The Real Problem with Calories In Calories Out

December 30, 2023 By Jennifer Fitz

Is “Calories In Calories Out” the reality about weight loss and obesity? I caught a few glimpses of the recent Twitter food fight over that question, and here are the two main, credible arguments in favor:

It is a mathematical fact.
We understand that many people find the math hard, so they use other rules that are simpler to follow, and that’s fine, but it’s still CICO.

I’d like to weigh in with a reality check: CICO is sometimes the problem, but it isn’t always the problem.

I know real live people who used calorie counting, either directly or through a simple set of portion-control practices, to lose weight and keep it off. Some included exercise in their approach, others did not. Most experienced a little bit of hunger while losing weight, but overall found it to be a manageable experience with no negative side affects (no depression, anxiety, anger, fatigue, frequent infections, hormonal disorders, etc.) After reaching their goal weight, they had no further difficulty with maintaining their new, lower weight via continuing with the same dietary approach that got them there.

These people exist. They are by no means the majority of dieters, but they are real human beings in actual human bodies, and they are the examples the public health industry points to when saying that Eat Less Exercise More is all it “really” takes.

And yet, clinical practice has shown that while CICO is sometimes an effective approach to weight loss, most of the time CICO alone is not sufficient.

What’s going on?

Let’s pause for some metaphors.

If you google “Causes of Foundation Failure” overloading is often (not always) on the list. The structure is too heavy for its foundation, done. That’s the problem.

Dam failure? Maybe there is simply too much water pushing against the dam. You need to either reduce the amount of water being retained, or you need to strengthen the dam, or both.

Power grid going down? Maybe there is too much demand for electricity and the system can’t handle it.

Blew a circuit in your house? Maybe you’ve plugged too many appliances into that outlet.

These are real things that happen, and they are analogous to Calories In Calories Out. Your foundation really will fail if you overload it. Your circuit really will blow if you overload it. It’s not pretend.

And yet I promise you: Do not hire an engineer whose only solution is, “I guess three bedrooms is too much house for you,” or “Have you considered that maybe you’re just not meant to have lights in that room?”

Sometimes the problem is simple, obvious, easy to diagnose and fix.

I know to unplug the portable heater in the bathroom before running the hair dryer and we’re set. The circuit can only take so much. No big deal. Nothing deeper going on.

Likewise, I have a friend who lost all his excess weight just by cutting out his ice cream snack at bedtime and going for a pleasant walk every day. Simple, painless, and while we could point out that dropping the sugary item and increasing the exercise both have a favorable effect on insulin levels, which is essential to metabolic health, we can at least grant that it’s entirely possible simple calorie balance was the problem.

But no amount of “don’t overload the foundation” will fix the fact that your house is on a sinkhole. No amount of “eat less exercise more” will fix your weight problem if you have an underlying issue above and beyond simple overeating.

There is a reason that for many people, net-calorie reduction alone is not an effective weight loss strategy.

This happens either because:

They were already eating a healthy quantity of food, and their overweight was driven by some other problem than simple energy balance.
Their body responded to the calorie reduction by going into a powerful “starvation” mode — decreasing calories-in caused an uncontrollable drop in calories-out as the body fought against the perceived famine.

In both cases, calorie reduction is not a healthy weight loss strategy.

People in these situations need to figure out a different approach to being as healthy as possible, given the body that they have.

A lot of people who can’t lose weight through simple net-calorie reduction can lose weight successfully either through a fasting protocol or through changing the composition of their meals — even if in all three approaches they are eating the same total number of calories.

This is because though the number of calories may be identical, how you feel and how your body responds can be remarkably different. A successful diet has to both:

Be mentally sustainable. If it leaves you light-headed, fatigued, or experiencing serious psychological side effects, it’s not sustainable.
Induce a healthy metabolic response.

Thus there’s a reason that some people try a diet that works great for their spouse, and the diet fails. Either it causes too many unhealthy side effects, or the diet itself is entirely manageable, but no weight loss ensues. I’ve known people who simply had to try a different diet than their spouse, and the different diet worked miracles!

It’s like husband and wife had different bodies! They were not the same! They had different biological problems.

I have a daughter who is considering becoming a poop donor. Results of research into fecal transplants as an obesity treatment have been mixed — sometimes it leads to weight reduction, other times it doesn’t. This anecdote of a fecal transplant (for other reasons) apparently causing obesity is quite telling.

I think based on the research to date we can reasonably conclude that sometimes gut microbiota is the primary factor in obesity or leanness . . . and other times it isn’t.

So, in conclusion:

Is it true that eating too many calories will cause weight gain.

It is not true that all weight gain is caused by too many calories.

It is also not true that everyone is able to gain weight by eating more! Some people have serious medical problems causing their low body weight. Other people have not-necessarily-pathological reasons that they simply can’t eat enough to gain weight because the sheer amount of food it would take is not tenable.

Thus I conclude: Of course you should consider whether you are simply eating too much. But also the human body is complex and there are many factors that drive body weight.

If you’ve resolved to “finally lose that weight” this year, or if you’ve given up on losing that weight because your resolution has failed so many times in the past, consider that you might need to do a lot of research to figure out what’s going on.

Photo (by me): Pretty good crepes and cider at a restaurant near Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France, 2018. This is not an effective weight loss protocol for me.

How Do You Exercise When You Have a Serious Chronic Illness?

May 11, 2023 By Jennifer Fitz

0 Comments

My friend Emily DeArdo and I have a fitness club. It meets via text message, and it involves reporting in how we’re doing and how our day went, and congratulating each other for making good decisions where our health is concerned.

And here’s the thing: Emily is the girl who has kept me going on exercise, and not giving up, when it was extremely difficult to believe that it mattered.

When you have a chronic illness, exercising is really hard. There are lots of obstacles, situations where you just can’t, and you don’t get the amazing results that other people get. Last autumn I needed to hear from Emily: “Yes, my training at the gym is working. I am gaining strength and endurance.”

I needed to hear it because if Emily DeArdo can get improvements at the gym? You probably can too.

I held onto that all this fall when I was laid out flat with the latest exacerbation of my (much different) illness. I wanted to be working out, and I just couldn’t. The best I could do (see below) is identify a sustainable step count and aim for that (with just essentials of self-care and time with the family), and accept that it would take a lot of rest and strategizing even to function at the minimal sustainable level.

But it paid off! Eventually the exacerbation cleared up, and that discipline I’d developed let me hit the ground running (literally, within a few weeks, though it was mostly walking at first, see below about that, too) and get back on the training plan.

So today I want to talk about the reality of exercise when you have a chronic illness that significantly hampers your ability to exercise.

Grim Reaper reaching out for you — This is the Memento Mori t-shirt I commissioned off my daughter last fall. I talk about it here. Artwork by A. Fitz, photo by me.

Updated: A word about ME before we continue . . .

I’m reminded on World ME Awareness Day that for the disorders in the myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome constellation, including the form of post-COVID syndrome that falls into that grouping, post-exertional malaise is the extremely serious, defining pathology, and it directly inhibits your ability to increase your amount of exercise, because it is specifically a disorder of exercise-recovery.

So when I warn about “don’t wreck yourself” below? If you have ME/CFS, that warning is a flaming volcano and you need next-level caution, because the downside is much, much greater than average, even in sick-people world.

–> I would advise here that if you have a new-onset illness characterized primarily by fatigue, act as if it’s ME until you are certain it’s not. Don’t do the ramping up. Do the part where you dial back and rest enough. If it’s not ME/CFS, it’ll become clear with time. (And, you’re going to your doctor and running all the test to see if it’s something easy to diagnose or urgent to treat, right?)

