At BodyMatters Australasia we take a proactive approach when it comes to educating the public about matters related to eating disorders and unhealthy weight-loss practices.

Aiming to change the cultural factors that contribute to our global epidemic of eating problems, we work closely with other advocacy organisations, taking both a top-down and grassroots approach to effect change.

As Managing Directors and specialists in eating disorders, both of us have been interviewed and had our work published in a variety of mainstream media including print, radio, and television.

We hope you enjoy our blog, and please do not hesitate to leave commentary should the urge strike - we are always interested to hear your views!

PS. Many comments in response to our articles are posted on our Facebook fan page, so don’t forget to join if you like what we’re about!

Best wishes,

Lydia & Sarah xo

Dear Principal, parents and members of staff:

As many of you know, the choice of Jenny Craig’s CEO, Ms Amy Smith, as keynote speaker at the upcoming Alliance of Girls’ School conference (AGSA) to be held in Melbourne 25-27 May, was met with widespread concern from many members of the community including leading educators and health professionals. After my initial attempts to discuss these concerns with Jan Butler, the Alliance’s Executive Officer, were unsuccessful (she refused to discuss the matter) an on-line petition was initiated. Although this petition attracted almost 2,000 signatures, and a lot of media attention, the Alliance has remained unwilling to reconsider its decision.

Due to this lack of action on behalf of the AGSA, over 145 international health experts have now signed an open letter calling for the CEO of Jenny Craig to be removed as keynote speaker. The signatories wish me to pass this letter on to you which I am doing here.

Please find below the open letter, and the list of signatures.

It is important for you to know that In addition to this letter, the international peak professional eating disorders bodies, the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED), and the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) have both made public statements calling for Jenny Craig’s CEO to be removed. You can view them here and here.

The Australian & NZ peak professional eating disorders body, the Australian & New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders (ANZAED), has similarly released a statement.

The Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) sent a letter to the AGSA highlighting the harms of having Jenny Craig’s CEO as speaker .With their permission I have also attached it here (please see attached).

As health professionals who specialise in the field of health and weight, we hope our concerns on this matter will lead to a change of heart and a willingness to listen.

We trust you appreciate our desire to ensure our very real concerns are being heard.

Sincerely yours,

Lydia Jade Turner

OPEN LETTER

We, the undersigned, are calling for the Alliance of Girls’ Schools to remove Jenny Craig’s CEO, Amy Smith, as keynote speaker from the upcoming conference titled ‘Images of a Girl: Diversity, Dilemmas and Future Possibilities’.

We are aware that Ms Smith has been listed on the conference outline as a ‘women’s rights activist’, and will be talking about the ‘inequality of girls’ and the ‘economic standing of women.’ The hosting school, Melbourne Girls Grammar, has already referred to her as a ‘women’s health advocate’. We reject these notions. We cannot accept that the CEO of a company that peddles diets that set women up to fail, a company that has previously defended its sponsorship of the ‘Kyle and Jackie O’ show despite Kyle Sandilands’ long history of fat-shaming and sexist comments directed at women, could be positioned as such. In fact, we argue that the Jenny Craig brand is actually contributing to girls’ body dissatisfaction and harmful (and ineffective) weight loss practices.

As health professionals, we are aware that dieting is the single biggest predictor of an eating disorder, while also leading to binge eating, cycles of weight regain and loss, reduced self-esteem, food and body preoccupation, weight stigma and discrimination, and future weight gain. The multi-billion-dollar dieting industry – of which Jenny Craig is a global leader – is causing significant harm to girls.

Particularly for young people, when the focus is on weight rather than health, the risk factors for dysfunctional eating significantly increase. As health experts, we know that unhealthy weight loss practices are becoming the norm in schools, with some girls competing to see who can eat the least number of calories at lunch, while others see peers diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa as weight loss ‘gurus’ to seek advice from. By the age of 17, 90% of girls will have been on a diet of some kind, while The Eating Disorders Foundation of Victoria reports 8% of teenage girls smoke to control their weight.

