the morbs, vol. I
My weekly update which was supposed to be shorter and is, I think, longer in almost every possible way.
I hate the word “journey” and find it cringe. So this is the first issue of my shorter (probably), weekly, more informal letter chronicling my weight loss… thing. My weight loss odyssey. Weight loss sojourn? Weight loss campaign. You understand.
I’m going to start off with some data about my current body composition, but first I want to talk about a boundary I’m setting. I’m setting this boundary because weight is one tiny measure of health which has disproportionately and totally unfair social baggage and consequences, and this baggage and these consequences have very deeply impacted my life.
Here is what I mean:
Body weight, speaking in very broad social-perception ways, is very often the most important factor normal laymen types use when it comes to making guesses about the health of people around them. It also has a massive, socially-informed impact on the way we treat each other in completely non-health related ways — and the guise of “caring about health” is often used as rationalization for behaviour that is, at its core, very standard-issue hostility and unkindness.
I think a lot of people who are huge assholes believe they are acting assholishly for some reason that is ultimately morally correct in some big-picture way, when actually they are just looking for justifications for why they are mean and shitty. They want those reasons to preserve their self-image as a mostly good person. I think this is a fundamental, load-bearing tenet of what it is to act like an asshole.
People are assholes to fat people. The way I am treated when my body weight is high and the way I’m treated when it’s low are worlds apart, and almost everyone who has been both heavy and not-as-heavy say the same thing. We have sociological studies on it.123 It affects the quality of healthcare people get, which is simply fucked.4 You can clearly see it reflected in the culture and media of the last hundred years. Fat people are treated like shit, and then people claim they’re just treating them like shit because they care, actually — which is a very normal, boring, standard kind of rationalization for being mean. Being mean sucks. This is all very obviously true to me.
I also do, very sincerely and genuinely, believe that weight is medically relevant. This is in spite of having a lot of strongly-argued, very heart-string-pulling, very well-rationalized, very personal reasons why I would absolutely love that to not be the case.
But I don’t want to talk about my weight on here. I live in a world where there are consequences I have to deal with, and other people do not, even though that is not fair. I have to contend with the world as it is, and the world as it is puts a disproportionately strong emphasis on weight — so strong we act like its giving us information about somebody's inherent worth. I do not believe that! When I engage about weight, I’m engaging with data, not with a quality a human being has. I’m engaging in good faith. I'd love to believe that my good faith is enough. I'm coming from a place of love, and truth. I want to believe love and truth are enough.
But they’re not. And one of the points I want to make is that weight is one touchstone among many that someone can use to orient themselves in a more scientifically rigorous way of considering their own body composition, and how we can use that to make educated guesses about health and informed choices, and how we want to live our lives. I don’t have a lot of trust that this is possible if I confuse the messaging with distracting information about my weight.
I was also in and out of eating disorder treatment long enough to know weight can be one of the most triggering pieces of information it's possible to know — there was a nearly fifteen-year period where I could not know the number or I'd be psychologically devastated for weeks. The information itself was neutral — but my capacity to engage with the information was so dysregulated that it would put me in what felt like a genuine state of danger. I think it was danger — I would get triggered into hurting myself! It was like an immune response to something that is not actually poison. I was allergic to the information. If that sounds crazy, it's because it is. Suffering is frequently totally illogical. That doesn't make it less real.
Beyond all that, weight’s so ten years ago. How passé. The other data about body composition is so much weirder, and more interesting, and more fun.
I have a very cheap “smart” scale which purports to measure body composition using something called bioelectrical impedence analysis, or BIA.
BIA is not in any way the scientific gold standard for body composition estimation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (BXA) are what the hard scientists, nutritionists, and medical doctors use to estimate those things.5 However, BIA is the method of estimating body composition that is capable of fitting inside of my bathroom, and cost $40 CAD on the internet.
I won’t link the actual scale since this is not an ad, but I’ll say that it is cheap and its numerical outputs are consistent and it comes with access to a free app. I stand with my feet and heels on little sensor pads, I get a mild tingling in my extremities, and the device sends my phone a bunch of information. All of these are guesses based on how easily electric impulses can move through my tissues — muscle contains more water than fat, and so conducts electricity more easily.
People like to harp on about how inaccurate these scales are. My research indicates they work well enough for what I want to use this one for, as far as I can see.