And for everyone, seriously: You need to learn about the unique features of your disease and know what the specific hazards are that you have to caution against. What follows are some general concepts, but liver disease is different from heart disease is different from lung disease . . . and so on. Your have to add in your personal factors and adapt accordingly.

Now carrying on with the previously-published post . . .

Exercise matters.

Dr. Howard Luks is on my priority-follows list on Twitter, one of the handful of people I’ve picked to be my positive brain-break when I just want to chill and be inspired. (Emily’s there, so is John Herreid with all his great art posts . . . it’s a variety of interesting people who make my day better with what they say.)

I don’t know Dr. Luks and I haven’t read his book. What I know is that his blog and his tweets contain lots of good, important information about why exercise matters:

Leg strength is important for health and longevity.
Sarcopenia is the enemy: Muscle Mass, Strength and Longevity
Physical fitness protects your brain, too: Delaying Alzheimer’s Disease and Neurocognitive Decline: Let’s Stay Active Longer

I need these reminders, so I keep a flow of them in my life. If you are not working hard to build and maintain muscle mass, mobility, and aerobic conditioning? You’re in trouble.

But if you have a serious chronic illness, you probably feel like all this is impossible. You’re not alone.

The fitness world doesn’t know what to do with sick people.

That includes doctors. Here’s Dr. Luks at a loss about people like us. At the end of the tweet I’m about to link, he writes:

And yes, I do realize there are many people who are ill, disabled, disadvantaged, and otherwise cannot exercise, afford fresh produce etc… but I still think it’s worth sharing this info with the rest of the population that this is worthy of consideration.

But what he writes is still true even if you have an illness that hampers your ability to exercise:

Our expected lifespans in the US are shortening. The incidence of frailty is increasing. The prevalence of heart disease and cancer in the US is increasing.

This isn't rocket science. We have a healthcare system that does a fabulous job if you need open heart surgery, a…

— Howard Luks MD (@hjluks) May 6, 2023

It is still true that exercise is beneficial and necessary even though most fitness writers are athletes, and most exercise scientists are focused on peak human performance.

It is still true even though the usual standards for what you “ought to be able to do” are absurdly out of reach for many people with chronic illness.

Fitter is still better, even when your “fitter” is barely on the fitness radar.

My favorite fitness bloggers and podcasters tend to be like “Okay, for this problem, what you need to do is these many pull-ups, and . . .” Um, okay. What if I have that problem, but I can’t do a pull-up?

Well you know what, sick people? There are other exercises you can do if you can’t do a pull-up. And you can do them fewer times, or with less resistance, or whatever it takes so that you are exercising the amount that you can.

That’s all you can do. But you will be healthier than you otherwise would be if you build that muscle mass, even if what you build is invisible to these fitness gurus.

So I’m here to tell you: Come join the club of sick people who reap the benefits of exercise, even if no one else in the world thinks it’s really happening.

And that’s the rest of this post: How to get yourself into the mental space where you can do that, and how to approach your training plan when you can’t just follow some recommended workout created for regular people.

Let’s start with the mental game.

You have to prioritize stewardship of your health.

This is really hard, because everybody around you wants stuff out of you. Even if you were a regular person, you could not give everybody that piece of you they’re trying to take.

When you are a sick person, you have to be much more intense about setting boundaries. Everyone’s going to be playing the game of “If she can do that, why can’t she _______?”

The answer is: She can’t do the lower priority item because she chose to do the more important thing.

So you have to get to a place where you recognize: Taking care of my body is more important than other stuff people want from me, because if I don’t take care of it right now as a high priority, I’m going to be even sicker or deader down the road, and then who are they gonna whine to?

It really sucks having to make these trade-offs.

It’s a lose-lose life you’re living. No matter what you prioritize, you will have to give up some extremely important things.

Regular people are like, “I prioritize things like family, friends, quiet moments savoring the sunset . . . you just have to focus on what really matters in life.”

Sick people are like: “Yeah, I have to choose whether to talk to my kid for five minutes today or brush my teeth. Maybe I can do two minutes with the kid and some mouthwash.”

Even if you’re not that sick right now? You have to get very far into regular-people territory for a long time before you’re going to be able to do all the basic things that matter most.

Until then, you’re going to constantly be having to thicken your skin and accept that the life you actually have is one where you have to say no to things — people, mostly — that you truly treasure.

This is why it is so hard to exercise enough when you have a chronic illness.

It takes ruthless determination to not make that phone call to someone you love so that you can go to the gym instead. But you, unfortunately, have to choose. And if you don’t choose the gym today, there will be no phone call tomorrow.

We’re not talking about you putting your Olympic dreams above close family and friends. We are talking about the fact that if you don’t get very, very serious about your physical training you will be dead sooner. And then the people who joke about how you’re so hard to get on the phone will really know what “hard to reach” is like.

When you can, train as hard as you can reasonably, safely sustain.

Different illnesses take on different contours. My friend Emily, a double-lung transplant recipient with cystic fibrosis, has a fairly stable situation overall, punctuated by bouts with infections or other setbacks that require rest and recovery.

In contrast, I have a relapsing-and-remitting illness. When I am seriously sick, Emily’s normal runs circles around me. But when I’m not in a sick phase, I can do way more than she can. Your situation is probably yet different from either of us.

Regardless, there are likely times when you can do relatively more, and times when you really can’t.

During those times when can do more, physically, there are going to be many, many things you are going to want to catch up on. During those times, though, you need to be banking physical fitness.

Fitness-banking is a thing.

You need as much muscle mass as you can get. You need as much aerobic conditioning as you can get. You need as much strength, balance, and mobility as you can get.

When you are more-sick, some deconditioning is going to occur. You can’t help that or change that.

What you can control is your starting point. If you lose 10% of your muscle mass while you’re down with a bad bout of the thing, yeah that sucks — but it sucks way more if you didn’t have much to begin with. Which means that when you can*, you need to hyper-focus on strength training, even though it means missing out on other stuff.

*You can’t always.

Everyone dies in the end.

It is really discouraging when you have to put so much work and discipline and self-denial into fitness training, and you still look and feel like a lump. It’s not fair that other people get to keep their fitness gains, because they don’t have bouts of some stupid illness. It’s not fair that other people can train more intensely with bigger results and far less sacrifice, because they have normal bodies that can do that.

Well, okay. You know what else is not fair? You cheating yourself out of being as healthy as you can be.

Exercise is always, for everybody, a temporary game. No one escapes death forever. No one stays perfectly healthy forever, no matter how amazing their health-and-wellness game. But guys, everyone gets the same amount of eternity.

What you’re deciding with how you exercise isn’t whether you will one day be sicker and later be deader. What you are deciding is: Will I be as healthy right now as I can be? And will I be as healthy as I can be for as long as I can be?

Exercising isn’t selfish.

This is a huge mental shift you have to make.

You think, “Oh I’m so humble with putting others first, and not being vain about my appearance, and being so accepting of my difficult lot in life.” Okay that’s fine as far as it goes.

But also, if you don’t do what you reasonably can to take care of the body that has been given to you — even if it’s a bit of a clunker — then you are being selfish. You are making the decision to have less time and less ability to be with others and to serve others.

The point of serious fitness training for sick people isn’t that we’re going to impress anyone. We aren’t. Sorry. The point is to be there for others as well as you can. And fitness makes a huge difference in the course of your disease (yes, it does!).

There are no guarantees, of course. If you knew exactly when and how you would die, you could carefully steward all but the last ten days, and then binge on Krispy Kreme with your besties and go out in style.

