My best friend since kindergarden, Jeannette, died at age 23 back in 1990 from anorexia less than three months after giving birth. She was the kind of friend who, if you didn’t have a smile, she would lend you one of hers. She was not always anorexic - she developed a very poor body image because she didn’t have the Hollywood starlet “perfect pregnant body.”

The jerk who practically twisted her arm to have his baby decided he no longer loved her once he realized that pregnancy meant stretch marks, varicose veins, saggy boobs, and weight that won’t come all the way off. Did this moron think that pregnancy entailed going to Montgomery Ward, picking out an emryo to carry around for nine months in the latest style Gucci bag? If he could not love my friend because of the things pregnancy does to women’s bodies, he should not have proposed marriage and pushed her into a pregnancy that she really wasn’t ready for, but went through for him because she loved and trusted him.

He was pointedly cruel to Jeannette and held her up to the unrealistic airbrushed standard of Vanity Fair. She did not kill herself - he killed her. But he had co-conspirators. The fashion industry, big media, a society that values women solely on physical appearance acting as the final arbiter in beauty, and the plastic surgery “professionals” hawking their wares like snake oil salesmen.

Recent reports from a myriad of medical journals state that more and more women are giving birth to low-birth weight babies due to eating disorders during pregnancy. Low birth weight babies run a much higher risk of being developmentally delayed, and susceptible to other serious ailments as well.

Post partum depression is rampant and studies show the primary cause being poor body image, due to societal pressures to be super thin with perky breasts, washboard abs and zero flaws. Many younger women of Generation Y have admitted that they avoid pregnancy because they fear getting fat and having other pregnancy-related flaws that are, unfortunately, permanent - unless you’ve got $20K to afford risky plastic surgery.

In a society where overweight women are unemployed longer, and earn 12% less than their thinner, trimmer peers, it is no wonder that this femicide has had such far-reaching consequences: Countless deaths from eating disorders, underdeveloped babies, and an entire generation of women who have an unhealthy fear of pregnancy and giving birth. And that is society’s greatest shame.

Have you ever noticed how men are never judged by how much they weigh, or how “fat” they are?? Only women are judged by their weight.

Speaking as a fat man, I assure you that isn’t true.

However, it’s certainly true, speaking in general, that women are judged more harshly for being fat. Furthermore, women who are only a little fat are judged harshly for it, whereas men have to be quite fat before being judged harshly for it. (By and large.)

Our planned exit turned out to be impassable, and we had to track back. Eight extra hours, many people had not packed extra food, she had no body fat to fall back on, she must have been hungry to begin with… By the end, three of us were carrying her where we could and dragging her like a casualty where we could not. One of us was a long timer whose recent weight gain had been tactfully ignored… boy was I glad to have her around that night.

I am still prejudiced against overweight people when it comes to physical activities, though. I know that some of them are just as fit as I am, but I do not want to bother finding which ones, and definitely don’t want to assume any of the risks. Of course, after that caving trip gone bad, I am wary of underweight people just as much.

And by the way, I have not been inside a cave since.

Re: the thread- I, too am deeply annoyed when anyone’s attempt to discuss body acceptance (with a clear inclusion of being healthy and able to do what you want to do as an integral part of that acceptance) turns into a massive argument about dieting, what ‘fitness’ is and how to quantify it, external determination of what healthy is and what it looks like, etc.

Happens every time. Here, too. And I’m susceptible, I guess, to going there, because while watching Joy Nash’s video, my one hesitation was her embracing of the term ‘fat.’

It is a negative-value-laden word, and when she described herself as being in the medical category of ‘moderately obese,’ I thought (and hoped) she’d be focusing on how completely absurd that is, given that she’s healthy, fit, able to do what she wants, and beautiful to boot (as much as a result of her charisma, wit, positive and energetic inhabitation of her own skin, and ferocity as her pretty hair and awesome curves or great smile or whatever other subjectively appealing physical traits).

Instead, it becomes a ‘fat acceptance’ thing, which bums me out - I guess because it seems more radical to me to challenge the very notion of what ‘fat’ is and the medical standardization which fails to accurately reflect people’s experiences of their own bodies and fitness.

I celebrate hearing average-sized (and Joy Nash is) women publicly say they love their body and their experience in it, and hearing them challenge the fashion industry. I celebrate hearing large people who feel healthy and fit publicly say they feel healthy and fit.

I’m not at all sure how I feel about framing political change in body image, fashion industries, media images in terms of ‘fat acceptance,’ particularly when doing so adopts the definition of ‘fat’ given by those industries (ie: anything over an emaciated size 2).

But maybe I’m doing the same thing I mentioned above - imposing externally defined standards (ie: ‘Joy Nash is NOT ‘fat’!'), which leaves other people out in the cold.

I seriously wish we could just stop talking about ‘fat’ though, and size, in the same conversation as health and fitness, because they do not necessarily correlate. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Anorexia’s hell on fitness and health, too.

Not sure I articulated that very well, but my .02.

