Madalin Giorgetta

me not currently in Greece but quite happily isolating from the rest of the country (and world) in Perth 🙃
I was so blessed to travel and see the world last year and I am so grateful for the experiences I had... but I am really happy being back home surrounded by friends and family🏡☺️

I just eye rolled my way through one of my tutorials as we were shown an episode of Four Corners (which I usually like), “Tipping The Scales”, spoiler alert, don’t watch it.

It’s rife with prejudice, bias and fatphobia and after I finish posting this I’ll be writing to my lecturer to hopefully ensure that it doesn’t get shown again.

What a s**t-show.

It’s made me feel angry and sad and a bit hopeless.

Some of my classes have been amazing, acknowledging the role weight stigma plays in health, but others not so much.

Weight bias is dominant in weight science and among health professionals, and I am aware of this, but it still hurts to be confronted with it, I can’t imagine how it would feel in a larger body.

I sometimes feel like a flat-earther, that my weight-neutral approach makes me the odd one out. But I am convinced of its validity and the support science lends to it. It’t not woo-woo, and there are more health professionals who support a weight-neutral approach - lol I just need to meet them 😅

It’s why I’m so passionate about being back at uni and studying science - I still haven’t decided what I’m majoring in yet... I want to choose a pathway that will make the largest impact within my field.

Anyway, I am still really enjoying uni, just had a tough day today but it made me more resolved to create a positive impact and help to change the status quo 👊🏼

Thanks for the beautiful blooms 🌷 imma sucka for flowers 💐 I have a whole NIOD, Hylamide, The Ordinary favs saved to my highlights under “skin” go check it out and DM if you need some help 😘 I love everything about this brand and started using them after Liz recommended them to me. I’ve since got both Sid and his mum onto to their products and have yet to be disappointed
Whats your fav Deceim product?
Mine is the NIOD MMHC for the ultimate hydrated skin 💦

Part of the work of breaking down weight stigma involves destroying the idea that diets work.

Why is this idea even up for debate in 2020? Why is it so impossible to believe that diet’s are actually a massive scam?

I’m not just spouting my own opinion. The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia has acknowledged this years ago, and there are a multitude of studies and research that report this same information, but… “diet’s don’t work and we don’t know what the solution is but we can only keep recommending diets because we refuse to believe that it’s that hard to like, eat less food and move more”.

All the reports say the same thing, diet’s don’t work, but the rampant fatphobia and weight stigma present within these organisations means they refuse to seek another viable solution that doesn’t involve recommending weight loss. It’s a real face palm moment. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

As long as we are sold the idea that diets work, we continue to believe that it is completely possible, manageable and even easy, to lose weight, when this is not true.

Once we accept that the failure rates of diets is impossibly high, and the chances of somebody maintaining long term weight loss, unlikely, then we can move on from weight loss advice as the solution to health.

We can focus on health without weight loss, we can suggest health behaviours without linking them to BMI, and we can encourage the pursuit of health at every size. We can focus on health outside of physical health, and give importance to mental, emotional and social well-being. Establishing health promoting eating habits and enjoyable forms of movement is a more viable goal, and one I hope more health professionals will begin to encourage.

I often get asked this, that if you care about somebodie’s health than you should tell them to lose weight. Did you ever stop to think that these words may do more harm than good?

“Self-perceived overweight is a risk factor for increased weight gain, both for adults and adolescents with normal weight and overweight status, while weight status misperception among adolescents with overweight seems to be protective against weight gain.” (Romano et al., 2018)

How does that make any sense?

We are taught that if someone is overweight and we care about their health, particularly a loved one, it is our duty to let them know our concerns, to help them “get healthy”.

But what does this result in?

Weight loss?

No.

Actually, weight gain.

This may be partly explained by overeating.

A study found self-perceived overweight to be associated with binge eating among adults with normal weight and overweight, and a recent systematic review found evidence that self-perception of overweight tends to be associated with disordered eating.