That is not reality. Reality is that you need to invest in your physical health as if you aren’t going to get hit by a bus tomorrow morning. Your responsibility isn’t to control what you can’t control and can’t know. Your responsibility is to consider the fact that you might not get hit by a bus tomorrow, and prepare for that.

Okay, so what does that look like?

Let’s start with reality when you’re super sick and honestly you can’t do much at all.

When you can only do very, very little, prioritize:

Non-negotiable medical care. Let’s be real: Little things like taking your medicine you’ll get seriously sick (or sicker) without, checking your blood sugar if you have diabetes, monitoring your blood pressure if you have hypertension . . . these require physical energy. Depending on your health condition, you probably have some true do-or-die interventions. Do those.

Put lower on the list things that might-be-nice but honestly aren’t personally major risk factors for you.

True do-or-die chores. Maybe the garbage really has to go out today, because otherwise you have a serious sanitary situation on your hands. Okay, take it out. Or maybe you can tie up that bag and set it aside and someone else can take it out later, and that’s not your first choice but it’s FINE.

Your energy goes first to the things that really, truly must be done. If it can wait, it gets downvoted on the priority list.

Rehabbing your biggest vulnerabilities. Those exercises that help your bad knee, or balance training because honestly you need it, or stretches to keep the back pain down to a minimum . . . whatever it is. You know what your things are. If you can only do twenty-five seconds of exercise today, do the exercise that will shore up, even just a tiny bit, the thing that otherwise is gonna wreck you.

Prioritize this over low-urgency chores. You’re gonna have a lot harder time getting laundry done if you let your back go out again.

Sticking to a sustainable daily level of exertion. Maybe “sustainable” is:

“I am going to eat today and also go to the toilet and frankly if I do those two we’re calling it a victory.”
Or: “I can do up to 2,000 steps a day, and if I obsessively stay under that ceiling, I can reliably do it again tomorrow and the day after.”
Or: “I will do the top thing on my list (um, those meds?), and then rest. When I feel energetic again, I will do my #2 priority (food? toilet?).” And you slowly turtle your way through the day, and it works for you.

And that’s it. Stick to sustainable.

The thing you are missing is that regular people are not living at their maximum capacity.

Even professional athletes aren’t pushing themselves so hard that they literally, really truly could not brush their teeth at the end of the day if they added one more thing. They just go run the Ironman and then they’re like, “Yeah I can also brush my teeth today I have so much extra energy even after doing that.”

Sick people are on a different plan. Your daily sustainable energy output is intensive training. The discipline of sticking to what you can sustain will pay back so, so much.

Err on the Side of Being a Little Too Careful

So you think you can probably do 2000 steps a day? Yeah let’s see 1500 for a week and then we’ll talk.

Exercise guide suggests starting with five pound weights? We’re starting with zero weights, and if that works we’ll up it to a pound. Three sets of ten? Nope, one set of three. 90 degree angle on that new stretch? Okay well we’re starting with 45 and we will see from there.

See, the thing is: You can always add more. You cannot undo an injury.

If you wreck yourself, it is going to cost you much, much more than it will cost a regular person.

When everything goes fine with your initial, super-cautious approach? Great. Increase the intensity a tiny bit and see how it goes. If it’s still fine, sure, inch it up another notch.

If you do this, eventually you will safely get to your sustainable max. Sure, it is slower progress than if you had somehow magically known exactly what you could do before you even tried. But this isn’t fairyland, and also you know what slows down your progress? Getting injured.

Intensify when you can, and don’t dilly dally about it.

When you are feeling relatively better, here is what you are going to want to do:

Get out and tackle that huge, physically intense project that really needs to be done, even though you are deconditioned from being so sick and it’s probably going to wreck you.
Tackle a million little things that you are so behind on that if you did nothing but chores for the next six years, maybe you could catch up.
Spend time with people and get back to all your old activities.
Eat donuts. Hurray, you’re better!

Here is what you have to do instead:

Slowly, carefully, ramp back up your conditioning program, and wait on physically intense chores until you have built back up the strength to do them safely.
Work through only the highest priority backlog of chores first. Yes, you need to get the IRS off your back. Immediately. No, you don’t have to clean out right now that closet that frankly someone else can deal with if it comes to it, it’ll keep until later.
Continue thinking carefully about your priorities. Who are the people who truly have a claim on you above all others? What are the activities that contribute most to your mental health, even if they seem gratuitous or “wasteful” to other people who are not you?
Slowly but seriously ramp back up on your conditioning program.

–> I’ll note, however, that chores are exercise. They just aren’t always the right kinds of exercise in the right proportions. The key is they need to be the exercise that fits into your conditioning plan. Don’t sort the odd sock basket instead of completing the strength training workout you would otherwise be ready to do. But if your fitness plan legit calls for a short, light walk, it’s okay if your house is cleaner at the end of that walk.

And then here is what you need to do next, if you keep being pretty healthy overall, for you:

Continue slowly but seriously ramping up on the conditioning program, even if you are back to where you were before.

Even if you get to where you’re in pretty good shape for someone your age? Even if you are fitter than you’ve ever been? Keep going.

You are not a regular person. You have to bank your fitness while you can, and bank as much as you can, because when you get sicker again, you are going to need that reserve.

Keep exploring until you find the kind of exercise that works with the body you have today.

What I do for exercise is constantly changing because my body is constantly changing.

I love the outdoors. I like yardwork, hiking, camping, biking . . . all kinds of outside activities. Also, I live in the Deep South. Before I developed an illness that is made worse by heat exposure? I was the queen of heat adaptation. A little insufferable about it, ask anyone.

I was good at exercising in the heat. I was dying laughing back during the Atlanta Olympics when there were all these articles about athletes having to deal with heat and humidity, oh my. Poor babies.

Well, that was before. And I do still work the heat-adapting as much as I can? But also I finally realized I needed to find options for exercise during the hot-season that were compatible with the body I have today.

Maybe one day, because I do keep working on the heat-adapting within my capacity for that, I’ll be able to get more summer outside-time. For now, ice skating it is. You could do a lot worse.

You have to become the expert in adapting recommendations.

The other day Emily was talking about the value of wall sits, and I balked. They don’t go well for me. And somewhere in that conversation came the aha-moment: I don’t have to go into a deep wall sit. There is still strength-training happening even if I’m sitting at a much shallower angle.

The thing is: Only I can know what that angle is.

A physical therapist can’t feel my knee creaking, even if she’s watching carefully for all the right body mechanics. A fitness guru on the internet can’t write up a special version of his go-to workout Just for Jennifer. A doctor making general recommendations about “getting more exercise” is not living my daily life.

So I have to be the leader. I have to be the one who pays careful attention to my body and makes smart decisions about what I can and can’t do.

And the same goes for you. Become the leader in making the final judgement call on what you can do and how much you can do.

When you do that, exercise becomes good.

What Religion Does Taylor Swift Practice?

May 9, 2023 By Jennifer Fitz

0 Comments

I’m out of the closet as a Taylor Swift fan, even though I fully recognize that significant parts of her work and political beliefs are contrary to the Catholic faith. I won’t say I am comfortable holding onto the true, good, and beautiful in a mixed-package that has some serious concerns as well? But also at times Swift expresses Catholic things, and ordinary human emotions and experiences, with spot-on artistry and magnificence. So I work with it.

The question I volunteered to answer today is what religion Taylor Swift actually practices. Since she doesn’t make many explicit statements about her religious beliefs, we have to piece together some clues.

