Foreword

As far back as I can remember, I was always overweight. Even as a child, I felt like a big lumbering oaf next to my three skinny stepsisters. It was so unfair, the way they were able to polish off huge portions of pizza or ice cream and not worry about their weight. When they came to visit and would stand giggling on the scales, not even knowing the significance of the numbers on its dial —‘Fifty kilos, is that a lot?’— I would be painfully aware of the fact that I was almost twice that weight, even at the age of fifteen.

The difference was like night and day. While they came from a genetically thin family, my parents were morbidly obese — in non-medical language, grossly overweight — just like three of my grandparents (my maternal grandmother was ‘only’ obese — in other words, just fat). In my teenage years alone, I tried the Hay diet, the Atkins diet, the Hollywood diet, fasting, and more in my battle to become less overweight. I repeatedly lost up to 15 kg, but the ‘yo-yo effect’ would kick in and I would soon pile that weight back on.

When I was twenty, I weighed more than 130 kg. Then I went on a crash diet and in just a few months starved myself down to a weight of 68 kg, with a body height of 175 cm. It was the first time in my life that I had been in the normal weight range for my size. It didn’t last long. My metabolism had slowed down completely and as a result I just kept gaining weight again. When I was eventually diagnosed with hypothyroidism, I concluded that so-called normal weight just wasn’t realistic for me. In my case, it would mean a life of permanent hunger and self-torture. After some reading, I found that such a life wasn’t necessary: excess weight was demonised without reason. I might be fat, but I didn’t smoke, drink, consume fast food, or eat red meat. And I was physically fit, apart from my excess weight.

I decided to set other priorities in my life — I completed my doctorate in psychology, trained as a psychotherapist, got married, and started renovating an old house. At the age of thirty, I tipped the scales at 150 kg, but was not limited in life by my weight. In short, I was happy with my conscious decision to enjoy life rather than leading an existence of constant hunger and self-denial.

I was open about my weight and, in general, it was not an issue for my husband, my friends, or the people I encountered through work. If asked, I said I was comfortable with my weight and that my only wish, if anything, was to get a little more active and be a bit fitter. But at that same time, I was visiting an obesity clinic as an outpatient and enquiring about a stomach stapling operation. I kept this fact secret from everyone because I didn’t want to face the questions it would have prompted about my claim to be ‘comfortable’ with my weight. For various reasons, I eventually decided not to have the operation, and instead I buried myself even deeper in studies that showed that being overweight was not really harmful.

My doctor never mentioned my weight, but I rarely went to the doctor’s anyway. Not because I was never sick, but because I didn’t want to be confronted with the problem of my weight. Every time I did go, my blood pressure was enormously high, but I dismissed it as ‘white-coat hypertension’. In fact, my blood pressure was just as high at home. To reduce it, I stopped taking the pill and started drinking a litre and a half of green tea every day, having read research that said that both things would help lower my blood pressure. And actually, it did go down slightly. It was still far too high, but I was relieved at the improvement I saw. I managed to ignore the fact that I was suffering frequent back pain and that I was having trouble sleeping, in part because of my heavy snoring.

This went on until one day I slipped while doing housework and injured my knee. I know now that I tore my cruciate ligament, but at the time my doctor said it was probably nothing to worry about and prescribed me ibuprofen. And it’s true that after a week I was able to walk again without pain. From then on, I would sometimes feel a twinge in my knee, and it was susceptible to spraining, which would hurt for a few days, but the pain was tolerable.

Then I had another accident while renovating our house. This time, I ruptured my meniscus. Again, my doctor told me it was probably nothing serious, gave me ibuprofen and … no, this time it did not get better within a week. I walked with a limp for months, but my knee improved enough for me to be able to function in day-to-day life. After six months I must have pulled my meniscus or torn it again because I was laid low for another several weeks, unable to move. Six months later, the same thing happened again.

That last time was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After more than a year of pain and restricted mobility, I had a breakdown. I realised that, over the previous few years, my health had decreased while my weight had continuously increased. And I knew that if I kept going this way, within a few years I would be severely morbidly obese and unable to walk — and still in my early thirties!

Something had to change. For the first time in my life, I consciously started thinking about my eating behaviour and began reading research on genetics, metabolism, diets, and obesity. Ironically, I was not a novice in this field. I’d graduated from a high school specialising in nutritional science, and my dissertation in psychology focused on diets. However, in my private life, although I followed the topic, I did so selectively — looking only at what I wanted to see. Now, I began to explore the 95 per cent of the research that I had turned a blind eye to before.

For months, I read everything I could get my hands on about obesity, metabolism, nutrition, and weight loss: articles, studies, forums, books, reports. Gradually, this led me to throw my previous ‘knowledge’ — all my fat logic — overboard.