You know what also increases overeating? Stigma. Exposing participants to stigmatizing information about larger body sizes has been shown to PROMOTE increased food intake in women.

In other words, if you need to make somebody believe that they are overweight and need to lose weight, that person will believe that they need to lose weight, and that in itself is a risk factor for INCREASED weight gain, not DECREASED weight gain.

Individuals who self-identify as overweight may overeat as a way of coping with their concerns of being stigmatized by others because of their perceived body size.

Essentially, for all our helpful intentions, we are causing more harm than good.

P.S This is not to say that it is harmful or bad to be overweight. This is to do with binge eating, a disordered eating behaviour which is harmful, not body size. Your weight loss advice is useless 🤷🏼‍♀️

When I first changed my messaging last year to anti-diet, a well-meaning fitness influencer, with 1 million followers, slide into my DMs.

It started off friendly enough, but eventually it turned sour, a lot of snarky voice messages were exchanged and then I think we both blocked each other and both of us ended up feeling more convinced of our own opinions. I’ve since come to believe she’s even more wrong. LMAO.

She was actually very concerned and wanted to share that concern with me, to plead with me to reconsider my change of message and see the harm I was causing.

Her main concern was for the children and teenagers who would hear my anti-diet message, believe that their current weight was acceptable and thus essentially die early due to health complications.

This is not a joke. She was extremely serious. She genuinely felt that teenagers should not be made to feel that they can accept their bodies, they MUST change to be healthy.

I don’t believe it’s presumptuous of me to believe that the overwhelming messaging in high school is that fat = bad. And that noise is loud.

That noise continues to be loud as we grow into adulthood. It continues to dominate every conversation, from diet talk at work, to late night dinners with friends, to the “ob*sity epidemic” on TV, to the numerous ways that fat people are excluded from their environments, from employment, from clothing…

Fat people are constantly told “you need to change to fit in”. So when somebody argues that fat people are not aware of their bodies, or how it impacts their experience in the world, I am skeptical to say the least.

I often get demanded to share both sides of the story, that it’s not always healthy to have a high BMI.

But that’s not the story I believe needs to be told. That story is old news. We all know that story. That story isn’t actually helping anyone. That story is contributing to eating disorders, bullying, low self esteem, weight stigma and fatphobia. The story that is ignored is the one I want to tell, and hopefully I can make a few teenagers believe that maybe their bodies are perfectly lovely, just as they are.

Yup, read that again.

In the spirt of , I’ll be sharing information that aims to break the stigma. Part of this information relates to the “dangers” of ob*sity.

I saw an IG post the other day that provided the stats of hospital admissions attributed to ob*sity. I’m assuming this kind of information is shared to “prove” that being ob*se is unhealthy.

What does it mean to be “unhealthy”?

Regarding the “ob*sity epidemic” unhealthy is usually related to somebodies physical health, their mortality rate. Nothing is mentioned if that life is a happy life or not, but that’s another post.

Does ob*sity lead to a shorter lifespan? We’ve come to believe that it does, but this information has been proved to be misleading in this systematic review and meta-analysis: Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and ob*sity using standard body mass index categories (2013).

Flegal et al., analysed 97 studies covering nearly 3 million participants and found:
1️⃣ No relationship between Overweight or Grade 1 Ob*sity with higher rates of deaths
2️⃣ Overweight group had the lowest mortality
3️⃣ Highest mortality was found between underweight and morbidly o*ese

In other words, people classified as “overweight” and “ob*se” do not die earlier than those classified with a “normal” BMI.

This study does link higher mortality to Grade 2 and 3 ob*sity, but it also links higher mortality to an underweight BMI.

There is significant nuance that is often missed in the “ob*sity epidemic” debate.
The focus is always on the last point 3️⃣ (ignoring underweight mortality), without any focus given to point 1️⃣ and 2️⃣.

I personally don’t believe your rate of mortality should equate to the level of respect, care and compassion you receive (and if you don’t either, than why are we focusing and recommending weight loss when diets don’t work?), but facts are important in the fight against weight stigma.