Taylor in sequined "business suit" costume with feet propped up — If you really want to know where I was April 29th . . . Here’s T. Swift performing “If I Were The Man” live in concert at the *Eras* tour. Snapshot off the halo board at the Mercedez Benz stadium taken by A. Fitz, used with permission.

Did Taylor Swift start out Christian?

It’s fairly clear that Taylor Swift grew up in a culturally-Christian environment. She attended Alvernia Montessori School, a preschool and kindergarten run by the Bernardine sisters and which had been a ministry of Alvernia University until it closed in 2014. Her parents ran a Christmas tree farm. There are other references in her biography to Christian practice and in her early music to belief in God.

Her 2008 song “Christmas Must Be Something More” is about how commercialism crowds out the spiritual heart of Christmas. It includes the lyrics:

It seems the last thing on your mind

It’s that the day holds something special

Something holy and not superficial

So here’s to Jesus Christ who saved our lives

However, even from this early date, it’s a fairly vague theology. Her references to God and faith could be the tip of the iceberg on an abiding literal belief that Jesus really is God who became man, who suffered and died on the cross, and who really did literally rise from the dead on the third day.

Or, alternately, she may not have held such beliefs, but instead identified with the Christian story more as a metaphor. That would be consistent with earnestly wanting Christmas be something deeper and more meaningful than just gifts and parties, but without necessarily fully buying into the historic claims of Christianity. Here’s my own story about starting out in a very similar place.

Is Taylor Swift still a Christian?

In her early-2020 documentary Miss Americana, Swift explicitly identified as a Christian. However, that statement came in the context of her decision to endorse a political candidate, so she wasn’t laying out her theology generally.

In terms of hot-topic moral issues, Taylor is more aligned with denominations like the Episcopalians, which more-conservative Christians would increasingly describe as Christian-origin faiths but which do not adhere to the historic understanding of Christianity.

At stake is whether the Bible as inerrant and authoritative . . . or not so much?

While much attention has been given to the moral issues surrounding human sexuality, the theme of revenge in Taylor Swift’s work is one of the most direct conflicts with the Gospel:

Matthew 5:11-12 “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Luke 6:35-36 “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”
Romans 12:19-20 “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.”

Admittedly this is one of the most difficult tenets of Christianity to keep. Nonetheless, some explanation is owed when the repertoire includes “Better Than Revenge,” the vengeance-murder ballad “No Body No Crime” and most recently “Vigilante.” This in conjunction with her condoning of abortion and sex outside of marriage are both consistent with a utilitarian rather than a Christian moral theology.

Is Taylor Swift “Spiritual But Not Religious”?

I think this is the emerging category in which Swift’s religious beliefs and practices seem to fall, though I don’t think pegging people with labels is very helpful.

There is undeniably a spiritual thread throughout Taylor’s entire repertoire. She is frank about moments of doubt and of tentative attempts to reach out to God in times of difficulty. She clearly seeks something deeper in life than mere self-gratification.

I think we need to let it rest at this.

Taylor Swift is a real human person who deserves a private life in which to connect and reconnect with God. So while we fans are understandably curious about whether Taylor has a specific set of religious beliefs and practices, I don’t think it is helpful or healthy to put the most intimate questions of the life of her soul under public scrutiny.

Is Taylor Swift a witch?

Finally I’d like to address a newer concern that religious believers have been raising.

Simply using the term “witch” in her song lyrics or conversation is not itself a spiritual claim — the word has multiple meanings. For example there is nothing in “mad woman” to indicate the reference to “hunting witches” is about the narrator actually practicing witchcraft. A “witch hunt” in contemporary usage just means you’ve decided to sniff out scapegoats, assign blame, and force someone to take the fall.

However, the “willow” music video, and the corresponding live performances, have generated accusations of the occult. You can view the video here:

Much of it reads more like a dream sequence with fantasy elements (evoking perhaps The Chronicles of Narnia for Christian readers), but questions have been raised specifically about the segment where cloaked figures gather around a bonfire of glowing orbs and do . . . not a whole lot?

Are they just dancing? Worshipping? Casting spells? Admiring the special effects? I don’t have an authoritative answer to that (not for lack of searching), but I will update here if I receive one.

–>Meanwhile, the wikipedia article about “willow” is comprehensive and includes a basic explainer for the imagery in the song.

I do suspect the part where Taylor herself refers to “witch” versions of the remixes suggest she is comfortable with identifying with witchcraft at some level. Whether she takes that seriously or considers it more of a metaphorical spirituality is a question that deserves her attention.

Both those who actually practice witchcraft and those of us who warn of its dangers do not take it as a mere stylism.

What if I just take her at her word?

Taylor began her career in the country music world, where Christian religious belief is acceptable and saleable. The slightest mention of God or prayer in that subculture is often interpreted as Bible-Belt Christianity; similarly, there can be a tremendous pressure to identify as “Christian” even if you harbor doubts or disbelief about key tenets of the faith.

It is not necessary, though, to second guess the religious statements Taylor has made in the past. The crucial question for us all is always: What do I believe and practice now?

I don’t think the evidence supports, at all, the idea that Taylor Swift currently practices historic Christianity as recognized by Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians.

As for her spiritual future? It’s Taylor Swift. You never know what she’s gonna do next.

Parsing Out the Physical from the Psychological in Chronic Illness

October 17, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Today I want to dive into a study brought to my attention by a usually very sensible health and fitness blogger, but who erroneously interpreted the results as evidence “long covid” might be primarily psychological in origin.

Here’s the study: “Psychophysiologic symptom relief therapy (PSRT) for post-acute sequelae of COVID-19: a non-randomized interventional study.” Click on the “full text” tab to read it for free (you can also download the PDF if you’d like to save a copy). It’s a pre-print, and that may explain a few things.

I want to run through it because the study tackles a problem that everyone with chronic illness deals with: To what extent am I just turning into a hypochondriac here?

As I’ll explain below, the study itself is quite generalizable, as it’s not just a long covid study. It’s really a study of patients with chronic illness of unknown origin.

The Mental Game is Real

I have a friend whose wife died of a particularly miserable cancer. While she was in remission, though, he shared with me the constant head-game they dealt with: Every time she felt a new ache or pain, she wondered, “Is that the cancer coming back?” Eventually it was the cancer metastasizing, but that doesn’t mean every single joint pain or stomach cramp in the year leading up to her final illness was in fact a new tumor wreaking its havoc. Sometimes, even when you’re dying of cancer, you just have a sore knee.

With long covid, some of the most pernicious symptoms fall into the “dysautonomia” umbrella, which are notoriously hard to diagnose and treat. For an example of how crazy-making this is, here’s my 2016 description of what was going on at that time: “Dysautonomia Awareness: You’re Not Insane, You Just Feel That Way.”

Sometimes it is very easy to know that your autonomic nervous system is going off the rails all on its own, like that month where I woke up every morning at 4AM with allergy symptoms, blew my nose for an hour, and then went back to bed spontaneously cured. No one is only allergic to their bedding one hour a night. Even if sneeze-inducing panic is a thing (is it?), how exactly are you panicking when you were sleeping peacefully all night long, and you don’t even realize the runny nose is weird until it just keeps happening at the same hour of the early morning every day for a month? (And then goes away on its own, because you have a relapsing-and-remitting disease, which is much nicer than symptoms not going away, so props for that.) That’s an example of being able to easily tell what’s in your head and what’s not.

In contrast, if you’re out for a normal walk and start to feel short of breath, good luck staying calm through that one. Once your panting and your inappropriately racing heart come to your attention, I don’t know really know how you don’t think about it. Honestly all you can do is make sure you aren’t about to drop dead and then calmly walk home, lay down, and see if you continue to be hit out of the blue with these symptoms in the future, at times when you aren’t thinking about it, because you just forgot.

