It Is Because of Sexism

That is the reason there is an obsession with thinness in our culture, and almost all of it is directed at women.

"Obesity" has very little to do with consumption of food and everything to do with hormonal changes that happen to women as they approach or exceed 50. Thyroids get shot to shit, lack of estrogen forces the fat to migrate from the hips and thighs to the waist, regardless of how active a woman is. But women are relentlessly hit with this thinness crap because women who are "heavier" are not attractive to (most) men, regardless of how shitty most men look. Once women hit menopause, they basically become invisible or unfuckable to men (unless they are already married or in a shackup situation).

Rather than going through life without the "love" of a man, women will do everything in their power to remain "fuckable." Women will ruin their health to meet some kind of arbitrary "beauty" standard. In the end, though, age happens, and at some point women are no longer considered "attractive" enough to get a man. This happens as early as age 35 or 40, but definitely happens by age 50.

Weight has little to do with health, the medical profession's collusion with the diet and fashion industries notwithstanding.

Fat Chance "Fatism" Will Be Starved Into Oblivion

Hatred toward those people of larger body size, which can be just about everything "heavier" than concentration camp emaciation, is still fashionable. This is especially true when the hatred is directed at women, which is almost always the case.

The diet and fashion industries, aided and abetted by doctors who should know better, have done a hell of a con on women. But once women get a "certain age," 50, and the thyroid starts going to shit and estrogen decreases, those diets will not work anymore. Medical attention will be necessary if a thyroid or diabetes is the culprit.

This hatred is being exported:

Part of the torment of fat, and fatism, is how it grows. Dominant American (read privileged and white) body ideals have spread along with our pathologies. Despite the conventional wisdom about African American and Latino cultures’ appreciation for more voluptuous female body types, eating disorders are on the rise for both those groups. We are also exporting our body issues to faraway places, with disturbing success.

Studies funded by Harvard Medical School tracked the eating habits of girls on the island of Fiji, where television was first introduced in the year 1995. Between 1995 and 1998, the islanders watched Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, and 11 percent of the girls surveyed developed bulimia — a disease previously unknown to them. Television, it seems, can carry disease. That is not to say those affected were unwilling victims.

“The girls were articulate and explicit about why they were making themselves throw up,” says Harvard medical anthropologist Anne Becker, who led the study. “They felt that if they had a Jennifer Aniston body, they would look more modern and more Western, and they would have a better chance of getting a job.”

News

A homeless man was reunited with his cat after an earlier story ran about the cat having disappeared:

Samantha, the pug-nosed cat, and Daniel Harlan, a homeless man who owned her, were reunited Tuesday.

Harlan wept when Tom Neville, who had the missing cat for weeks, gave Samantha back.

"I thought I'd lost her for good," Harlan said.

The cat and Harlan got together again after The Chronicle ran a story Tuesday, along with a picture, about the cat's disappearance. Neville saw it and recognized Samantha as the animal he rescued from life on the streets.

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I wish Michelle Obama would quit swallowing the nonsense from the health food nuts who want to tell us what to put in our mouths and raid our refrigerators, if necessary.

She needs to talk to Paul Campos about the nonsense "obesity epidemic":

Paul Campos

rips apart the anti-"obesity" culture in this interview with the Atlantic:

Megan: Over the last five years or so, I've noticed that public health efforts about obesity are not just amping up the volume, but exploring increasingly coercive methods to induce weight loss: taxes on junk food, lawsuits against fast food companies (which are basically a tax on junk food), and so forth. Does that match your analysis?

Paul: It's the classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to "do something" about the crisis, usually by eliminating the folk devils.

That of course is the strategy for this crisis. If fat people are the problem, then the solution is to get rid of them, by making them thin people. The most amazing aspect of this whole thing, for me, has always been the imperviouusness of policy makers, and even more so people who consider themselves serious academics and scientists, to the overwhelming evidence that there's no way to do this.

I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population's average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace's average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources

It's all about prejudice, especially against women who don't conform to an unrealistic body size.

Misc

I can't believe the whole thing:

Willoughby said she thought they would be able to return for the animals, and that she had arranged with a neighbor to bring them food and water.

But Willoughby departed in January, over nine months ago, and Willoughby's dogs have been the subject of much discussion. 17-year-old neighbor Brittany Henson said some of the dogs have died from neglect.

