Chewing the Facts podcast host Sasha Borissenko. Photo / Dean Purcell
Chewing the Facts podcast host Sasha Borissenko. Photo / Dean Purcell
Sasha Borissenko - best known to Herald readers for her weekly legal column – launches a new podcast tomorrow called Chewing the Facts, which debunks myths about fatness. She explains what inspired her to make it.
I repeated, then skipped a year in primary school when Iwas an overly confident 10-year-old. With a school camp on the horizon, I mastered a plan. I’d impress the kids thanks to my flair for interpretive dance and make friends in the process. I spent what felt like months - it was a week - practising in the garden, and my sister provided sound advice as she pressed play on the primary-coloured Fisher-Price Play Tape recorder.
I “boot-scootin-babied” across the hall to a room full of prepubescent teenagers and their parents. I killed it. For me, it was a huge win as I was crowned class councillor weeks later. The success started to wane when comments about my body started to surface.
I’d be told by a parent my success on the water slide was due “to being huge”, I’d be excluded from rock climbing because of ‘weight restrictions’, and doctors would repeatedly ask if I’d had too many lollies while I was seeking advice on asthma medication.
As I progressed into teenagehood, my weight increased as I started to internalise a sense that to be fat was a moral failing. Bias in social and education settings, media, and popular culture wore me down and prompted a harmful relationship with food and my body for the next 10 years.
The rinse and repeat of drastic dieting worked - until it didn’t and resulted in confusion as to why I couldn’t crack the code and reach society’s clavicle-protruding ideals. It’s there I started to investigate diets and exercise, only to realise years later that exercise only accounts for 20-30 per cent of energy output.
Exercise wasn’t the answer but neither was dieting. In fact, a 2018 meta analysis looking at 29 long-term weight loss studies found more than half of those who lost weight through dieting regained it within two years. A 2012 study followed more than 4000 identical twins aged 16-25, and found going on a diet increased the odds of reaching a body mass index classified as “overweight”. In other words, there’s more than 30 years of research to suggest diets don’t work.
What’s more, research suggests dieting is one of the primary risk factors for people developing an eating disorder. This explains a lot.
In my view, the whole process of weight control is counterproductive as it stigmatises fat people while also failing to acknowledge the role of genetics, socio-economic status, and an environment that’s inundated with inaccessible “healthy” food options.
Unlike most, I have been fortunate to address the turbulent food years and fickle fears of weight gain through professional help. Like most things, it’s a work in progress. I don’t own scales, I have the financial means to cook nutritious food, and to exercise, and I can consciously reject pontifications around wellness and the benefits of intermittent fasting.
It’s also strange to traverse a world where I can sympathise with the harmful effects of fat discrimination but, in doing so, it’s difficult not to sound overly melodramatic. Frankly, I’m sometimes fat and my experience is inconsequential but it’s driven me to question the very foundation of the forces and belief systems that drive discrimination.
What started as an attempt to crack the code into my body’s failings on a personal level resulted in shock that little attention is afforded to the discriminatory blind spot thin people have when discussing fatness in media, social, health, and employment settings. It’s also used as a tool that’s financially prosperous for big industries - but we’ll look at all of these issues in the podcast.
Chewing the Facts - new episodes out every Sunday. Produced with the NZ Herald, with support from NZ On Air.