The study we’re going to look at specifically addressed the problem of: Am I really sick, or am I just freaking out? The results are pretty informative.

What is “Psychophysiologic Response?”

The study authors note that for a subset of long covid patients, finding a physical cause of dysautonomia and pain symptoms remains elusive. They ask the question, is this psychophysiologic?

What that means is that you have a psychological situation that is causing a genuine physical symptom. They give the example of blushing: It’s caused by an emotional state (embarrassment), but it is a measurable, observable physical symptom. If you sweat because you’re nervous, faint at the sight of blood, or get a blood pressure spike at the doctor’s office because of “white coat syndrome,” that’s your autonomic nervous responding to a mental state.

It’s important to parse out what is happening in these situations, because the treatment for, say, chronic high blood pressure is different than the treatment for anxiety-induced high blood pressure. Both need to be treated, but they need to be managed in different ways because they are not the same illness.

Narrowing Down the Study Group

In order to answer this question, the study authors had to pare down their study group very aggressively. About 90% of the people who applied to participate were ruled out. The three general reasons were:

Did not have a positive confirmation of prior covid infection. Obviously if you are attempting to understand “long covid” then that’s a good one. However, see my notes below about the limitations on this parameter.
Had a confounding health status, whether related to covid (such as detectable organ damage) or otherwise (diabetes, over age 60 or under 18, known psyche co-morbidity, etc.). This is logical. If you’re trying to tease out the purely psychological element of someone’s chronic illness, you need to be as clear as possible about what is what.
Did not express openness to exploring a mind-body connection, or else had some other reason they were unable to complete the program.

Let’s get our heads around this last criteria, because it is very important for understanding the limits of the study.

Who Can Benefit from Psychotherapy for Chronic Illness?

I think it goes without saying that if you aren’t open to the possibility that a psychological intervention will help you, that therapy is unlikely to make you better, even if your problem is purely psychological. Unlike popping a pill, where your body will respond regardless of whether you believe the medication will work or not, psychological therapy requires your active cooperation. Mentally you have to be willing to do your part.

So this is a necessary part of the study design. You could do future studies with additional control groups, but for pilot research, this criteria makes sense. As a result, though, it eliminates a major category of long covid patients who are critically important to unveiling the physical causes of the disease.

Who are the Self-Treated Long Covid Psyche Patients?

What has caught my attention since the emergence of “long covid” accounts in mid-2020 are the stories from physicians, academics, and competitive athletes. These are people who, by definition, are extremely motivated — the absolute masters of pushing through it.

You simply cannot become an MD, get on the tenure track, or place at the top in your sport if you’re the kind of person whose response to life’s serious challenges is to retreat, reconsider, and just give up.

As a result, patient accounts from these subgroups nearly universally include a long, intense period of drawing on every psychological trick in their book for powering through anxiety-states. When these patients say, “No, it’s definitely not in my head,” they know.

These are people who simply won’t stand for having their ambitions checked. Not by you, not by the committee, certainly not by any damn disease. Residual symptoms in this group are the result of some kind of intractable physical illness, even if it is not yet possible (because the medical technology hasn’t been developed yet) to detect the physical cause of those symptoms.

Eliminating these patients from the study group helps us better understand to what extent a psychophysiological response might be in play for more-normal people — those (presumably) long covid patients who are legitimately still asking the question about how much of what they are feeling is just anxiety taking over their life.

Measuring Your Mind-Body Experience

The study’s main outcome measure is scoring on a questionnaire called the “Somatic Symptom Scale-8.” As described by the authors:

The SSS-8 is an eight item scale in which participants rank how bothered they have been by eight separate groups of symptoms over the past week on a scale of 0-4 from “not at all” to “very much” (19). Results from the SSS-8 are summed to an overall score that ranges from 0 to 32. Scoring of the SSS-8 is categorized as follows: no to minimal (0-3 points), low (4-7 points), medium (8-11 points), high (12-15 points), and very high (16-32 points) somatic symptom burden (27).

You can read about the SSS-8 and see a PDF version of the questionnaire here. I’ll discuss this more below, but for the moment notice that the one big question is how much are you bothered by . . .? This is an important measure for a psychological intervention.

Psyche Holds Its Own Against Big Pharma

For the study, the twenty-three patients who met the criteria evaluated themselves on the SSS-8 at intervals throughout the treatment period. They also did an array of other evaluations, but I’m initially going to focus on the SSS-8 data, because that was the primary outcome being assessed. Looking at that data gets us some good answers. By all means dig through the tables for other insights.

The treatment included regular classes that covered both education about stress-responses and exercises designed specifically to treat stress-induced physical symptoms. I’m not going to copy and paste the whole description, but it was quite a thorough intervention, and patients reported some specific experiences of realizing they did have some physical symptoms that were psychologically-induced. (Just go read the “intervention” section.)

Let’s look at the numbers, and these are lifted straight from the text and tables. The authors tell us:

The overall population mean SSS-8 score is 3.2. That’s just at the top of the “no to minimal” category. The study authors set as a goal to try to get the study participants down to that level — down to being no more bothered by their symptoms than is typical for people generally.
The participants began the study with a mean SSS-8 score of 20.8. That’s in the “very high” category of being bothered by pain and other symptoms.
Just four weeks in to the psychological intervention, participants’ SSS-8 scores were down to a mean of 11.7, the “medium” category.

This is an impressive improvement. If a new medication provided this much relief, and without any dangerous side effects, you’d be crazy not to take it.

However, and this is where the study gets very helpful in a different way, that psyche treatment only gets you so far in dealing with chronic illness.

Better is Good, But It Isn’t the Same as Cured

At weeks 8 and 13 of the study, participants did show continued improvement, but the gains were minimal. The average SSS-8 dropped one more point by week 8 and yet another point by week 13, but at a mean score of 9.3, the average participant was still in the “medium” category of how bothered they were by their symptoms. This is much, much better than where they began, but nowhere close to the stated goal of getting down to the “low” category.

While it’s possible that this flatter downward trend would continue indefinitely with on-going treatment, it seems more likely that the study has successfully identified a genuine plateau. If you check the raw scores on the secondary evaluations (pain, fatigue, etc.), the pattern is similar for many (but not all, see below) measures: A rapid drop in patient discomfort at the four-week mark, and then relatively few gains after.

A reasonable conclusion is that for patients who have intractable physical symptoms not easily explained by an obvious disease course, and who have not yet ruled out psychological origins for their symptoms, treating for stress-response can dramatically improve patients’ well-being even though it cannot eliminate any purely physical side of the disease.

What it Means to be Bothered

One of the most interesting secondary measures were the assemblage of pain-related evaluations.

“Average Pain” started at a mean score of 5.4, dropped to 3.8 by week four, and held steady at 3.8 and then 3.3.
“Pain Intensity” started at a mean score of 5.1, dropped to 3.3 by week four, and then again stalled at the plateau with only slight improvements at 3.1 and 2.7.
In contrast, “Pain Interference” showed a stronger continued drop: Mean score of 43 at week 0, down to 20.5 by week four, and then continuing the slide to 14.5 and then to 10 by the study’s end.

This is a great example of how psychological reframing can make the same pain less bothersome, even though you are still in the same amount of pain. You can read about the Brief Pain Inventory here.

The “interference” section of the questionnaire asks patients to rate not how much pain they are feeling (covered in the other sections of the BPI) but how much that pain is keeping them from doing what they want to do. Can you sleep? Socialize? Work? Get around? Enjoy life?