With the public’s dawning awareness that diets don’t work, many diet companies now pitch themselves as ‘not a diet’ but a ‘lifestyle’. According to leading psychotherapist specializing in eating and weight struggles, and author of The Diet Survivor’s Handbook, Judith Matz, any time food is manipulated for the goal of weight loss, you are being sold a diet. And regardless of how a diet company markets itself, since 1959, numerous studies have demonstrated that diets carry a 95-98% failure rate after 2-5 years. Diets set people up to lose weight in the short term, but as long-term studies show, the weight doesn’t stay off.

To date, there is no independent research to show that Jenny Craig’s diet is any more effective than other diets on the market over time. The research that Jenny Craig has conducted on its diet approach has been described by psychologist Dr Deb Burgard as the ‘research equivalent of a photoshopped fashion shoot‘. Jenny Craig relies on celebrity endorsements to sell its 12-week prepackaged food programme.

On March 30, speaking on ‘The Morning Show’, the vice president of the Alliance of Girls’ Schools, Judith Poole, would not rule out the possibility that Jenny Craig’s CEO would talk about health and weight issues. We are greatly alarmed by this. Health professionals have voiced their concerns from as far as the United States and Middle East, and more than 1,900 people have signed a petition calling upon the Alliance to remove Jenny Craig’s CEO from the conference line-up. We have tried repeatedly to engage in a discussion with the Alliance, even offering assistance, but we have been told that no discussion is to be had.

We respect the Alliance as education experts; and as health experts, we would also hope our opinion would be valued. Regardless of the topic she speaks about, having the CEO of Jenny Craig as a keynote speaker requires educators to turn a blind eye to the real harm that the diet industry causes to girls. We urge you to tell the Alliance to remove Jenny Craig’s CEO as a presenter at the conference, for the health, happiness and welfare of girls.

RELEVANT ARTICLES:

Why I led the charge against Jenny 

The weightloss industry has no place in our schools 

All diet customers are losing is their dignity, possums 

A diet that works? Fat chance 

Childhood obesity is at an all-time high. According to the latest figures available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics a quarter of children aged 5 – 17 years are overweight or obese, up 4 percentage points from 1995. So when a mother decides to do something about her daughter, deemed by a paediatrician to be ‘clinically obese’, shouldn’t we be applauding her? After all that’s one less statistic, albeit in the USA. Not if the mother is Dara-Lyn Weiss.

Weiss wrote a story about putting her 7-year-old daughter, Bea, on a strict Weight Watchers-style diet in the April edition of US Vogue. The article included details of Weiss’s weight loss incentive scheme – ‘many pretty dresses’ – and, as proof of the diet’s success, “before” and “after” pictures. The inevitable furore ensued.

Using rewards to motivate weight loss may be questionable but what really got readers riled was the author’s willingness to publicly shame Bea into conforming to the diet. Among other punishments, Weiss admitted to chiding her daughter for failures to ‘self-regulate’ at children’s parties.

“I often derided Bea for not refusing the inappropriate snack. And there have been many awkward moments at parties, when Bea has wanted to eat, say, both cookies and cake, and I’ve engaged in a heated public discussion about why she can’t,” Weiss wrote.

She even publicly lobbed Bea’s small hot chocolate into the bin when a Starbucks barista failed to report its precise calorie count.

Public derision and the Vogue writer’s own dysfunctional issues with food aside, experts say that parents should steer clear of putting children on diets.

“The worst thing a parent can do is have their child focus on weight loss as a goal,” says Psychotherapist and Managing Director of BodyMatters Australasia, Lydia Jade Turner.

“Dieting appears to be causally linked to both obesity and eating disorders and dieting also increases risk of binge eating, cycles of weight regain and loss, reduced self-esteem, food and body preoccupation, weight stigma, and future weight gain. It teaches a child that their body cannot be trusted and increases shame, which is harmful to their physical and emotional development.”

Turner advocates encouraging kids to find physical movement that is enjoyable for them, while teaching them to listen to their internal cues for hunger and satiety, distinguishing between physical, emotional, and sensory hunger.

“Every day they can go to bed feeling good about themselves for engaging in healthy behaviours, rather than feeling distressed that they are not yet a certain number on the scale,” she says.

