Attitudes about beauty and bodies are always, if subtly, changing, and in the last century in particular, we've been bombarded with the message that "thin is in."
Weight loss was the topic of this year's Women's Health Symposium. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Herbert Pardes (left), president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and featured (from right) Dr. Orli Etingin, Dr. Scott Goldsmith and Dr. Michael Rosenbaum.
The efficacy of this mantra was just one of the topics discussed at the 24th Annual Women's Health Symposium, hosted by Citigroup. The event was organized by the Women's Health Symposium Committee, co-chaired by Joan Weill and Myron Mahon, and benefits the Educational Resource Center at the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. This year's symposium was titled "The Real Skinny: Dispelling the Myths About Weight Control" and it tackled two questions central to the weight control debate: why is it so difficult to keep weight off and why have we become so obsessed with it?
To illustrate the point about society's insistence on a thin silhouette, Dr. Orli Etingin, director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center, asked the gathering of several hundred women the following: "How many of you have thought, 'I'd be happy if I could just lose those five extra pounds'?" Nearly every hand shot into the air.
"In this country we have a good deal of information about weight and obesity, but many choose not use it, even though obesity is clearly a problem," said Dr. Herbert Pardes, president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. "Sessions and lectures like this one put on by the Women's Health Symposium Committee are a good part of the solution."
According to Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, associate program director of the General Clinical Research Center and an associate professor of pediatrics and medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center and one of the speakers at the symposium, our body weight is highly regulated and evolution has hard-wired our bodies to maintain a specific weight. Although we consume hundreds of thousands of calories a year, on average a person burns 99.8 percent of these calories, gaining roughly one pound per year. If a woman's weight fluctuates dramatically, functions like egg production and breastfeeding capabilities are affected.
"Our bodies are designed to defend fatness, and traits that we've adapted over millennia are now maladaptive in modern society," Dr. Rosenbaum said. As a result, our metabolism makes it extremely difficult to keep weight off, even though the potential health benefits may be enormous.
"Obesity and drug addiction are the only two diseases I know where the body fights the cure," he said. "We can gain fat cells easily, but they are very hard to get rid off."
From left: Myra Mahon, Iris Cantor, Dr. Pardes, Joan Weill and Dr. Etingin.
During the second presentation, Dr. Scott Goldsmith, associate dean for Continuing Medical Education at Weill Cornell Medical College, explored how the psychiatry of weight loss affects women, pointing out that research has shown that a woman's mood can be affected for several days based merely on a scale readout in the morning.
According to Dr. Goldsmith, the idea of weight loss has been dominated by commercial, rather than medical, interests, most of which play on a women's insecurities to create revenue—be it through glossy magazine advertisements, misleading marketing campaigns or quick-loss diets. "Everybody is trying to lose weight and keep it off, and sadly, it's not all driven by health concerns," Dr. Goldsmith said. Often depression plays a role in how women are affected by these commercial ploys.
"If you are obese and depressed, you may think weight loss will ease depression, but this is not so," said Dr. Goldsmith. "Women in weight-loss programs tend to leave these programs depressed and with distorted ideas about their bodies and weight loss."
Both Drs. Rosenbaum and Goldsmith emphasized that exercise and a restricted diet will always be the cornerstone of any successful weight-loss program. And with the body under both a metabolic and cultural assault, maintaining weight loss is extremely difficult.
"Any diet or exercise changes will probably have to be done for life to maintain weight loss," said Dr. Rosenbaum. "But the benefits of weight loss for the body are enormous."
Photos by Richard Lobell.