I came across the term ‘fat logic’ on a website somewhere on the internet, and it immediately resonated with me, as it seemed to describe my lifelong beliefs until that point. The term doesn’t mean ‘fat people’s logic’ but refers to the complex grab bag of supposedly medical facts, well-meaning advice, homegrown ideas, and fantasies that make losing weight not only difficult, but actually impossible.

I don’t consider myself stupid or naïve. I have always been the kind of person who questions things, I have an interest in science, and I have a doctorate. But still I believed in so much fat logic — probably because I was always surrounded by it, because I was told from an early age that our family had ‘fat genes’, and because it appeared to be corroborated by my own personal experiences. Tearing down the fallacies I had believed for my whole life was a long and sometimes painful process.

In the following year, I went beyond simply gathering theoretical knowledge, and began to put it to practical use. By September 2014, I was within the normal weight range, and a few months later I weighed 63 kg — the least I had weighed since the age of about twelve or thirteen. In 2014 I also started drawing occasional cartoons, which I published on my blog, illustrating my new discoveries and describing fat logic in general. The effect was — to put it mildly — polarising.

My readers didn’t know anything about my private life, and some of them wrote irate comments, accusing me of having something against fat people. Though I lost a few followers, I gained many more new ones, and regularly received feedback from readers telling me that my blog and cartoons had helped them to recognise their own fat logic and change it.

But I began to realise that blog entries and cartoons were not the ideal media for communicating what I had to say. I decided to stop trying to pack all my hard-won knowledge into short cartoon strips, and instead put it all together in a structured way and make a book. The final product is a mixture of personal experiences and scientific facts. It has been, and remains, important to me to back up all my claims with academic research and facts — as a counterweight to fat logic, which is so resistant to change even when it’s faced with hard facts. My main goal is to expose the system of supposed wisdom and well-meant advice about obesity and weight loss as nothing but fat logic, as a vicious circle of fallacies and myths. I intend to do it by taking each individual claim of fat logic that together make up that system and directly debunking them, one by one.

For me, breaking that cycle was the pivotal change. As a behavioural therapist, I failed to deal with my own weight for years. The reason is that (behavioural) therapy can only work if we recognise which behaviours we need to change, and we are convinced that therapy will be effective and we will be able to make it work.

Fat logic stands in the way of that recognition because it obfuscates the facts, and it includes so much contradictory advice that permanent weight loss comes to seem like an unattainable goal. Overcoming fat logic is the first and most important step towards achieving a body weight that we are actually comfortable with.

Whether and when that happens is a decision for each individual to make, and even if this book offers certain possibilities, it should not be taken as a self-help dieting book with a ‘Follow these steps to lose 40 kg in two weeks!!’ formula. It should, however, help readers to find their own path and gain some clarity in the chaos propagated by diet books, magazines, and some so-called professionals.

But this book is not just for people who want to lose weight. Its intended audience also includes people whose weight is within or below the normal range, and those who are either generally interested in the topic or have problems in similar areas. The final chapter is aimed directly at normal-sized people, and most chapters will be useful to those who want to gain weight as well as those who want to lose it. Fat logic is not just a problem for fat people; it’s a general phenomenon. I have never yet met a person who was completely free of it. Some slim or athletic people are more immersed in fat logic than other severely overweight people who are constantly confronted with the issue — whether they like it or not. And even I sometimes discover some remnants of fat logic in my own thought processes and beliefs.

For example, a few months ago I was talking to a friend of mine who is a physiotherapist, and complaining that my ribcage is too broad, and that my ribs stick out. I went on for some time bemoaning my big bones and speculating that my stocky structure might mean that my body wasn’t suited to normal weight. My friend’s offhand remark, ‘Just wait a couple more months,’ really put me off my stride, especially when she followed up by explaining that the fat in my upper body had naturally pushed out my ribs and splayed them — it would just take some time before they returned to the normal position and then my chest would get narrower by a few centimetres. I was astounded; it had never occurred to me to doubt that I was naturally ‘big-boned’ — one of the typical fallacies of fat logic.

Each of the following chapters covers one such fat-logic fallacy, which enjoys widespread credence among overweight people, and which ultimately serves only to make losing weight more difficult. Some of the examples I use are gathered from day-to-day life or from forums, but most are beliefs I myself held steadfastly for years. Some of these facts and research findings will be difficult to believe, simply because we accept many fairytales about obesity and weight loss so unquestioningly as facts — some prime examples are the ‘yo-yo effect’, the body’s ‘starvation mode’, and our social ideal of the slender body in recent years. If this book achieves its goal, reading it will open up new perspectives and incentives, and give readers a clear view of fat logic and how it stands in the way of achieving a healthy body weight and life style.