"There used to be 10 ... in there, and there's like three or four now. There were puppies that me and my boyfriend tried to rescue, but they ended up dying," said Henson.

Another neighbor said that there were multiple plastic bags on the property with dead dogs in them, but Willoughby said she hadn't heard about anything like that. She said she had asked a neighbor to check on the dogs just an hour ago, and had been told that there were no dead dogs currently on the property, and that the dogs were fine had food and water.

Willoughby did admit some animals have died, however.

This woman should have called an animal rescue group at the very beginning. ALL of the dogs would have survived and lived in good homes.

This just pisses me off.
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Actress Kim Novak and her husband resolved a two-year problem after failing in getting federal permits to place large rocks along the Rogue River to help ease erosion.
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Bigotry about body size (sizeism or fatism) is fashionable in this country; some people think they are so goddamned superior.

Most of it is directed at women, of course, who aren't valued for anything other than their bodies.

This spells it out, I think:

Fatness has always been seen as a slight on the American character. Ours is a nation that values hard work and discipline, and it's hard for us to accept that weight could be not just a struggle of will, even when the bulk of the research—and often our own personal experience—shows that the factors leading to weight gain are much more than just simple gluttony. "There's this general perception that weight can be controlled if you have enough willpower, that it's just about calories in and calories out," says Dr. Glen Gaesser, professor of exercise and wellness at Arizona State University and author of BigFat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, and that perception leads the nonfat to believe that the overweight are not just unhealthy, but weak and lazy. Even though research suggests that there is a genetic propensity for obesity, and even though some obese people are technically healthier than their skinnier counterparts, the perception remains "[that] it's a failure to control ourselves. It violates everything we have learned about self control from a very young age," says Gaesser.

In a country that still prides itself on its Puritanical ideals, the fat self is the "bad self," the epitome of greed, gluttony, and sloth. "There's a widespread belief that fat is controllable," says Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. "So then it's unlike a disability where you can have compassion; now you can blame the individual and attribute all kinds of mean qualities to them. Then consider the thinner people that are always watching what they eat carefully—fat people are symbols of what they can become if they weren't so virtuous."

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Miscellaneous News

Everybody has posted the YouTube of Miss USA falling down at the Miss Universe pageant--the second time in a row this has happened.

Okay, I'll go ahead and post the YouTube for this year:




And 2007:





It's symbolic of the United States in general, at least in the past. When the United States fell from economic downturns, it always got back up. When the United States fell over political scandals, it always got back up.

However, it is debatable whether the United States can get back up after almost eight years of unmitigated disaster both here and abroad.
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The problem with the "obesity crisis" is that "obesity" is really not so much a medical definition as it is a social one. The problem with more people being "fat" isn't so much that they are, whatever that is, but that others, the so-called "thin," find their body size objectionable.

It's prejudice, and prejudice is far harder to reduce than so-called "fat." It's like skin color or gender, but don't expect anybody to take it seriously.
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Miscellaneous.

I'll bet there will be no takers to Paul Campos' $10,000 challenge.
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No bodies were found at Barker Ranch.
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An idiot pilot got caught with his pants down--literally.
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Paul Campos

lets the medical establishment have it over the bogus "obesity epidemic." Now we find being "overweight" is even healthy.

The real disease is prejudice based on body size.

Of Course

the "ideal weights" for people are way too low, just as BMI is a poor indicator of "obesity" and "fitness" levels.

Paul Campos could have told the researchers the obvious.

Paul Campos

takes on Harvard University's obsession with "overweight" people being at risk for disease and death.

The recent hysteria over "obesity," whatever that is, dovetails perfectly with our society's preoccupation with thinness as virtue. It has nothing whatever to do with concern for health:

Of course, one reason the Harvard claims are treated with such respect is that they tell people what they want to hear. Their claims dovetail perfectly with social prejudices that declare one can never be too rich or too thin, and with the widespread desire to believe that sickness and death can be avoided if one follows the rules laid down by the appropriate authority figures. Combine these factors with the social cachet wielded by the Harvard name, a willingness to make brazen assertions that run from serious exaggerations to outright lies, and lazy journalism of the "some say the Earth is flat; others claim it's round; the truth no doubt lies somewhere in the middle" type, of which the Scientific American article is only the most recent example, and you have a recipe for an epidemic of wildly misleading statements dressed up in the guise of authoritative scientific discourse.