I first read Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin about two years ago. I was thinking about the book recently and wondered how I’d interpret it now, after having spent the last two years focusing on nothing else but losing weight. I reread it over the weekend and came away with different conclusions and rebuttals.

Rethinking Thin is extremely well-written and a very quick read. Kolata manages to make medical research accessible and I simply couldn’t put it down (but that may be because I’m so personally vested in the topic). I highly highly recommend it (especially if you’ve never struggled with your weight since it is pretty insightful). The book alternates between offering an overview of medical research into obesity and following a number of participants in a two year diet study at the University of Pennsylvania.

Throughout the book, Kolata emphasizes a number of points (some of which I agree with and some I have a very hard time believing):

  • Overweight people face extreme societal burdens and prejudices (check)
  • Losing weight is extremely difficult (check)
  • Diets simply don’t work. There’s more to losing weight than “eat less, exercise more” (check)
  • Some people are genetically more susceptible to being overweight (check) and hence can’t ever be thin, despite their best efforts at diet and exercise (I don’t buy this one)

At the time when I first read the book, I was just beginning to lose weight (and I believe I may have been stuck in a plateau). When I finished the book, that last conclusion left me pretty depressed and emotional. I identified so strongly with the dieters profiled in the book so Kolata’s conclusions about weight and dieting made me feel pretty hopeless.

I’ve struggled with my weight my whole life. Before 2007, the most weight I’d ever lost was about 15 pounds and despite going through diet after diet (usually several times every year for as long as I can remember), I’d always gain back the weight and then some. My current behavior/lifestyle and current progress is very unusual given my own track record. And as I understand it, statistically I’m in a pretty small pool of people (I’ve lost more than 10% of my weight, I’ve kept it off for a while, and I’m sticking to a “diet” for longer than a few months).

Despite all the signs that make me think that I’m finally conquering it this time, my biggest fear is that I’ll eventually gain the weight back. That’s one of the reasons why I struggle with Kolata’s conclusion that some people are just meant to be fat. How depressing! Don’t tell me that after all the work I’m currently doing, I’m biologically destined to be fat for the rest of my life!

Based on my own experiences, I don’t think that’s exactly true - the situation simply isn’t that black and white. I do think I’m probably biologically more susceptible to being overweight. But it’s not like I’ve spent my whole life eating right and working out and was still fat. When I wasn’t dieting, I rarely exercised, didn’t eat the right foods, and ate way too much of the wrong foods. That had nothing to do with my biological makeup. Those were issues with my behavior and my lifestyle.

I agree with Kolata that dieting doesn’t work. However, I don’t think dieting doesn’t work because some people are just meant to be fat. Dieting doesn’t work because losing weight and maintaining weight loss isn’t a short term project. You simply can’t lose a lot of weight quickly by going on some crazy crash diet and expect your body and mind to follow. When you’re deprived of something, it becomes far more valuable and you start craving it even more.

Healthy weight loss has to be slow and it has to involve a lifestyle change. I know the whole lifestyle change thing sounds cliche but it really works. Only when I started thinking of myself as a healthy person, did it actually stick. It is now part of my identity and I simply can’t imagine changing that. And some things are just really fun (like hiking, running, riding a bike, swimming) and I wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of me enjoying those activities.

I also think that some people struggle with making these lifestyle changes because there is something deep down inside (emotionally) that’s keeping them from doing so. It is really hard to resist certain food when your mind is working against you. Food has an amazing power to sooth and comfort people. Fat and sugar are especially powerful (that’s probably why you don’t see too many people craving or binging on carrot sticks). It takes a really long time to identify emotional triggers around food and to learn to cope with them. When I really started listening to my mind and body, I came to identify the difference between being physically hungry and needing to be emotionally soothed. It’s pretty amazing how two very different signals can elicit the same response in me.

As much as people want to lose weight and as much as they try, it is simply impossible to do so without identifying and dealing with all the emotional baggage around self-image, weight, and food. Kolata doesn’t really talk about that much and it is a shame because her book is so right on in so many ways.