Black liberation is for everyone and I'm excited to announce that I'm joining the created by Monique Melton , anti-racism educator, author, international speaker and host of the Shine Brighter Together Podcast. The 21-day challenge officially starts on September 21st (but you can join anytime after that) and we will be focusing on doing the work to build a daily practice of anti-racism by pursuing Black liberation. The challenge is completely free and is designed in a way for you to take practical and sustainable anti-racism action everyday. There's much work to do and we must do this work together...will you join me in the challenge? Tag 3 others that you're inviting to join you in this challenge too. Let's do this work together 💓

There’s a few statements about fat shaming that I see constantly repeated in the comments on my page, in varying forms:

1️⃣ “I don’t think fat shaming is very nice, but we can’t glorify o*esity can we?”
or
2️⃣ “I support body positivity but we shouldn’t encourage people to be fat and unhealthy.”

Both these comments perpetuate weight stigma which is harmful to health. Assuming someone’s health based on their body is a form of weight stigma and fat shaming.

Healthy comes in all shapes and sizes.

And PS, if somebody is unhealthy, they still deserve to be seen, to be heard, to be loved, to be represented, to have clothing made for them, to have medical issues listened to, and to feel comfortable and respected.

Research has shown that fat shaming for fat loss is not a beneficial public health tool for reducing o*esity or improving health. In fact researchers have concluded that the “stigmatization of o*ese individuals poses serious risks to their psychological and physical health and generates health disparities.” So if we *really* care about folx health, weight stigma needs to stop.
O*esity Stigma: Important Considerations for Public Health” (2019) Rebecca M. Puhl PhD and Chelsea A. Heuer, MPH for APAAA

We put so much onus on the individual to be “healthy” - the idea that their health and their weight is completely within their control. This is in spite of all of the research showing that there are a multitude of factors not within an individuals’ control. We need to be talking about the social determinants of health - and what we as a society are going to do to improve the health and wellbeing of ALL people, not just the privileged few.

People of all sizes deserve to celebrate their bodies, to gain the same equal rights and access as straight sized folx, and to accept themselves just as they are; and they certainly don’t need the “health concern” of a stranger on the internet.

👋🏼 And remember, the only time somebody wants your opinion on how to lose weight is when they ask for it 🙃

Did you see the controversy behind the Gymshark post?

They chose to post an image of a model without abs and people went wild.

Here’s my thoughts.

Gymshark goes up to a size XL, which is a size US 10 or AU 14. Not exactly inclusive.

I used to feel really annoyed when I saw a brand or influencer capitalising on body positivity, but still promoting diet culture.
Selling an app that promotes fat loss, posting transformation photos, advertising tummy shredder workouts and selling fat burning shakes, consistently linking fitness to leanness, having a clothing range of only 5 sizes...

What is the intention of posting different size models?

Is it because they care about representation or do they simply want a piece of that body positive pie and don’t want to give up on the other aspects of diet culture that bring in the
$$$?

Or maybe they don’t truly understand the damage that diet culture causes. I mean, I used to have a fitness app that promoted fat loss and what I thought was an inclusive swimwear brand because we made XXL bikinis (we offer 7-10 sizes now), and I didn’t think I was causing harm, I really did think I was helping people and being inclusive, so sometimes we need to give people the benefit of the doubt.

But what is the impact?

People start to feel represented, other brands take notice, different body shapes and sizes are normalised in the media, conversation opens up about the lacking of diversity in fitness, and a push comes for extending sizes... lots of positives.

Think about how many brands had s**t diversity when it came to POC, and after their feeds changed... should they have changed earlier?

Yes.

Are they only diversifying their page now to avoid scrutiny and to appear ?

Maybe.

But at least it’s a change, and maybe the positive impact outweighs the sometimes capitalist intentions.

Though you can still be mad about it 🙃 😂

What do you think?