According to Dannielle Miller’s new book, The Girl with the Butterfly Tattoo (Random House), a Victorian study of kids aged 12 to 17 years showed 38 per cent of girls and 12 per cent of boys were intermediate to extreme dieters – that is, they were at risk of an eating disorder. And a Sydney study of children aged 11 to 15 reported that 16 per cent of the girls and 7 per cent of the boys had already used at least one potentially dangerous method of weight reduction, including starvation, vomiting and laxative abuse.

“Within two years, 95 per cent of people who go on weight-loss diets, including commercial diets, regain all the weight they lost, plus more,” says Miller who co-founded Enlighten Education, offering programs helping teenage girls decode the mixed messages they receive and develop self-esteem.

Miller believes that any talk about weight around children needs to be handled with care.

“Focus on the health aspects such as nutritious choices and an active lifestyle rather than size; whether a child is overweight or too thin,” she says.

“And most importantly, lead by example, it important that the parent not be a hyprocrite, they should be eating right too and not be on a computer all day,” says Miller.

Internet uproar over children and dieting is not new. The recently released children’s book Maggie Goes on a Diet about a teenager who loses weight and suddenly leaves her insecurities behind caused much ado and Walt Disney World in Florida recently had to ‘re-tool’ a childhood obesity exhibit after critics deemed it insensitive.

Children are already dealing with increasingly unrealistic images of (Photoshopped) bodies and the thriving juggernaut of the diet industry feeding body image insecurities. Add to this a culture that equates fat with moral failure and you have the perfect conditions for creating an eating disorder, says Turner.

“It’s important to explain that bodies come in different shapes and sizes and that food is not a moral issue.

“There is nothing inherently ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’ about eating chocolate cake, yet walking down our supermarket aisles we see labels that scream ’99% guilt-free!’ as if the word guilt and fat are somehow synonymous. They are not, and often it is negative feelings such as ‘guilt’ associated with food that drive people to binge eat or eat in a manner that is out of tune with their internal signals of hunger and satiety,” warns Turner.

Who knows what will happen to little Bea, forced on to a diet, publicly humiliated and then written about in a fashion bible.

“Only time will tell whether my early intervention saved her from a life of preoccupation with her weight, or drove her to it,” Weiss writes.

And, despite the backlash, Dara-Lynn Weiss was rewarded herself, with a book deal.

To access the original article: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/good-parenting-or-figure-fascism-20120418-1x73o.html#ixzz1sTiNtSSh

Exciting times await us, comrades! As many of you know, BodyMatters recently launched ‘Endangered Bodies Australia’ – the Australian branch of a global non-profit grassroots movement that challenges visual culture and the multi-billion dollar diet industry. With branches in London, New York, Dublin, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires and now Sydney, our well-oiled machine is here to wage war against the diet industry for the health and happiness of citizens across the globe!

But WE NEED YOUR HELP. With International No Diet Day just around the corner (May 6), there are 2 things we’re asking fans to do:

Step 1. Engage in guerilla warfare! It’s clear our fight against the multi-billion diet industry is not an even battle ground.

Street artist Banksy, had this to say about advertising:

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Starting today up to International No Diet Day, we want you – our army of body image activists – to stick stickers on diet products or other diet -related products that contribute to a culture of body terrorism. It’s simple, all you need are some sticky labels and a marker pen. You can write whatever you like, I tried this yesterday with no trouble at all! I was at Broadway Shopping Centre when I noticed a set of public scales that were massive with bright flashing lights and weren’t there the week before. On a whim I decided to purchase some sticky labels – and within seconds, I’d stuck these to the scales:

and

I was a bit scared at first as I was expecting some big burly security card to toss me out, and I was cautious that one of the retailers from a kiosk next to the scales was staring as I was doing this, but to my surprise he came over and said “what you’re doing is awesome. It’s awesome.” He then told me about how many members of his family were ‘obese’ and the hurt that dieting had caused them. He said they had now figured that diets don’t work, instead focusing on engaging in a healthy lifestyle instead. We had a discussion about the harms of the dieting industry and I told him all about our #ditchingdieting campaign. It was great seeing people walk by, looking at the refaced scales with curiousity.