For the same amount of pain — again note that after the first four weeks, average pain and pain intensity held fairly steady — psychological coping tools can help you:

Adjust your expectations so that you aren’t as depressed or overwhelmed by your chronic pain;
Learn relaxation or other palliative techniques to assist in falling asleep, since sleep-deprivation drives pain and other symptoms;
Use constructive work-arounds to accomplish your goals without aggravating your pain (example: use a jar opener rather than wrecking your arthritic hands);
Learn pacing and self-care strategies to prevent exacerbations;
Identify when it’s okay to just power through pain, or outright ignore it, because nothing bad is going to happen, it’s just there;
Eliminate self-sabotaging coping mechanisms;
Set boundaries in toxic relationships that undermine your physical or mental health;
Treat yourself to special Jedi mind-tricks to ignore the pain and just do what you need to do.

All of this can make you far less bothered by your pain, even when no amount of psychology can eliminate the fact that you have a painful disease process, sorry, too bad.

Probably not in the study, but it’s also an important psyche technique: Learning when and how to use pain-relieving medications for best overall effect. It’s a skill.

The Long Covid Study that Wasn’t About Long Covid

What I find most intriguing about this study is that we have no idea whether the participants actually have long covid. We know that they had a prior covid infection, and that they have something wrong with them. Whether they have what will one day be easily diagnosed as “true long covid” or whether they are people with random other difficult-to-diagnose disorders remains a mystery. That’s the nature of the study design and the current state of diagnostic technology.

I think, therefore, that the results of this initial pilot intervention are worth considering for any chronic illness.

And that, in turn, leads to a follow-on I’d like to see in this study, but which can be tried at home any time.

Deconditioning vs. Fitness Ceiling

The in-study assessment of fatigue follows the same improvement curve as most of the other measures: A sharp improvement at first, and then a more or less steady-state thereafter. In contrast, the assessment of dyspnea (shortness of breath) shows the initial sharp improvement at the four-week mark, but then a slower rate of significant continued improvement over the remaining weeks of the study.

Both of these measures are important proxies for answering a common question with protracted chronic illness: To what extent is deconditioning the cause of exercise intolerance?

Do you have no stamina because you can’t exercise, or because you don’t exercise?

As I mentioned here, when I first developed heart-attack levels of shortness of breath that couldn’t be explained by any obvious heart or lung condition, I had medical professionals attempt to tell me, with a straight face, that I had somehow deconditioned from running up and down a snow covered hill for hours at a time to being able unable to walk a quarter mile on flat ground. In two weeks?

That’s not how that works.

But in the long game of chronic illness, deconditioning does become the on-going nemesis. Therefore I would love for a replicated version of this current study to tack on a second 14-week follow-on intervention to specifically parse out that question.

Objective Counterparts to the “Bothered By” Scale

Dyspnea, or shortness of breath, is a self-perceived, somewhat subjective measure. To an extent other people can see you panting and gasping for breath, but to be honest I’ve never known a pulmonology tech who had that level of perceptiveness. I’m sure they are out there.

In the absence of identifiable lung disease, however, heart rate is an objective measure of physical effort that is easily tracked using an over-the-counter fitness tracker.

Likewise, whereas perceived fatigue is a subjective measure, sleep duration and daily step count are both objective, easily-measurable ways to assess how active you are able to be, and how tired you are as a result.

For a finer-grain detail on the question of fatigue, you could also sample, at intervals, measures like how much of the day was spent just plain lying there, or how long you could be up and active before you needed to rest. (You wouldn’t want to do this every day because that level of recordkeeping is, um, exhausting.)

It would be good to track this information in a general way (collecting the data from the fitness watch and possibly doing some sample-day detailed journaling) during the initial 14-week psychotherapy intervention, to establish an initial baseline level of fitness and stamina.

If this were my study (whether in the lab or self-treating at home), I would absolutely work on the psychological treatment first, however. You need to overcome any exertion-related anxiety so that you are confident of your ability to move on to attempted reconditioning.

This confidence includes the self-assurance that when you feel exhausted or short of breath, it is indeed your body begging for rest, not you psyching yourself out. This pre-print study appears to have done a good job of cutting through that noise and getting the participants to a stable physical state.

UPDATE 3/16/2023: If you are someone experiencing a “post-exertional malaise” (PEM) type syndrome, or tasked with treating it, take a look at this: Recovery from Exercise in Persons with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). The authors are frank about the limitations of this study, but I think it is clear that erring on the side of caution is warranted for patients showing signs of impaired exercise-recovery.

This is fairly distinct from other kinds of illness-induced fatigue that reduce stamina but don’t involve PEM. What follows from here is based on what works with non-PEM fatigue. Therefore, given the growing consensus that a significant portion of long-covid patients are experiencing PEM as described by the CDC in ME/CFS, I would consider carefully this advice from the CDC:

Patients need to determine their individual limits for mental and physical activity, and plan activity and rest to stay within these limits. Some patients and healthcare providers refer to staying within these limits as staying within the “energy envelope.” Limitations may be different for each patient. Keeping individual activity and symptom diaries may be helpful to patients in identifying their personal limitations, especially early on in clinical care. Healthcare providers need to keep in mind that when patients with ME/CFS exceed their individual capacities, PEM and serious deterioration of function may result. In general, patients should not push themselves beyond their capacities as this may exacerbate the symptoms and trigger PEM.

You would want to rule out PEM quite firmly before proceeding with self-experiments on pushing your fitness ceiling as described below.

I’ll add here, with respect to step one below, that one of the hallmarks of ME/CFS is the combination of crushing fatigue and poor sleep. In contrast, people (even very sick people) with normal fatigue responses sleep well when they have exercised to a comfortable capacity (however much or little that is), and wake feeling comparatively rested and restored.

Final note with this update: Edits on this post will automatically close (by the software, not me) after six months. So if you are reading this after that point, please do your research to see if new info (or new-to-me info) contradicts anything I suggest here. I’m not your doctor and never will be.

Finding the Fitness Ceiling

From that stable physical state, if I were conducting a study my psyche intervention would shift to education on basic conditioning concepts like pacing, sleep hygiene, and heart-rate zones (with continued review of the mental health skills developed in phase 1).

My first four weeks of phase 2 would focus only on establishing a reliable daily activity level: How many steps can you fit in to your day and hit that sweet spot of sleeping well (however that happens for you), but without ending up exhausted and unable to maintain the pace through the days or weeks that follow?

This is a largely observational process of looking at your step count each day and adjusting for slightly more activity the following day if you are restless from lack of activity, and reducing your step count target if needed because you experience an increase in exhaustion.

Once you have a reliable daily activity level, which will usually require lifestyle adaptations to accomplish a stable daily step count, then you can explore whether this level of stamina is the result of a fitness ceiling.

All you do is nudge up the daily step count target by 10% (5% if you are being conservative) and attempt to hold. If reconditioning is possible, then you will experience mild positive signs of exercise-adaptation (sleep just a little better, maybe some mild muscle soreness that self-resolves, likely feel some sense of exertion during the extended activity), but it won’t crush you. You’ll be able to maintain it and soon you’ll be maintaining that improvement as if it were totally normal.

[–> To hit your target reliably, what you do is go about your daily life, and in the early evening take a look at where your step count is. If it’s low, either go for a walk or do random chores to nudge it up to almost-there. You’re still gonna use a few more steps getting ready for bed and putting the cat out and all that.