How do you feel about filters on your stories?
Sometimes I feel like they are nice to throw on when I’m feeling a bit “blurgh” but more often then not, they make me focus on what I want to change about my face.
If my lips were a little bigger.
If my skin was a little smoother.
If my eyes were a little bigger.
If my cheekbones were a little more structured.
If my wrinkles were a little less defined.
It’s been about 18 months since I last had fillers and botox and it’s been a weird experience seeing them leave my face.
Seeing the lines come back to my eyes, my eyebrow arch fade away, my upper lip disappear when I smile, my cheeks sink ...
It’s been a mix of emotions for me, I’ve felt guilty for missing my old face.
The temptation to conform to the beauty standard is hard, when injections become common place, when Facetune is used by every celebrity and when IG stories offers you the option to look like the smoothed, prettier version of you.
I’m not going to tell you some line about accepting your natural beauty and loving yourself blah blah because we all know it’s not as easy as that.
Do what you want, what makes you happy, question why it makes you happy, remember that beauty standards change every year, and it’s not your fault for wanting to conform, capitalism exploits our insecurities and profits off them, the patriarchy is oppressive and you’re doing the best you can ❤️

Spring has sprung in Australia and the flowers make me so happy 🌸

Vegan LCM Bars 😋🤯😋
I posted this on my story a few weeks ago and you guys went nuts asking me for the recipes, so I’m posting the entire recipe here, make sure you save so you can re-make.
I was inspired to make these after seeing Donna Hay make these on the food channel with two kiddos for a party and I though, yup, I can make that!
If a 5 year old can do it so can I, that’s my level of cooking expertise 😂
Ingredients
20 dates
3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
3/4 cup rice puffs
1/4 cup chopped peanuts
100g dark cooking chocolate
1/3 cup vanilla cake batter protein powder ~MADALIN15~
Method
1. Remove pits from the dates, and add to blender with peanut butter. I used my NutriBullet which was hard work but doable. If you have a food processor that’s defo better. Blend until you have a smooth paste.
2. Once blended, transfer to a large bowl and add protein powder. You might need to add more peanut butter depending on how powdery your mixture is. Add rice puffs and peanuts. Give it a really good mix. I got my hands in there to make sure everything was well combined.
3. Line a medium sized dish with baking paper, and scoop the date mixture into the dish, making sure to press down with your hands.
4. Place the chocolate in a glass bowl, over a boiling saucepan of water. Stir and remove once melted.
5. Pour chocolate onto the date mixture and set in the fridge for 30 mins.
6. Remove and cut into long bars or squares and eat!
There you have it, you are now a chef. Go you and enjoy your LCM bars you genius, you 👩🏼‍🍳
@ Perth, Western Australia

FINALLY newest and cutest! long loops are arriving tomorrow 🥳 includes 30 day free workout guide with every purchase - great if you want to move ya bod at home and get a really great sweaty workout with just your loops 🥵 will hopefully be the first of many more exciting (can exercise equipment be exciting 🤷🏼‍♀️😅) product launches 😘 @ Perth, Western Australia

Did you know you can acknowledge that balancing your input (food) and output (activity/exercise) determines if you maintain, lose or gain body weight

AND

also acknowledge that maintenance, weight loss or weight gain and or/heath may be a combination of individual behaviours, social circumstances, genetics and biology, medical care and physical environment?

The anti-diet community does not deny that input > your output can cause weight gain.
Nor do they deny that input < your output can cause weight loss.

What many in the anti-diet community are fighting for, is the acknowledgment and recognition of the other factors that determine health.
Enough with the victim blaming.
Enough with the reductionism.
Enough with the narrow minded and simplistic thinking.

Society conditions us to believe that we control our own reality, that our actions are performed in a vacuum, without influence of outside factors.

We can see with the current state of the world, that this is clearly not the case. You only need to look at how COVID-19 has disproportionately affected people from different racial and ethnic minority groups to see that health is not purely a result of our own personal choices.

The dominance of the biomedical model which underpins western society has meant that we are more focussed on cure and treatment, then prevention and understanding of societal factors.

Both are important in addressing the health of the future.