I felt so kickass about our #ditchingdieting campaign I decided to take things a little further. Birkenhead Coles, here I come! It all took less than 5 mins:

I noticed a woman in her forties quietly hovering around as others passed by. I wonder if there was something about this that spoke to her. What’s clear is that we are constantly bombarded with dieting messages, it’s time to take our power back and talk back to these diet ads. One sticker has the capacity to reach many, many people.

Step 2. Join us in our rally outside of Parliament House on May 6. We are going to march up to Parliament House and ditch our dieting products into a communal dieting bin. Already 3 major cities have signed up – Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth!! Find out how you can get involved here.

We will also be calling for a Parliamentary Inquiry and regulation into the diet industry, with an open letter signed by eating disorder organisations across Australia and worldwide.

Since the nineties several attempts have been made to regulate the diet industry, but these have not been successful. The Weight Council of Australia, established in 1994, is a self-regulatory body that has a VOLUNTARY code of conduct which its member companies are supposed to adhere to. Out of the thousands of diet companies in Australia, guess how many have signed up?

5.

Just 5.

It’s not hard to adhere to the Weight Council’s rules. It doesn’t require its member companies to have independent evidence to demonstrate their diet product works for the majority. There is also nothing requiring them to show long term efficacy: already we know anyone can lose weight in the short term, but diets carry a 95-98% failure rate after 2-5 years.

The Weight Council has no problem with diet companies pushing products that only work in the short term, setting people up for a whole host of unintended consequences including weight cycling, binge eating, food and body preoccupation, feelings of failure and self-blame, and a higher than pre-diet start weight.

And if you want to complain about a diet product? You might not have much chance of winning. In the fine print the code states:

“On receipt of your written complaint, the Complaints Committee Secretariat will seek a written response from the member…the Committee is not bound by the rules of evidence but can inform itself in any way it sees fit…”

and, in the unlikely event that the breach of code is acknowledged:

“Sanctions include warnings, reprimands, directions to undertake corrective action, suspension, payment of an administrative surcharge or fine (not exceeding $1,000) or expulsion from membership of the Council.”

A fine not exceeding $1000 for multi-national diet companies like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig is a joke. It is nothing more than a slap on the wrist for the corporations which are only growing more powerful by the day.

There’s just one more thing I want to share. This is my cute little niece, Cecilia. She’s only 3 years old.

It pains me to think that during her lifetime she will be bombarded relentlessly with messages that have nothing to do with health but instead are designed to hurt and damage her sense of self worth and her relationship with her body. I hope she never suffers the shame and mental anguish that is becoming the norm among girls and women today. The status quo is not okay – and it won’t change unless you and I do something about it. Join us at our Ditching Dieting campaign today!

• Our heart. It beats tirelessly without us even thinking about it. It weighs about 300g yet it pumps about 10 000L of blood each day. It beats 2.5 billion times over the course of a lifetime: technology cannot replicate it’s durability.
• Our skeleton. It contains 206 bones that, gram by gram, are stronger than solid steel or reinforced concrete. Unlike other man made products, our bones actually become dense and stronger with use.
• Our bone. It’s marrow manufactures 2.5 million red blood cells every second to replenish a supply of 25 trillion red blood cells without us even knowing this is happening. Laid end to end they would reach 50 000km into the sky. We donate blood because nothing we create sufficiently replaces this life juice.
• Our lungs. Each day we continue breathing without even realising: we inhale nearly 10 000L of air which is equivalent to a small room! And its not just the fact we breathe. This air usually contains about 20 billion foreign particles. Our nose and airways just “deal” of them, without further ado.
• Our immunity. We fight disease unknowingly. Billions of white blood cells relentlessly manage invaders that have entered into the body. They can trigger a fever to defeat invaders and then shut down the fever when the battle is over. Except for the occasional small sweat, we often do not even realise when this has happened.
• Our brain. It makes even an ipad look dumb. It weighs less than 1.5kg and contains one hundred billion nerve cells. It makes decisions, solves problems, dreams, retrieves stored memories, recognises faces, and affords unlimited capacity for wisdom and personality.

• Checking out our webpage; and
• Joining our Facebook page Endangered Bodies Australia