And, from the other direction, if you know you have a high-step day coming up, you have to do all the prep for that day in the lead-up. I.e. pack your bags one day, clean the house over the next three days, and then go on that trip. Or: inventory your groceries today, go to the store tomorrow, put away only perishables when you get home, leave the non-perishables in the car to put away the day-after. Learning to estimate how many steps you’re going to use is part of the skill set you are building.

If you are step-limited due to an injury or disability, then you substitute alternative measures of activity. I’m using steps, but you might have to develop a different exercise metric if you aren’t much of a stepping-person.]

In contrast, if you attempt to nudge up your average daily steps from baseline and you simply can’t do so because of your underlying disease process? You will know. Oh believe me: You. will. know.

That’s the fitness ceiling. Everyone has one. Ironman triathletes, hyperactive toddlers, normal people with or without chronic illness . . . everyone has an amount of daily exertion they can maintain, beyond which they simply must rest and recover because the human body can only do so much and then it’s done.

The Fitness Ceiling is Not Static

No matter how healthy you are, your maximum daily exertion is going to fluctuate. With chronic illness, these fluctuations can run either direction, and move quite dramatically up or down in the case of a relapsing-and-remitting illness.

For everybody, incidents like fighting off an infection or grieving a significant loss will also impact your fitness ceiling; with chronic illness, these lows will tend to go lower and run longer.

There’s not much for it. You just identify what is happening, temporarily adjust your baseline down to as reliable of a steady-state as you can, and then nudge back upwards when it seems like you are doing better.

Psyche vs. Sick

I’ve spent so much time responding to this study for several reasons. First and foremost is because I was seeing people who should know better dramatically misinterpreting what the study does and doesn’t say. I hope I’ve cleared that up.

Secondly, I think this research provides some valuable insights into the benefits to be gained from working through the mental game of any chronic illness. This is especially so for undiagnosed chronic illness, which is what the study participants all had, and which brings a distinctive set of psychological challenges.

And finally, I do think it’s important that psychological intervention not stop with only the benefits that emotional coping strategies can bring, but instead move on to supporting a carefully-planned physical trial of how much fitness can, or cannot, be recovered once the individual has developed a stronger set of coping skills for dealing with their on-going illness.

I think that physical trial does belong in the context of a supportive, psychologically healthy group or partner relationship, because the mental game in rehab is hard. The pressure of figuring out how to live your life when you can’t just live your life is intense and unremitting. The decision to discover your absolute physical limits and live just under that line takes serious mental toughness.

And in that regard, I think this study, properly interpreted, contains some useful insights for just about anyone in the position of needing to push yourself beyond what it feels like you can honestly do, but maybe you can and it’s worth a shot.

Jonathan’s Run Falls, photo by Hubert Stoffels, via Wikimedia, CC 2.0. You can come up with your own metaphor. I decided it was time for a nice waterfall photo, no deeper meaning from my end.

Happy Easter & A General Update

April 19, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Checking in here to wish you a blessed Easter, lest you wonder whether I’ve forgotten there’s a holy season afoot. For those who are just returning online or otherwise weren’t aware, most of my strictly-Jesus blogging has moved over to jenniferfitz.substack.com. Right here at Patheos remains my default location for controversy, Rant-O-Rama, and off-topic miscellany.

FYI there’s no paywall at the substack. A free subscription sends all content to your inbox, so you don’t need to brave the infinite scroll in order to keep up. You can also just check-in directly on the website from time to time. The same is true here: Check the sidebar to sign up for e-mail delivery.

You can also subscribe at both places via the feed-reader of your choice. As someone who subscribes to dozens of blogs, newsletters, and news outlets across the spectrum and ranging from massive corporate productions to tiny personal weblogs, I can attest that the age of blogs is far from over. If anything, I’d say there’s been a resurgence of late.

For those looking for me live online, my only active social media presence is @JenFitz_Reads on Twitter. The theme is Whatever the Heck I Felt Like. Some cat-content, but I try to keep the cat from actually typing himself.

How’s it going, Jen?

I give myself a B- in the life department. Lost a good two months this winter to catching every dang thing circulating in town, nothing serious, just a lot of it. (COVID went fine, for the record, and my non-scientific feeling is that the vax did help make it that way.) This spring I’ve deployed a strategy of germ-avoidance that appears completely irrational but actually there’s a logic to it, and which seems to be helping in terms of how much time I lose each time I catch the hot new virus trending at the kids’ high school.

A year of aggressively Doing All the Things has coincided with a huge turnaround healthwise, and I’m going to assume correlation is causation for the moment. I remain firmly in the awkward phase where I more or less act like life is normal and try not to think too much about the part where I’m still behind on 60% of the things responsible people do.

So if it seems like I’m ignoring you? I’m not. You’re on my mind, in my prayers, and sooner or later we’ll get there. Meanwhile: Happy Easter!

Photo: Wax-painted Easter eggs via Wikimedia, CC 4.0.

Dismembering Womanhood

March 16, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Confession time: In daily life the pronoun thing is off my radar. I live in the land of Ma’am and Sir, so everyone gets “gendered” constantly. I’m not bothered if someone calls me Sir (whether by slip of the tongue or genuine mistake — I’m not always the picture of feminine stereotypes, thanks), and like all the rest of the world, in my own routine courtesies I don’t ask to see paperwork, I just roll with whatever sex the person I’m speaking to looks or sounds like.

That’s normal life.

There are times, though, when sex matters. Here’s one of the less offensive reports on the latest crimes of serial killer Harvey Marcelin, a man who murders and dismembers women. The New York Post at least explains at the top of the article that Mr. Marcelin identifies as a transgender woman; I’ve seen other articles where “she” and “her” crimes are described at length before only mentioning at the very end of the story that we aren’t speaking of a woman at all, but a man. Because there are significant differences in the patterns of male and female homicide, sex matters.

***

Another time sex matters is when speaking of reproductive systems. Only women menstruate, conceive, and give birth. Men do sometimes lactate, but not as the means of nourishing newborns. In the effort to somehow prove that sex is a mutable characteristic, it’s become a fad to describe sex-specific physical traits rather than naming the sex those traits belong to. Men and women cease to be persons with lived experiences and instead get named by their genitals. Classy.

This desperation to divorce human beings from their bodies leads to some ridiculously unscientific terminology. Chestfeeding? You can just say breastfeeding. Men and women both have breasts, and any lactation that occurs comes from that breast tissue.

Lately I’ve been seeing bleeder to refer to women who menstruate. Again, terrible science. There are woefully few animal species that don’t have a circulatory system. Men bleed. Women bleed. Dogs and cats and goldfish bleed. We sometimes even refer to trees bleeding. It’s difficult to be any less specific than to use the term “bleeder.” In the desperation to erase distinctions between men and women, we’re now lumping together menstruation, paper cuts, and maple syrup?

***

Something else that matters is the differences between male and female patterns of cardiovascular disease. Here’s an explainer that does indeed drill down to XX vs. XY, which in this case is the relevant distinction.

When you, a man or a woman, try to get your disease diagnosed and treated, though, it’s not just your chromosomes that will protest if your physician ignores the sex-based differences in this area. You as a man or a woman may experience unnecessary suffering because of your sex, due to ignorance about the genuine physical differences between men and woman in this aspect of human physiology.

***

We cannot separate the experience of being a man or a woman from the experience of living in a male or female body. That’s what being a man or woman, male or female, is. I repeat: That’s what it is. Because of this, yet another area where sex matters is in sports.

In order to provide fair competition, all competitive sporting events categorize people by their capabilities. Depending on the sport, we use age categories, weight classes, years of experience, skill-based handicap scoring, or disability classifications in order to create as fair of a playing field as possible. The value of competition derives from playing someone as equally matched to yourself as possible, so that you and your opponent are both striving to perform at the limits of your ability.