“By reducing disease to the biological, cellular, molecular, and genetic levels, the biomedical approach ignored or downplayed the social and psychological aspects of illness, so that the experience of disease was treated as if it occurred in a social vacuum. Not only does this marginalise the importance of social support networks, but it also ignores the role played by social factors such as poverty, poor working conditions, and discrimination in affecting an individual’s physical and mental health.” Germov, John. Second Opinion : An Introduction to Health Sociology, Oxford University Press, 2018

If we’re still recommending weight loss but are continuing to disregard the other determinants of health, we‘re ignoring vital information.

The recently updated Canadian Adult O*esity Clinical Practice Guidelines were developed over 2 years by a committee of 62 health professionals led by Dr Sean Wharton, a specialist in weight management. Together they assessed well over 500,000 published peer-reviewed articles and built consensus on a wide range of clinical and scientific issues.

The findings?

The common medical (Instagram?) advice to eat less and move more doesn’t really help most patients. I know. SHOCK HORROR.

Warton explains, “we’re failing people all the time when we say go on a diet so they can lose a little bit of weight, because they often regain all of it, if not more.”

Dr. Arya M. Sharma, another contributor to the new guidelines also added: “the human body is hard-wired against weight loss. Historically, we have told people whose weight affects their health merely to eat less and move more, which on its own is ineffective and even dangerously simplistic advice.”

If health professionals are not recommending diets, what information should we follow? Here’s a start:

💓 Shift the focus of weight management toward improving patient-centred health outcomes, rather than weight loss alone

and understanding that;

💓 People living with o*esity face substantial bias and stigma, which contribute to increased morbidity and mortality independent of weight or body mass index
💓 O*esity care must validate patients’ lived experiences and move beyond simplistic approaches of “eat less, move more”.

I don’t agree with certain parts of the guideline recommendations (for example, bariatric surgery), but I do feel like we are at the start of a big change in healthcare, and this level of compassion and understanding from medical providers makes me feel optimistic about the future.

Do you care?

Do you feel like influencers should post their cute outfits, exercise videos, maple donuts and leave the activism to activists?

Social media is a form of escapism but it’s also how we gain news and information.

Do you think it is a responsibility of influencers to use their influence for good?

Because influencers aren’t activists ( unless they specify).

I’m not an activist.

But I do believe there is a responsibility to provide information around our industry, as we are part of the voices and we are heard and listened to.

but really, you don’t have to do any of these things..

I understand that navigating the deeper issues can be tricky when you’re a newbie to social justice.

There’s a reason so many influencers posted a black square then deleted it because they realised they messed it up, then realised they had zero understanding of social justice issues and were like well f*ck I’ll just wait for this to blow over 🙃

because

How can you fight against diet culture if you promote a fat burning drink?
How can you argue against mass consumption if you have a scheduled PLT haul?
How can you fight for inclusivity and accept paid work from brands that only go up to a size 14?

How can we get paid by capitalism and still retain our morals?

The big companies with the big budgets are the ones that influencers rely on to get paid. The smaller brands with higher ethics and morals usually don’t have big budgets.

I think there needs to be some leeway and understanding for influencers. If you’re not paying an influencer, than how are they getting paid to provide you with free content?

My content takes hours to create and research, so sometimes I may work with a brand that doesn’t tick every single box for me eg has an inclusive size range but contributes to mass production, because I gotta get paid too.

What do you think? Do you think influencers have a responsibility to include deeper issues in their content or should they stick to regular content?

Just a friendly reminder this page is not a weight loss advice page. I am aiming to share evidence, reduce stigma and weight bias for larger folk + promote healthy behaviours.

I recently shared evidence pertaining to the belief that “diets don’t work.”

There has been a mix of positive and negative reactions to this information (slide to view).

I strongly believe that diets don’t work and I’m invested in providing access to healthy behaviours that do not focus on weight loss as a goal.

If you’re new to my page, and weren’t aware, I have a workout app with access to nutritious recipes and hundreds of workouts, it’s also affordable starting at $4.99 per month. I also share free workout content on here and on my YT channel.