The video made me feel happy, mostly, and it’s definitely a good thing. I just wish we could hold the standards accountable for irrationality, rather than ‘embracing’ ourselves as ‘fat’ if we don’t conform to them.

That’s why I said it was an oxymoron.

Nope. As I said, It never occurred to me to take up a “diet”; Atkins, etc. Diets don’t work. At least, not by themselves, and not ones that have some kind of imbalance.

Just for the record, the Atkins diet—the real one outlined by Robert Atkins, as opposed to the folk-Atkins diet portrayed in the media—is not a “diet” in the sense in which you’re using the word (i.e., a crash diet intended to be followed for short-term weight loss but unsustainable in the long run).

The Atkins diet, and AFAIK all other reduced-carbohydrate diets, are intended to be permanent dietary changes, and are based on the proposition that fat is preferable to carbohydrate as a source of energy, and that high-carbohydrate diets eventually lead not only to weight gain, but also to a host of unrelated health problems.

So, despite taking this “time consuming” and “expensive” route, they still wouldn’t allow perfectly fit and capable people from engaging in this activity if they didn’t fit into their preconceived notion of “fit.”

You’re absolutely correct. They’re using a simplified method to weed out a whole big chunk of the population from participating in their activity, and that simplified method is undoubtedly giving them false positives - people who actually are fit enough to go, and could be found as such, but who don’t qualify under the weight/height simple test.

But not letting those people go is costing them money - lots of it. Why on earth would they let false positives slip through their fingers? The answer, of course, is that it would cost more to catch the false positives than it costs to let them go. Giving everyone a fitness test, to increase the accuracy of the screening process, would cost a fortune. The enhanced profit they would make by catching the overweight-but-fit is less than that fortune. So, they don’t do it.

you really believe that there is no such thing as a fat person who is capable of having endurance and lifting heavy weights?

Sure,Vasily Alekseyev is ft one of the greatest weight lifters of all time and he was obese. Also, one of the greatest long distance swimmers is an obese woman who is about 5 ft tall. I can’t recall her name but she is an exceptional athlete with an amazing of level cardiovascular fitness. But these are the exceptions to the norm. Reality is that you don’t see many obese people competing in a marathon

Weight lifting does not burn fat. The body has no reason to burn fat if you are only lifting weights and as a consequence many weight lifters are quite heavy as they carry a ton of weight in muscle and fat.

Long distance swimming (most swimming) is a cold activity and while sprinting distances may burn fat, long distance swimming triggers the brain into laying down a thick layer of subcutaneous fat for insulation. Must keep the core warm!

Long distance running does burn calories and eats fat without the body developping the lay down more fat urge. Thus most marathoners are rail thin. There is an obese triathlete but he came from long distance swimming before entering Ironman competitions.

The body works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. The best bet is always to know yourself and your personal and family history and find a competent primary care doctor. Me- I’m working on the eat less and think about exercising more diet- thinking burns alot of calories for effort ;)

RonF is the best person to decide what he does with his body.
What I object to, are the falsehoods and double speak that he and others perpetuate.

If you take in less calories than you expend, RonF you are on a diet. Why do people persist with this “don’t call it a diet, it’s healthy eating, or a lifestyle change” nonsense. Who do they think they are fooling? Certainly not the body which responds the same way as the above, it fights to defend its girth.

Why not? Could it be that your body’s defenses are beginning to gain the upper hand, ditto your eating.

Why can you not stay at this weight, if it makes you feel so good? Because your body is trying to do what it is programmed to do, trying to regain what you have
lost.

If it does what is the solution, yo-yo?

Your feeling of well-being is, assuming you are free of disease, mainly subjective. I’m sure you know your attitude to what you think you can and can’t do is important. ‘Most people live lives of quiet desperation’ the slim also have sorrows ,disappointments, fears and limitations.

What is different or permanent about yet another diet? Doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result. Goethe’s definition of madness.

95-98% of times, no.

This is irrelevant to the principle of whether it is worth investing any hopes or efforts in dieting.

Chiefly no acceptable alternative to the thing that doesn’t work.
Whether or not someone should go on a diet depends mainly on the effort you have to put in, the likelihood of success and the level of risk.
Dieting can damage your metabolism slowing it down, sometimes long it never fully rights itself. It can and does destabilize the nervous system leaving you more ’sensitized’ and less able to cope with life in general.

I am not against the idea of weight loss, I know there is a job to be done here, but is it too much to ask that it be tolerable and sustainable for all who want and need it.
I am not forgetting the people who are dying from their weight, bedridden unable to breathe unaided.

Also don’t forget that there are people that lose weight seemingly spontaneously, often after giving up on dieting. Whether they are rarer than permanent diet successes, your guess is as good as mine, but they exist. Are scientist falling over themselves to study them though? It is often exceptions like this that provide progress, what to look for, answers even.

The nub is how do we replicate this ’spontaneous remission’ ?
Maybe part of the reason why there is not more pressure to find out, is the refusal of so many of us to value ourselves and our actual experiences enough to say over and over again no more diets!