I’m also committed to the scale because one of the foundational delusions of my body weight accumulation struggles has been this: I tell myself my scale is broken or inaccurate, and giving me a way higher number than it should. This is clearly a delusional coping strategy because I cannot handle the truth — kind of like the morning poop thing I talked about in my earlier post. I’m not going to get an inaccurate read of, like, thirty pounds or more, as much as I’d like to believe there is some magical way my weight is actually thirty pounds less than the scale says it is. BIA scales tend to be inaccurate in the other direction — underestimating body fat percentages by eleven pounds (five kilograms) on average. The scale can underread my lean body mass if I’m very dehydrated. These are all limitations I’m willing to live with.
The numbers reflected here do not measure “day one” — I am not at day one of my diet. I think the concept of “day one” is insane, honestly. There was never a day I woke up and “began” to consider my body, what I want from it, and what it needs. I also think the “day one” concept reinforces some stuff I don’t think is true, or I’d like to leave behind:
That I’m starting from scratch. I’m not. I’m a veteran, man. A veteran with beginner’s mind is still a veteran.
That giving up completely is an option, because I can just start over again at “day one” — this contributes to a kind of bigger binge-and-purge cycle, more sprawling and psychological than my old habit of just eating too much and then making myself sick. Committing to a methodology of weight management because I want something to change, quitting when it gets hard, and then just doing the same thing all over again when I realize I also don’t like the effects of not trying at all — this is just the same pattern as my bulimia, with different values plugged in.
That there will be some kind of end point when I won’t have to think about my body like this any more, and I can pass back into the state I was in before “day one.” I have to kill the dieter within. I have to destroy the idea that I can just do something very hard for a very short amount of time, and then be finished and go back to what I was doing before. This is the template for yo-yo dieting. It is why everyone says dieting doesn’t work. There is no day one, and there will also be no end point. Managing my weight has been a lifelong project, and will be a project I work on for the rest of my life. It’s not a set point in time. It’s a way of looking at the choices I make.
But for the purpose of this substack, I took my “first” set of measurements on Thursday, January 19th, 2023.
It was, however, not until the 28th that I realized my scale was still set to “athlete mode” — a holdover from a time much closer to my treeplanting career, when my dog’s arthritis had not progressed as far as it currently is, before I fell down a flight of stairs and nearly died, or had a cancer recurrence, or started getting intensive regular sports massages, or any of the other things that made me slow down, and enter what I have been calling My Dainty Era.6 It was a time when I was a lot more active than I currently am. My activity level currently could probably be described as breaking new frontiers in the definition of “sedentary lifestyle.”
Millennials, speaking very broadly, are smart, capable people, working hard to adapt to an impossible late-capitalist financial quagmire and the delicate social structure of a changing world. Please do not make any unfair correlative-causative jumps about people my age when I tell you that I love the term “bohemian layabout” and identify with it very strongly. I’m childless, thirty, and an independent working artist. I live in a sexy, affordable big city, in a filthy-rich first-world country. I essentially spend most of my time lying around on camelback couches, eating nice food, reading, and pontificating. I live like a Victorian aristocrat. Except I have no money.
So, no athlete mode for me. As of Saturday, January 28th, here are the stats I’m willing to share:
BMI: 37.5 (category II obese, considered severe when my other health issues are taken into consideration)
Subcutaneous fat: 40.6% (mid-level high)
Visceral fat score: 19 (anything over 11 is “high,” and anything over 15 is “excessive,” and an active health risk.)
Body fat percentage: 47.1% (“dangerously high”)
Fat-free body weight: [a number I will not name but will talk about later]
BMR: 1680kcal
“Metabolic age:” 37 (this sounds made up but whatever. Seven years older than my actual age.)
Friends, romans: this is what we’re working with. I will be diving into each of these more thoroughly as THE MORBS continues.
Puhl R, Brownell KD. Bias, discrimination, and obesity. Obes Res 2001; 9 (12) : 788–805. Google Scholar.
Brownell KD, Puhl RM, Schwartz MB, Rudd L, Weight Bias: Nature, Consequences, and Remedies New York, NY: The Guilford Press; 2005. Google Scholar.
Cramer P, Steinwert T. Thin is good, fat is bad: how early does it begin? J Appl Dev Psychol 1998 ; 19: 429–451. Google Scholar.
Phelan, S M, et al. Impact of Weight Bias and Stigma on Quality of Care and Outcomes for Patients with Obesity. Obesity Reviews : an Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2015. Web. You caught me, I used a website to make this citation and now there is formatting giving me away. I don’t know how to fix it. Cat head lawyer moment.
Notice I still said “estimate” and not “know for certain.” Look, you know gravity is just a theory, right? Most stuff is an educated guess if you dig down deep into it far enough. Some educated guesses are just more educated, replicable, and measurable than others.
In my dainty era, I have been petite pilled. I have gone delicate mode.
I have a chaise but I think we are in the same era.