But first. For me to promote the idea that diets are not the solution, I need to first debunk the theory.

I choose to provide evidence that they don’t work, and this can seem negative or even fatalistic. I know that hearing this information is hard to digest, we have been told our whole lives to diet and have been under the impression that it is widely achievable.

The evidence states otherwise. We can choose to ignore it, but the evidence stands. It is very unlikely to lose weight and keep it off in the long term. I believe people should be aware of the success rates before spending money and time on something, but I get it, the truth hurts. I’m also aware of the privilege I hold in my body, but that shouldn’t stop me from reviewing the evidence and making a decision that I feel aligned with.

Instead, I am focussed on promoted healthy behaviours irrespective of weight loss. If you want weight loss advice, this is not the page for you. Almost every fitness influencer promotes weight loss so it will not be difficult to find somebody that supports your goals.

But what about the people that do not want to pursue weight loss and instead want to give up dieting and instead focus on incorporating healthy behaviours? I can not be everything to everybody, but I can hopefully provide something in a space largely dominated by weight loss 🙏🏼 @ Perth, Western Australia

This slide deck was developed in collaboration with nutritionist and student doctor Jess Campbell , please follow her for smart, easy to understand, evidence based non-diet content.

Jess posed this question and the study in question, in a recent IG post and it got me thinking, do we know the probabilities of achieving long term weight loss?

More often than not, we don’t.
We say, just eat less, move more, it’s not complicated. If this was true, we would all easily be eating less, moving more and losing weight.

So, what are the chances of maintaining long term weight loss?

This paper attempts to answer that question. Published in 2015 in the American Journal of Public Health, this study: “Probability of an ob*se person attaining normal body weight” reviewed the electronic health records over a 9 year period (2004-2014) for 76,704+ men and 99,791 women with BMI >30.

The information is partially presented in the following slides and you can review the study in it’s entirety here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26180980/

The authors conclude that:
“The probability of attaining normal weight or maintaining weight loss is low. Our findings indicate that current nonsurgical o*esity treatment strategies are failing to achieve sustained weight loss for the majority of o*ese patients.”

When we continue to repeat the validity of dieting (it works! You’re just doing it wrong) we continue to disregard the plethora of evidence that concludes how difficult and unlikely long term weight loss is to maintain.

Fildes et al. Probability of an ob*se person attaining normal body weight: cohort study using electronic health records. American journal of public health. 2015

Did you know I’m back at uni? Yew yew, I’m back at uni at studying a Bachelor of Science (Health Sciences). I am loving it so far! So much emphasis on the social model of health and lots of ranting about the biomedical model. lol jks jks both have their place and are important in providing patients with treatment and care. But, it is nice to be surrounding with peers and lecturers who share the same views with me regarding health and make me feel validated and supported in my own beliefs. IG is so narrow-minded when it comes to defining health.

Our health is influenced by many factors, which determine the health status of individuals or communities and create health inequalities between people. They are known as ‘determinants of health’. We often fail to mention the SDoH when discussing health (especially on this platform) as physical activity and health behaviours takes up a large part of the conversation.

Maybe because it’s easier to focus on these two behaviours to make money off people’s insecurities, or maybe because they both appear to be deceptively easy and achievable...

How much we move and what we eat is part of our overall health, but you can see it only makes up a very small part of the picture.

When we fail to recognise and promote the other determinants of health, we contribute to weight stigma.

We put all onus on the individual and give no thought to the structures dictating everyday people’s lives.

Only a small part of how much we weigh is within our personal control. Many factors are dependent on genetic makeup, societal factors, environmental location, socioeconomic status and our yes, our health behaviours.

We need to encourage more compassion, less judgement and more understanding, which should in-turn lead to less stigmatised views of those in larger bodies and less bias within the medical / health community. Weight stigma is a cause of ill health but that’s a conversation for another day.

If we can adjust our narrow view of health, to one that understands health is influenced by much more factors then (EAT LESS, MOVE MORE!) maybe we can move forward?