responding to vastly improved maternal health with a slight increase in a number of markers, weight being one of them. Every time researchers set out to prove that the national girth has some distinct cause in food or exercise habits, they've come up bust. Americans are, on average, eating more healthily than they did 30 years ago. And still they get fatter. The cause could be too large portions, or too much exposure to the same, simple molecule that makes up corn syrup, or too much desk-work -- but no one really knows.

Meanwhile, as Kolata forcefully demonstrates, few endeavors are less successful than dieting. But that doesn't stop billions from being made in the fitness and supplement industry. Academic institutes and back-street charlatans alike all make a fat pile of cash off of their respective projects, be it institute-based research or the concoction of snake oil. Despite all the self-denial and micro-measuring, fewer than a handful of people out of a hundred will make any lasting changes in their weight because of a diet.

Why is dieting so fruitless? Maybe if we thought about the problem in terms of the inherited condition of height, the answer would be easier to see. Let us imagine that our species had taken a slightly different path way back in evolutionary time. Let us imagine that our heights can be modified and that we value tallness. And so an industry has developed in this alternate history, one we'll call Torture, Inc. Everyday, you can go to one of Torture's plushly appointed salons and rack up some time on the rack. Some people, a tiny handful, would have a high pain threshold and they can spend hours getting stretched. Most others can only manage a few minutes. In this alternate history, perhaps we'd be inclined to understand height and pain thresholds as biological features you're simply stuck with. We would perhaps be less likely to praise the tiny number of giants and disparage the great majority of hobbits. Both groups would be understood as simply the inheritors of a cluster of chemical processes that determine an individual's pain threshold.

The weight range you're stuck with really isn't so different from the height you're stuck with. Every human comes complete with a set of biochemical processes that indicate satiety, that burn fat, that ramp metabolic rate down or up. There isn't much you can do to affect these processes. One of the great lies of the fitness industry is the lie that if you were leaner, you'd burn more calories. In fact, if you take a fit 150 lb chap and have him gain a kilo of muscle by working like the devil in the gym for six weeks, he will burn -- wait for it -- 20 more calories per day. Your muscles at rest burn less than your brain and liver combined. That weight-training fiend, if all he was after was an increased burn rate, would have been better off just taking a brisk walk around the block every evening.

The ability to modify an inherited condition, like one's natural weight range, is simply going to vary across the population. As someone who lost 30 plus pounds and has kept it off, I don't want to be pointed to as an example of what profound self-control can do for you. Sure, the cycling and the moderation in diet helped, but without those two measures, the chances are I still would have dropped 20 pounds, right on schedule.

Now, was I going to say something about Yankees? It has to be noted that in this neighborhood we've been visited 3 or 4 times, invited over for dinner twice, and are frequently flagged down for a bit of a chat. If they're any unfriendlier than Texans, I've yet to notice it. It's true that their style of speech can be off-putting to a southerner. They think that by interrupting you, that they're just urging on the conversation. Or perhaps I just ramble on too much, and they can be forgiven for getting impatient?

Possibly. I'm going to munch on a cup of blueberries while I think about it.