Another way we usually (not always) categorize athletes is by sex.

We might do this for social reasons, regardless of whether there are significant differences in typical male and female performance capacity in a given sport. We might do it out of modesty in sports where players have intimate physical contact with each other’s bodies, recognizing that we are sexual beings who rightly place limits on physical contact with the opposite sex.

We also create sex-segregated sports because men and women do vary in their physical abilities, but both need opportunities for fair competition at an intense level. Because humans are not just pieces-parts but men and women, there is genuine need for men’s-only and women’s-only sports.

***

The recent fad for attempting to desexualize human beings — reducing women to bleeders and chestfeeders — is a process of dismembering womanhood. Rather than womanhood being the sum of all the many, diverse experiences of female humanity, “womanhood” becomes a disembodied abstraction built on stereotypes and labels, disconnected from the reality of being the female half of a sexually-dimorphic species.

And into that vacuum, men claim a “right” to female spaces. Protected spaces. Spaces women need in order to develop and thrive as women. Women who have spent generations fighting for equal access to education and to athletics are now told that our womanhood is whatever men decide it will be.

A woman who objects to men taking over women’s sports, or a man insisting on undressing in the women’s locker room, is told she needs to hush-up and obey her betters, or she can expect to be punished.

It’s not really a surprise, then, that our culture goes along with the fictions of a male serial killer who murders and dismembers women while claiming “womanhood” for himself.

Photo: Canadian women’s ice hockey team with gold medals, 2010 Winter Olympics, via Wikimedia, public domain.

Culture War and Civil War

February 16, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Hypothesis: Black Lives Matter riots, Antifa riots, Jan 6, and the Canadian trucker convoy — and all the European and Australian analogs to these — have something in common that we need to acknowledge if we don’t want to keep pushing people closer and closer to civil war.

***

Peaceful protest is nothing new. These recent events, however, have taken on a character that I have spent the last two years telling my children: This is not normal for our country.

I’m old. Born near the end of US engagement in Vietnam, reared in the post-segregation world, often-times oblivious to just how different, socially, the world of my boomer-parents’ youth was to my own. If you’re Gen X, you grew up with the Cold War as your defining paradigm, but not with a nation on fire.

And here is what I have to say, watching arson on the left and occupations on the right become far too normal: We need to stop creating whole classes of people who have nothing to lose.

I am not legitimizing lawlessness. I am saying: It doesn’t come from nowhere. We need to be honest with ourselves about that fact.

***

Lately an awful lot of people have been experiencing extremes of marginalization.

Nothing left to lose economically.

Some examples:

The entire gig-economy, descendent of the part-time servant-class economy.
Insane student debt burden as the entry-fee to middle-class employment, and somehow it’s legal for an 18-year-old to take on six-figure loans in pursuit of that dream — same kid who reputedly lacks the decision-making capability to be trusted with a can of beer?
Housing market booms and busts that wreck family financial security, but for which reckless bankers get bailed out and subsidized.
And yes, blanket vaccine mandates that push people out of work, even those who risked their lives keeping the world running pre-vaccine, even when the established science doesn’t support the stated purpose of a given mandate.

There are more and more people every year, from more and more different walks of life, who are getting a clear message: There’s no room for people like you in this economy. You get to just be poor.

Nothing left to lose socially.

People care about their reputations and they care about their place in the world.

The rhetoric of “deplorables”? Branding as “white supremacists” a movement in Canada that was taken up by many, many non-white people? The French president openly taunting the vaccine-hesitant with his plans to f*ck with them?

I know people who’ve been told at corporate trainings that they can’t use the words “husband” or “wife” about their own opposite-sex spouse, because those words create a “hostile environment” — but it’s okay to use those words for your same-sex significant other. We aren’t talking about tolerating anti-gay bigotry. We’re speaking of real, documented cases where employees have been threatened with discrimination charges if they discuss basic facts about the existence of another human being.

Girls who want female-only sports competitions? No matter how otherwise indifferent or even supportive they are of transgender classmates, they are being branded as hateful, death-wishing bigots if they don’t give way to the males who want their spot on the team.

Women who want female-only prisons and locker rooms and rape-survivor support groups are being accused of death-wishing towards the men they don’t want to share intimate spaces with?

It has become normal to brand as hateful anyone who holds an opposing viewpoint . . . and to threaten those “haters” with loss of livelihood. This is now the media, academic, and political mainstream discourse.

Eventually people begin to the get message: There is no place for me in civil society anymore. I guess uncivil society is what they want?

Nothing left to lose physically.

When the police — and a whole swathe of society — think it’s just fine to murder a suspect?

When we just somehow can’t avoid judicially-sanctioned police home invasions that are highly likely to be a death sentence for occupants caught by surprise?

And then we make excuses for these killings of people who do anything, whatsoever, alarmed or defensive when they are awoken from a deep sleep by armed strangers breaking down their doors?

Anyone who can remotely identify with Amir Locke (or any of the long slew of prior victims of police brutality) has been informed: There is no innocence for you. You and your family are available for us to murder at any time.

It is the ultimate in nothing-left-to-lose.

***

Are there criminal agitators behind this and that violent protest? We’ve certainly caught a few.

Some of the looting at my local 2020 BLM protest was carried out by agitators who were definitely not part of the BLM movement at any level, and we’ve seen frank criminals across the country use legitimate, much-needed protest as an excuse for vandalism, theft, and far worse.

It would be laughable to characterize Antifa as just a bunch of poor sweet zoomers and millennials trying to pay off their student loans by driving for Door Dash and turning Portland into a war zone. I am making no defense whatsoever of Jan 6. I’m not qualified to parse all the many strands of thought and action going on in Canada, but I do know I would personally go insane if people honked all day outside my window; it would not make me feel grateful that at least they weren’t pillaging burning. I am indeed, meanwhile, grateful in a general way for the civil rights movements in Europe, but I’m appalled and chilled to the core by the open anti-Semitism I’ve seen among a few of the reactionaries in that crowd.

Do not, for a moment, infer that I am supportive of hatred or violence. Just the opposite.

What I am saying is that otherwise-decent, non-criminal, non-agitating people are being drawn into increasingly powerful opposition events in part because they’ve been pushed to their limits by a society that openly disdains them.

This is not a left-right issue. It’s a cultural issue of accepting extreme marginalization as the ordinary business of the day.

***

Even if you don’t care about right and wrong, maybe you do have something to lose. Maybe civil war does not mesh with your plans.

In that case, please:

Stop slandering people you think are wrong. When you resort to ostracizing and doxing, you are personally responsible for growing the outlaw class. In the long run it only sows violence.
Tread very, very carefully any time a policy position is in play that will cause someone to lose their home or livelihood. Is it truly the only option? There’s no other way? You sure about that? “But they deserve to lose everything” does not build up the bonds of civil society.
Consider it your duty to protect human lives, rather than making up excuses for why those people had it coming.

If you’re comfortable with the level of “mostly peaceful” protest taking place over the past several years, there’s not much I can say to you. But if you’ve decried this or that spree of lawlessness, this message is for you.

I’m not selling nonsense idealism. Treating strangers and opponents with respect doesn’t do anything about criminal agitators who just want to stir things up. But simple civility and decency towards other members of society is indeed very effective at denying the agitators a crowd to do their bidding.

Photo of a bird perched, eating tranquilly, on the fingertips of an outstretched hand by Paweł Kuźniar, via Wikimedia, CC 2.5.